'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Africa book, chapter 11 (again)

So just in case any of you is sitting there thinking, "I wonder how Helena's getting on with finishing her long-awaited (!) book on violence and conflict termination in Africa?"....

The answer today is "surely, but slowly." Some days it's "slowly, but surely." Some days it's just slowly. And then, some days it's AAAAAAARGH!! Like the day back in-- was it February?-- when I realized that all the writing I'd done for the previous 5-6 weeks needed to be set aside.

So at least we haven't had another of those recently. (She wipes metaphorical sweat off her brow, in relief.)

Actually, that was about three months ago. Those months have been, in general, pretty worthwhile for the project although the work has often felt like a hard slog... And meanwhile I've had to set so many other things aside!

But I do have a commitment to getting this book done in as timely a fashion as I can. I need to get this (pretty darn' good) draft done before May 18, because that evening I'm heading over to Harrisonburg, VA, to spend ten days teaching a course at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University.

This chapter I've been working on so hard all this year (also, last fall) is the one that draws together the lessons from all three of the "case-studies" that I have previously explained to the reader in such exquisite and compelling detail. That is: Rwanda, South Africa, and Mozambique. I have some really, really wonderful interview and other field-research material from all three countries. I really need to get the book out soon before it all becomes hopelessly out of date!

This present chapter is Chapter 11. So far, it's already pretty long, at 11,600 or more words, and I'm probably around 70% of the way through it. That's okay. Maybe once I've done a good draft of it I'll find I can handily split it into two chapters. Or maybe it'll just BE long. I think the longest single piece of sustained narrative I've ever written was my first draft of the first Rwanda piece I wrote for Boston Review. This one. I'm not sure how long the edited version of that turned out to be-- it got quite majorly developed as a text along the way (cuttings, expansions, and revisions). Anyway, I think the first draft was 14,000 words and it was, imho, quite readable if not (perhaps) extraordinarily easily so.

Anyway, on the present draft of the present book, chapter 1-10 add up to 88,000 words. So I'm almost exactly at what I consider to be the ideal length for a book: 100,000 words.

Why am I putting all this on the blog? I don't know. I just felt like doing something different here tonight; and worrying about finishing this book as well as I can is the main thing on my mind right now.

I also thought I'd share a little bit from near the top of Ch.11 with y'all. Feel free to comment or not on the following as you please:

In the late 1990s, after the generally perceived success of South Africa's amnesty-reliant TRC had posed a significant first challenge to those who advocated the "duty to prosecute", there were many earnest discussions among (primarily) liberals and rights activists in western-cultured countries over how the possibly competing interests of "truth" and "justice" could somehow be reconciled. ("Justice", in this context, was nearly always understood to denote only the narrow procedural issue of the pursuit of criminal prosecutions rather than anything broader such as, for example, distributive justice or the assurance of fundamental human rights and liberties.) What nearly all of those discussions failed to pay much heed to, however, were the interests of "peace"-- that is, the interests of both peacemaking and longer-term peacebuilding-- in situations of atrocity-wracked inter-group conflict. But the present work has amply illustrated the fact that the commission of all of the kinds of atrocities that are recognized in current international law (war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide) nearly always takes place in circumstances of deeply rooted inter-group conflict, whether at the international or intra-state level. Any strategy, therefore, that seeks to put in place a general political situation in which people can have some credible assurance that atrocities will no longer be committed must be based on successful strategies at the broader political level for both peacemaking and peacebuilding. By "peacemaking" I mean a policy that seeks explicitly to resolve the deep political differences that lie at the root of the conflict in question and puts in place a sustainable and fundamentally egalitarian political order in which those political differences that will inevitably remain, or will emerge over time, can be resolved through nonviolent, non-coercive means; and by "peacebuilding" I mean a set of policies in different spheres that aim at transforming public attitudes and social and economic relationships in ways that will sustain the non-coercive, post-conflict political order.

In both Mozambique and South Africa, the requirements of peacemaking were addressed, clearly identified, negotiated, and then agreed upon during the course of the four-year-long peace talks that preceded, and brought about, those two countries' signal "conflict termination events". (For Mozambique, that event was the conclusion of the General Peace Agreement [that ended the 15-year civil war] in October 1992; and for South Africa it was the holding of the April 1994 democratic elections.) Beyond peacemaking, each of those relatively lengthy negotiations also gave the leaders of the conflicting parties a good opportunity to address many key items in the longer-term peacebuilding agenda. Crucially, it gave the negotiators themselves—who were high-ranking representatives of these conflicting parties—the opportunity to experience for themselves and then model for (and explain to) their respective home constituencies the kinds of transformations in attitudes toward "the other" that could help to reframe the relationships among the relevant social groups on a much more constructive basis. It also, equally crucially, allowed the negotiators and the leaders and broader social movements to which they reported the time they needed to work through a process of envisioning how a new social-political order based on fundamental political equality might actually be fashioned in practice, and what kinds of accommodations people from every party would need to make, if they wanted to allow such an order to be built. In the process of these negotiations, therefore, not only were the fundamental political terms of conflict termination agreed upon, but considerable work was also done in preparing the social and psychological ground for the cooperative (or at least, non-antagonistic) relationships of the post-conflict era.

The parties did not reach agreement on absolutely everything in the course of these pre-transition negotiations. For example, in South Africa, they agreed to defer until later the fashioning of the full, final version of the country's democratic Constitution (as also of the exact procedure whereby the promised amnesties for apartheid-era rights abusers would be granted). They also agreed to defer till later resolution of some of the thorniest issues to do with the restoration of the rights of non-Whites to land and other natural and economic resources. But in South Africa and in Mozambique, in the course of the pre-transition negotiations each of the conflicting parties certainly did give up a lot of its previous claims, arguments, and strong social and political predispositions-- in the interests of allowing the peace process to succeed. In a real sense, therefore, we might say now (though it may well not have felt like that to many of the stakeholders at the time) that the South Africans and Mozambicans ended up being relatively lucky that the conflicts that had burdened their countries for so long were not resolved through the outright victory of one side over the other, since it was precisely the years-long period of negotiations that allowed the parties to those conflicts to work together to craft a shared vision of a form of shared citizenship with which both (or all) of the previously contending parties felt they could live throughout the years and generations to come.

The people of Rwanda were not so "lucky"...

In the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, in my long experience, so many Israelis and so many of their generally well-meaning friends elsehwere have focused very heavily all along on peacebuilding projects while the actual requirements of concluding a real-life peace agreeement have nearly always so far been either set aside or deferred until an ever-receding future... And meanwhile, the "Greater Israel" crowd has used every hour of every day of that delay to push forward their project of Judaizing the West Bank.

But you can't have a lovey-dovey peacebuilding climate unless there is a clear and precise final peace agreement either already concluded or already, clearly being discussed as such and near to being concluded.

How to get the Israelis to the point where they are ready to make a final peace and to terminate their conflict with the Palestinians on a clearcut, egalitarian, and mutually acceptable basis? Who knows?