Photo: PBS CC
Since 2012, April has been the traditional month of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) open debate to discuss the annual Secretary-General’s report on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. And while for the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) community it is always a major event on the calendar, with the prospect of a US veto of a new resolution, the debate this year suddenly became a must-watch event in New York and around the world.
Ingrid Eide at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in 1968. Photo: Henrik Laurvik / NTB / Scanpix
When people ask what peace is, I urge them to tell me what they associate with war. They answer death, destruction, battles, arms, hatred, uniforms, suffering, fear, anxiety, loss, misery, and much else, all of which are bad and sad. Then I suggest that peace could be the opposite: life, construction, debates, tools, friendship, a colourful dress, thriving, safety, serenity, gain, prosperity, all of which are good and enjoyable. The exact meaning of peace will differ from one person to the next, but it is always the opposite of war. This is how I saw it after the War, and this is how I see it today.
Ingrid Eide receives me at her home in Bjerkealléen (The Birch Alley) at Grefsen, Oslo, the neighbourhood where she grew up. She sits down in front of a painting of her mother, the teacher and peace activist Ragnhild Hjertine Haagensen Eide (1901–91), who also grew up at Grefsen. They resemble each other. I get a feeling of listening to both at the same time, speaking to me with a warm, firm, compelling voice.
Stein Tønnesson: When you say, ‘the War’, I suppose you mean the Second World War, when Germany occupied Norway. You grew up with that war. How did it form you as a sociologist and peace researcher?
Ingrid Eide: I had turned seven when the war came to Norway, and had started school at Grefsen. I was twelve before the war was over. Those five years gave me so many memories. I believe they were decisive for my later dedication to the mission of the United Nations and my enthusiasm for developing peace research.
The battles over leadership of the peace process in Afghanistan are intensifying. It seems increasingly likely that there will be a peace agreement, in one form or other, between the United States and the Taliban. But an Afghan peace settlement that is not based on dialogue between parties within Afghanistan – between the Taliban and other groups – will have scarcely any hope of survival. The international nature of the conflict means that agreement is also needed with Afghanistan’s neighbours, as well as unanimity among global powers. Coordinating this process, between all the different parties, and at many different levels, is a challenging task. Right now, there is reason to fear that the struggle over leadership of a process is taking up more energy than the peace process itself. At worst, this could result in the whole process hitting the rocks.
A scene in Kabul. UN Photo / Eskinder Debebe
Johan Galtung at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in 1968. Photo: Henrik Laurvik / NTB / Scanpix
The Second World War had a lasting effect on me. Especially because my beloved father was imprisoned at Grini (west of Oslo). And we were informed that every time there was a British bombing, prisoners would be shot. So, every night the air raid siren went, my mother and I would run out to the air raid shelter and sit there with only one thing on our minds. And my mother never wanted to go and get the paper the day after in case the headline read: ‘Dr Galtung shot this morning in retaliation for last night’s bombing raid’.
Henrik Urdal: You were born six years before the war came to Norway. Could you tell me a bit about your childhood? What sort of influence did your father and mother have on you?
Johan Galtung: My father’s educational background had a real influence on me. He’d attended the Norwegian Military Academy and received top marks in tactics, something he was very proud of. So he knew quite a bit about war and that sort of thing. And, of course, he’d completed a medical degree. And, on top of that, he’d studied political economy. As a politician in the 1920s, a deputy mayor and acting mayor at one point, he’d felt he needed a better understanding of economics. All of which is to say that he was, in effect, fully qualified in three distinct fields. And I suppose I’ve copied him to some extent. Studying one subject shouldn’t stand in the way of studying another. So, when I chose to take both a cand. real. degree in mathematics and a mag. art. degree in sociology, you could say I was following in my father’s footsteps.
It all comes back to my beloved father – he always supported me. He also had a daughter, of course, my sister Ingegerd, who was a strict conservative. She idealized people like Salazar and Franco, while I stood for the complete opposite. She wrote in Morgenbladet and I wrote in Dagbladet. My father would try to reconcile this conflict by praising our writing: ‘You both write such elegant Norwegian!’ You might say he was a bridge builder. But there was, of course, also something of the politician in this approach. At the same time, he supported me completely when I terminated my membership of the state church. He was a devout Christian and went to church every Sunday, but he understood that when I left the state church, it was the state and not the church I was rejecting. It was my view that the state and the church should have nothing to do with each other.Read More
Hundreds of Mozambicans were killed and thousands made homeless recently by Cyclones Idai and Kenneth. Almost immediately, there were reports of a sadly familiar story: women being forced to trade sex for food by local community leaders distributing aid.
Globally, international organisations appear to be grappling with the issue more seriously than before. Yet reports about sexual exploitation keep coming. How does the aid community strategise to protect women’s safety in disaster situations?
Kinshasa, DR Congo: A view of female blue berets of the Ghanaian contingent serving with MONUSCO. Photo MONUSCO/Myriam Asmani
Over the past 15 years, I have done research on sexual exploitation of displaced women in Uganda and Colombia. I have also worked with a variety of humanitarian organisations on accountability and legalisation. Through this, I have identified the factors necessary to bring justice to the victims of predatory aid workers.
Sexual exploitation must be recognised as a real and widespread problem. There must be staff and management accountability. Transgressions must be sanctioned through disciplinary or penal measures. But there are also major dilemmas that need to be understood and tackled by governments, agencies and, most importantly, local communities.Read More
Climate change has the potential to increase violent conflict risk. This suggests the need for a specified subfield of peacebuilding research and practice to address this issue. Environmental peacebuilding is growing in prominence among scholars and practitioners, even though the debate as to how much climate change increases conflict risk is not yet settled. This… Read more »
Kabul. Photo: Sven Gunnar Simonsen / PRIO
Is the peace process in Afghanistan already in serious trouble? Talks continue in Doha between the US and the Taliban – which is good. The Loya Jirga – dedicated to peace and reconciliation – has concluded, but with a number of prominent politicians abstaining. In Moscow a significant group of prominent Afghan politicians met in February to start a dialogue with the Taliban negotiating team. But efforts to continue this dialogue failed, with Kabul presenting an unmanageable list of 250 representatives. Who was responsible for the failure is not for me to judge.
Moscow prepares for the parade.
Military force remains the instrument of choice in Russian policy-making, yet the expenditures on its building keeps going down. This paradoxical picture comes out of the recent estimate by our sister-institution Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which is eagerly picked up by the Russian media. SIPRI methodology is long-established and respected by experts, but the assessment that demotes Russia to the sixth position in the world behind France appears to be not just counter-intuitive but plain wrong. This impression may be partly shaped by the assertive political rhetoric amplified by official propaganda and reinforced by many demonstrations, like the military parade that is going to roll over the Red Square in Moscow on the Victory Day celebrated on May 9. There is, nevertheless, much material evidence to doubt the 3.5 per cent reduction of military spending in 2018.
SIPRI doesn’t take the official data uncritically, but the best research efforts can correct the deliberate distortions produced by the main statistical agency Rosstat only so far. Every year, more and more parameters of the defense budget are made secret and denied even to the State Duma in violation of basic legislation. It is also clear that a direct re-calculation of expenditures from rubles into US dollars using the current exchange rate produces serious errors because the pricing mechanism in the Russian defense-industrial complex is obscure, so that the Armed Forces get new weapons for a price very different from what the foreign customers pay. In macro-economic estimates, the indicator of “purchasing power parity” is increasingly used for international comparisons, and a very rough (because of secrecy) application of this method to defense expenditures increases Russia’s total figure approximately thrice.
President Vladimir Putin excels at praising Russia’s military might and bragging about new technologically advanced weapon systems, such as the nuclear-propelled underwater vehicle Poseidon. He used the occasion of launching the nuclear submarine Belgorod (in construction since 1992), which is supposed to be the carrier of Poseidons, for supervising the laying of keels of four other combat ships. This ceremony cannot quite camouflage the deep problems in Russian shipbuilding, which struggles with orders for constructing the series of Yasen-class nuclear submarines and for repairs of the only aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and other Soviet-era cruisers.
Russian Navy has come out as a loser in the 2027 State Armament Program approved with delays only in early 2018 because the government insisted on cuts bitterly contested by various lobbies. Putin is wary about economic consequences and often claims that Russia will not repeat the Soviet blunder of channeling too much resources towards military needs and will pursue the arms race on the cheap. The economy is indeed stuck in a protracted recession and the discontent caused by the sustained decline of incomes and the increase of the retirement age is deepening. The growing public demand for social benefits brings greater political need to hide the real costs of militarization.
This “creative accounting” is particularly wide-spread in budgeting for the on-going “hybrid” applications of military force, which are often financed from special “money pools” filled by “voluntary” contributions from super-rich individuals. Costs of de-facto occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine are certainly not included in the defense expenditures, and Putin took pains to explain that his decree on granting Russian citizenship to the population of this territories would not be that heavy for the Russian budget. The Syrian intervention is becoming increasingly unpopular, and state media only reluctantly informs about continuing attacks on Russian troops and bases. The deployment of Russian “advisers” and mercenaries in support of the Maduro regime in Venezuela is bluntly denied, and the state-owned Rosneft will probably have to cook its books for hiding the accumulating losses.
One feature in the complicated picture of money flows in the Russian military machine that is extremely difficult to calculate is corruption, which even in minimalistic official investigations reaches mind-boggling proportions. Scandals about hundreds of “dead souls” on the payrolls of military research institutes or fake research projects emerge from the veil of secrecy every month. Squabbles for shrinking funding are the main driver of these exposures, and the military structures are no different in this respect from other armed bureaucracies. Even in the all-powerful Federal Security Service (FSB), the head of the department supervising the financial sector was recently detained for bribery.
Financing of these structures is not included in the military expenditures, even if the Border Guard, subordinated to the FSB, is capable enough to capture three Ukrainian vessels in the international waters near the Kerch Straight last November. The main task of these forces is to ensure domestic security, and the brutal detention of liberal activists during the May 1 demonstration in St. Petersburg is supposed to demonstrate their readiness to protect the regime. Corruption goes hand in hand with this readiness, and the command of the heavily armed Rosgvardia wants to make the acquisitions secret, so that embezzlement would be better covered.
The sum total of money spent on strengthening, modernizing and corrupting various elements of Russian super-structure of militarism is probably not known even to Putin, who quite possibly doesn’t care to enquire. Some lobbies may suffer cuts, but the whole system appears perfectly sustainable, so that top generals keep building mansions in the Rublevka suburbia outside Moscow next to the dachas of “liberal” ministers. This waste of resources condemns Russia to degradation and losing ground in the global competition for redefining the world order, but these consequences are entirely acceptable for Putin’s court. Russia is not facing bankruptcy, and each new “wonder-weapon” appears to be affordable, but progressive militarization generates an interplay of external and domestic risks, which the Kremlin is ill-equipped to control.
A version of this text is published in Eurasia Daily Monitor.
Remote sensing can provide valuable insights into the environmental dimensions of armed conflicts. Access to areas affected by armed conflicts is often limited, posing problems for research into environmental change. Because of this, remote sensing using satellite imagery is one of the tools that is increasingly used to monitor how armed conflicts interact with the… Read more »
St. Anthony’s Shrine was one of the targets of the Easter Sunday terror attack. Photo: AntanO via Wikimedia Commons
The terrorist attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday have spawned many questions about the return of violence to Sri Lanka after a 10-year hiatus following the defeat of the Tamil Tiger (LTTE) terrorists in May 2009.
The first thing to understand is that the terror attacks have no bearing on the internal politics of Sri Lanka. Neither are these attacks tied to any inter-ethnic, nor inter-religious questions reflected in current political discourse on the island. During the civil war, terrorism in Sri Lanka went abroad; for example, the Tamil Tigers assassinated the Indian PM, Rajiv Gandhi. This time, the world (Middle East) seems to have come to Sri Lanka.
So why Sri Lanka? The answer is simply that Sri Lanka offered a soft target.
I am of the opinion that the relations between the religious groups will not be soured by these actions, but that the immediate days following the attacks have shown that people are unified, condemning terrorism rather than the religious faiths of others. There have been some incidents of vengeful violence against Muslims, which the police and security forces need to address and tamp down on quickly. But overall it seems that civil society in Sri Lanka has come a long way, unfortunately baptized by the fire of a 30-year civil war and decades of mass terrorism.
So why Sri Lanka? The answer is simply that Sri Lanka offered a soft target. Within that scenario, the churches, particularly Catholic ones, offered greater softness in terms of access and the number of targets. Five-star hotels in Sri Lanka today are also soft targets because after decades of civil war, when even ladies’ hand bags were searched before entering a hotel, none of this exists today. What explains this? Why the laxity in security?
This can be partly explained as a result of the “success” of the post-war peace in Sri Lanka — little studied and little understood. One might recall the bloody ending of the civil war in May 2009, when the government, with little regard for the international community´s misguided calls for the Sri Lankan forces to cease hostilities, utterly defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Immediately following the war, the government, without much help from an alienated international community, successfully reintegrated 15,000 former combatants and resettled several hundred thousand internally displaced, including 200,000 civilians that had been taken as a human shield.
Considering all this disruption, displacement, perhaps even built up hatreds, little to no interethnic violence and retaliation has been recorded in these past 10 years — so much for theories of ethnic conflict. Consider also that for a civil war that had thousands of suicide bombings and entire squads of suicide bombers that were trained by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, not one known attempt of a suicide bombing has been recorded in Sri Lanka — trains and busses travel freely between the South and North every day. In other words, there has been little to no violence between the so-called warring ethnic groups in 10 years. Hurrah for peace!
Of course, successful peace has now given way to security failure, but the hope is that lessons will be learnt to prevent the next one. Democracies do badly when fighting terrorism and insurrections, which leaves a lot for us studying civil violence to understand better.
Indra de Soysa is an external associate at PRIO and a professor at NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research interests include the field of political economy and questions relating to the causes of war and peace, governance, and development. He is originally from Sri Lanka.