From

http://www.transcend.org/

The "chapter": After violence: 3 “R”

TRANSCEND:

A Peace and Development Organisation for
Conflict Transformation by Peaceful Means

 
 
 
AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION, RESOLUTION
Coping With Visible and Invisible Effects of War and Violence
 
By Johan Galtung, dr hc mult, Professor of Peace Studies 
American, Granada, Ritsumeikan, Troms” and Witten Universities 
Director, TRANSCEND: A Peace and Development Network
 
1. An Overview, and a Summary. 2
 
2. On Conflict/Violence/Peace Images  8
 
3. Mapping the Violence Formation 15
 
 Nature 17
 Humans 17
 Society 19
 World 23
 Time 24
 Culture 25
 
4. Violence, War, Trauma, Guilt - and the Search for Closure 27
 
5. Auschwitz, Gulag, Hiroshima, Nanking: Who/What is Guilty? 35
 
6. Truth&Reconciliation in South Africa: A New Jurisprudence? 40
 
7. Reconstruction After Violence: An Overview 53
 
 Rehabilitation: the collective sorrow approach 54
 Rebuilding: the development approach 56
 Restructuration: the peace structure approach 58
 Reculturation: the peace culture approach 61
 
8. Reconciliation After Violence: An Overview 64
 
 Introduction 64
[1] The exculpatory nature-structure-culture approach 65
[2] The reparation/restitution approach 67
[3] The apology/forgiveness approach 69
[4] The theological/penitence approach 71
[5] The juridical/punishment approach 73
[6] The codependent origination/karma approach 75
[7] The historical/truth commission approach 77
[8] The theatrical/reliving approach 79
[9] The joint sorrow/healing approach 81
[10] The joint reconstruction approach 83
[11] The joint conflict resolution approach 85
[12] The ho'o ponopono approach 87
 Conclusion 89
 
9. Resolution After Violence: An Overview 92
 
 The democracy, parliamentarian approach 96
 The nonviolence, extra-parliamentarian approach 98
 
10. Reconstruction/Reconciliation/Resolution: The Interface 100
 
 Diachrony versus synchrony 101
 Building conflict transformation capacity 103
 
 2
 
1. An Overview, and a Summary.
 
Violence has occurred, in the collective form of a war, with one
 
or more governments participating, or in the family, or in the
 
streets. Material and somatic, visible damage is accumulating,
 
deplored by parties and outsiders. But then the violence is
 
abating: the parties may have run out of material and nonmaterial
 
resources; the parties converge in their predictions of the final
 
outcome and more violence is seen as wanton, wasted; and/or
 
outside parties intervene to stop the violence, keep the peace,
 
for whatever reason, like preventing the victory of the party they
 
disfavor. A truce, cease-fire (armistice, Waffenstillstand, cese
 
al fuego) is initiated, an agreement is drawn up, signed. There is
 
a sigh of relief. And bewilderment.
 
 The word "peace" is used both by the naive who confuse
 
absence of direct violence with peace and do not understand that
 
the work to make and build peace is now just about to start, and
 
by the less naive who know this and do not want that work to get
 
started. Thus the word "peace" becomes a very effective peace-
 
blocker. Our purpose is to contribute to the worldwide effort to
 
unblock that process toward a peace beyond cease-fire so that
 
"after violence" does not so easily become "before violence"./1/
 
 The scene is appalling. The killed, the wounded, the raped,
 
the traumatized, the bereaved. The refugees, the displaced. The
 
new populations of widows, orphans, the wounded and war-struck,
 
the demobilized soldiers. The material damage, ruins; PTT,
 
electricity and water not working, road, rail, bridges, broken.
 
The institutional breakdown, the absence of law and order, the
 
lack of governance. The land mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO)
 
everywhere. People scavenging in the ruins.
 
 3
 
 And yet this is only what meets the naked eye. In another
 
context what to do before violence has been explored/2/. In that
 
connection a little triangle was found useful, the ABC-triangle
 
where A stand for attitudes/assumptions, B for behaviour and C for
 
the contradiction underlying the conflict, the clash of goals held
 
by the parties; the issues. C is the root conflict. But as the
 
conflict runs its course A and B start taking ugly shapes:
 
anything from hatred eating at their heart to depression for A,
 
the inner state of the parties; anything from the most rabid
 
physical and verbal violence to withdrawal, apathy for B.
 
A and B, particularly B, constitute the meta-conflict, the
 
conflict that comes out of, or after, the root conflict, the over-
 
layer.  Only B, the overt violent behaviour, is visible.
 
 The focus in Conflict Transformation By Peaceful Means was on
 
how to transform the root conflict so that the parties can handle
 
it, the thesis being that "it is the failure to transform conflict
 
that leads to violence". But then there was also another thesis,
 
that conflict mobilizes a reservoir of energy that can be used for
 
constructive, not only destructive purposes. In other words,
 
violence in general, and war in particular is not only a monument
 
over the failure to transform the conflict so as to avoid
 
violence, but also the failure to use the conflict energy for more
 
constructive purposes.
 
 Before violence the emotions were more pent-up. It made
 
sense to approach the root conflict as an intellectual problem
 
demanding high levels of creativity. After violence all of that
 
has changed. Pent-up emotions have been released in a frenzy of
 
collective human madness. There is massive destruction of all
 
kinds. And under the ruins the root conflict is still there!
 
 4
 
 The first task dealing with the root conflict is to map the
 
conflict formation, the parties, the goals, the clashes/issues.
 
The corresponding task after violence is to map the violence
 
formation, to understand better how the meta-conflict has run its
 
diabolic course, wreaking havoc within and between humans, groups,
 
societies, producing war-torn people, war-torn societies, a war-
 
torn world./3/ War is man-made disaster.
 
 To start this mapping of violence another triangle, related
 
to the ABC-triangle, may be useful:
 
 
 
VISIBLE Direct Violence
 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 
INVISIBLE Cultural Violence Structural Violence
 
 
 
The direct violence, physical and/or verbal, is visible as
 
behavior. But human action does not come out of nowhere; there
 
are roots. Two roots are indicated: a culture of violence
 
(heroic, patriotic, patriarchic, etc.), and a structure that
 
itself is violent by being too repressive, exploitative or
 
alienating; too tight or too loose for the comfort of people.
 
 The popular misunderstanding that "violence is in human
 
nature" is rejected. The potential for violence, like love, is in
 
human nature; but circumstances condition the realization of that
 
potential. Violence is not like eating or sexing, found all over
 
the world with slight variations. The big variations in violence
 
are easily explained in terms of culture and structure: cultural
 
and structural violence cause direct violence, using violent
 
actors who revolt against the structures and using the culture to
 
legitimize their use of violence as instruments.
 
 5
 
 The ABC-triangle is at the human level of human attitudes and
 
assumptions, cognitions and emotions, human violent behavior
 
physical or verbal, human perceptions of goals as incompatible,
 
clashing. The violence triangle is a social reflection of this.
 
The cultural violence is the sum total of all the myths, of glory
 
and trauma, and so on that serve to justify direct violence. The
 
structural violence is the sum total of all the clashes built into
 
the social and world structures and cemented, solidified so that
 
unjust, inequitable outcomes are almost unchangeable. The direct
 
violence described above grows out of this, of some elements, or
 
out of the total syndrome.
 
 Obviously peace must also be built in the culture and in the
 
structure, not only in the "human mind". For the violence triangle
 
has built-in vicious cycles. The visible effects of direct
 
violence are as described above: the killed, the wounded, the
 
displaced, the material damage, all increasingly hitting the
 
civilians. But the invisible effects may be even more vicious:
 
direct violence reinforces structural and cultural violence, in
 
ways to be described below. And this, in turn, may lead to even
 
more direct violence. Most important is hatred and the addiction
 
to revenge for the trauma suffered among the losers, and to more
 
victories, glory among the winners. Power also accrues to the men
 
of violence. People feel this, are skeptical about "military
 
solutions", start searching for "political solutions". They tend
 
to be structural, like drawing geographical borders. Left out is
 
the cultural aspect, including the possibility that drawing
 
borders in geography may reinforce borders in the mind, which in
 
turn may legitimize direct violence in the future. An intra-state
 
war today may become an inter-state war tomorrow.
 
  6
 
 Geographical fragmentation may substitute the horizontal
 
structural violence of "too distant" for the vertical structural
 
violence of repressing, exploiting and alienating minorities
 
within a nation-state. We are now in a phase of internal wars of
 
secession and revolution. But distance may also lead to a new
 
phase of external wars between newly created states.
 
 In addition, with a cease-fire the motivation for serious
 
action often suffers a dramatic decline. The obvious thesis would
 
be: if violent cultures and structures produce direct violence,
 
then such cultures and structures also reproduce direct violence. 
 
The cease-fire, then, becomes nothing but a between-wars period;
 
an illusion perpetrated on people with too much faith in their
 
leaders. A feeling of hopelessness follows as people start
 
realizing the vicious circle: violent structures can only be
 
changed by violence; but that violence will lead to new violent
 
structures, and also reinforce a culture of warfare.
 
 The way out lies in denying the first horn of the dilemma,
 
the thesis that "the (oppressive, exploitative) structure can only
 
be changed by violence", itself a part of a culture of violence. 
 
If the contradiction is not too sharp, then the politics of
 
democracy is an answer. If the contradiction is very sharp--
 
meaning that the vested interests in the status quo are
 
considerable for some, and so is the suffering in terms of the
 
basic needs of survival, well-being, freedom and identity for the
 
majority or the minority (in the latter case majoritarian
 
democracy may legitimize the status quo)--then the politics of
 
nonviolence, following the lead of Gandhi, may be the answer./4/
 
 A major problem is that (parliamentary) democracy and (extra-
 
parliamentary) nonviolence are parts of the political culture in
 
 7
 
only some parts of the world, and democracy (which may be violent
 
in its consequences) more so than nonviolence. But both are
 
spreading rapidly, and do not exclude each other.
 
 In this complex of vicious cycles we can now identify three
 
problems that can only be solved by turning the vicious cycles
 
into virtuous cycles (notice the "re": again, again, and again):
 
[1] The problem of reconstruction after the direct violence:
 
[2] The problem of reconciliation of the conflict parties
 
[3] The problem of resolution of the underlying, root conflict;
 
  If you do only one of these three without the other two you
 
will not even get that one. Hegel was arguing reconciliation
 
between Herr and Knecht without resolution; Marx resolution
 
without any reconciliation. Reconstruction without removing the
 
causes of violence will lead to its reproduction. Badly needed is
 
theory and practice combining all three.
 
 But what does "combined" mean? Assuming violence has already
 
happened, it means synchronic rather than diachronic, linear, one-
 
after-the-other. That opens for two models: three separate tracks
 
for each task; one track for all three tasks.
 
 The first model refers reconstruction to "developers",
 
reconciliation to theologians-psychologists, and resolution to
 
jurists-diplomats-politicians; all approaches to be discussed.
 
 The second model would fuse the tasks into one, based on a
 
fundamental hypothesis: reconciliation can best take place when
 
the parties cooperate in resolution and reconstruction.
 
 And this may also be where the road to peace is located, if
 
peace is defined as the capacity to handle conflicts with empathy,
 
nonviolence and creativity./5/ Capacity to handle conflict is a
 
major casualty of war. So let us look into that.
 
  8
 
2. On Conflict/Violence/Peace Images
 
Violence must be seen in a context, and the context chosen is
 
"conflict". There are many misunderstandings and unfortunate
 
conceptions of conflict, that great Creator and great Destroyer. 
 
A common discourse about conflict, in the media, among researchers
 
and people in general, conceives of conflict as an organism with
 
birth, growth to a turning point, and then a decline, till in the
 
end the conflict dies out. That discourse has quantitative time,
 
khronos, on the horizontal axis and on the vertical axis the level
 
of direct violence, from the first sign of "trouble" to "cease-
 
fire", the kairos points of time, in the qualitative sense. The
 
conflict may have "burnt out", the parties may coincide in their
 
prognosis about the outcome and find it useless to continue
 
destroying each other, or a third party has intervened, forcing
 
them to stop, or making them agree to stop. The end is then often
 
called "peace"/6/, a khronos flow.
 
 A list of major shortcomings of this discourse includes:
 
[1] The impression is given that violence/war arises out of
nothing, ex nihilo; compatible with the idea of evil at work.
 
[2] The impression is given that violence/war has its origin at
precise space and time points, and with the first violent act.
 
[3] The impression is given that violence/war ends with no after-
effects, compatible with ideas of "conflict termination".
 
[4] The impression is given of a single-peak conflict life-cycle,
and not of long periods of latency, multiple peaks etc.
 
[5] A point not to be underestimated: violence/war is seen as a
variable; peace only as a point, as zero violence/war.
 
 Thus, violence/war is seen as an eruption with a beginning
 
and an end and no other consequences than those that are visible
 
at the end of the violence: the killed, the wounded, the damage;
 
the kind of military communique we have lamented above.
 
 
  9
 
 Of course, nobody is quite that naive; a considerable
 
literature exists about "causes of war" and the "aftermath". But
 
this image counteracts both prevention and aftermath care.
 
 Before an alternative image is developed, let us compare
 
violence to disease, for instance to tuberculosis, TBC. A
 
fruitful way of conceiving of any human pathology is in terms of
 
interplay between exposure and resistance; in casu between micro-
 
organisms operating under the right conditions (for them) of
 
temperature and humidity, and the level of immunity of the body,
 
which in turn has to do with the immune system, nutrition and
 
living standard, mind and spirit. This all plays together
 
holistically and synergistically. Of course some generalities can
 
be identified, but they will never completely cover any individual
 
case, leaving room for empathy with the individual patient and
 
his/her total environment and history, combining the generalizing
 
and the individualizing.
 
 More particularly, studies show how TBC rates decreased more
 
because of improved living standards (nutrition, housing,
 
clothing) than because of artificial strengthening of immune
 
systems through inoculation, and early diagnosis (X-ray)./7/
 
 A disease cannot be detached from patient/8/ and context as
 
an abstract entity with a life-cycle of its own, calling for
 
generalized prevention, therapy and rehabilitation. Key aspects
 
of exposure and resistance may be in the context in a broad sense,
 
not in the disease-patient interface. Causal cycles pass body-
 
mind-spirit, not only the body. And key causes may be far away
 
from the symptoms. Include the full context, and the cycles may
 
even be global (AIDS), and macro-historical (flu).
 
With increasing globalization this becomes even more true.
 
 10
 
 Nor can violence be detached from its space/time context.
 
 The context in space is the conflict formation, including all
 
parties involved, proximate and distant, with all goals relevant
 
for the conflict, consciously held values as well as positional
 
interests. A first mistake in conflict practice is to include
 
only parties in a limited violence area; confusing symptoms with
 
causes, like a physician referring to a swollen ankle as an "ankle
 
disease", not as a possible heart disorder symptom. Or to hunger
 
as "insufficient food intake", not as a social problem. Remote,
 
back-stage, parties may be crucial.
 
 The context in time is the conflict history, including the
 
history of the future. A second mistake made in conflict practice
 
is to equip conflict history with beginning and end, coinciding
 
with a limited violence interval, from the first eruption of
 
violence till the cease-fire confused with peace.
 
 A violence area-interval is then detached from formation and
 
history and reified as in the "Manchurian Incident", the "Gulf
 
War", the "Yugoslav debacle", "Rwanda", and tabulated in research
 
long on data and short on understanding. One reason for this is
 
no doubt epistemological, rooted in empiricism and beyond that in
 
behaviorism: violence is behavior and can be observed; conflict is
 
more abstract. Another is political: violence may escalate not
 
only inside but also "out of area-interval" and become dangerous
 
to others by contagion, like an epidemic disease. Hence the focus
 
on proven carriers of the germs of disease and violence,
 
"terrorists", to be eradicated, like germs. Causal cycles outside
 
area-interval might include very powerful actors who prefer to
 
remain unnamed/unmentioned. Mainstream media tend to fall into all
 
these traps.
 
  11
 
 What kind of discourse would we recommend to accommodate
 
these considerations, focusing not only on the etiology of a given
 
outbreak of violence/war and on meaningful intervention, but also
 
on the aftermath? Here is one tentative answer:
 
 [1] Direct (overt) violence is seen as having a pre-, side-,
 
and after-history, in unbounded areas and intervals.
 
 [2] These histories can be traced in six spaces:
 
Nature: as ecological deterioration/ecological improvement
 
Human, body, mind, spirit: as traumas-hatred, as glory-love
 
Social: as deepening of conflict/as healing of conflict
 
World(space): as deepening of conflict/as healing of conflict
 
Time: as the kairos of trauma/glory, as the khronos of peace
 
Culture: as deposits of trauma/glory, as deposits of peace
 
 [3] These six spaces can be summarized into three:
 
Direct violence/peace: to nature and human body-mind-spirit
 
Structural violence/peace: in social and world spaces, as
 
- vertical structural violence: repression and exploitation,
 
- horizontal structural violence: parties too close/too remote
 
- structural peace: freedom and equity, adequate distance
 
Cultural violence/peace: legitimizing/delegitimizing violence
 
 [4] Time enters as a medium in which this all unfolds. But
 
whereas direct violence is usually seen as a process with kairos
 
points, structural and cultural violence, and peace, are more like
 
step functions at those kairos points. There is an event that
 
brings about a lower or higher level, after which the level is
 
more permanent. As the permanent is difficult to see (there is no
 
contrast), and the event is difficult to catch (it is too sudden),
 
both phenomena easily pass unregistered. Violence is more easy to
 
understand and conveniently confused with conflict.
 
 12
 
 How would we now depict a conflict process? There is no
 
denial that the violent aspect of conflict is a function of time
 
like an organism with birth, maturity and death, even if multi-
 
peaked rather than single-peaked violence processes may be more
 
realistic (as for diseases). But there are three problems:
 
 This represents violence as a variable and the absence of
 
violence as a point, as zero violence, as "cease-fire". But peace
 
should also be seen as a variable, in terms of more peace or less
 
peace, reflected among other places in the level of positive,
 
cooperative interaction and the level of friendship.
 
 Only one type of violence is included: direct violence; not
 
the underlying structural and cultural violence.
 
 Third, and this is more psychological than logical: up and
 
down have evaluative connotations, so why not have peace on the
 
positive side of the Y-axis, and violence on the negative? With
 
three types of violence/peace this means three Y-axes.
 
 Thus, a more adequate conflict analysis would start with a
 
social formation, and then assess the levels of structural and
 
cultural violence/peace. If positive and high, don't worry. But
 
if both are low we have an early, very early, warning. Both have
 
considerable inertia, being permanent for long intervals of time,
 
like the level of repression/exploitation of indigenous people
 
combined with Western/Christian contempt for primitives-pagans,
 
and machismo interpreting direct violence as catharsis.
 
 Structural, like direct, violence is relational, not only
 
relative. Not only "Y was killed by a bullet, X was not", but "Y
 
was killed by a bullet fired by X". Not only inequality, but
 
inequity: not "Y is low on well-being and human rights" and "X is
 
high on both", but "X is high on both, because Y is low"./9/
 
 13
 
 Structural and cultural peace correspond not only to immunity
 
in disease analysis, but to level of health in general. This
 
resistance may not only be disturbingly low but negative, meaning
 
there is structural and cultural violence operating; a basis for
 
early action instead of waiting for the exposure.
 
 The exposure, like the shot in Sarajevo,/10/ is often seen as
 
an event although the famous drop that leads to an overflow may be
 
a better image. A final provocation, an additional act, with
 
repression, misery/hunger and alienation at an intolerable level.
 
The violence may be expressive of despair and frustration rather
 
than a calculated, instrumental act for basic change. But it will
 
probably provoke a counter-violence, and the process unfolds,
 
downward in this image, until the curve turns upward, less
 
violence, passing zero=cease-fire, and then into peace.
 
 But then comes the basic point: after the cease-fire the
 
situation may be worse than before the violence erupted, for the
 
reasons explored in the preceding chapters. The direct violence
 
may be the lesser evil, at least in the longer term, than the
 
structural and cultural damage wrought. It is like the way being
 
hospitalized is seen in some societies: like a market. The
 
patient offers one disease and gets two or three iatrogenic
 
diseases in return, one surgical error, one infection; and then
 
"hospitalitis" if only in the form of long-lasting back-sores.
 
 Direct violence may have come to a celebrated end. The
 
direct suffering is over, but the structural and cultural violence
 
have increased in the process. Violence therapy has to learn from
 
disease therapy: include prevention--build cultural and structural
 
peace--and include rehabilitation, meaning build cultural and
 
structural peace again. And again. And again.
 
 14
 
 To repeat: conflict is over incompatible goals, violence is