| Date 12-Nov-2013 to 12-Nov-2013 |
Location New Delhi, India |
Format International |
Over the past three years researchers from India and Europe have jointly been examining the interface between conflict and governance in India and the EU. Case studies and field research in India have included the north east, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand and Bihar. In Europe, Georgia, Bosnia and Cyprus have been studied.
The international seminar to be held on 11-12 November, 2013 will present the findings of this three-year research to facilitate reciprocal learning between academicians, researchers and conflict resolution practitioners from Delhi working in the area of peace, conflict and governance.
The conference raises, and answers, emerging questions around conflict, peace, security, nationalism, identity, development and peace. The focal points of the presentations and discussions will be issues that researchers grappled with in the course of the project – the issues that emanate from the scale and response of the Indian state to a range of complex conflicts as it seeks to maintain its legitimacy as a democratic state with the capacity to develop; as well as the impact of the EU model of conflict resolution and how this is understood and received by the people in Cyprus, Georgia and Bosnia in a world where the EU is seen as the diplomatic exemplar. How can these dynamics be understood in terms of the broader philosophical and political questions of our times?
The conference will include a session on “Thinking beyond liberal peace”, during which the emerging themes of “Peace as governance”, “Economics of peace”, “Agency, complicity, autonomy in Conflict Zones” and “State and social justice issues” will be discussed. The findings of the research and the dialogue on liberal peace will feed into a book which is to be published in 2014 (by the University of Manchester Press).
The second day of the symposium will host a dialogue on future implications in terms of theory building, research, practice and policy. Key policy makers from the Planning Commission, bureaucrats, elected representatives, and policy think tanks will exchange ideas with project researchers on the role of elections and electoral politics; autonomy, dialogue and reconciliation; resistance and protest; and the role of civil society in conflict zones.
“The Role of Governance in the Resolution of Socioeconomic and Political Conflict in India and Europe – CORE” reviews and critiques current approaches to conflict resolution in an attempt to revise and improve both the theoretical and operational sides of conflict resolution and peace building. It analyses the premises and operation of governance initiatives in conflict transformation processes through a combination of fieldwork, qualitative analysis and theory development.
Governance was understood in this project as actors, institutions and processes that define, contest and redefine what is public good. Governance, particularly in conflict areas, is always in a state of flux as new rules of engagement emerge through the various combinations of private and public authority; the shifting interests of powerful actors in the supranational, central, state and local levels; and the creative responses of social actors on the ground who can also recombine and reprocess institutional resources in response to new challenges. How these processes pan out in the diverse sites of conflicts in India and Europe provided the leitmotif that connected these otherwise diverse case studies. The project sought to be both context-sensitive as well as projects-in-context while looking at how context can modify governance initiatives and also how governance can impact the conflict. It adopted a post-liberal peace building approach in its analysis of conflict and governance and worked with the consensual understanding that free markets, procedural democracy and rule of law are not necessarily the magic bullets that can bring about an emancipatory and sustainable civic peace.
Field reports based on extensive field work were analyzed through thematic rubrics of how instruments of governance interfaced with actors, institutions and processes in these conflict spots in order to gain a deeper understanding of how effective they were; the manner in which they were accepted/rejected/modified by formal, informal, state and non-state actors; and their intended and unintended consequences.
Apart from the fact that the conflict contexts were very different, there is another significant factor that distinguishes the conflicts in India from those in Europe. There is no counterpart of the European Commission – a supranational body that sets rules and norms on a variety of matters including issues of security and conflict resolution in Europe – in South Asia. These differences posed a challenge in terms of making meaningful comparisons across the board but also presented a set of unique opportunities for cross-contextual and cross-national learnings.