Resilience as remembering: temporality, memory and compounding crises in Mindanao

The West Bank wall is a contemporary manifestation of the protracted violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet, the Israeli state-promoted discourse has detached the wall’s construction from the conceptualization of violence. It has achieved this by relying on the employment of the traditional conceptualization of the violence, governed by the regimes of instantaneity, visibility and physicality. Embracing Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence, the paper problematizes the restricted understanding of the notion. It draws attention to the politics of conceptualizing violence and explores various nexuses between the modalities of violence and the production and governance of conflict ‘realities’, as well as the regimes of legitimacy, accountability and responsibility. The paper argues that the discursive inequalities in the representation of violence in the conflict are not independent from the material power of the Israeli occupation regime; they constitute an extension of Israel’s dominant status, and as such should be analysed as an intentional strategy that enables and legitimizes the occupation.

Covid-19 has exacerbated violence in Kashmir, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Direct and structural violence, through discriminatory policies, has increased the risk of the humanitarian crisis in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. A few examples of this include the communication blockade in the Indian occupied Kashmir [IOK] and Palestine, supply of expired Covid vaccines to Palestine by Israel, and no provision of vaccination for the Balukhali Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. During Covid-19, these communities have also been suffering due to insufficient health care facilities besides violence. Considering that the international community invests substantially to develop Early Warning and Risk Analysis (EWRA; such as hotline communication between rival states) to gauge the 'traditional military threats' related to the nuclear states. This study focuses on developing a customized EWRA that can help countries prevent the vulnerabilities of violent conflicts during Covid-19. It argues that EWRA only helps prevent a violent conflict but does not aim to provide solutions to the conflicts. The article takes a generic approach to violent conflicts, building on how Covid-19 has increased direct and structural violence in those areas. The study, with a qualitative exploratory approach, offers unique contribution to the literature. First, it is an original contribution to the literature on conflict prevention as no EWRA is suggested to deal with the combined threats of Covid-19 and violent conflicts. Second, it evolves a discussion on paradigm shifts from geo-politics/geo-economics (during post 9-11 era) to geo-humanism in the postCovid-19 period.

Security risks of global environmental changes

Conflicts related to livestock raiding are not new phenomena in many pastoral societies in the Horn of Africa. Traditionally, various pastoral communities use raiding as a cultural practice for restocking of herds, especially after periods of drought or outbreaks of diseases. However, in recent years, livestock raiding has become more frequent, violent and destructive. This paper elucidates, first, the motives behind the current livestock raiding, and second, it analyses how conflict affects livelihoods of pastoral communities. Between 2008 and 2011, focus group discussions and interviews were carried out with 376 members of the Turkana and Pokot communities and key informants. The study findings suggest that hunger and drought impacting on availability and access of resources are critical raiding motives among the Turkana, while increasing wealth and payment of dowry are the most important motives for the Pokot community. Violent conflict poses a significant threat to pastoral livelihoods which are already under pressure from recurrent drought, diseases and political marginalisation. The direct impact of violent raiding is felt in terms of loss of human life and property, reduction in livestock numbers, limited access to water and pasture resources and forced migration. Indirectly, violent conflicts create a strong and omnipresent perception of insecurity which results in ineffective resource utilisation, reduced mobility, food insecurity and closure of markets and schools. These factors combined undermine adaptation strategies and pastoralism altogether. Hence, a framework of conflict mitigation is needed which addresses the specific raiding motives of each group.

Governance inefficiency is responsible for unspeakable feelings of structural violence and political disenchantment. Cameroon like many other African countries is afflicted by weak governance. This study investigates the intricate relationship between governance and structural violence in Cameroon, a nation grappling with multifaceted crises rooted in historical injustices and socio-political challenges. Structural violence, defined as systematic ways in which social structures harm individuals by preventing them from meeting their basic needs, manifests in various forms, including economic deprivation, social inequality, and political marginalization. This research reveals that governance in Cameroon, characterized by corruption, sociopolitical crisis, and lack of accountability, exacerbates structural violence, particularly affecting marginalized communities. By employing a qualitative methodological framework, this study analyzes governmental policies, civil society responses, and the pervasive impact on civilian populations in the education sector, health sector, and economic sector which are domains where structural violence inflicted on the poor is the product of poor governance or bad policies. It argues that the failure of governance to address socio-economic disparities not only perpetuates structural violence but also contributes to the escalation of direct violence, further destabilizing an already fragile social fabric. Ultimately, this research emphasizes the urgent need for inclusive governance reforms that address the root causes of structural violence to foster peace, social justice, and sustainable development in Cameroon.

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on two under-explored domains in peacebuilding: structural violence and art. Structural violence, despite its pervasiveness and positive correlation with violent conflict, is often overlooked within key debates in peacebuilding. Arts, despite its prevalence at ground level, continue to remain outside the mainstream approaches to peacebuilding. In this article, I bring these two domains together and explore the potential of sustained engagement through theatre in building peace within violent structural narratives at community level. Based on an empirical study in West Bengal, India, I argue that theatre has the potential to bring prevalent but less-heard narratives of structural violence into communal discourse. I identify two key elements in this process: first, theatre offers a space where onstage resistance to structural violence is performed. Second, the performed resistance leads to triggering transformation within the violent structural narratives.

Johan Galtung coined the concept of «triangle of violence» to explain the dynamics of the generation of violence in social conflicts. According to this author, violence is like an iceberg in which the visible violence (or direct violence) is only a part of the conflict, with other more invisible types of violence such as structural violence and cultural violence. Understanding violence, in this case against women, means taking into account the three types of violence. Likewise, in the feminist theory, the presence of a specific type of violence to which women are exposed by their gender and which concerns injuries, physical, sexual, psychological or economic distress was made explicit. From this point of view, violence against women is understood as part of a system of domination or, more specifically, as dominance practices established by men. The purpose of the text presented hereafter is to describe and analyze the various types of violence against women in relation with the uneven situation of women in society. The methodology used has required the consultation of secondary data obtained from official resources, as well as the development of indicators which show the violence experienced by women from the perspective of the «triangle of violence», regarding data in relation with direct, structural or cultural violence. The findings suggest the interrelation of such violence types, specifying that, in all of them, the lesser power and the inequality of women with regard to men constitutes an explanatory factor in the production of violence.

Strategies of conflict transformation are intended to transcend violence and promote peaceful change (see Miall, 2007; Lederach, 2005). Yet these strategies may be premised on a specific form of violence: violence against conflict. In other words, they may enact violence against conflictual forms of world-building, including the threatworks I have described in Chapter 1. This is due largely to the assumption that conflict, left unchecked, causes violence, and indeed that the forms of physical, material and structural violence which these strategies are designed to ameliorate, are forms of ‘violent conflict’. This chapter will raise a counter-hypothesis: that conflict itself can neither be conflated with violence, nor is it necessarily a cause of violence. The incidences of conflict and violence are indeed very often correlative, and even causally related, but not in the way that theorists of conflict often assume. Conflictual forms of world-building, I shall argue, are used to manage, minimize, cope with or resist radical threat. When these forms of world-building are breached or made impossible through acts of coercion or violence, the breach is responded to with violence. As Arendt (1965) argues, violence is purely instrumental and reactive, and occurs only when human action is impossible. Conflict, on the other hand, is a powerful means for creating, asserting and protecting elements of plural worlds, as theorists of agonism aver (see Chapter 4 and Mouffe, 2000; Honig, 1993; and Conolly, 1995). In ‘conflicted’ contexts – that is, contexts where threatworks and conflictual forms of world-building are constitutive of daily life – violence occurs where these phenomena are breached or precluded and the radical threats they resist become irresistible (see Arendt, 1998).

Why do civilians suffer most during times of violent conflict? Why are civilian fatalities as much as eight times higher, calculated globally for current conflicts, than military fatalities? In Why They Die, Daniel Rothbart and Karina V. Korostelina address these questions through a systematic study of civilian devastation in violent conflicts. Pushing aside the simplistic definition of war as a guns-and-blood battle between two militant groups, the authors investigate the identity politics underlying conflicts of many types. During a conflict, all those on the opposite side are perceived as the enemy, with little distinction between soldiers and civilians. As a result, random atrocities and systematic violence against civilian populations become acceptable. Rothbart and Korostelina devote the first half of the book to case studies: deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Ukraine, genocide in Rwanda, the Lebanon War, and the war in Iraq. With the second half, they present new methodological tools for understanding different types of violent conflict and discuss the implications of these tools for conflict resolution.

The causal relationship between environmental scarcities - the scarcity of renewable resources - and the outbreak of violent conflict is complex. Environmental scarcity emerges within a political, social economic, and ecological context and interacts with many of these contextual factors to contribute to violence. To examine this relationship, we outline a theoretical framework defining scarcities, the social effects arising from these scarcities, and the ensuing movement towards violence. We subsequently apply this framework to analyse the link between environmental scarcities and violent conflict in South Africa. Within South Africa, violence arose at precisely the same time that many anticipated a transformation to a more peaceful society - upon the release of Nelson Mandela, the end of the ban on political activity and the official end to apartheid. This article provides a new perspective on these events by analysing the link between South Africa's environmental scarcity and violent conflict.

Current climate change research suggests that certain seasonal weather patterns will be extended and others attenuated as global temperature increases. This is important because seasonal temperature change affects both the scarcity of resources during certain times of the year and the overall mobility of people living in countries that have seasonality. Consequently, these seasonal changes have implications for the onset of violent conflict, particularly as it relates to distinguishing when, where, and how it is most likely to occur. This article evaluates the relationship between monthly temperature changes, civil war onset, and various, less-organized conflict events, offering theoretical expectations for how seasonal changes and climate aberrations are related to an increased risk of violence. The results show that prolonged periods of stable, warm weather are consistently associated with an increased risk of civil war onset and non-state conflict. These findings are best explained through the strategic viability mechanism of temperature change, which allows actors to resolve their collective action problems that are often associated with poor weather conditions, while simultaneously increasing their strategic and behavioral incentives for engaging in violent conflict. Warm weather generates more resources for rebel looting and permits predictability for coordinating troop movements and strategy development. These findings are particularly salient in areas of the world affected by strong seasonality, where prolonged extensions of warm weather conditions would be regarded as both peculiar and attractive for participating in violent action. Although these findings are notable, even under the most extreme climate change scenarios, the substantive effects for these relationships are comparatively minor relative to other well-known intrastate conflict covariates.

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that violent conflict prominently impacts on land governance and so contributes to land conflicts in post-conflict settings. In the natural resources literature, the relationship between land and conflict is often explained in terms of environmental security or political ecology, and many have pointed out that the way land is governed in itself may be a source of conflict. However, less attention has been given to the effects of violent conflict on land and its governance in post-conflict situations. This paper argues that violent conflict affects land governance in many ways and that this in turn might contribute to further violent conflict. The argument builds around an extended case study of the Apaa evictions in Amuru District in Northern Uganda. The case illustrates how conflict around land is not just the result of resource scarcity and competition, but is the outcome of a combination of political, historical and social dynamics. Past policies on land and practices of land governance play a critical role in this. However at the same time, violent conflict has a critical impact on land access, transforms land governance authority and the rules applied. The land conflicts resulting from this, in turn, fuel ethnic tensions between local population groups, and grievances about those in power and the institutions that govern natural resources. The ways in which such problematic conflict-induced changes in land access and governance are dealt with by policymakers is critical for post-conflict stability.

In 2020, our research collective facilitated a photovoice project titled “Picturing Our Realities: Arts-based Reflections with Central American Youth in Canada,” which brought together young, second-generation, and one-and-a-half-generation (born in another country and moved at a young age) Central American identifying people in Toronto to talk about their experiences growing up as children of immigrants. This photovoice project reveals the ways the civil war and migration process is a haunting presence in the lives of second and 1.5 generation Central American Canadians as they grow up and carve their paths as adults. We can see how unresolved social conflict emerges and shapes family memory, sense of self, understandings of community, and means of engaging in community activism and community work. We argue that this act of remembering and paying homage to previous generations is a means of confronting and resisting past injustices and forming ways of healing from the afterlives of violence. This recognition of the afterlives of mass violence, and the calls of action that this recognition entails, may form a powerful catalyst for community organizing and creating community spaces to respond to historical hauntings and structural violence.

In the recent times, due to the increasing rate of global warming, the northeast region of Nigeria has been experiencing continuous climatic change characterized by drastic reduction in rainfall, increase in the rate of dryness and heat, which makes it a fast growing arid environment, with depletion in the amount of water, flora and fauna resources on the land. In response to the pastoral and arable farm occupational needs of the people, there has been continuous population drift southward where there are more fauna, flora and water resources. Following the above, an important question that needs to be addressed is how has the pressure over scarce resources consequent to climatic change led to communal civil violent conflict in the area? And what have been the patterns over the years? Against this background, this work focuses on investigating the chain of interactions between climate change, population drift and pressure, and conflict over land resources. Specifically this article addresses the nature of communal civil violent conflicts in the northeast area of Nigeria, the extent to which continuous climate change has contributed to the scenario, the patterns of the climatically induced violent conflicts, the major actors and the policy implications of the conflict in the sub region. Among other theoretical orientations, this discourse anchors on and utilizes the Toronto School of Environmental Scarcity and Conflicts paradigm in examining what obtains in the study area. However, it went step further to present a fair critical overview of the weakness and strength of the theoretical postulation of ecoviolence of the Toronto school as amplified by Homer-Dixon, his associates and other scholars in the field of conflict analysis

Statistical data and research suggest a strong correlation between various types of threats, radiating and enhancing each other: terrorism, violent conflicts, ecological threats, and political and economic instabilities. The most affected are the most vulnerable: countries of the Global South, and within those the underprivileged communities and peoples, including Indigenous populations. In this article, the interdependence of various types of threats will be presented based on data from the Global Terrorism Index, the Global Peace Index, the Ecological Threats Report, and the World Bank database. As of November 2023, according to World Bank estimates, over 1 billion people live in fragile and conflict‐affected situations. At the same time, violent conflicts are the primary drivers of terrorism (according to the Global Terrorism Index, in 2023, over 90% of attacks and 98% of terrorism deaths took place in countries in conflict). Moreover, data suggest that ecological threats and resource scarcity can contribute to the emergence and perpetuation of violent conflicts and terrorism. Among the case studies, the situation in the Sahel region will be analyzed with a particular focus on Burkina Faso—one of the least developed countries in the world that, as of 2024, is estimated as the country the most impacted by terrorism in the world. The author hypothesizes that the interdependence of security threats requires addressing those threats in a systemic way (with coordinated actions at local, national, and international levels) to effectively counter the negative impact on societies.