Separatist Conflict Research Articles

Conflict Resolution in Papua Using a Social Reconstruction Approach

The problem of High Social Gap in Papua is an indication of the causes of marginalization and discrimination against the Papuan people. The difference in perceptions of some Indonesian people at home and abroad regarding the armed separatist conflict is a push factor to corner the Indonesian government. Apart from that, the issue of the internationalization of the 1969 referendum mechanism, violations of Human Rights (HAM), and the management of Natural Resources (SDA) by multinational companies which did not have an impact on improving the welfare of the Papuan people also complement the opinion of the government's failure. Based on the background of the problem, this research uses qualitative research methods and a descriptive approach. The research results show that conflict resolution in Papua can be implemented through (three) things, namely the first, the gradual development of an Integrated Food Estate (IFE) according to traditional areas in Papua, which will indirectly support the realization of Territorial Resilience and the Universal Defense System (Sishanta). Furthermore, to ensure that all these processes are carried out well and continuously, it is necessary to form an Integrated Solution Center (ISC). To eliminate the issue of internationalization of Papua, it is necessary to implement International Defense Diplomacy (IDD) carried out by Indonesian government agents abroad to socialize International Laws which are the juridical basis that Papua is part of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI). By implementing all these recommendations, it is hoped that a peaceful and prosperous Papuan society will soon be realized.

Memories of Exile, Memory in Exile: The Sri Lankan Separatist Conflict in the Films of Pradeepan Raveendran

In this article, we wish to examine the place of the memory of the armed conflict in Sri Lanka and how it is transmitted. We analyze how stories, memories, and narratives collide, and how Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in France seek out traces of their past to negotiate their inclusion in the present. Using a body of film - Pradeepan Raveendran’s creations - and interviews with the filmmaker, we explore how each personal history of the conflict accounts for the reorganization of the subject’s identity and environment, and thus, is perpetuated from one generation to the next. This article explores building on Stef Craps’s work on postcolonial trauma, how the memory of this conflict is transmitted in France. We also analyze how each actor negotiates a new space, both real and imaginary, in the space of the diaspora. Finally, we look at how the past is reconstructed to build a collective memory akin to Maurice Halbwachs’s new “social frameworks” (Halbwachs 1925).

Book Review: Secession and Separatist Conflicts in Postcolonial Africa by Charles G. Thomas and Toyin Falola

Book Review: <i>Secession and Separatist Conflicts in Postcolonial Africa</i> by Charles G. Thomas and Toyin Falola

Analysis of Armed Separatist Movement Conflict in Casamance, Senegal &amp; Lessons Learned for the Indonesian Government in Addressing Similar Conflicts

This in-depth article explores the complex factors that have contributed to the long-standing armed separatist conflict in Casamance, Senegal. It offers an analysis of the most effective approaches to resolving the conflict, drawing valuable lessons that can be applied to other nations grappling with similar challenges. Historical, socio-economic, political, and cultural factors all play a role in the conflict, which has endured for decades. There are additional issues to navigate, including military fragmentation, political leadership voids, economic and cultural decline, failed ceasefires, and neighboring state behavior. By examining these causes and lessons learned, this article provides valuable insights for Indonesia and other nations facing separatist movements. Despite the daunting nature of the conflict, there are several potential solutions that can be employed to facilitate successful negotiations in the future, including trust-building, official and unofficial mediation, the establishment of a State Peace Secretariat in Casamance, and a comprehensive, inclusive settlement negotiation.

BALOCHISTAN AND THE 18TH AMENDMENT: THE CIVIL-MILITARY ROOTS OF SEPARATISM AND REGIME MILITARISATION IN PAKISTAN

The 18th Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan in 2010 transferred powers to the country's provinces and removed articles inserted by the previous military regimes which facilitated military influence. However, the reform failed to reverse the material roots of the Pakistani military's structural dominance, especially its multi-billion-dollar business empire. Instead, it pushed the military to develop new ways of (re)producing its influence by strategically appropriating the separatist conflict in Balochistan as the most serious threat facing the country and one that required the military's continuing role in policymaking. These counter-processes rendered the constitutional reform inadequate and kept the ethnic conflict alive, while also enabling the military to perpetuate a militarised regime at the national level. Using primary evidence, the article shows how a civil-military institutional imbalance favouring the military can impede ethnic conflict resolution even when the constitution offers autonomy to ethnic groups.

Conflict Resolution: Comparative Analysis of Separatist Conflicts in Papua, Indonesia, and Zulu, South Africa

The conflicts in Papua, Indonesia, and Zulu, South Africa, present similarities and differences. This article concentrates on the discussion of the separatist conflict in Papua which is then compared with the separatist conflict in Zulu, South Africa. Which ended with a peace agreement between the Zulu separatist movement and the South African government to take lessons from the Zulu Separatist Conflict to support the resolution of the separatist conflict in Papua, Indonesia. This paper is based on the Library Research methodology and comparative method approach.. There is a big difference, namely that in the Zulu conflict there is a window of opportunity which is the way to peace and ends in a peace agreement. Meanwhile, the Papua conflict does not yet have a window of opportunity which is an opportunity to pave the way for peace. So it is hoped that the Indonesian government will be more observant in seeing opportunities in resolving the Papua conflict. Since the democratic elections, there has been no figure from Papua with an Indonesian nationalist spirit who is able to accommodate and bridge between the Papuan separatist groups and the Government of the Republic of Indonesia. Because looking at the Zulu conflict, apart from the election event there were also nationalist and democratic figures who were black in South Africa.

Analisa Kegagalan Upaya Perdamaian Turki Dengan Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK) Tahun 2009-2015

The prolonged separatist conflict that the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK) had with the Turkish government was caused by the failure of peace efforts between the two sides, hence raising questions about what caused the failure of the peace effort. Therefore, this article aims to analyze the factors behind the failure of peace efforts between Turkey and the PKK that occurred in 2009-2015. Using Charles Kupchan’s stable peace theory. The article argued that the failure of the peace effort was due to Turkey’s and the PKK’s lack of compliance with Kupchan’s stable peace criteria and conditions, as well as the failure of the peace process at the unilateral accommodation stage as both sides did not trust each other’s commitments. Turkey assumed that if it continued the negotiation process, the PKK would increase their demands. Meanwhile, PKK assumed that the Turkish government was not serious about dealing with the Kurdish Question so that the peace effort was deadlocked.

Geopolitics of separatism

Geopolitics of separatism

Insurgency and national security: a perspective from Cameroon’s separatist conflict

This study examines the nature and factors associated with the onset of the conflict in Cameroon’s North West and South West regions to contribute to conceptual, theoretical and methodological debates in war/conflict studies. It used an explorative approach, examining the immediate political tensions prior to hostilities and major government policy areas. It shows that teachers’ and lawyers’ protests (beginning in 2016) and strategic miscalculations by the government and rebels are the immediate factors associated with the onset of the conflict. The underlying factors include greed, colonial heritage, a history of insurgencies, an internal geography conducive to group conflict and guerrilla warfare, poor macroeconomic performance, the ability to finance authoritarianism without relying on taxes, political decay, slow political development, a turbulent regional neighbourhood and unfavourable international relations. The results enable four main contributions to longstanding debates in war/conflict studies. First, an insurgency is a distinct type of war. Second, insurgencies occur due to several immediate and underlying factors unique to each case. Third, studying insurgencies requires a holistic approach, examining immediate and underlying factors. Finally, although rebel victory is impossible in an insurgency, multiple and widespread insurgencies can nullify the essence of a state, making insurgencies important national security threats.

Demos at war: Revisiting the democratic boundary problem with a performative lens

This essay revisits a classic conceptual puzzle in democratic theory – the democratic boundary problem – to shed new light on contentious politics and separatist conflict in Sri Lanka. This theoretical problem is congruent with the core disagreement of this conflict – whether or not the Tamils comprise a nation that is entitled to its own state. Democratic theory struggles to adjudicate between competing political projects that pivot on different conceptions of the demos. Sri Lanka's conflict protagonists have advanced a wide range of institutional forms for their competing ideological projects. To understand these efforts, I posit, we need to look beyond legal strictures and formal delineations of democratic institutions by conceptualizing politics as a performative arena. This opens up analytical space to understand how institutions may be valorised or mocked, reenacted, sidelined or reversed. This article comprises a sequence of empirically based reflections organised around five keywords, which elucidate some of the central tenets and historical shifts of ethno-political contestation in Sri Lanka: Constitution, election, court, checkpoint, and Prime Minister. Contentious forms of political performativity around each of these five institutions unmask the self-referential nature of constitutional and democratic legitimacy. I thus argue we must mitigate the problematic tendency to accept as real and legitimate those political entities that emerged from history as part of recognised sovereign states, while the efforts of sovereign aspirants are shrugged aside as a problem that needs be explained and addressed.

Émergence des mouvements ambazonien et de la brigade anti sardinards (b.a.s): entre quête de souveraineté anglophone et lutte pour le changement socio-politique au Cameroun

"Since the fall of 2016, Cameroon has been the scene of a fratricidal and separatist conflict in its English-speaking part known as North-west and South-west (NWSW). This war has to date caused more than 3,000 loss of human lives, 700,000 Cameroonian refugees, and the closure of nearly 80% of schools. This conflict, orchestrated by a group of secessionist fighters known as ""Amba-boys"", which constitutes the ""Ambazonian movement"", has made the English-speaking regions the most militarized part of Cameroon. At the same time, a protest movement against the capture of power by the Biya regime has been formed since 2018 within the Cameroonian diaspora: the Anti-Sardinards Brigade (B.A.S). The objective of this work is therefore to understand the logic of action and the protest strategies of these two movements. To achieve this, we used a qualitative research method. It appears that these movements are fighting against a common adversary, namely: the regime in power for 40 years. However, their divergence lies at the ideological level and in their conflicting strategies. The Ambazonian movement advocates, through direct violence, secession in order to promote Anglophone sovereignty. While the B.A.S fights for the socio-political change of the country, through indirect violence. Keywords: conflict strategy, protest, movement, Anti Sardinards Brigade, ambazonien movement, conflict, secessionist, sociopolitical change "

Building the state and conceiving the nation: the origins of separatist insurgency in the Mizo Hills, 1945-61

ABSTRACT In 1966 the Mizo National Front (MNF) instigated a separatist conflict against the Indian state. This article argues that an environment conducive for separatist insurgency was created by the early 1960s in the Mizo Hills, a direct result of problematic state- and nation- building practices. First, there was an inability to initiate a successful state-building drive to overcome deep-seated challenges bestowed by colonial rule. Second, the friction between regional and national conceptions of identity was not resolved. This argument exploits a clear research gap. Currently there is a convincing explanation for the MNF’s transition towards civil war between 1961-66. Yet, explaining the structural factors which created an environment conducive for separatist conflict remains elusive. This article plugs that gap, through archive-led historical analysis. In the process, it provides wider insights for conflict dynamics in India’s northeast and raises broader questions about interdisciplinary research in the subfield of intrastate conflict.

The Separatist Conflict

There is a strong opinion among researchers of regional processes about the relationship of separatism with ethnicity. For the effective regulation of separatist conflicts, it is important to assess the importance of ethnicity in the development of separatism and to determine whether ethnicity and separatism are always united by a causal relationship. The primary purpose of the study is to focus on the process of ethnicization of separatist conflicts. The focus is on the issue of endowing separatist conflicts with ethnic characteristics; and the causes of the conflicts initially lay in a non-ethnic plane. This study seeks to analyse the reasons for the appeal of separatism to the topic of ethnicity; the instrumental possibilities of ethnicity in the context of separatism are assessed. To that end, the concept of ethnicity in this survey is taken into consideration through the prism of instrumentalism.

Cyber risks to Ukrainian and other health systems

Cyber risks to Ukrainian and other health systems

Ambazonian Separatist Movement in Cameroon and the Dialectics of Cameroonian Refugee Crisis in Nigeria

While earlier studies have concentrated on the political and historical dynamics of the Cameroon Ambazonian separatist conflict, there is little knowledge on the effects of the conflict in Anglophone regions on Cameroonian refugees in Nigeria. The study used the mixed method to show how decades of Cameroon’s repressive governance system that favors Francophone Cameroonians against Anglophone Cameroonians accounts for the Ambazonian separatist movement, forcing Cameroonians into migration and generating humanitarian crisis for Cameroonian refugees in Nigeria. It recommends that the intervention of the United Nations is capable of mitigating the conflict and preventing the humanitarian consequences in Nigeria.

Beyond Reassurance: The Reputational Effect of Cultural Reforms in Peace Agreements

AbstractWe explore whether including cultural reforms in an intra-state peace accord facilitates its success. We distinguish between accommodationist and integrationist cultural provisions and employ a mixed research method combining negative binomial regression on a data set of all intra-state political agreements concluded between 1989 and 2017, and an in-depth analysis of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland. We recognize the important reassuring effect of accommodationist cultural reforms in separatist conflicts. However, we also find that they have an important and hitherto overlooked reputational effect across all conflict types. By enhancing the reputation of negotiating leaders, accommodationist cultural provisions contribute to ending violence by preventing leadership challenges, rebel fragmentation and remobilization across all civil conflicts. By the same logic, and despite the overwhelming emphasis of peace agreements on integrationist cultural initiatives, integrationist cultural reforms problematize leaders' ability to commit to pacts and to ensure compliance among their rank and file.

BOOK REVIEW CHARLES THOMAS AND TOYIN FALOLA, SECESSION AND SEPARATIST CONFLICTS IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA. CALGARY: UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS, 2020. PP. VIII, 344.

The book, Secession and Separatist Conflicts in Postcolonial Africa, is a timely intervention on this important dimension to conflicts in Africa, especially in the post-cold war order where intra-state conflicts have become the norm rather than exception. Armed with suitably relevant historical analysis and epistemological methodology, the authors cleverly approach the varieties of conflict cases associated with secessionist, separatist and irredentist moves and Movements across Africa. Such liberation efforts span through struggles towards decolonization and struggles for self-determination or autonomy. The arrangement of the book is methodical, encompassing the dynamics and structures of successful, failed, protracted and short-lived attempts at secession and separatism in Africa and implications for sub-Saharan African states.

TRANSNISTRIAN SETTLEMENT: UKRAINE’S CONTRIBUTION AND EXPERIENCE FOR DEOCUPATION OF DONBAS

The article addresses the role of Ukraine in the Transnistrian settlement. The author analyses its peacekeeping experience and plans for further steps in the light of Ukraine's national interests in the context of Russia's ongoing aggression. Other countries’ roles as participants in the peace process are also considered.&#x0D; This conflict should not be classified as an interethnic or interfaith one, just as the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it is a geopolitical confrontation with a minor ethnic component. The positions of the parties do not differ fundamentally on ethnic or confessional grounds, but consist in worldview differences, geopolitical orientation of elites and the population of the two banks of the Dniester.&#x0D; Russia, which had been a de facto participant in the hot phase of the conflict, managed to take over the role of the mediator. Ukraine and Moldova agreed on the legal personality of the Transnistrian occupation authorities. Countries where separatist conflicts have been provoked by external forces cannot agree to negotiate directly with the occupation administrations of the ‘separatist’ areas. They should negotiate directly with the independent players who have provoked, provided this conflict and are able to make decisions.&#x0D; It is important to conduct an effective awareness-rising campaign in Transnistria and the temporarily occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, create highly professional alternative media and a high-quality information product. Russia's continued military presence in Transnistria is becoming an additional security threat to Ukraine and the Black Sea region.&#x0D; The ‘peacekeeping’ mechanism needs to be reformatted and internationalized by withdrawing the Russian contingent and deploying the International Civilian Observer Mission. Such operations should be carried out either with the participation of contingents of exclusively neutral countries, or with multinational contingents if possible, which will guarantee their impartiality. Findings of the present study may be used as the groundwork for formulating Ukraine’s strategy of countering the Russian aggression and retrieving the temporarily occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Războiul de pe Nistru și separatismul transnistrean: narațiuni contradictorii / The war on the Dniester and Transnistrian separatism: contradictory narratives

The separatist conflict in the eastern districts of the Republic of Moldova – the premises and sources that fueled it, the events it has provoked over the years, the 1992 war, and other various related topics generate diverse and contradictory narratives among interested political actors. The rhetoric of Chisinau, Tiraspol, and the Kremlin denotes opposed visions and positions. While in Chisinau officials talk about the independence and territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova, internationally recognized in 1991, in Moscow and on the left bank of the Nistru they make arguments to justify the actions undertaken by Tiraspol separatists over the past three decades to create and consolidate the so-called Transnistrian „statehood” – existing de facto, but not recognized by anyone internationally

Strategies to End Violence in Ethnic Conflicts: What is Sufficient? The Case of “Peace” in Chechnya

Abstract After decades of violent separatist conflict between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the region stabilized and peaceful in 2008. Despite this grand proclamation of peace, Chechnya today operates under an environment of violent repression and the conflict remains un-managed. This article argues that a threshold of sufficiency exists which settlement strategies must pass to achieve peace. While a perceived peace may occur when the armed conflict ends, without sufficient management strategies the identity-based roots of the conflict will manifest in other forms beneath the surface. By examining co-optation, power-sharing, autonomy and reconciliation, this research finds that while Russia’s incomplete conflict management strategy may have ended the violent insurgency within Chechnya, the failure to apply these principles sufficiently has allowed violence to continue. This research hopes to be applicable in informing strategies to resolve conflicts in multi-ethnic states within and beyond the North Caucasus.