Does peace research need knowledge on social policy?

Abstract

Peace Research and Social Policy are linked both conceptually and causally. Concepts such as structural violence and positive peace connect elements of the two disciplines, as Social Policy, by definition, focuses on how societies across the world meet human needs for security, education, work, health, and well-being – i.e., elements of a structurally nonviolent condition. The causal analysis of intrastate conflict, in particular, further links the foci of Peace Studies and Social Policy, as many of the grievances addressed by social policies tend to lead to conflict. Globally, horizontal inequalities are causally associated with conflict, while in the MENA region, conflicts are strongly linked to corrupt state factionalism – a condition in which the state becomes an instrument of only some subnational groups, while corrupt practices marginalize others. This forum article focuses on the conceptual and empirical linkages between Social Policy and Peace Research, demonstrates why these fields of research need each other, and reveals temporal variation in the extent to which findings from Social Policy have been mobilized in the study of peace and conflict.

Peace research and research on social policy share some common foci. However, issues of social policy have received varying attention in peace research over the years. In this forum note, I will show how the two fields have been conceptually and empirically linked, especially in studies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. I will demonstrate how the emergence of Peace research in the 1960s first established a conceptual connection between social policy and positive peace, followed by an instrumental link of social policy as a means of conflict prevention. Evidence from the study of conflict causes, particularly in the MENA region, suggests that social policy is relevant for peace, especially when it focuses on collectives, addresses questions of inclusivity, and counters the tendency to use the state as a corrupt discriminatory tool of a subnational (religious or ethnic) group (Kivimäki, 2021b).

Peace research emerged in the 1960s as a discipline with a clear normative stance. Its aim was to reduce structural and direct organized violence (Galtung, 1969). While organized violence refers to the deadly use of arms in political conflict, structural violence does not have a direct perpetrator, though it certainly has victims. Structural violence arises when unfair political conditions result in the unnecessary loss of years of human life (Galtung and Höivik, 1971).

Peace, understood as a positive concept, is seen as both a state and a process in which direct organized violence is minimal, and there is cooperation between agents focused on reducing structural violence and the risk of war (Galtung, 1964). Social policy, by definition, is related to the reduction of structural violence, as it deals ‘with the ways societies across the world meet human needs for security, education, work, health, and wellbeing’ (Platt, 2023). While social policy that fails to address human needs is not necessarily structural violence, the economic, political, or discursive structures that produce such poor social policies are indeed examples of structural violence. Positive peace, in turn, requires a focus on cooperation to reduce the structures that lead to poor social policies and structural violence (Galtung, 1964).

There is also an empirical connection between direct violence, peace in negative terms, and social policy. When Peace research emerged as an alternative to security studies in the 1960s, its main critique was that while security studies focused on conflict behaviour and ways to contain, deter and defend against it, peace research focused on the motives and grievances behind such conflict behaviour (Galtung, 1969). The relationship between grievances and conflicts became a central focus in peace research, leading to the development of two schools of thought. On one hand, basic needs theorists showed how conditions of peace and non-violence are only possible when basic needs are met (Hoadley, 1981; Mitchell, 1990). On the other hand, theorists of relative deprivation emphasized the changing level of grievances, arguing that deprivation is most acutely felt when grievances increase, creating a gap between expected and actual well-being (Davies, 1962; Gurr, 1970; Runciman, 1966).

The focus on grievances has been challenged by a focus on violent opportunities. This alternative perspective emphasizes the importance of strong police and military forces rather than equitable social policies. According to Tilly and others, grievances are so widespread that their predictive value as causes of conflict is limited. Conflict prevention, they argue, should focus on opportunities to gain through violence, rather than on grievances that exist in all societies (Tilly, 1978). This focus on limiting violent opportunities gained prominence after the end of the Cold War, following the so-called ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992), as political individualist democracy triumphed over collectivist economic democracy. Demands for economic rights were no longer seen as legitimate but rather as opportunistic and driven by greed. Governance and state power became relevant primarily as tools for capturing access to revenues from natural resources (De Sousa, 2000). If new wars are comparable to criminal enterprises driven by greed and opportunity, social policy aimed at addressing grievances plays only a marginal role in legitimate conflict prevention. Instead, conflicts could be prevented through public and private military and police power, overwhelming forces capable of enforcing law, order and humanitarian norms (Kaldor, 1999: 139).

The rise and fall of the frequency of terms such as ‘social policy’, ‘grievance’ and ‘structural violence’ in the titles of articles in the two leading peace research journals, Journal of Peace Research and Journal of Conflict Resolution, illustrate the prominence of socio-economic approaches in conflict prevention literature. To demonstrate these trends, Graphs 1 and 2 show the 3-year average of these terms, highlighting the relevance of social policy to Peace research.

Graph 1.

Journal of Conflict Resolution.

Graph 2.

Journal of Peace Research.

Yet, the political explanation of the world that failed to consider economic grievances was not accurate; grievances needed to be reintegrated into the explanation of violence. As can be seen in Graphs 1 and 2, this started to happen after the first decade of post-Cold War era. However, the analysis of grievances needed to be refocused from individualistic topics, which did not seem to predict conflict (Collier, 2007; Fearon and Laitin, 2003), to collective grievances. The individualistic idea of rights from the post-Cold War era needed to give way to the idea of grievances of groups and horizontal economic inequalities. Structures that did not just threaten the life expectancy of individuals but discriminated against entire groups of people predicted conflicts more effectively (Cederman et al., 2011; Stewart, 2008). This brought economic grievances back into the picture but refocused attention from social policies that failed to help individual poor people to social policies that systematically discriminated against ethnic and other groups.

In the MENA region, there is a special, state and social policy-centred mechanism of horizontal inequality. There conflict is most likely when the state apparatus was factionalized (the definition and measurement of factionalisation are from Marshall and Elzinga-Marshall, 2017), i.e., the state was an instrument of a specific ethnic or religious group. In such a situation, it is the state and its social policy that produces horizontal inequality. There, up to 42% of the variation of fatalities of organized violence per population can be explained by the state production of horizontal inequalities. While globally, more factionalized states have 5.5 times as many fatalities of organized violence per population as less-factionalized states, in the MENA region, factionalized states have 28 times more such fatalities than non-factionalized states. Of the 20 most belligerent country-years in the MENA region, 19 are in the most factionalized quartile of MENA states (calculated from data in Kivimäki, 2021a).

Furthermore, when a factionalized state is combined with a culture of corruption in the MENA region, the ruling group can effectively discriminate against other groups, and these collective grievances produced by factionalisation and corruption, explain more than half of the fatalities of organized violence in the MENA region (calculated from data in Kivimäki, 2021a). While individual political rights may be important for democracy and individual well-being, it seems that only collective economic grievances are serious enough to motivate people in the MENA region to risk their lives in wars. Consequently, to prevent conflicts, we need to focus on state-based social policy and try to prevent collective economic grievances. We need to avoid corrupt structures and policies that lead states into factionalisation and societies into a vicious cycle of war and economic decline. Thus, Peace research and Social Policy both need knowledge from each other, especially in the MENA region.