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Conflict Resolution: The Social Sciences
as Force Multipliers
Keynote Address
Workshop on
Can Political Science Be A Tool To Understand And Resolve Conflicts?
The Case of India’s Northeast
Organized by
Centre for Development and Peace Studies
in collaboration with British Deputy High Commission, Kolkata
Guwahati
March 16, 2008
- Knowledge and power
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In what has been widely described as the information
age, in which knowledge is increasingly regarded as the principal
source of wealth and power, it is indeed astonishing that we should
ask such a question: ‘Can Political Science be used as a tool
to understand and resolve conflicts?’ The answer is simple and
inescapable: not only can political science so be used, the costs
of not so employing this discipline are unacceptable.
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The critical question, indeed, is why political
science in particular, and the social sciences in general, have
not been applied to secure a better understanding and more efficient
resolution of contemporary conflicts, and how can this be remedied.
2. Historical Amnesia
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A historical amnesia, the near complete absence
of institutional memory, afflicts much of the Indian security
establishment and its perspectives and understanding of the country’s
overwhelming wealth of experience – both of success and failure
– in counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist campaigns. The first
of India’s insurgencies commenced soon after independence – in
Nagaland in 1952 – and since then there has been a continuous
succession of ‘wars within borders’, culminating in the multiplicity
of contemporary irregular conflicts and movements that have come
to afflict, in various degrees, an estimated 271 of India’s 630
districts. Astonishingly, the literature on these many internal
wars is minuscule; and strategic and tactical assessments of counter-insurgency
and counter-terrorism campaigns, negligible.
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With no systematic effort to document and analyse
the enormous cumulative experience of campaigns since Independence,
Force commanders at all levels are virtually abandoned to their
own devices, repeatedly required to reinvent the wheel, despite
the fact that a long history of both successes and failures across
theatres, as well as in the specific theatre of their current
deployment, could yield a wealth of wisdom, of strategic and tactical
best practices, and excellent counsel on the many pitfalls that
can and must be avoided. These problems are further "aggravated
by policies of task allocation and transfer that do not value
continuity of experience. The result is that there is little opportunity
for the development of long-term perspectives and a knowledge
base that may help in an authoritative and informed assessment
of emerging or ongoing emergencies."
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"A good and decent society",
it has been remarked, "needs good politics. Good politics
requires good theory. Good theory requires good methodology."
The same dictum applies, without qualification, to good policing,
to good counter-insurgency policy, strategy and tactics, and to
good conflict resolution. Bad theory and bad methodology yield
bad practices, as Administrations and Forces muddle along, learning
slowly ‘on the job’. Such practices impose tremendous costs in
wasted resources, wasted efforts, but most significantly, wasted
lives. And the index of ‘wasted lives’ cannot accurately be constructed
out of data on fatalities or casualties in insurgent conflicts;
it must accommodate the millions of other lives that are fractured
and destroyed by the lack of development, the loss of opportunities
and employment, and the despair and desperation that widespread
violence, intimidation and terror create.
- Barriers to Reason
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Within the Indian system, regrettably, powerful
obstacles have been gradually erected against the evolution of
‘good theory and good methodology’ in the spheres of conflict
studies in general and of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency
policy, strategy and tactics, in particular. Academicians have
been reluctant to ‘soil their hands’ with research in these troubling
subjects, and the limited efforts in this direction have been
deeply flawed. By and large, academics has not committed itself
in sufficient measure to the documentation and study of issues
relating to terrorism and insurgency. To the extent that there
has been some academic writing, it has chosen ‘safe areas’ – such
as discourses on the definition of terrorism, the ‘root causes’
of terrorism, and the distinctions between terrorism and ‘liberation
struggles’; or politically correct ‘meta-issues’ – such as human
rights and political violence – that do not demand engagement
on the ground or unpleasant field research in the affected areas,
or fractious interactions with uncooperative civil and police
bureaucrats. Current scholarship appears to be insulated from
the more demanding and crucial aspects of the conflicts, and from
the areas of risk, while reductionism and an entirely doctrinaire
approach dominates most such analyses. The academic discourse
has also been variously distorted (as has thinking in governance)
by intellectual inertia, by passing fashions of thought, and by
the tyranny of public opinion and media endorsement. There has
been little effort or courage to challenge received wisdom or
settled orthodoxies – except in the language or idiom of another
such orthodoxy.
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Governments and their various agencies, on the
other hand, have failed to establish internal mechanisms and institutions
to carry out these necessary tasks of documentation, analysis,
assimilation and dissemination of counter-insurgency and conflict
resolution experience in various theatres. In passing, it is useful
to note that several institutions with the requisite mandate do
exist within Government. However, their state of health and the
availability or profile of human and material resources for mandated
tasks remains poor. More significantly, they enjoy little prestige
within the official hierarchy, particularly in comparison with
‘executive’ posts and departments, and have generally had no more
than marginal impact on official policy or practice.
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In the absence of vigorous institutional instrumentalities
to carry out these tasks, fitful efforts and an absence of focus
tend to characterize the approach of executive agencies who
may be tempted, from time to time, to take up such an undertaking.
Specifically, the executive duties of these agencies themselves
constitute a near-insurmountable obstacle to any systematic
and adequate enterprise of documentation and analysis.
Events crowd one another too rapidly.
Technology matures too quickly. Crises succeed each other too abruptly.
Coping with a demanding present and confronting an ominous future,
few current civilian and military leaders seem willing to indulge
in systematic reflection about the past.
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The criticality of concurrent documentation and
field research in the theatres of strife, and at the time of the
various campaigns, needs enormous emphasis in this context: "Bland
statistics and banal secondary sources cannot replace the understanding
that comes through engagement in field research at the time
when the conflict is current."
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In the absence, then, of a coherent body of internal
(official) or open source documentation and analysis, the national
discourse on terrorism, insurgency and other patterns of major
political conflict, has remained polarized and overwhelmingly
moulded by political and partisan sympathies, rather than any
information or understanding that reflects the realities of the
ground. It has been muddied, moreover, by a polemical, rather
than practical, obsession with the most extraordinarily obtuse
dichotomies that have dominated the largely incestuous debate
on conflict: ‘law and order approaches’ vs. ‘addressing root causes’;
‘military solution’ vs. ‘developmental solution’; ‘criminals,
extortionists and brigands’ vs. ‘our children’ or ‘our brothers
and sisters’; ‘terrorists’ vs. ‘freedom fighters’. These conceptual
opposites have done little to inform or shape policy, but have
imposed a measure of paralysis on the state’s institutions, constraining
the evolution of effective strategies to confront and neutralize
India’s multiple insurgencies.
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It is not possible, here, to document the range
of pseudo-histories and false sociologies, and the extensive scope
of the tyranny of political correctness that has obstructed rational
assessments of, and policies in response to, terrorism, insurgency
and other patterns of contemporary mass political violence. There
is the irrational quest for a ‘perfect definition’ of terrorism;
the ludicrous affectation of the claim that ‘one man’s terrorist
is another man’s freedom fighter’; the simulated and unprincipled
discourse over demands for ethnic or communal separation, autonomy
and ‘self-determination’ – ideological bullock-carts that are
irreconcilable in a globalising world order that shares universal
values of equality and human rights; and the perversion of democratic
processes to further the power and interest of democracy’s most
unwavering enemies. It is clear that policy prescriptions based
on abundantly falsified theoretical perspectives and mistaken
popular beliefs contribute directly to terrorist butchery and
to the persistence of movements of extremist violence across the
world.
- A Re-dedication to Reality
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The success or failure of any enterprise depends
substantially on the measure of clarity that attends its conceptualization
and execution. The responses to major contemporary conflicts,
including terrorism and insurgency, have been greatly inhibited
by an absence of clarity, enormous confusion over the concept,
a partisan debate, and deliberate obfuscation by at least certain
entities.
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Crucially, no real scientific progress can rely
purely on conceptual paradigms or theoretical science. This is
as much the case with the hard as with the social sciences. In
the hard sciences, real progress depends as much on developments
in pure theory as it does on the material and applied sciences,
on engineering and technological advances, and on applications,
right down to the levels of technicians who assist in the transfer
and dissemination of technologies to the end user. Each link in
this chain, from the conceptually highest to the lowest levels
of application, is integral to the outreach of the benefits of
science to mankind. To the extent that the social sciences have
distanced themselves from this model, focusing overwhelmingly
on the meta-theoretical levels, and on secondary analysis, rather
than on the primary datum of experience and on the imperatives
of policy and practice, they have marginalized their relevance
and are, as a result, themselves poorer, even as society and governance
has been deprived of informed and objective feedback that is integral
to efficient and, crucially, democratic functioning.
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We need, consequently, to enormously re-dedicate
ourselves to reality, to the study of the specific circumstances
in which movements of political violence emerge, and in which
they end; to the creation of vast and over-lapping data-bases
on conflicts; and on the documentation of specific strategic and
tactical initiatives that have succeeded or failed, and the circumstances
within which they have secured these outcomes.
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