In the following essay, Visualising Peace student Mathias Katsuya reflects on his experiences with the Visualising Peace project as well as his and his peers’ research into peace and peacebuilding.
How has your research developed your own understanding of peace and peacebuilding?
This semester marked my second engagement with Visualising Peace, having previously worked as part of the inaugural project team in Semester II of the 2021-2022 academic year. Much of my initial research had focused on the intersection between International Relations and peacebuilding, particularly with regards to the dominant frameworks employed by states and international organisations such as the United Nations – the liberal peace. This top-down approach is not only centred on the development of institutions of centralised political and economic control but is also inherently ideological, seeking to construct a state rooted in principles of “democracy and free trade” espoused by the dominant discursive actors of contemporary peacebuilding (Richmond 2008, 440). The result is a highly standardised conceptualisation of peacebuilding or, in the words of Roger Mac Ginty, “peace from IKEA” (Mac Ginty 2008, 145). Though undoubtedly suited for rapid implementation, these off-the-shelf peacebuilding efforts only serve to reflect the capabilities of intervening parties, rather than needs of recipients, and create a highly compromised peace.
My research this semester sought to build upon this previous knowledge and employed a problem-solving methodology to examine potential reforms aimed at optimising, rather than replacing, this contemporary framework. Though I was aware of shortcomings such as a continued reluctance to integrate local traditions and institutions of conflict mediation, my research uncovered another crucial gap in doctrine regarding international peacebuilding efforts: the absence of any overarching framework regarding the employment of psychological operations and psychosocial interventions. The Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Thematic Guidelines on Peacebuilding, for instance, focuses purely on the provision of politico-military and development assistance, while the UK government’s literature peacebuilding review includes a single mention of post-conflict educational efforts to assist recovery from “psychological trauma” and acknowledges that “a policy on the relationship between education and conflict has yet to be fully developed” (Thematic Guidelines 2011, 6 and Lawry-White 2003, 25). Perhaps the most damaging account of this blind-spot in peacebuilding doctrine revealed through my research originates with the United Nations’ Institute for Disarmament Research, which affirmed that psychological or psychosocial interventions remained “improvised, un-coordinated and [not] in support of a common mission goal” (Raevsky 1996, 5)
My inquiry this semester, however, also revealed numerous successful, albeit isolated, instances of these interventions. These ranged from the dissemination of messages of forgiveness and community to encourage the reintegration of Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army fighters to the employment of a fictional radio soap drama to promote Hutu-Tutsi perspective-taking in post-genocide Rwanda. The effectiveness of these psychological interventions is centred on their application of narratives, with the act of storytelling representing a “primary way in which people create and exchange meaning” (Bothel et al. 2022, 8). In other words, stories have a constitutive impact on peace. In addition to shaping how individuals see those they perceive as being different from them, narratives also serve to influence normative understandings of acceptable or unacceptable means of redressing grievances. While they may be insufficient to unilaterally alter an individual or group’s fundamental beliefs, this shift in the perception of social norms can serve as a vital catalyst for reducing short-term violence and setting the conditions for subsequent efforts aimed at reconciliation and dispute-resolution. With this in mind, the most significant impact of my research on my own understanding of peacebuilding has been to introduce an understanding of peace as more than a physical condition in time in space, reflected by tangible indicators such as an absence of armed conflict or structural violence through discrimination. Peace is also a perception in the minds of others, a set of shared understandings regarding norms, values, and events that transcend the divisions instigated, or exacerbated, by conflict. Efforts to, in the words of Professor Stephen Gethins, ‘win the peace’ must, therefore, seek to address the psychological and cognitive factors central to its initial success and enduring sustainability.
What have you learnt about wider habits of visualising peace and peacebuilding?
Peace is complexity. This statement does not simply indicate that peace is a complicated or difficult end-state to achieve but that the very process of constructing, developing, and sustaining peace is inextricably linked to the notion of complexity. My research last year briefly examined the conceptualisation of peace through the image of narrative trees: the roots consist of underlying facts, stories, and parables that lay the foundation for a group or individual’s views; the trunk grows from this to form the framework through which we view ourselves, one another, and the world around us; and the branches represent the actions and emotions which result from this framing (The Role of Narrative 2021, 3). Previously, I focused on applying this concept to the study of moral injury and found that individuals were most capable of achieving internal peace by challenging the simplified narrative ‘trunk’ of self-blame that arose from the events they witnessed or participated in. Just as this degree of narrative complexity is central to internal moral peace, the same can be said for the process of attaining peace between groups in the aftermath of conflict.
In all the contemporary case studies of polarisation and conflict I examined, a key commonality was the presence of simplified narratives. Present-day Rwanda, for instance, has been marked by the continued reluctance of the country’s Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups to consider one another’s understanding of the 1994 genocide (Bilali and Volhardt 2013, 145). Both factions have, instead, remained, deeply entrenched in their respective narratives and engaged in competitive victimhood through the comparison of perceived relative suffering. The same is true for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the public expressions of one side’s experiences eliciting allegations of hypocrisy or deceit by the other (Maoz, Mor, and Ron 2016, 18). These instances serve to display the extent to which simplified narratives of conflict can serve to lock groups into a state of enduring polarisation and division. In both cases, each faction selected a different set of underlying facts and events to lay the roots for their narrative tree. The ‘trunk’ which emerged, thus, reflected each side’s curated understanding of the conflict, with the absence of any overlap in roots resulting in narratives that excluded any consideration of the other’s perspective. Distinctions between the in-group and out-group, each united by their own narrative of exclusive victimisation, are, thus, continually strengthened through repetition of these stories, and both factions remain trapped in a cycle of continued division.
As with overcoming internal moral injury, the process of healing this narrative divide between groups relies not on planting another tree but on challenging the simplified ‘trunk’ of victimisation and polarisation. Central to this process is exposure to the narratives of one’s out-group, with psychosocial interventions in Rwanda and Israel/Palestine encouraging adversarial groups to develop a fuller awareness of one another’s narratives and experiences. It is only by identifying commonalities, addressing divergences in interpretation, and recognising mutual suffering that the simplified narratives that trap groups into a perpetual cycle of opposition and conflict can be overcome. It is this notion of complexity as a foundational component of lasting peace that is, perhaps, the most profound lesson I have taken away from my work on Visualising Peace.
What have you learnt about the forces/influences that shape (or might shape, challenge, or stretch) people’s habits of visualising peace?
One of my favourite Museum of Peace entries examined the influence of scientific discourse on habits of visualising peace. Many of the dominant theoretical frameworks which shape conceptualisations of peace within fields such as international relations or security studies are rooted in an understanding of human nature propagated by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His seminal work, Leviathan, describes mankind’s existence outside a system of sovereign governance as a “state of nature”, in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 2008, 84). In effect, the state of nature is one of perpetual conflict, with aggression between individuals and groups constituting the sole manner of ensuring one’s survival in the absence of overarching structures of national or international authority. Egoistic and selfish behaviour is, thus, the norm, as actors aim to secure their survival through the relentless pursuit of power. In the words of Hans Morgenthau, the father of Classical Realist theory, “whatever man does or intends to do emanates from himself and refers again to himself” (Morgenthau 1947, 163).
These rationalist understandings of actor behaviour are reinforced through insights offered by natural science. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, for instance, offers a powerful explanation for the development of aggression and egoism as seemingly natural traits of human behaviour. Inhabiting an environment with limited resources and numerous predatorial threats, organisms are primed to secure their own survival; in this sense, selfish, warlike behaviour arise from the “strong selection pressure” to develop them (Johnson and Thayer 2016, 7). This explanation, rooted in the language of biological science, serves as a powerful discursive tool to reinforce a specific understanding of human nature regarding peace and conflict. Peaceful behaviour is understood not simply as an exception but an aberration, a clear deviation from the evolutionary instincts central to the survival of individuals and groups. When achieved, peace is, therefore, conceptualised in the negative sense as the absence of violence, a brief interlude that punctuates the immutable reality of conflict as the natural state of human existence. Ultimately, this scientific discourse has a profound constitutive impact on dominant understandings of peace, legitimising efforts focusing solely on negative peace as the best that can be hoped to achieve and offering a powerful rhetorical tool to denigrate those moving beyond this narrow visualisation as unrealistic or naïve.