Cultures of governance and peace: A comparison of EU and Indian theoretical and policy approaches

By Manchester University Press

This volume brings together insights which look at the intersection of governance, culture and conflict resolution in India and the European Union.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526117595

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Contributors

Paula Banerjee specialises in issues of conflict, peace and displacement in South Asia. She has published extensively on issues of borders in South Asia. She has written and edited fourteen books and multiple articles including a special volume in Journal of Borderlands Studies entitled Women in Indian Borderlands. Her book Borders, Histories, Existences: Gender and Beyond (2010) has been widely quoted. Paula Banerjee is an international editorial board member of a number of journals including the Oxford Journal of Refugee Studies, and editor of Refugee Watch. She is the current President of the International Association of Studies in Forced Migration and the Calcutta Research Group. She presently teaches at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Calcutta.

Navnita Chadha Behera is Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. She has more than fifteen years' research experience on Kashmir, and has authored two books: State, Identity and Violence: Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh (2002); Demystifying Kashmir (2007), which have been rated among the top non-fiction books in India. Her other research interests include IR of South Asia, in particular, issues of war, conflict and political violence and international security.

J. Peter Burgess is Professor and Chair in Geopolitics of Risk, École Normale Supérieure, Paris and Adjunct Professor, Centre for Advanced Security Theory, University of Copenhagen. His research and publications concern the meeting place between culture and politics in particular in Europe, focusing most recently on the theory and ethics of security and insecurity. His most recent book is The Ethical Subject of Security: Geopolitical Risk and the Threat against Europe (2011).

Sumona DasGupta is a political scientist based in New Delhi who writes on democracy, governance, peace and conflict issues in South Asia and India. Jammu and Kashmir on which she has conducted extensive research for fifteen years have been her longstanding area of interest. She is currently visiting Senior Fellow with Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), and is chair of the international advisory group of International Conflict Research Institute, University of Ulster, UK. Dr DasGupta was the lead PRIA researcher for the project on cultures of governance and conflict resolution in Europe and India (2011–13); and in 2014 was Visiting Fellow with the South Asia programme of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where she continued to work on issues related to Kashmir. Publications include: Citizen Initiatives and Democratic Engagements: Experiences from India (2013). She is currently working on a book on Kashmir.

Janel B. Galvanek is Project Manager at the Berghof Foundation. She is currently working on a research project on traditional and non-traditional forms of conflict resolution in Liberia, Colombia and North-East India and is managing the dialogue project involving the High Peace Council of Afghanistan. Previously, she was a researcher for the EU-funded CORE project, and also has research experience in Liberia on the reintegration of child soldiers. Her other topics of interest include the interaction between state and non-state actors during conflict; engaging local actors in conflict transformation; and the global phenomenon of child soldiers, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. She holds a master's degree in peace research and security policy from Hamburg University, and an MA in German studies from Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Atig Ghosh is a member of the Calcutta Research Group and teaches history at Visva-Bharati University, India. He has published variously on the political economy and culture of nineteenth-century Bengal, statelessness in South Asia, accumulation under post-colonial capitalism, and surveillance technologies of the post-colonial Indian state.

Hans J. Giessmann is an executive director of the Berghof Foundation, prior to which he was Deputy Director of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, where he still has an affiliation as a professor and is a member of the social science faculty. He is also on the Board of Directors for the European master's programme in human rights and democratisation. Since 2009 he has been a member of both the Global Agenda Council on ‘Terrorism’ at the World Economic Forum and of the European Expert Network on Terrorism. He is also a member of the Advisory Board for Civilian Crisis Prevention at the German Federal Foreign Office. Professor Giessmann is co-editor of Security and Peace and Connections. He has published, edited or co-edited over twenty books and numerous articles. He graduated from the Humboldt-University in Berlin and holds doctorates in both philosophy and political science.

Elida K. U. Jacobsen is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Her research is situated in critical security studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies and peace and development research. She is also the academic manager of the undergraduate course in Peace and Conflict Studies by Oslo and Akershus University College, which takes place in Pondicherry, India. Recent publications include: ‘Unique identification: Inclusion and surveillance in the Indian biometric assemblage’, Security Dialogue, 43:5 (2012); ‘The plurality of peace, non-violence and peace works in India’, co-authored with Samrat S. Kumar, in Upadhyaya et al. (eds), Peace and Conflict: The South Asian Experience (2014); and ‘The cross-colonization of finance and security through lists: Banking policing in the UK and India’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(1) co-authored with Anthony Amicelle (2016).

Kristoffer Lidén is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, working on the ethics of peacebuilding, security and humanitarianism within the disciplines of philosophy and IR. His publications include: ‘Building peace between global and local politics: On the cosmopolitical ethics of liberal peacebuilding’, International Peacekeeping, 16:5 (2009); ‘Peace, self-governance and international engagement: From neocolonial to post-colonial peacebuilding’, in Shahrbanou Tadjsbakhsh (ed.), Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives (2011); ‘In love with a lie? On the social and political preconditions for global peacebuilding governance’, Peacebuilding, 1:1 (2013) and ‘EU support to civil society organizations in conflict-ridden countries: A governance perspective from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Georgia’, International Peacekeeping, 23:2, 274–301 (2016) (with Nona Mikhelidze, Elena B. Stavrevska and Birte Vogel).

Roger Mac Ginty is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, and in the Department of Politics, University of Manchester. Recent books include: the edited volume Handbook on Peacebuilding (2013); International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (2011). He co-edits Peacebuilding and edits the Palgrave book series, ‘Rethinking Political Violence’.

Sandra Pogodda is Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester. Sandra completed her PhD in International Relations at the University of Cambridge as a Marie Curie Fellow before joining the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the United States Institute of Peace and the University of St Andrews as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research focuses on state formation processes in the revolutionary societies of the Arab region; resistance movements; revolutionary challenges to peace and conflict studies; and critical development studies. Among her publications are two edited volumes: Post-Liberal Peace Transitions (2016) and the Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace (2016), both co-edited with Oliver Richmond.

Amit Prakash is Professor and Chairperson at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Amit Prakash holds a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His areas of research and publications include: politics of development and identity; critical governance studies (including governance indicators); conflict, governance and the state; democratic political process in India; policing in India; global governance. Publications include: Jharkhand: Politics of Development of Identity (2001); Politics and Internal Security (2004); Local Governance in India: Decentralisation and Beyond (co-edited with Niraja Gopal Jayal and Pradeep K Sharma, 2006).

Oliver P. Richmond is Research Professor of IR, Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. He is also International Professor, College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tromso. Publications include: Failed Statebuilding: Intervention and the Dynamics of Peace Formation (2014); A Post-Liberal Peace (2011); Liberal Peace Transitions (with Jason Franks, 2009); Peace in IR (2008); The Transformation of Peace (2005/7). He is editor of the Palgrave book series, ‘Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies’, and co-editor of Peacebuilding.

Ranabir Samaddar belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered as one of the foremost theorists in the field of forced migration studies. He has worked extensively on issues of forced migration, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. The much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue was a culmination of his long work on justice, rights and peace. Publications include: The Materiality of Politics (two vols, 2007) and The Emergence of the Political Subject (2009), which challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth of nationalism and the nation state, and signalled a new turn in critical post-colonial thinking. His co-authored work on new town and new forms of accumulation Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of Urban Imagination (2013) takes forward urban studies in the context of post-colonial capitalism. He is currently the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies at the Calcutta Research Group.

Elena B. Stavrevska holds a PhD in Political Science from the Central European University in Hungary. Her research and publications primarily focus on agency, temporality, intersubjectivity, and the space–class nexus in (post-)conflict societies. Empirically, her work has zeroed in on the peacebuilding initiatives in the Balkans. In addition, she has done extensive ethnographic research at multiple sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Macedonia and has published on interpretive methodologies used in researching conflict-ridden societies. Elena has also contributed various op-ed pieces to outlets such as OpenDemocracy, Radio Free Europe and Eurozine. Beyond her academic work, she is involved in a number of activist groups.

Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya is a professor of political science at the Banaras Hindu University. In her forty-year career, she has served as Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, Chair Department of Political Science and Director Centre for the Study of Nepal and also an adjunct professor at Malaviya Centre for Peace Research. She has carried out postdoctoral research at London School of Economics and Politics and Brown University and obtained an international diploma from Uppsala University. Professor Upadhyaya has also served as Scholar in Residence at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, and Director (Research) at the Institute of Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity, UU/United Nations University, NI, UK. More recently she served as the foundational ICCR Chair at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu. She has lectured and published extensively on issues of ethnicity, conflict resolution, gender and development.

Priyankar Upadhyaya is Professor of Peace Studies and Chairholder of UNESCO Chair for Peace and Intercultural Understanding at Banaras Hindu University. He has carried out postdoctoral research at London University and holds a Ph.D. and M. Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has gained many international awards/fellowships including the Guest Scholar Award of Woodrow Wilson Centre of International Scholars, Faculty Research Award, Canadian Government, Fulbright Award and Australia–India Council Senior Fellowship; he has served as adjunct/visiting professor at many North American and European universities. He also lectures at Indian academies including the National Defence College, Foreign Service Institute, Naval War Academy. His Peace and Conflict: South Asian Experience (2014) has been widely acclaimed.

Birte Vogel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester, UK. She is managing editor of Peacebuilding and currently an executive member of the International Studies Association's Peace Studies section. Birte's research focuses on the interplay between international actors and local peace initiatives, and investigates the political space(s) available for non-state actors. She is particularly interested in spatial dimensions of peace and conflict, and the isolation of local peace communities. She is also interested in the connection between peace and economics on the micro-level.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Cultures of governance and conflict resolution in the EU and India

J. Peter Burgess, Oliver P. Richmond and Ranabir Samaddar

This volume is made up of chapters reflecting results from a European Union Framework project entitled ‘Cultures of Governance and Conflict Resolution in the EU and India’. In it the authors examine the intersection of governance, culture, and conflict resolution in two very different but connected epistemic, cultural, and institutional political settings: the world's largest democracy and the world's most ambitious regional organisation, the former resistant to the echoes of British colonialism and eurocentrism, and the latter strongly influenced by British and American thinking on the liberal peace.¹ These two entities have been divided by distance, colonialism, and culture, and yet have recently been brought closer together by the ideas and practices of what is known as liberal peace, new technologies and opportunities for travel, collaboration, and exchange in a neo-liberal context, and by cooperation over development projects. The differences between India and the EU are obvious in terms of geography, culture, language, the nature and shape of institutions, and historical forces: and yet the commonalities between the two are surprising. The depth of cultural variation and scale as well as very significant institutional differences are obvious. Yet, there have not been many attempts to make such a comparison in the context of the post-colonial world order, at least.

However, what has emerged from the research project that this book summarises – and what is more unexpected – are the similarities between the cases in terms of their critiques of neo-liberalism and of governance and its conceptual relationship with governmentality, their turn to decentralised institutions, local forms of peace agency, the escalatory tendencies of territoriality, nationalism, capitalism, and borders, the urgency of equitable development, and the pressure for autonomy and self-determination. A further common dynamic relates to the way in which both governance frameworks do not seem to be conditioned to deal with conflict according to recent scientific approaches and modes of understanding, but instead are locked into a version of statehood and regional relations perhaps more appropriate to the post-war world.

This volume examines these dynamics in the context of broader philosophical and political questions about conflict, peace, security, nationalism, identity, development, and not least justice.² It is based on detailed case studies and rigorous analysis and examines these issues in the context of the practices of conflict resolution in India and Europe, representing very different institutional frameworks, but throwing up surprisingly similar lessons about the relationship between governmentality and peacemaking.

Opening new research venues on peace and governance: the EU as ‘postmodern’, India as ‘post-colonial’?

While casting light on several issues relating to governance, conflict, and peace, the research behind the contributions to this book, as with any good research, has raised some fresh general issues which now demand our attention. They revolve around the dynamics of post-colonialism, post-Westphalianism (i.e. integration), and neo-liberalism in governance in conflict-affected areas. Indeed the new enquiries are interlaced with our research findings. These issues might be formulated as follows.

The first is of course related to the concept of governance. Does this term mean the institution of government and the complex of its activities? Does it mean the field of governing, and thus the relation between the rulers and the ruled? Does it indicate democratic participation of the subjects of government? Or, does it mean, as the World Bank suggested more than two decades ago, a particular orientation or slant of relations of administration and participation in democracy?³ From the last point of view governance is a modern idea and reality, not more than 50 years old. There was little talk of governance in the nineteenth century. Others will dispute this claim and say that the fundamentals were put in place in the course of last two centuries. The authors of these contributions do not engage with the question of definitions and the exact relation between the two concepts of democracy and governance. Instead, they take the elasticity and the imprecision of the term as given, as an asset, and a particular kind of terrain in which to situate the analysis. While this has produced rich results, it has further queried the study of contemporary governance – global, liberal, or post-colonial.⁴

Second, in the course of this research, participants and audiences alike sometimes mistook the rationale of comparing the lessons of EU and India as a purely comparative exercise, and thus had misgivings and criticisms about the scope, findings, and approach. They said basically that these studies were not (and perhaps could not ever be) exhaustive enough for a sufficient comparative exercise. But the point is that, while the case studies are rich, and they speak of the focused approach of the research informed by the same anxieties, concerns, questions, and to a large extent methods, the main purpose was not taxonomic but rather heuristic. In other words, the researchers sought to interrogate the global governance model of peacebuilding, the classic liberal model, and the post-colonial model to identify its structures, tendencies, actors, and compositions. One of the inquiries further suggested by this research is, namely, while theoretically they may be ideal types, in practice do they overlap? More significantly, can one find the post-colonial within the European–liberal and its supposed post-Westphalian modes of governance? From this point, the case studies assume significance. Indeed, some of the studies raise the question, what is post-colonial? In what specific ways do the post-colonial methods of peacebuilding move away from the liberal and the global methods? Do they mean the continuity of the colonial mode in certain respects and discontinuities in others? Do they signify the ascendancy of the local or continuity of old power structures, governmental of colonial in nature? Do they mean different forms and kinds of subjectivation? Do they signify also the plurality of the subjects of peace – women, ex-combatants, peace-yearning groups, lower orders of society, etc.? Or, do they signal all of these, the mixture always being contingent and historically predicated? The case studies that this volume covers also suggests a necessary methodological pluralism in the study of governance and peace, therefore the research always moves between the fields of generalisation and particularisation.

Third, if these are the globally relevant lessons from post-colonial experiences of governance, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding, what are the lessons that a post-colonial country, or a post-Westphalian regional polity, like India and the EU draw for themselves? When we look at the Indian experiences chronicled in this book, we may point out few possible areas of further enquiry, such as: is peace in the North-East (or Kashmir) possible without breaking the jinx of the nation-state? The continuity of the colonial policy of pacification and a fundamental lack of understanding among governing classes of how autonomy constitutes the core of claim-makings today in post-colonial societies make the question inevitable. We have to see how the framework of sovereignty is being re-conceptualised in a post-colonial country like India with the notion of shared sovereignty, popular autonomy, and justice. Similarly, in the EU context, we can point to the contradictions of processes such as integration, normative projection, and the multiple dynamics of external boundaries, centralisation and decentralisation, all in the light of increasingly globalised capital in order to understand the EU's evolving position on peace. This raises the issue of how in a post-colonial world can the post-Westphalian integration project avoid becoming a neo-liberal project whereby the rights desired by integration, previously maintained by the liberal state, are then lost through globalised capital? This may be innocuous in the advanced polities or economies of much of the EU, but may be conflict inducing as a response to the conflicts in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, or in Kashmir or with Maoist conflicts as in Bihar.

Similarly, one may ask against the background of state-Maoist conflict in Jharkhand–Bihar and the caste conflicts, is a peace that is defined by a broad range of liberal rights possible through or together with neo-liberal development? The latter may focus more on opportunities and resilience than rights, and require the dismantling of the large state. The neo-liberal economy marks the expanding grid of elite capital accumulation, particularly on the basis of the extractive sectors of economy such as mining, and it combines with the growing obsession with state security. After 9/11, the field of governance and conflict resolution has been overwhelmed with the discourses of terror, failed states, and statebuilding. The discourse of terror has overshadowed or displaced all discussions of governance and popular demands for justice from the state or from regional or international actors. If governance is not a military mode of conduct of rule but a civilian one, we have to ask now how securitisation modifies governance. Foucault once said that the model of war had given modern society the model of governance.⁵ Securitisation of regional conflicts takes the form of a governmentality that approaches the use of war methods without declaring war. Logistics occupy an important place in this metamorphosis. India and the EU are affected by these dynamics, both in similar and different ways.⁶

A further issue arises from the post-colonial angle: given the particular spatial configurations marking the history of governance and conflicts, how does the parallel existence of the three levels – the local, national, and the global – have an impact on peacebuilding? For instance, in the Mughal imperial age rebels hailed the emperor as great while revolting against local despots, and now it is the other way round. Local rulers say⁷ they do not want to tax the indigenous but it is the centre, which goads them. The game goes on with the centre saying to the people that we want welfare, we provide money, but it is the local rulers who eat up everything and do not protect you. Therefore, in the light of the existence of parallel levels, it may be necessary to move away from an extended debate on peacebuilding and focus on concrete practices of power to see how certain norms of governance are produced; how and under what specific historical circumstances the actors shape their conduct; how conflict is not a question of some original residence of power, but an expression of a relation that produces power.

Fourth, in the light of an overwhelming presence of the theme of governance in restorative peace studies, this volume has an important lesson for peace researchers, namely, that it is necessary to investigate whether the subjects of conflict and governance are passive subjects bowing incessantly to the apparatus of governance, or conducting themselves in a way that ensures their relative (always contingent) freedom from the governing apparatus and the