Nov 8th 2007

A report on how not to solve disputes

Clarkson: learning to avoid disintegration

DID you ever hear about an Indian economist, a Ghanaian-American philosopher, a Chinese-Canadian stateswoman and a Northern Irish politician who tried to work out why so many groups of people were fighting each other and what could be done about it?

Along with seven other public figures, the above luminaries—respectively Amartya Sen, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Adrienne Clarkson and (Lord) John Alderdice—have spent two years preparing a report *; their formal remit was to consider “respect and understanding” as a way to stem conflict. The recipient of their collective wisdom will be the (formerly British) Commonwealth, whose heads of government, representing about 1.8 billion people, gather in Uganda later this month.

At first glance, the fruits of this huge array of brain power look rather modest: a slim volume which, when opened randomly, seems packed with familiar political correctness and concessions to the idea of victimhood. People feel aggrieved because they are poor, powerless or else they belong to groups (ethnic, religious, economic) which are not sufficiently respected, and one grievance feeds another.

But brevity is no sin—far from it—and amidst all this fluffy stuff are to be found some nuggets of very tough-minded thinking about the dangers of putting people into neat boxes—and the cynical way in which ethnic or tribal warlords or nationalist and religious zealots always try to shoehorn people into simple, unchanging categories because it suits their purposes and keeps conflict on the boil.

Perhaps that much is obvious to anyone who has observed a peaceful society slide into conflict, or simply struggle to avoid disintegration on linguistic lines, as Canada has done. What is less obvious is that people who are trying to put an end to conflict—be they soldiers or nice peace-brokers—often fall into the same trap as the belligerents, by assuming that people naturally divide into simple categories.

Instead of addressing, say, Protestants and Catholics and urging each “side” to think better of the other, it may be wiser to remind them that they have lots of other identities too: as parents, sports enthusiasts, believers in a political or economic ideology, music fans or whatever.

As Mr Appiah, a novelist and New Yorker who descends from famous British and Ghanaian politicians, puts it: “When a cab driver asks where I am from, what he really wants to know is why I am brown-skinned, so I tell him I grew up in Ghana....But when I go to a philosophy conference, what matters is which school of philosophers I belong to.”

From these personal musings, Mr Appiah derives some quite stern conclusions about the way Western societies have responded to terrorists acting in the name of Islam. After the terrorist bombs in London of July 2005, he thinks, Tony Blair shouldn't have appealed for moderation among “British Muslims”; he should have addressed British citizens as a whole.

Mr Sen, who was born in West Bengal in 1933, says he has been depressed by the way “Bangladeshi Muslim” identity has superseded all others—in contrast with 30 years ago when (in the early days of Bangladeshi independence) people of all religious backgrounds felt a Bengali solidarity that cut across religious affiliation.

The existence of lots of competing affiliations which pull people in different ways is the best hope of silencing gloomy talk of a “clash of civilisations” (with religion, and Islam in particular, often seen as the defining characteristic for giant global blocks). Such thinking is “deeply flawed on a conceptual level and deeply divisive in practice,” the report says.

As everybody knows deep down, the authors suggest, people belong to lots of categories (family, language, personal interests, political ideology) and spend their time shifting between them—unless some conflict arises in which a detail of family history becomes a matter of life and death.

At a minimum, say these authors, the authorities who are trying to keep inter-communal peace should not empower people whose authority depends on keeping divisions sharp. “It could be argued that, in Britain and America, attempts at engaging against terrorism...have had, at times, a perverse effect of magnifying the voice of extreme Islamists...faith-based approaches make it more difficult for politically secular Muslims to speak out against terrorism and violence,” the report argues. If anybody reads it carefully, it will stir some interesting arguments when those Commonwealth leaders gather.

* Civil Paths to Peace: Report of the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding

Source: The Economist