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March 25, 2002
Human rights advocates and conflict resolution specialists share a common
aim - building stable societies based on mutual respect and the rule of
law - and often work on the same conflicts, addressing closely related
issues. Despite the substantive overlap in their work, however, they often
talk past each other. At a recent meeting between peace workers and human
rights advocates, a rights activist made it clear that her organization
"does not do peace." At the same workshop, a peace worker bemoaned the
fact that the conflict resolution field has no guiding regime of laws
and institutions comparable to that available to human rights advocates,
implying that human rights principles were not a resource she could usefully
apply to her own work.
This issue of Human Rights Dialogue is the seventh in a series
exploring ways to dismantle the “human rights box,” to find
creative ways to increase participation in the human rights movement,
and to expand access to the benefits of a human rights framework. By exploring
the relationship between human rights groups and peace groups in different
settings, this issue seeks to shed light on the barriers to the integration
of human rights into peace work and on the means to overcome those barriers.
Contributors provide insights into the interaction between human rights
and peace groups in the countries where they work or have conducted research:
Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and South Africa.
The unfortunate fact is that both in the field and in the offices of
international organizations, human rights groups and peace groups often
work on separate tracks and even at cross purposes. Mutual stereotyping
by group members is common: Conflict resolvers are characterized as willing
to compromise rights or avoid sensitive discussions of abuses altogether
to satisfy the interests of the parties and secure a political deal; human
rights advocates are seen as idealistic and uncompromising in seeking
redress for individual violations, even at the cost of prolonging conflict.
In at least some cases, these stereotypes are expressions of a fundamental
clash between the human rights groups’ principled, legalistic, rights-based
approach to resolving conflict and the more pragmatic and cooperative
interest-based approach taken by peace groups.
In general, contributors agree that there needs to be better coordination
between peace groups and human rights groups. Peace workers have to be
willing and able to design intervention strategies that ultimately promote
human rights standards. Human rights workers need to learn conflict management
skills in order to address community demands and communicate effectively
the relevance of human rights to the parties in conflict.
These needs have not gone entirely unnoticed. In the fall of 2000, major
donors funded an institute devoted solely to addressing the problem—the
Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution (CHRCR) at Tufts University.
Executive director Ellen Lutz describes the CHRCR’s work in developing
training and education programs that give peace workers and human rights
advocates a better grounding in each other’s concerns and strategies.
Michelle Parlevliet and Ivana Vuco demonstrate that an approach that
integrates human rights and conflict-prevention strategies can be both
pragmatic and principled. The effective response of the South African
Center for Conflict Resolution to an instance of conflict in Cape Town
shows that a principled, rights-based stance can be the pragmatic response,
according to Parlevliet. Vuco’s study of human rights and peace
work in Nigeria describes how some human rights groups are taking a less
adversarial approach to their work in a new, more open political environment.
In societies divided by ethnic, religious, political, or other intergroup
tensions—Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland, for example—this
integration of approaches is harder. In these conflicts, as Jehan Perera
and Christine Bell explain, differences in the emphasis each community
places on human rights have had the unfortunate effect of dividing them
along the lines of the parties in conflict. Comments by Alan Keenan and
Jeevan Thiagarajah on the Sri Lankan conflict stress the role of politically
powerful actors in perpetuating Tamil-Sinhalese divisions, which makes
it difficult for an independent movement to unify peace and human rights
groups. In response to Bell, Mari Fitzduff explains that in Ireland rights-based
approaches were effective in making claims against the state but did not
adequately address nonstate actors, such as paramilitary groups.
The clash between human rights advocates and peace workers is most visible
during formal efforts to resolve conflict, when the need for redressing
abuses is most pressing. The typical human rights organization’s
position is that there can be no peace without justice, in the form of
criminal prosecutions for past abuses, and that impunity cannot be tolerated,
even if the pursuit of justice prolongs the conflict. Peace groups, especially
those oriented toward conflict resolution, are often more forgiving, tending
to support reconciliatory approaches and nonpunitive measures, such as
amnesty, as a means of ending conflict as quickly as possible.
Richard Wilson, Bonny Ibhawoh, and Vasuki Nesiah and Paul van Zyl offer
insights into this debate by discussing different notions of justice—retributive
versus restorative, punitive versus nonpunitive—and linking these
notions to the cultural sources and legitimacy of the human rights framework.
Wilson calls for a vigilant watch over activities conducted in the name
of human rights; his concern stems from his observation that political
elites in South Africa conflated human rights with "nation building,”
which he argues undermined human rights and the rule of law in that country.
In contrast, drawing on the case of Nigeria, Vuco and Ibhawoh argue that
it is valid to use human rights language in serving the greater goal of
social stability. The authors of the two commentaries on Wilson’s
essay argue for expanding the notion of justice beyond legal prosecutions
and for developing creative ways to achieve accountability that are suited
to local capabilities and culture.
International policy makers are also debating what it would mean to
incorporate a human rights perspective into conflict prevention and resolution.
Looking beyone the question of appropriating human rights strategies (e.g.,
litigation, maning and shaming, and the like), actors at this level are
considering whether human rights can function as a broad framework in
which in which to carry out peace. In an interview with Dialogue, UN
Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs Danilo Türk says
that the human rights framework functions best at the level of norm-setting
and that the desire for peace should serve as a further motivation for
insistence on those standards. In the view of United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), according to special advisor
for conflict resolution Dayton Maxwell, a “human security”
framework that is broader than a “human rights” framework
can provide the basis for a more successful collaborative approach.
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