Introduction (Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security)

The version of record of this manuscript is: Rumelili, B (2015) ‘Introduction’ in Rumelili, B. (ed.) Ontological Security and Conflict Resolution: Peace Anxieties. Routledge (PRIO New Security Studies Series), pp.1-9. 'Whoever has learnt to be anxious in the right way has learnt the ultimate.' (Kierkegaard 1980, p.153). Word count: 4.276 Introduction Bahar Rumelili, Koç University I grew up with stories. I had these images about this place and it was a different place than I saw when I crossed. I was expecting to find beautiful houses, beautiful trees, a community, like living in a neighbourhood, feeling at home. But what I saw was not the image I was expecting… It was like being in a forest and not being able to breathe. It was the worst feeling I ever had in my life. (Dikomitis 2005, p. 9) The quintessential Palestinian experience … takes place at the border, an airport, a checkpoint… What happens to Palestinians at these crossing points bring home to them how much they share in common as a people. (Khalidi 1997, p.1) 1 The first quote depicts the way a Greek-Cypriot woman conveyed her profound disquiet after being allowed to cross the Green Line in Cyprus to see the Northern part of the island, which has been under Turkish occupation since 1974, for the very first time in 2005. Many ethnographic analyses of conflict resolution point to similar unsettling effects whereas all conflict resolution endeavours are premised on the contrary assumption that peace is a universal/idealistic end-point, which would ultimately settle and bring to end fundamental grievances, fears, and anxieties. 1 This book disrupts this highly taken-for-granted assumption and highlights the ways in which the prospect of peace, to be brought about by the resolution or transformation of conflicts, generates anxieties at the individual, group, societal, and state levels, and consequently sets in motion social and political processes that reproduce and reactivate the conflicts. In analysing how the prospect of peace may generate anxieties and the consequences thereof, the book builds on the notion of ontological security, as developed by Giddens (1991) and its recent applications to international relations theory (Huysmans 1998; Kinnvall 2004; Steele 2005, 2008; Mitzen2006a, 2006b; Roe 2008; Krolikowski 2008; Berenskoetter and Giegerich 2010; Zarakol 2010; Lupovici 2012; Croft 2012; Kay 2012). Although conflicts threaten the physical security of the parties involved, they help settle certain existential questions about basic parameters of life, about being, self in relation to external world and others, and identity. Thus, over time, conflicts become sources of ontological security (Mitzen 2006a). They sustain the political and social 2 production of definite objects of fear, systems of meaning that clearly differentiate friends from enemies, and unequivocal moral standards premised on the necessity for survival. At the individual, group, and state levels, they become embedded in habits and routinized practices and enable actors to maintain stable and consistent self-narratives that inform their actions. At the individual level, the fears and deprivations induced by conflict and the emotional and behavioural responses developed to deal with them, no matter how costly and negative, generate a sense of stability and certainty, and enable actors to simultaneously bracket out existential questions and to know what they are doing and why they are doing it. Thus, as indicated in the second quote above, being humiliated once again by security guards at an Israeli checkpoint becomes a source of ontological security for Palestinians. At the societal level, these negative experiences maintain stable and clear-cut definitions of self and other, and thereby fix the otherwise fluid and contested narratives of collective identity. At the state level, conflicts solidify friend/ enemy distinctions and become embedded in routinized securitising acts and practices, which empower security actors and legitimize exceptional measures. The prospect of peace, through the resolution or transformation of conflict, promises to end these fears, deprivations, and states of exception, yet threatens to unsettle the stability and consistency of self-narratives, and 3 their associated routines and habits at the individual, societal, and state levels. Thus, the first objective of this book is to analyse in a variety of conflict cases, how conflict resolution induces ontological insecurity, a state of general anxiety which stems from the disruption of habits and the inability to sustain a coherent narrative about doing, acting, and being (Kinnvall 2004). Anxiety is a generalized state, and is to be distinguished from fear, which is linked to a specific threat and therefore has a definite object. In contrast, anxiety is unconsciously organized and experienced internally, rather than projected externally. In different conflict contexts, ontological insecurity induced by the prospect of resolution or transformation may manifest itself in different ways and to different degrees. While at the individual level, ontological insecurity manifests itself in certain emotional responses and behavioural coping mechanisms, at the collective and state levels, it triggers inconsistency, ambiguity, and dissonance in narratives, and in practice avoidance and incapacity to act (Lupovici 2012). The second contention of the book is that ontological insecurity at the individual, group, and state levels may set in motion political and social processes that reproduce and reactivate conflicts. Ontological insecurity generates pressures for the reinstatement of the conflict narratives and practices, which had, after all, provided consistent, firm, and non-negotiable answers to existential questions about being and acting, through friend/enemy distinctions and securitisation. Ontological insecurity undermines trust and accentuates the perception of general threat from the 4 outside world. It, thus, creates a setting conducive to the manipulation of this distrust by political actors, who act to re-channel this anxiety into specific and habituated fears. Ontological insecurity may hamper the negotiation process by leading parties to elevate minor outstanding aspects of the deal to existential issues, generating new issues of discord beyond the ones addressed by the conflict resolution process. It may also empower spoilers of the peace processes (Stedman 1997). The contributions to this book analyse the different ways in which ontological insecurity has thus prevented the successful culmination of peace processes in different conflict contexts. The third contention of the book is that coping with peace anxieties necessitates the formulation of alternative self-narratives at the individual, societal, and state levels that re-situate the Self in relation to Other and to the world at large, and that become embedded in new habits and routines. In this respect, the book is in close company with social-psychological approaches to conflict resolution that stress the necessity to reconstruct societal beliefs. However, in the existing literature, insufficient attention has been paid to the processes whereby these alternative beliefs are formulated and become ingrained in self-narratives and practice. It is the quest for ontological security that drives the political and social processes through which the parties construct their identities in relation to one another. Without paying due attention to the quest for ontological security, various peace- building interventions have been designed under the assumption that members of conflict societies are in essence liberal subjects (Richmond 5 2008, 2011), who are willing to strip themselves of their particularistic identity narratives and identify with the Other in the interest of peace (Browning & Joenniemi 2012). In a number of conflict resolution and peace- building contexts, the contributions to this book analyse the alternative self- narratives that have become the basis of an altered state of ontological security and study their characteristics. The book makes a number of critical contributions to the fields of international relations theory and conflict resolution. This book is the first to explore the question of how the pursuit of ontological security matters for and impacts conflict resolution. In addition to the literature on ontological security, the book also contributes to the growing literatures on the role of habits (Hopf 2010), practices (Neumann 2002; Pouliot 2008; eds Adler &Pouloit 2011) and emotions (Crawford 2000; Ross 2006; Hutchison & Bleiker 2008; Bially-Mattern 2011) in international life. The burgeoning literature on ontological security has explained how and why the maintenance of habits and routines becomes important to states just as it is important to individuals (Mitzen 2006a, 2006b; Steele 2008). Particularly, the literature on ontological security has pointed out how the pursuit of stability, certainty, and consistency of self-narratives leads conflict parties to stick to the habits and routines that reproduce conflict. This book, similarly, underlines the habitual nature and practicality of conflicts and their ontological security- producing implications, but shifts the focus away from explaining the continuity of conflicts and other patterns in international politics towards the 6 theorization of the possibilities for change. We argue that the concept of anxiety is critical to our understanding of how the pursuit of ontological security makes change difficult but nevertheless possible. Despite the growing attention to paid to various emotional factors in international relations, anxiety has not received due attention. This book provides a preliminary theorization of anxiety and how it interacts with other political and social dynamics in international affairs. The book is also the first to highlight the contribution that the concept of ontological security makes to the theory and practice of conflict resolution. Extant approaches to conflict resolution attempt to construct rational solutions to conflicts that satisfy the pre-given interests and needs of conflict parties through a fair allocation (Wallensteen 2007; for a similar critique, see Farneti 2009) and strive to address the underlying psycho-social dynamics of conflicts through interactive and reflexive dialogue based methods (Rothman & Olson 2001). While sharing close affinities with the social-psychological approaches to conflict resolution, ontological security adds to the existing literature a number of critical insights. At a basic level, ontological security shifts the focus away from the issues at stake towards the underlying processes and the practicality of conflicts, to the narratives, habits and the routines that shape the practical consciousness of conflict parties and maintain the conflict. At a more fundamental level, ontological security cannot be conceptualized as an additional, pre-given need, which can be addressed and provided for through the right form of interventions (cf. 7 Burton ed. 1990). Rather, ontological insecurity evades all rational solutions, and is the most intense when all needs and interests are thought to have been addressed. By assuming the issues at stake to be pre-given and focusing on them, extant approaches to conflict resolution neglect that the seemingly existential quality of the issues themselves are the products of political processes of securitisation, and that the seemingly insurmountable differences among conflict parties stem from social processes of identity construction, and that these political and social processes are sources of stability, certainty, and ontological security. Consequently, the construction of comprehensive solutions that address all relevant aspects of conflict often proves impossible because as existing issues are addressed, the ensuing anxieties re-activate these political and social processes to produce new issues as existential and new differences as insurmountable. The contributors to the book consist of leading scholars in the fields of ontological security studies, securitisation theory, critical peace studies, and institutional and social psychological approaches to conflict resolution. Our conversations have enabled us to situate ontological security in relation to other concepts of security, be attentive to the processes that underlie the production of ontological security, and be aware of the normative implications while not losing sight of the practical challenges of conflict resolution. Moreover, the book distinguishes itself with the empirical span of its case studies across time and space. It focuses on a broad range of international and domestic conflicts in various stages of negotiation, 8 resolution, and reconciliation. It is thereby able to analyse how the prospect of peace triggers ontological insecurity, which in turn hampers negotiation and resolution efforts in protracted international conflicts such as Cyprus and Israel/Palestine and domestic ones such as Turkey’s Kurdish conflict, while also indicating the ways in which ontological insecurity remains a factor even following seemingly successful peace processes, such as Northern Ireland, and generates new forms of conflict and violence. The book also analyses how ontological security was reinstated following the resolution of two Nordic conflicts -Åland islands between Finland and Sweden and the Karelian conflict between Finland and Russia- through the construction of alternative self- narratives and the enactment of new habits and practices, while enabling a comparison with local ‘peace formation’ practices to reinstate ontological security following liberal peace-building interventions in contexts, such as Somalia and Sierra Leone. Furthermore, by including both conflict cases that were resolved in 1920s-30s, such as the Åland islands and Greek-Turkish population exchange and those of the contemporary period, the book is able to trace the changing conditions of ontological security over time. Furthermore, different contributions complement one another as a result of the different degrees of emphasis they place on ontological (in)security at the individual, societal, and state levels. Outline of the Volume 9 The following chapter, entitled Ontological (In)security and Peace Anxieties: A Framework for Conflict Resolution, lays out the overarching theoretical framework of the book. The chapter will first draw mainly on Giddens, Kierkegaard, and Tillich to introduce the concepts of ontological security/ insecurity and establish their relationship to anxiety. Then it will lay out the dynamics and manifestations of ontological (in)security at the individual, societal/ state, and ultimately the inter-state/ inter-party levels. After discussing the contribution of ontological security to the extant literature on conflict resolution, the chapter will offer a framework to analyse the impact of ontological security in conflict resolution processes. Drawing on this framework, chapters 2, 3, and 4 will discuss three protracted conflicts, namely the Israel/Palestine, Turkey’s Kurdish conflicts, and Cyprus conflicts. The contributions focus on the different ways in which the prospect of peace induces ontological insecurity and peace anxieties at the individual, group, or state levels and analyse the implications of these anxieties for the conflict resolution processes. In the chapter, entitled Ontological Security, Conflict Resolution, and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, Amir Lupovici underlines the Israeli ontological insecurity that stems from the multiplicity of Israeli identities and the inability of the peace process to simultaneously address them. However, according to Lupovici, this ontological insecurity does not trigger a return back to the routines of enmity because the continuation of the conflict is also 10 a source of ontological insecurity. He argues that the Israeli policy based on encouraging the separation between Fatah and Hamas provides a way to deal with this dissonance and to break away from this uncomfortable in- between situation. In particular, it allows Israel to create ambiguities regarding the Palestinians and regarding the peace process. Preservation of the conflict with Hamas enables Israel to placate some anxieties, while engagement in conflict resolution with Fatah appeases others. While this dual approach helps Israel to contain the contradictions in Israeli identity and to lower Israeli anxieties, it thwarts meaningful and comprehensive resolution attempts. In the chapter, entitled Kurdish Issue and Levels of Ontological Security, Ayşe Betül Çelik focuses on the Turkish governments’ recent peace attempts to bring about a resolution of the Kurdish conflict. She argues that while establishing basic trust between the parties is a requirement for successful peace processes, asymmetric levels of ontological (in)security felt by conflicting groups can prevent them from engaging in a dialogue with each other. Therefore, according to Çelik, the basic trust and sense of security of the dominant group and the state need to be challenged -in other words, the dominant groups need to be ontologically insecured- in order to push these dominant actors to recognize the minority group and start empathizing with its grievances. Çelik’s chapter analyses the extent to which Turkish governments’ recent peace attempts were able to satisfy this criterion. She finds neither the 2009 nor the 2013 peace attempt successful enough in 11 challenging the dominant Turkish narrative, and hence in pushing the Turks to emphasize with the Kurds. She especially notes how the hostility between the two groups intensified following the failure of the 2009 peace attempt, as a result of the Turkish state’s return to ever more repressive and criminalizing practices to suppress the ensuing anxieties. In the chapter, entitled Ethnic Nationalism and the Production of Ontological Security in Cyprus, Neophytos G. Loizides traces the historical evolution of collective identity narratives in the two communities on the island through the various phases of conflict, and furthermore discusses how external developments and communal politics have affected the salience of alternative narratives. Like Lupovici, Loizides stresses the multiplicity of self- narratives, and identifies the ontological security challenges that stem from ‘dealing with multiple identities which themselves transform during contested peace processes.’ Loizides’ chapter also examines whether and how protracted mediations in Cyprus have attempted to address this multiplicity of identities, including the challenge of continuously reproduced differentiations in a changing regional and international environment. The second section of the book focuses on two conflicts-in-resolution, namely Northern Ireland and the conflicts involving non-Muslim minorities in early republican Turkey (1923-46). The contributions highlight the different implications of heightened anxieties following the seemingly successful resolution of violent conflicts. In both cases, the disruptions of systems of 12 meaning and morality trigger the establishment of new objects of fear at the individual and/or collective levels. In the chapter, entitled Ontological (In)security and Violent Peace in Northern Ireland, Audra Mitchell discusses how the peace process in Northern Ireland has generated ontological insecurities at the individual and group levels by imposing homogeneity on combating groups, disrupting the practices through which communities have maintained their particularities, and dictating a process of radical change. These insecurities, Mitchell contends, have become a major source of ongoing violence, as evident in riots and the recent ‘flag’ protests that have disrupted central Belfast. She argues, however, that the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland should not be treated as a straightforward case of ontological insecurity stemming from the relationship between Republicans and Loyalists. Too much focus on the primary Self/Other relationship obscures the role of multiple Selves and Others, such as those Republicans and Loyalist groups that will not and cannot be integrated into the peace process. In the chapter, entitled Insecuring Citizens: Included/Excluded Citizens in Early Republican Turkey, Pınar Bilgin and Başak İnce analyse how the citizenship policies, implemented by Turkey within the framework of the 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty, have rendered various groups of Turkish citizens and non-citizens insecure. Different from other accounts that have focused exclusively on the insecurities of those who were forced to migrate or 13 assimilate, Bilgin and İnce highlight the ontological insecurities of the ‘model citizen Turks’, who chose to become fully integrated within the model of unified citizenry. According to the authors, the rise of identity conflicts in Turkey in the 1980s, particularly the Kurdish conflict, is integrally linked with the experiences of these ‘model citizens’, who contain their own ontological insecurities by securitising all claims to ‘difference’. The three contributions to the third section of the book analyse how individuals, communities and states construct alternative systems of meaning and morality to reinstate ontological security in different post- conflict and peace-building contexts. The chapter, entitled Ontological (In)security after Peace: The Case of the Åland Islands, by Pertti Joenniemi, focuses on how the 1921 League of Nations decision placed the Ålanders in an ontologically insecure, in-between position, by rejecting their demand to join Sweden, but granting them cultural autonomy within Finland. Joenniemi analyses how the Islands adjusted to their new and unexpected position by adopting a new self-narrative and set of routines that revolve around defending their exceptional posture and keeping their distance with mainland Finland. In other words, maintaining a self-sustaining pattern of identity related strains between Åland and mainland Finland has been critical to the reinstatement of Åland’s ontological security. Joenniemi argues that Finland’s EU membership is once again unsettling Åland’s ontological security, as issues of belonging/non-belonging are losing their significance in the EU context. 14 The chapter entitled Desecuritising the Ontological Significance of Territory: Karelia, Conflict Resolution and Finland’s Reconciliation with Losing the Promised Land, by Christopher Browning and Pertti Joenniemi focuses on how the Karelian issue in Finnish/Russian-Soviet relations was resolved following the Second World War through Finland giving up on its claims. The chapter charts both the securitisation process in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which involved the ascription to the region of Karelia deep ontological significance in Finnish identity narratives, and the various desecuritising strategies utilised in the post-war and post-Cold War periods. The authors emphasize that the tensions and anxieties generated by the loss of Karelia in World War II were ameliorated through the formulation of alternative self- narratives that renegotiated understandings of Russian/Soviet identity as well as the position of Karelia in Finnish identity narratives. These new narratives have provided new grounds upon which the Finnish sense of ontological security and national self-esteem could be re-instituted, even during a process of giving up claims on a territory widely considered to be a constitutive and fundamental part of the national self. The final chapter in this section by Oliver P. Richmond, entitled Decolonising Security and Subaltern Ontologies of Peace, draws on examples from a number of peace-building contexts including Somalia, Afghanistan, Columbia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and Cyprus. He presents the multitude of ways in which the in-group/out-group dynamics of peace and security are exacerbated rather than resolved by (neo) liberal peacebuilding/statebuilding approaches. 15 Richmond underlines the multitude of ways in which local communities counter the disruptions in their self-narratives and everyday routines caused by these (neo)liberal approaches through ‘peace formation’, ‘localized, social, customary, religious, and ritualistic practices of peace-making’. The chapter also examines if and how a non-essentialised and non- instrumentalised ontological security may emerge through these ‘peace- formation’ how these practices of peace-making enable the reconstruction and reformulation of self-narratives and routines to provide certainty and stability to individuals and communities in the turbulent context of peace- building. 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