Finding local paths toward democracy and peace: International Development Research Centre

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2009-02

What is the common thread that links local citizen councils in Mexico, Venezuela, and Nicaragua; Lebanon’s electoral system; community-level politics in Sri Lanka; and government reform in South Africa?

The answer: each situation holds potential lessons for how the international community can encourage peace and democracy in countries emerging from or experiencing armed conflict.

Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is funding research in those post-conflict societies, ultimately aimed at enabling citizens to participate more fully in the democratic process and at strengthening political institutions.

Selected from a global research competition that attracted 63 applications, four research teams will extract from local landscapes some conclusions about how on-the-ground political and social relationships affect the prospects for creating a sustainable peace and more democratic societies. They will also ask what the international community can do to encourage those positive outcomes, and as their project near conclusion, if there are any patterns that can be applied globally.

No one blueprint for democracy

At a recent public forum at IDRC’s head office in Ottawa (where the projects were officially launched), several speakers conceded that this focus on local level relations acknowledges that past global efforts to foster peace and democracy in fractured societies have often failed. This is partly because the very concepts of “peacebuilding” and “democratization” have remained vague — embraced as universal concepts, rather than as ideas that can change with the terrain.

“Peacebuilding is a bit like a Rorschach test,” said IDRC President David Malone. “We project onto peacebuilding all kinds of personal fantasies about peace and how it is constructed. Many of them are not terribly helpful on the ground, in specific circumstances. Democracy is another concept that varies tremendously in form and content around the world and is greatly misunderstood. Different societies construct different forms of democracy best suited to their needs.”

In the absence of a clear grasp of how local circumstances affect the prospects for rebuilding societies after conflict, international players have often attempted to impose prefabricated solutions that can alienate the people they were intended to help.

“Some approaches have certainly failed,” says Gerd Schönwälder, leader of IDRC’s Peace, Conflict and Development program. “The emphasis on working only through international civil society — disregarding local civil society — is an approach that didn’t produce the expected results. And trying to create democratic institutions by simply exporting blueprints from Western Europe and North America — that hasn’t worked either.”

Drifting into a “grey zone”

Declaring that “the agenda of democracy promotion is in trouble,” Schönwälder notes that many countries — particularly in Latin America — have drifted into a dangerous “grey area” somewhere between democracy and authoritarianism. While formal democratic mechanisms (such as elections) do exist, opportunities for genuine political participation remain limited, creating resentment and stoking the potential for renewed conflict.

Overcoming such problems and creating functioning institutions, however, will likely require a new type of research, directed more from below than above. Evidence is emerging, for instance, that a key premise of Northern-based researchers — that democracy naturally enhances the chances for peace (and, conversely that peace creates the conditions for democracy) — is in many cases overstated. In Lebanon and Sri Lanka, for example, conflict persists despite the establishment of democratic institutions. And in Kenya, the 2007 elections brought a dangerous period of bloodshed and instability. Researchers must explore ways of resolving the tension when “democratization” and “peacebuilding” seem to be operating at cross-purposes.

More room for voices from the South

“Much of the research in this area has had a lot of ideologically driven assumptions, and a fair amount of cultural baggage,” says IDRC Vice-president Lauchlan Munro. “We want to improve the evidence-base in the field. In particular we feel there is a lot more room for comparative work and certainly considerably more room for voices from the South.”

South Africa: Lessons learned

Gerard Hagg of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, recalls that when South Africa put the apartheid era behind it in 1994, the country was seen as “a textbook case of democratic discourse.” The governing African National Congress (ANC) avoided post-conflict bloodshed by forming a coalition government of national unity, with broad-based input into policy-making by multiple sectors of society.

Today, however, South African democracy is in turmoil. The ANC has lost legitimacy and many South Africans are distrustful of the country’s political class. Looking back over almost 15 years of political development, Hagg finds many factors at fault. While civil society organizations took prominent roles in initial post-apartheid reconstruction, in the ensuing years government became increasingly bureaucratized, as funding flowed to government institutions rather than non-governmental organizations (many of which had to fold). When “the dividends of democracy” consequently stopped reaching poor rural areas, a profound political alienation set in.

Looking beyond South Africa, the project will examine whether bringing traditional African institutions into the governance system can reverse that alienation.

Latin America: Beauty and the Beast

In Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela meanwhile, a common portrait emerges of political reforms that are failing to gain traction on the ground. Researcher Gisela Zaremberg of FLACSO-Mexico, uses the metaphor of “beauty and the beast” to describe the situation. The “beauty” is that, on paper, political rights are fully enshrined — including the creation of “innovative spaces of discussion” such as citizen councils, designed to give civil society a voice in policy-making.

The “beast” is the reality that many powerful political elites have not relinquished power. So while innovative new structures are embraced in theory, international indices of political freedom and conflict remain poor in all three countries, where the public remains distrustful of political reform programs and local cases of political assassination and disappearances have occurred. The research will explore how citizen councils have been affected by local institutional settings, with a view to increasing their effectiveness.

Sri Lanka: Beyond Elections

Sri Lanka faces a similar disconnect between formal moves toward democracy and day-to-day life, says Professor Neloufer De Mel of the country’s Social Scientists Association. Despite regular elections and reforms intended to bolster democracy by devolving power to local authorities, the continuing civil war dictates that more and more resources are directed to the military. This in turn stunts economic growth and the development of democratic institutions.

In particular, the project will look at the role of women: local women will create video “eye reports” and documentaries to shed light on how women’s roles influence the prospects for peace. Professor De Mel says that women’s potential role in helping to create a stable peace is at this point unclear, but it is a promising research question.

Lebanon: Constitutional flaws

Finally, Lebanon is another country where apparent advances toward post-conflict democratization have been limited by institutional inadequacies. Although the civil war ended in 1990, and Syrian troops (which occupied Lebanon between 1990 and 2005) have withdrawn, the Lebanese government remains unstable and the country’s future uncertain.

The reason, says Professor Bassel Salloukh of the Lebanese American University in Beruit, is not a lack of desire for democracy among citizens — but rather a fundamental constitutional flaw. A system that enshrines sectarian divisions in Parliament makes it difficult for different ethnic groups to work together, he says, and ensures that politicians “will act out of sectarian chauvinism at the expense of their national responsibilities.” Using Lebanon as a departure point, this project will examine the successes and failures of foreign political interventions in four Middle-Eastern countries.