Peace processes as political opportunities for CSOs
The interactions and mutual influences between Track I peace processes and Track II/III CSO activities are a matter of dispute and controversy. On the one hand, the negotiations and political reforms which accompany peace processes offer “a unique opportunity for mobilising and articulating different sectors of civil society in favour of peace” (Garcia-Duran 2005: 46). The opening of dialogue tracks between the government and its contenders is often accompanied by a series of policy measures favouring civil society participation, such as the legalisation of “oppositional” activities (Meyer 2004: 172), or the creation of consultation mechanisms for extra-parliamentarian organisations, facilitating the use of lobbying and advocacy tactics by non-state actors. A background of peace negotiations also provides a strong incentive for civil society actors to voice their support, discuss conflict resolution scenarios and increase public pressure for a comprehensive peace
accord. Finally, the immediate post-settlement phase often offers CSOs a prominent role in the implementation of national peace agreements. On the other hand, civil society groups are very rarely given “a seat at the [bargaining] table” (Wanis-St.John and Kew 2006: 3). Peace negotiations are traditionally led by representatives of the warring parties, such as government envoys and leaders of rebel forces, sidelining social organisations that did not take part in the armed struggle (Barnes 2002). Similarly, the “voluntarist” or “elitist” school of democratisation theory (e.g. O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986), based on the Spanish or Chilean models, defines democratic transitions as elite-launched and elite-run processes, initiated by internal splits in the authoritarian regime (Cohen and Arato 1995: 50-57, Krznaric 1999). It argues that popular mobilisation dissipates as soon as institutional actors (i.e. political parties) take over the negotiation of transition processes and reoccupy the political space initially opened up by social organisations (Baker 2004: 53). The Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace process provides a good example of demobilisation and apathy of the Israeli peace movement throughout the 1990s, as long as governments elected on a peace agenda were involved in negotiations with the Palestinian authority (Dudouet 2005).
Impact of policy shifts on the internal structures of CSOs
Whether their role expands or diminishes during peace processes, peace/human rights CSOs face some important ideological, institutional and financial reconfiguration throughout this crucial stage of conflict transformation. The direct or indirect participation of civil society representatives to peace negotiations and early implementation mechanisms is likely to have an impact on the internal features of their organisations, or might result in the formation of new networks, coalitions or formal structures of civil society consultation. Although this topic has not been researched in depth in the conflict transformation field, social movement scholars have pointed out that the policy reforms, as well as the new public and private funding opportunities for the third sector which accompany democratisation processes, induce CSOs to professionalise their structures (Hipsher 1998, Della Porta and Diani 2006). Such processes take even more significance in the third stage of conflict transformation, and will thus be reviewed more thoroughly in section 2.2.3.
Roles and influence of CSOs on peace processes
The most relevant function performed by civil society actors during peace negotiations and agreements concerns the activities listed in section 1.3 under the label “channelling state-society communication and collaborating in policy-making”. They might directly shape the agenda of peace settlements, either by sending civil society representatives to the negotiation table (e.g. 1996 negotiations in the Liberian civil war), or by organising official parallel civil society forums giving recommendations
to the Track I peace process, such as the Civil Society Assembly in Guatemala (see section 4), the National Unification Commission in the Philippines (Ferrer 2002), or the Opsahl Commission in Northern Ireland (Guelke 2003). They might also offer indirect communication channels from the negotiation table to the public via peace secretariats or public information campaigns (e.g. the “Yes campaign” in Northern Ireland), or from the community back to the negotiators, for example by conducting public opinion polls, referendums and discussion forums on specific issues (Paffenholz, Wanis-St.John and Kew 2006). Civil societies also often produce Track II mediators (such as clergy, academics, trade unionists, or the business community) helping to establish informal meetings between political opponents, even if this role is more often played by international CSOs (Barnes 2006: 53). The role of civil societies in initiating democratic transitions from authoritarian rule is a matter of controversy. According to the dominant elitist thesis mentioned earlier, not only have civil society activities very little influence on macro-political change, but an excess of unmoderated, radical popular mobilisation might even produce a reactionary backlash, as in Chile in 1973 (Pearce 2004: 99). The social movements literature has corrected this elite bias, and recent research has produced a list of mobilisation outcomes, which include changes in public policy and political elites’ attitudes, the introduction of new ideas into public debate, or the creation of new arenas of decision-making (Tarrow 1998: 161-175, Della Porta and Diani 2006: 229-239). Researchers in the field of nonviolent action also concentrate on the issue of domestic civil pressure as a factor of political change, and a quantitative study by Karatnycky and Ackerman (2005: 6) found that 70% of democratic transitions in the past 40 years were driven by grassroots civil resistance rather than top-level initiatives. They also argue that bottom-up driven transitions have a positive impact on post-war scenarios, which was confirmed by another statistical study correlating active civil society participation in peace negotiations with the durability of peace during the peacebuilding phase (Wanis St.John and Kew 2006).
2.2.3 Stage 3: CSOs during post-war reconstruction and development
This third and last stage of conflict transformation will be dealt with in more detail, as it implies some crucial shifts and transformations for peace/human rights CSOs. The oft-used terminology of “post-settlement peacebuilding” refers here to the procession from negative towards positive peace following the end of war, mainly concerned with “forging structures and processes that redefine violent relationships into constructive and cooperative patterns” (Lederach 1997: 71). Some authors choose to divide this long-term post-war peacebuilding process into temporal sub- stages, such as those of stabilisation, when DDR (demobilisation, disarmament, reintegration) and structural peacebuilding (institutional state-building) aspects predominate; normalisation, when economic and socio-cultural development become
increasingly important; and a final phase of continuing transformation with an increased emphasis on cultural peacebuilding and reconciliation (Ramsbotham et al 2005: 197-199). In parallel, democratic theory characterises this stage as a process of post-transition democratic consolidation, which marks the transition from “new” to “consolidated democracies”, might take as long as one or two generations, and which entails “the elimination of residues of the old system that are incompatible with the workings of a democratic regime and the building of new institutions that reinforce the democratic rules of the game” (Munck 1994: 362).
Impact of post-war transitions on CSOs
The crucial question for peace/human rights CSOs in conflict areas is to assess “what happens to the protagonists for societal change after that change has been achieved” (Church and Visser 2001: 10), since most issues originally taken on by war- time civil society groups are likely to be largely resolved in the course of democratisation and peace processes. Curiously, the literature on social movements does not really address this question. Very few scholars have scrutinised the fate of these movements once their goals have been achieved, and they fail to explain, for example, the relative collapse of CSOs in post-transition Latin America (Pearce 2004: 95). For its part, democratic consolidation theory is dominated by “minimalist” visions of liberal-democracy (e.g. Linz and Stepan 1996), inspired by Dahl’s pluralist model of poliarchy, where civil society demands are channelled into political parties and the electoral system, limiting CSOs to a mere “technical” role (Baker 2004: 62). These authors argue that although a robust civil society can help to ensure stability and predictability in the political system, “associational life ... will disrupt rather than deepen democracy if it retains the over-politicised role which helped it bring down non-democratic governments” (Pearce 2004: 103). A number of peacebuilding scholars, finally, offer a rather critical picture of post- war CSOs, with an emphasis on the dis-empowering effect of international involvement on local organisations, resulting in a loss of independence and accountability, and a shift from grassroots civic engagement to the “commercialisation of peace work” (Paffenholz and Spurk 2006: 17). However, they tend to focus predominantly on new NGOs which emerge during internationally-led peacebuilding operations, at the expense of older CSOs which were internally established during a conflict and are affected by its transformation. The remaining part of this section presents the shifts in structures and modes of interaction imposed on