Governing Conflict: The Politics of Scaling Difference

ABSTRACT

The dynamics of peace and conflict are fundamentally shaped by a politics of scaling difference. Based on the insight that difference is widely associated with both the causes of and cures for violent conflict, this article explores how practices of scaling mediate this duality. Drawing on South Sudan and Kosovo, it is argued that the governance of conflict is characterized by efforts to skilfully accommodate diversity, straddling the line between recognizing, reinforcing, and reconfiguring difference and investing it with political power at the ‘right’ scale. This is read as a conflictual process involving the unravelling, rescaling, and counter-scaling of difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Difference
• identity
• peacebuilding
• politics of scale
• Kosovo
• South Sudan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Andreas Hirblinger holds a PhD from the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research asked how conflicting governing rationalities underpin peace and transition contexts, based on an in-depth case study of the local government reform process in South Sudan. Parts of his research have been published in Security Dialogue and the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

Dana Landau holds a DPhil from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. During her doctorate, she researched the post-conflict statebuilding process in Kosovo, with a particular focus on the international normative commitments to multi-ethnicity. Parts of her research have been published in the Nationalities Papers.

ORCID

Andreas Hirblinger http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1193-1903

Dana M. Landau http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2900-4163

Notes

1 The territory of what is now South Sudan had prior to the country’s independence formed part of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899–1956) and independent Sudan (1956–2011), since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005 as the autonomous region of Southern Sudan. From 1945, Kosovo was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) as an autonomous province of Serbia until its violent dissolution in the 1990s. It unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008 after being governed under a transitional administration (1999–2001) led by the United Nations (UN) and a provisional self-government under UN executive powers (2001–8).

2 We recognize that a focus on ethnicity can blind scholars to other forms of enacted difference, as well as to the question of intersectionality. Rather than discarding these, this article proposes a frame of study that can be applied broadly, and we look forward to future studies of the scaling of difference in relation to class, gender, and other forms of difference.

3 This is a task with which scholars often struggle. In a recent contribution on the Murle for example, the author notes that she recognizes the ‘multiplicity of clans and sub-ethnic groups that are often coalesced together under the banner of a wider ethnic group’, but notes that ‘in some cases, such detail was not forthcoming in the author’s investigations’ (Laudati 2011, 27).

4 The Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement plan is commonly referred to as the Ahtisaari Plan, after Martti Ahtisaari, the Finnish diplomat who led the negotiations in his role as Special Envoy for Kosovo appointed by the UN Secretary-General from 2006–7.

5 Interview conducted via Skype with a project manager of the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI) Kosovo, 13 May 2009. See also Krasniqi (2015, 209).

6 Interview conducted via Skype with a former senior International Civilian Office (ICO) official, 18 September 2014.