War, peace and geography: the perilous engagement with public policy toward armed conflict

ABSTRACT

Geographers engaging with policy debates on armed conflict in the Global South are confronted with a set of difficult questions that have no satisfying answers. In this provocation, I discuss three risks that appear inherent to policy engagement in this domain: the first is contributing to reproducing rather than upending a deeply unjust and unequal world order; the second is reinforcing colonial structures and epistemologies; and the third is facilitating the weaponization of one’s research. The discomforting confrontation with these dilemmas should not deter geographers of armed conflict from contributing to public policy, because non-engagement can be equally – if not more – problematic.

KEYWORDS:

• public policy
• decolonizing research
• weaponizing research
• violence
• peace

In 2018, armed violence flared up in an area of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that I have been studying for over a decade. As the clashes intensified, one of the ethnic groups involved started labelling the violence ‘genocidal’. Consequently, diplomats, humanitarians and journalists increasingly turned to me – a so-called ‘area expert’ – to make sense of what was happening. This put me in a deeply uneasy position. A growing number of academics interpret the term ‘genocide’ much broader than how it is defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, which emphasizes the intent to physically destroy particular groups in whole or in part (Crook & Short, 2014; Short, 2016). However, most policymakers and practitioners stick to the narrow legal definition with its attending focus on direct physical harm and the motivations of identifiable groups of perpetrators.

With the violence assuming disconcerting forms and proportions, I was faced with stark dilemmas. What language should I use to qualify this violence among policymakers? And should I participate in the public debate on these atrocities in the DRC? Speaking about the violence in public seemed to inevitably entail endorsing or refuting the genocide claim. It could therefore have profound implications for the policies of ‘donors’ and the DRC government, including legitimizing an increased emphasis on military deployment. Expressing myself in public would also affect my positionality in the research context, as using the G-word or not seemed to serve as a proxy for taking sides. In addition, I found the idea of becoming an arbiter for violent events in the Global South as a white academic from the Global North deeply unsettling. Yet not drawing attention to the unfolding atrocities – however labelled – seemed profoundly problematic too.

In the end, I accepted to write a long report on the violence for a non-academic audience together with a group of Congolese researchers as part of series of analyses commissioned by a major development agency (Verweijen et al., 2021). In the report, we tried to convey the complexity of the situation and critically reviewed efforts to address the violence by international peacebuilding NGOs. Yet this too, raised uncomfortable questions. These NGOs have become part of a complex that some have described as the ‘peace industry’ and that is overall unable to fundamentally transform dynamics of armed violence, in part as it brackets the macro-structures that sustain such violence (Craze, 2021). By evaluating specific outputs of parts of the peace industry – rather than critically confronting it as a whole – did I not suggest its performance could be improved and therefore inadvertently contribute to its legitimization?

The complexities of positioning myself toward and within public debates on one particular setting of armed violence in eastern DRC illustrate the dilemmas that geographers working on armed conflict in the Global South are confronted with when engaging with public policy. Irrespective of one’s level of commitment to decolonizing geography and transforming an unjust world order, engagement with public policy bears the inherent risk of legitimizing institutions that maintain the status quo, including colossal North/South power asymmetries. In addition, policy engagement in relation to Global South settings inescapably risks reinforcing colonial structures and epistemologies that cause some forms of knowledge to be weighed and evaluated differently than others. Finally, those working on armed conflict face the heightened risk of inadvertently facilitating or legitimizing military intervention. Navigating these dilemmas requires thorough reflection on the vocabularies that one uses. Yet carefully weighing one’s words is not sufficient to resolve these issues. Nor can we steer clear of these challenges by simply avoiding any engagement with public policy, as non-engagement bears political weight too. Regardless of whether and how we engage with public debates and policy, we cannot escape the ongoing politicization processes surrounding academic work.

Uncomfortable questions, unsatisfying answers

A recurring theme in debates on the relationship between geography and public policy is the tension between striving to fundamentally uproot the status quo on the one hand and fostering change of a more incremental nature on the other (Boyle et al., 2020). Engagement with public policy tends to occur through platforms and formats that risk domesticating dissent and depoliticizing debate, thereby rendering academics to varying degrees complicit and compromised (Harvey, 1974). In a sense, these debates echo the long-standing tensions between revolutionaries and reformists around the possibility and desirability of revolutionary parliamentarism (Nimtz, 2014).

In the context of public policy oriented toward armed conflict in the Global South, the desire to be transformative evokes difficult questions around engagement with the complex configuration of ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ governments, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations that together constitute the peace industry. This industry, which is mainly but not exclusively a Global North product, is largely preoccupied with technocratic and/or micro-level interventions in areas of armed conflict without considering the global context that shapes such conflict (Craze, 2021; Denskus, 2007; Iñiguez de Heredia, 2018). It, therefore, ignores questions of degrowth, the unequal terms of North–South economic exchange and tackling the roots rather than the consequences of climate change (cf. Latouche, 1993). The peace industry also remains heavily inscribed in colonial logics and structures, including the orientalism that underpins its mission civilisatrice and the multi-faceted entanglement of humanitarian and military imperatives (Charbonneau, 2014; Sabaratnam, 2017). Indeed, in many contexts, the peace industry has become part of or complicit with broader counterinsurgency and counterterrorism efforts (Moe, 2016; Turner, 2015). For these various reasons, this industry ultimately underpins a deeply unjust world order characterized by mindboggling inequalities of power and wealth.

Whether and how to engage with public policy, then, is a choice that is importantly guided by one’s beliefs regarding the nature of the peace industry and to what extent it can be transformed. If one believes that the best way Northern governments can contribute to fostering world peace is by reforming their climate and economic policies, why would one engage with them in a dialogue on their peacebuilding interventions in the Global South? Does this not distract from and obscure their broader responsibility for an unjust world order and legitimize their claims that they can in fact help bring peace in conflict-affected areas through technocratic and often militarized interventions?

In light of the pitfalls of interacting with governments, it might appear less dangerous to shape public policy via NGOs engaged in lobbying, advocacy, and awareness raising. Yet across the globe, many NGOs ultimately depend on (Northern) government or corporate funding (Banks et al., 2015). Moreover, NGOs are an integral part of the peace industry and the counterinsurgency/counterterrorism complex that it intersects and overlaps with (Bhungalia, 2015; De Montclos, 2014; Gould, 2018). In addition, ‘NGOization’ has been found to seriously undermine the transformative potential of activism (Choudry & Kapoor, 2013). What then about working with grassroots collectives and peace movements that manage to avoid the disciplining effects of NGOization? Some geographers working on peace see important potential in such alternative peacemaking projects, which could indirectly shape public policy (Koopman, 2008; Megoran, 2011). Yet it remains unclear how academics from or based in the Global North can support such initiatives in the Global South without compromising, endangering or undermining them. Importantly, transnational solidary activism often falls into the colonial trap (Koopman, 2008), becoming entangled in the structures and logics of the white savior-industrial complex (Cole, 2012).

This brings me to another set of challenges surrounding engagement with public policy in relation to the Global South: how to prevent such engagement from reinforcing colonial dynamics and epistemologies? Does participating in public and policy debates as a Global North academic not inevitably entail crowding out other voices and forms of knowledge? Does it not always reinforce the idea of the Northern academic as ‘the expert’ with supposedly superior knowledge and insights?

The decolonizing agenda also raises questions around engaging with public policy within the Global South. Attempts by Global North academics to directly shape the policies of Global South institutions may come across as pure imperial practice and can backfire. I recall stakeholder workshops involving officials from Africa’s Great Lakes Region where efforts to discreetly bring up government policy were countered by remarks about the responsibility of multinational corporations and UN peacekeeping missions. Interactions with policymakers can also be uncomfortable where they pertain to autocratic and violent governments, although any differences with Northern governments generally seem more a matter of degree than of kind. To what extent does engaging with these officials legitimize their illiberal regimes? And how to balance such engagement with maintaining research access? While any attempt to engage with policymaking in the South, then, seems to reproduce colonial dynamics, speaking as a Northern academic about certain areas of the world to Northern policymakers only, while bypassing those formally in charge of governing these areas, would seem no less imperial. Furthermore, Northern academics’ privileged position sometimes allows them to voice concerns that would be dangerous for their colleagues in the South to express. Where does that leave the heirs of a discipline that was once heavily preoccupied with ‘the technics and mechanics of the management of Empire’ (Harvey, 1974, p. 20)?

Aside from reproducing colonial structures and the status quo, engaging with policy in the context of armed conflict may end up promoting the weaponization of one’s research (Price, 2011; Koopman, 2016). As the infamous case of the Bowman Expeditions shows (Wainwright, 2013), detailed geographies of the Global South, including efforts to ‘map the human terrain’ can be a boon to military intelligence. Research that provides an insight into the workings of armed groups and forces runs an even bigger risk of being put to military use, especially when one actively draws policymakers’ attention to it by participating in policy debates. Yet such research may also uncover violence against civilians, links between state forces and insurgent groups, and armed actors’ involvement in illegal resource economies. These insights can in turn be harnessed to put pressure on governments and intergovernmental organizations, such as the UN, that maintain or collaborate with the troops involved in these abuses. In the end, it may be precisely the work that is most at risk of being weaponized that constitutes the most powerful weapon against militarized interventions. However, ensuring that one’s research serves that function would seem to require active engagement with public policy, even though this increases the risk of weaponization.

Vocabularies of engagement

One important way to navigate the dilemmas outlined above is to carefully consider the vocabularies that one uses. Different academic and non-academic constituencies use distinct vocabularies, which imprint their grids of intelligibility and the ways knowledge is rendered actionable. Adapting one’s vocabularies to these constituencies has important political and policy consequences.

Like the term ‘genocide’, the word ‘violence’ has distinct meanings within and outside of academia. Many critical geographers contend that an understanding of violence should go beyond direct physical violence to encompass forms of harm that are indirect, do not have clearly identifiable perpetrators and unfold over large time–space scales (e.g. Laurie & Shaw, 2018; Springer, 2011; Tyner & Inwood, 2014; see also Verweijen, 2020). Their vocabulary, therefore, features a multiplicity of violences, such as slow, bureaucratic, epistemic and infrastructural violence. While this use of violence usefully politicizes structural injustices and inequalities, it is largely alien to policymakers, who are stuck with classic connotations of violence as physical. If we use violence only in this last sense when engaging with public policy, do we become complicit in its depoliticization? I have personally opted to continue to use restricted definitions of violence in my interactions with policymakers, largely because the terminology of structural violence is also uncharted terrain for the people in the DRC that I work among and with, even though they are profoundly familiar with the phenomena it describes.

Dealing with the technocratic jargon of the peace industry poses another challenge. Like the development industry that it overlaps with, the peace industry has a specific vocabulary that is rife with buzzwords, many terms of which (‘stabilization’) are empty signifiers and/or essentially contested concepts. Others bear colonial echoes (‘beneficiaries’) and have profoundly depoliticizing effects (‘countering violent extremism’) (cf. Cornwall & Eade, 2010). Certainly, avoiding this language altogether is the best option. Yet when engaging with policymakers, I have been struggling to keep my language entirely free from traces of the jargon of the peace industry, encountering barriers of incomprehension when using terms that did not fit in any of their mental categories. I have also used elements of this jargon when interacting with Congolese officials. Much of my early work looks at the Congolese armed forces and their engagement in illicit resource economies and violence (e.g. Verweijen, 2013). I found the non-confrontational and depoliticizing vocabulary of the peace industry at times a convenient vehicle to navigate these charged interactions. Finally, it is possible to reclaim and reconceptualize some of the key terms of the peace industry, notably, the very notion of peace (Koopman, 2011; Megoran, 2011), although this appears a formidable task.

In sum, engaging with public policy entails a complex linguistic balancing act of tailoring one’s language to different constituencies without becoming compromised. Minding one’s words is also a necessary – but by no means sufficient – safeguard against the inevitable problem of the unintended consequences of engaging with public policy. How one labels violence may shape how this violence is being dealt with in ways that one cannot control, but sometimes can anticipate. For instance, if we describe a particular situation of violence as genocidal, we may help inadvertently set processes in motion that could justify military interventions (Herman & Peterson, 2010). Yet if we refuse to speak of genocide, we can become complicit in the continuation of violence by seemingly downplaying its severity.

Geography as an ‘art of peace’?

Derek Gregory once wrote that in order for human geography to become one of ‘the arts of peace’ it should think war and peace together, both concretely and conceptually (2010, pp. 180−181). In this contribution, I have shown that concrete engagements with war and peace, specifically, efforts to shape public policy in these domains, are full of pitfalls. Yet simply refraining from engagement with public policy is no less problematic.

Does failing to draw policymakers’ attention to settings of ongoing atrocities not make us somehow complicit in obscuring such violence? And if the Global South constituencies we interact with – and extract data from – want us to engage in policy debates – whether in the North or in the South – why should we ignore their wishes? Furthermore, even when pessimistic about the possibilities for inducing change, not engaging with policymakers altogether implies forgoing any opportunities to invite them to think otherwise and question the architecture and function of the peace industry they are part of. And undoubtedly, plenty of academics less committed to radical change would happily take one’s place at the stakeholder table. For me, the question is therefore not so much whether to engage with public policy, but how to do so in ways that are transformative and do not intensify colonial and militarized structures.

The imperial and militaristic legacies that haunt the discipline of geography – like most other sciences – render both engagement and non-engagement with public policy daunting. In this context, there is no ‘art of peace’ – nor a ‘peace science’ for that matter (Isard & Smith, 1982) – only a set of difficult, always imperfect choices regarding what constituencies to engage with and what vocabularies to use.

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Judith Verweijen

Judith Verweijen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She researches militarization and violence at the intersection of political geography, conflict studies and political ecology.