This Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development explores the relationship between political settlements and violence. While there is an emerging body of scholarship on political settlements, its relationship to violence has been under-theorised and has not been systematically examined through comparative country case studies. This Special Issue is the result of a DFID-funded research programme on addressing and mitigating violence co-ordinated by the Institute of Development Studies. A workshop was organised in Goodenough College in London in 2015 to discuss the research findings with representatives from DFID and the FCO, regional experts as well as leading academics who have contributed to the development of the concept of political settlement.
We recognise that political settlement is a fuzzy word and has deeply problematic genealogical roots in the development industry. We have sought to depart from political settlements as part of the liberal peace paradigm with its positivistic, teleological procedural dimensions. We have re-appropriated the term and redefined it as the interface between formal and informal actors in negotiation processes unfolding at critical junctures. We have sought to use the term political settlements in a way that allows us to recognise the interface of the formal and the informal; through elite pacts but also through bottom-up processes. The case studies have also taken a multi-scalar approach to broaden the current political settlement analysis, which has focused on the national level, to understand the dynamics of scale and various actors in shaping political settlements.
This volume on political settlements brings together an article examining the genealogy and praxis of the concept, as well as four country case studies of political settlements associated with varying degrees of violence: Bangladesh, Egypt, Kenya and Sierra Leone. The four case studies were selected to represent a broad spectrum of cases that seeks to narrow the divide between those studying conflict and political violence in contexts where there was a major reordering of the political system.
The focus of this Issue is on the relationship between political settlements and violence. The aim of the conceptual article is twofold: first, to delineate how the association of the term with Western donors affected its framing, use and normative underpinnings; and second, to explore political settlements in relation to violence. We argue that the appropriation of the concept as an instrument of policy-makers’ engagement in relation to the contexts in which they are rolling out interventions has major implications on how it has been framed and used. While some definitions are informed by a normative understanding of political settlement as the abandonment or absence of violence, we propose three ways of conceiving of the relationship between political settlements and violence: intrinsic, instrumental and resultant. Some political settlements feature all three suggesting that they are not necessarily incongruent or independent of each other. We argue that political settlements can be intrinsically violent because these critical junctures are often accompanied by a breakdown in rule of law and high levels of security laxity that create an enabling environment for criminality to thrive and flourish, whether politically or economically motivated or combined. A political economy lens onto political settlements is particularly helpful in revealing the intrinsic nature of violence accompanying the reconfiguration of power. Violence can also be used in an instrumental way. Actors may use violence and peaceful bargaining simultaneously to try to influence the unfolding processes of negotiation or resort to violence when negotiations become stalled or are seen as unjust. Violence may be used instrumentally to challenge the power configurations in the negotiation processes openly and directly or covertly through proxies. However, in both instances, the message sent to the opponents is clear: the terms of engagement are unsatisfactory and will be contested through all possible measures. Political settlements can also have violent outcomes, and there is a rich body of scholarship that has highlighted ways in which exclusionary political settlements, even when they initially appear stable, may create the conditions for the outbreak of violence.
The case studies use an inductive approach as a way of generating insights from the ground of these relationships but also to open opportunities for questioning assumptions and postulations inherent in salient conceptions of political settlement. Bangladesh is a case study of the negotiation of a political settlement following a military dictatorship in 1991 and the profound impact of ‘partyarchy’ and dynastic rule on its destabilisation, and possible eventual crumbling as a consequence of majoritarian politics. Egypt is a case study of how two political settlements forged in 2011 and 2012 created conditions of violence and exclusion, which eventually culminated in the forging of a new political settlement in 2013 that further entrenched the state of polarisation and violence. Sierra Leone is a case of post-conflict political settlement, and has been an important laboratory for UN and international donors’ interventions and thinking. Kenya is a case study about the intrinsic relationship between territorial control, land tenure and violence and its relationship with the evolving political settlement.
The political settlements in all of these countries are characterised by varying degrees of stability and durability. In the case of Sierra Leone, the political settlement in place is fairly stable though this does not imply that there are no ongoing power struggles; it does however mean that by and large in the eyes of most of the important power contenders, the political settlement is considered legitimate. While a glance at key indicators—in terms of growth forecasts and stable elections—will project Sierra Leone as a political settlement model for a post-conflict state, efforts by the international donor community to decentralise power to the margins, both geographically and demographically, have failed and Sierra Leone today shares similar socio-economic and political conditions with the Sierra Leone before the outbreak of the civil war.
In Kenya, the political settlement is very much linked to the politicisation of ethnicity. Situating the evolving political settlement in the context of the problem of political violence in Marsabit County, it argues that efforts to take control of institutions that will govern the control of territory under the new constitution are key to understanding the persistence of violence in this part of northern Kenya. It builds on considerable existing work on the relationship of land, ethnicity and contemporary politics in Kenya which endeavours to overcome a tendency to confuse symptoms, ethnic division, with causes, in particular struggles to control structures of power and resources.
In the case of Egypt, the political settlement has been contested three times over a short time period (2011–2013). The first juncture was an informal entente between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces who took power after the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011 and the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest political actor with a political constituency at the time. The Muslim Brotherhood, fearing a military takeover, forged another political settlement with the youth revolutionary forces and a number of political parties in June 2012. The Brothers promised power-sharing governance with the youth revolutionary forces and the political parties should the latter endorse the Brothers’ presidential nominee against his opponent from the Mubarak regime. This political settlement faltered in November 2012 and in July 2013, following a mass revolt against the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential leader, a new political settlement was forged, following military intervention. The new political settlement is stable, but considered illegitimate in the eyes of the Muslim Brotherhood and some of the youth revolutionary leaders.
In Bangladesh, the political order underwent significant changes after the democratic transition in 1991. The case study highlights the dynamics of elite interactions in the arena of competitive electoral democracy, particularly the elite strategies adopted to create an agreement around electoral processes and transfer of power. Violence was instrumentally used, by both the ruling elites and the main opposition party, to influence the process of negotiations around the succession of power and its outcome. The key argument is that ‘partyarchy’—where political parties exert informal control of the party through formal processes and institutions—and dynastic rule prevented the political elites from reaching a stable settlement around regime succession in Bangladesh.
This Issue has sought to untangle some of the assumed relations between political settlements and violence by engaging with the visible but also opaque kind of relations that influence unfolding processes of determining new power configurations at critical junctures. This new understanding opens up the space for a more complex research agenda in that it places political settlements at the intersection of social, economic and political longue durée transformations, along with an agenda which conceives violence through various lenses. In particular, the relationship between multiple sites, actors and scales opens up new possibilities to research on political settlements to understand slow and sudden ruptures and violence as an intrinsic and tactical process.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Mariz Tadros is currently the power and popular politics cluster co-leader at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Her monographs include: Resistance, Revolt, and Gender Justice in Egypt (Syracuse University Press, 2016); Copts at the Crossroads: The challenges of building an inclusive democracy in contemporary Egypt (American University Press, 2013); and The Muslim Brotherhood in Contemporary Egypt: Democracy redefined or confined? (Routledge, 2012).
Jeremy Allouche is currently a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies based at the University of Sussex. His fields of interest are at the intersection between development and security. He has published widely, including A New Deal? Development and Security in a Changing World and The Dynamics of Restraint in Côte d’Ivoire (IDS, 2013).
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by UK aid from the UK Government, however, the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK Government’s official policies. The authors would like to thank Robin Luckham, Jeremy Lind and Markus Shultze-Kraft.