Some Thoughts on Conflict

I met an acquaintance recently who described their education as that in ‘conflict studies,’ what seemed to me a peculiar approach to analyzing politics. She described the ideas of conflict resolution and conflict prevention both, raising questions for me as to the content of these terms, ideas implied by war as well.

The first question was ‘what is a conflict, and which do we try to resolve?’ Conflict concerns the non-political, that which is supposed to define the boundaries of normal political practice. Organizations like the US or HRW take up ‘conflict’ because it nominally appeals to all, to the foundations of political practice. Conflict occurs through disagreement over the conditions of political practice, the terms of politics – conflict begins with disagreement and gets resolved in consensus. To me, ‘disagreement’ as the core of ‘conflict’ fundamentally concerns the question of who decides. A person can find another’s logic regarding a decision faulty, but as long as both agree on who should make the decision, disagreement doesn’t arise. Following this, it seems that conflict concerns contestation between subjects over the right to decide certain questions (of state, territory, resources for example). Thus, a primary precondition for conflict studies should be the policing of identity that composes a subject that then imagines disagreement with other subjects.

This leads to the equally important question about which conflicts become priorities for international politics – this is clearly a subject of immense breadth, but here are my thoughts. First, there is a level of above the table politics that shapes international conflict priorities. In the case of the US, media and government call attention to conflicts that concern subjects of high political salience – in many cases now, this means conflicts that concern Islam or oil. Specifically, cases where countries that threaten oil access are more likely to be seen as conflict-prone (in the case of Iran, Venezuela) while countries that secure access under similar conditions (Russia, Saudi Arabia) will be seen as more stable. Other types of conflicts never make it to the level of any international agenda, and remain prior to much of politics. These conflicts concern the electoral and sometimes police politics of a state. All political bodies have perpetual minorities, and the conflicts that emerge out of minority-majority disagreements like that over national healthcare or nuclear disarmament in the US remain below the international conflict radar. In these cases, the disagreement is properly political, the violence created by them subsumed to the properly instrumental on the course to preserving a state or economic system.