Many of the world’s major conflicts dominating political and media attention have disputes over self-determination at their core. There are many others not in the limelight, often involving groups seeking respect for their identity and rights and tied to deeply embedded and emotional historical narratives. These conflicts tend to be protracted, and the longer they go on the more complex and difficult to resolve they become. Yet there is often limited recognition of the self-determination dynamics of conflicts and an unwillingness among policy makers and practitioners to engage with some of the political and legal barriers to preventing or resolving them.
What is needed?
As situations erupt and escalate, serious engagement with the causes and drivers of self-determination conflicts and options for addressing them is needed more than ever. This requires intelligent political strategies to address structural issues such as exclusion from political life or development opportunities, but also the role of ‘intangibles’ like emotions, grievances and symbols that underlie or perpetuate such conflicts. It is therefore essential that peace and mediation practitioners are equipped with the knowledge and tools to identify the entry points and opportunities for addressing the self-determination related dynamics of conflict and crisis.
Who are peace and mediation practitioners?
Peace and mediation practitioners encompass a range of peacemakers and peacebuilders including those involved in mediation, negotiation and dialogue processes, directly or in a support capacity. They may be associated with the UN, regional organisations or states acting individually or with (international) non-governmental organisations, including those engaged in private diplomacy. As well as third party internationals, they include local peace actors in conflict-affected self-determination contexts including insider mediators or facilitators.
Our response
We have been engaging with mediators, peace practitioners and groups with (potential) self-determination claims to explore lessons learned from existing practice and look at how a more transformative approach to peace mediation can help navigate common barriers to constructive engagement between parties and find alternative pathways to sustainable and inclusive peace in self-determination conflicts. This does not mean changing the whole peacemaking or peacebuilding process, but applying a self-determination ‘lens’ to conflicts can help identify and understand the distinct challenges they present and identify viable options for resolving them.
Our practice-based inquiry responds to emerging debates, developments and trends in conflict patterns and peace mediation, including increasing acknowledgement of the potential value of manifold peacemaking processes - official and unofficial - that occur in multiple spaces and at different levels. Recognising the importance of engaging with diverse communities and constituencies beyond elites, we have been exploring how more inclusive and representative processes can influence the framing of claims and potential pathways out of violence in self-determination conflicts.
Our working definition of self-determination conflicts
A political dispute (sometimes violent) where at least one party – usually but not always a minority – seeks more powers to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. Arrangements for self-determination can be internal, involving autonomy over certain aspects of governance within the territory of an existing state, but short of secession; or external involving territorial secession resulting in complete political and legal independence or unification with another state. Self-determination conflicts include situations where self-determination is an issue even if parties do not use the term self-determination or call it a self-determination conflict. Self-determination need not be the sole or initial cause of conflict.
What we have learned
Drawing on academic sources and our own and others’ knowledge and practice from around the world, we found that:
A broad working definition of self-determination conflicts helps conflict parties, policy makers and practitioners recognise the self-determination dynamics in a conflict situation and understand the wide range of models and arrangements available to meet self-determination goals. This can enable parties to move beyond polarised positions of self-determination vs territorial integrity and sovereignty, where self-determination is understood only as independence. Perhaps counterintuitively, having all options on the table, including independence, can open up more nuanced discussions that go beyond independence. Using a broad definition also helps ensure that crucial self-determination related elements are not overlooked and are incorporated at all stages of a peace or mediation process including analysis, process design, negotiations and implementation.
Working separately with single or fragmented parties in self-determination conflicts can be a valuable precursor to mediation or help unblock a process. Through accompaniment, support and persuasion, conflict parties can be helped to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, navigate sticking points in a process, work through internal differences to find common positions and goals and develop strategies to achieve them. Introducing options for realising self-determination goals from comparative practice, including through study visits and exchanges, can stimulate more open reflections, spark ideas and internal dialogue within conflict parties and also be used to build relationships among and between them. See here for an example.
Starting with ‘people not territory’ has great potential for addressing self-determination conflicts. An inclusive people-centred approach allows rights issues and other grievances underlying conflicts to surface and enables discussion of ideas and governance models such as autonomy arrangements that meet real needs and interests. Peace practitioners therefore need to look beyond high-level negotiations for partnerships and entry points with diverse sectors of the population, across all genders, generations and other identity markers.
There are numerous examples of peacemaking and peacebuilding approaches and models that can help ‘fill the gap’ where prospects of an official high level negotiated political agreement are slim or non-existent - as is often the case in self-determination conflicts. These are not just a stop gap until a high level peace deal is brokered, but have value in their own right as they save or improve lives. Peace and mediation actors, including donors, need to consider their own roles in mapping and engaging with different pro-peace initiatives and potentially supporting more connected and mutually reinforcing approaches in self-determination contexts. The International Contact Group on Mindanao provides one example of diplomats and NGOs working together to support a peace process.
New conflict and mediation landscapes bring challenges, but also possible opportunities. For example, a ‘multimediation’ approach that engages with the collective aspirations and geographies of control of sub-national groups can enable more creative thinking around state structures and potential support for pockets of ‘civicness’ and self-government within state boundaries. Subregional approaches that build on synergies between populations across national boundaries can help stakeholders cooperate to address common challenges that do not respect borders, such as climate change, and find ways to cooperate in a pragmatic way to create mechanisms to address self-determination conflicts.
Futures thinking
Scenario building, foresight and other methods that encourage stakeholders to look to the future are often used by peace and mediation actors in conflict-affected contexts to identify long-term challenges and opportunities, and make strategic decisions. Futures thinking can be especially useful in self-determination conflicts where parties are stuck in polarised positions and unable to move forward. For example, it can help them realise that the current situation is untenable in the light of current conflict trajectories and wider trends such as geopolitics, the economy or technology. There are numerous methods and approaches that can be adapted to suit the context, with different components and activities used alone or in combination. These need to be carefully tailored in self-determination conflicts where discussion of a shared future carries particular challenges, e.g. where one party seeks a separate future as an independent state. Futures thinking can be incorporated into a mediation process or used separately at any stage of a conflict. For an exploration of methods and examples of how futures thinking that can help generate fresh ideas and open up possibilities for dialogue in practice, see below.
Looking forward: connecting futures thinking, reconciliation and mediation
What does ‘futures thinking’ mean for peacebuilding?
Putting futures thinking into practice
The Sasakawa Peace Foundation and Conciliation Resources are engaged in a three-year partnership on ‘Mediating self-determination conflicts’. Conciliation Resources is grateful to the Sasakawa Peace Foundation who provide financial support for the partnership.
