Another branch of the literature significantly discounts the existence of any rationale with which to engage, whether political or economic, and also presumes that today's conflicts are internal. This position has variously been termed the ‘New Barbarism thesis’ (Richards 1996: xiii) and the ‘Coming Anarchy’ school’ (Keen 2005: 3). In his 1994 piece, The Coming Anarchy, Robert Kaplan manages to situate the problem of today's conflicts squarely within countries in which he sees a breakdown of the state monopoly of violence, the growth of informal and parallel economies and a thinning down of civil order, but also to suggest what the consequences would be for zones of order if such anarchy were to be allowed to spill over. Keegan, a military historian with a similarly high profile, also tends to present today's conflicts as internal, arising from ‘tribal’ enmities and irrational primitivism which had been long-suppressed during the Cold War. He argues that ‘many of the newer states, particularly those brought into being by the dissolution of European empires, have been unable to liberate themselves from the grip of internal hostilities that pre-date colonisation…’ (1998, 66). The tactics of such internal wars are said to ‘resemble those of the surviving Stone Age peoples of the world's remote regions, at their most savage’ (idem, 68).
Although some have argued that such conflicts are best left to burn themselves out (e.g. Luttwak's provocative article Give War a Chance (1999)), the more usual view has been that solutions are to be found through third party interventions, such as those suggested by Keegan himself, namely ‘progress in aid and development programmes allied to stronger alliances with other nations which strengthen the economic structures of such states and help to neutralise the political insecurities against which their governments constantly battle’ (Keegan, 1998; 73). As such, fear of the spill-over of ‘anarchy’ is closely linked to a containment agenda.
As a whole, this body of literature presents war as a series of dichotomised possibilities; it is either externally or internally driven, it is either rational or irrational, and it is driven by either grievance or greed. When this lens is applied to today's wars it tends to find them as internal, irrational and driven primarily by greed – characteristics encapsulated in the ‘New Barbarism’ argument. These characteristics – or perhaps more accurately, characterisations – are visibly reflected in most presentations of the situation in northern Uganda. Often said to be a war of the LRA against its own people, and thus internal, fundamentally irrational, and without a cause beyond enjoying the fruits of its looting and pillaging, the situation is also presented as a two-party conflict, with the LRA and Government of Uganda as the key protagonists, and the Acholi people as the chief victim. LRA depredations receive considerably more attention than Government ones; indeed the Government is nearly always presented as intervening to protect its own citizens in response to these depredations. In this picture, NGOs, UN, donors, churches and media are all expressly viewed as external. They are presented (and view themselves), as responding to, rather than having any generative role in, the situation.
Building Blocks of a Counter-Narrative
Such interpretations of today's wars in general and of the situation in northern Uganda in particular, have a practical and political weight wholly disproportionate to their analytical and descriptive value. As Keen scathingly argues, chaos theories are the product of ‘chaotic analysts’, which unfortunately also serve the interests of ‘international actors who might wish to justify parsimony and inaction’ (Keen 2005: 4). In this respect, helpful parallels and connections can be drawn between the discourse on ‘internal’ wars outlined above, and Abrahamsen's analysis of discourses of development, and their role in sustaining particular external interests.
At the heart of Abrahamsen's argument lies the observation that the western discourse on good governance and democracy coincides with the end of the Cold War and the need to find alternative mechanisms and legitimations for implementing a neo-liberal economic agenda driven by the West (Abrahamsen 2000; 25–45). She notes that it constructs whole areas of the globe ‘as objects to be reformed rather than as subjects with a history and with their own power to transform the world and react to changing circumstances’ (idem 2000; 20). Effectively this discourse ‘is implicated in power relationships and serves to perpetuate international relations of dominance and subordination’ (idem, viii). Key to the discourses’ success is that they do ‘not take sufficient account of the interconnectedness of states and political forces in the global era, and that they maintain a strict internal/external dichotomy that is no longer an accurate or useful description of the world’ (idem 2000: xi). In short, Abrahamsen identifies both the function (subordination) and the mechanism (partial representation and over-simplified dichotomies) of public discourses.
Many aspects of this analysis can also be applied to the literature on internal war outlined above. By asserting one primary motivation for war, the literature plays havoc with the subjectivities of people in war, indeed it silences them.2 By focusing attention on some actors and diverting it from others it simultaneously discounts the importance of historical process and the possibility of ‘external’ involvement in and responsibility for the state of affairs in a given place. Its function is thus exculpatory (in that it casts silence on the sins of the past and present), justificatory (in that it justifies particular patterns of intervention), and politically oppressive (in that subjectivities are silenced, knowledge gaps created, and wars depoliticised). In short, the discourse on internal war (and the representations of northern Uganda which reflect it) has similar mechanisms and functions to those on good governance, democracy and development. Indeed it can be regarded as an extension of them.
To create a resilient counter-narrative to such mainstream discourses requires a firm empirical basis. This has been amply demonstrated by a number of fine-grained context-based analyses of particular conflict-related situations. The importance of external involvement in the dynamics of supposedly internal situations resonates throughout these readings, whether in the political economies of assistance (Harrell-Bond 1986, Keen 1994, De Waal 1997) and war (Berdal and Malone, 2000), or in the de facto cultural and political connections between very local dynamics and wider social and political processes (Girling 1960, Allen 1991, 1994, 1998, Richards 1996, Behrend 1999, Finnström 2003, Keen 2005). Work on the constructed nature of war and ethnicity (Jabri 1996, Turton 1997), as well as broader ranging political economy analyses linking ‘new wars’ with processes of globalisation (Kaldor, 2001) and global governance (Duffield, 2001) offer further support for such perspectives.
From a more psychological angle, Zur's work on Guatemala (1993, 1998), and Mamdani's work on the genocide in Rwanda in which he highlights the importance of understanding the complex interplay between a ‘victim-consciousness’ and a perpetrator role (1997b), offer important analyses of how ordinary people are drawn into and contribute to the dynamics of a conflict situation. Mamdani's work on the truth and reconciliation processes in South Africa also suggests the imperative of considering not just the visible perpetrators, but also the indirect beneficiaries of their acts (1997a, 1997b).
Gilligan, having spent twenty-five years working in and observing the American penal system, combines a psychoanalytical perspective with a public health agenda and a socio-political analysis to create an epidemiology of violence. He isolates humiliation and shame – notably in relation to men's sense of their masculinity – as the ‘pathogens’ causing violence. He suggests that perpetrators of violence have themselves generally been the victims of extreme forms of physical and psychological violence which weaken their self-worth and make them vulnerable to processes of shaming and humiliation. He argues that a penal system which punishes the violence born of humiliation by systematically ensuring the perpetrators are subjected to further humiliation and shame might appear self-defeating and counter-productive, but is in fact the result of deliberate choices made by the ruling classes. The latter wish to ensure that the lower classes (both black and white) turn the shame-induced violence of their social position against themselves and each other rather than against the ruling classes (Gilligan, 2000). While Gilligan's work is not directly addressed at the ‘new wars’, the importance of humiliation in the perpetuation of conflict – and linked to that, the withholding of dignity and recognition – is increasingly recognised (see, for example, Keen, 2005), though rarely addressed in policy or practice.
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