Scholarly Contributions | Human Rights and Development

HUMAN RIGHTS IN PEACE AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Dominant theories of human rights and of peace and conflict resolution have treated these concepts as related but ultimately separate issues. Yet as a leading scholar of peace and conflict resolution who prioritized human rights issues throughout his career, Professor Said contributed to showing how peace and human rights are inextricably linked and must be addressed together. Identifying the challenges of conceptually separating them as well as the opportunities for their connection, he demonstrated how their interconnectedness is necessary for true transformation of conflict toward lasting, peaceful, and just societies.

Many academics not only treat peace and human rights as separate but put them in contradiction with each other while dividing and subdividing ideas about them according to culture, discipline, and methodology. While one explanation for their separation is to make scholarly analysis more manageable and practical, in a 1990 article with Laura Barnitz, Dr. Said notes that “the result is closer to political manipulation and obscurity.”¹ He explains that what people understand as peace and human rights has evolved from a combination of experiences within three interrelated realities: our material world, or our physical environment; the structural world, or the systems we have developed to organize behavior such as health care, education, defense, and economics; and the psychological level, where humans experience their sense of self, informed by their values and sense of history.² Recognizing these three levels helps to explain why there can be miscommunication and disagreement between approaches to peace and human rights in different settings. Said further explains in a 2006 article with Dr. Charles O. Lerche III that the conceptual distinction between peace and human rights can also be explained by their different histories. For instance, peace (in this case understood as the absence of war) has been a part of international law since at least the 1920s while the contemporary international human rights system emerged later.³

The result of this artificial separation between peace and human rights is that “instead of security, we would settle for an absence of war. Instead of justice, we would accept a legalized injunction against gross, physical torture.”⁴ Said explains that peace as the absence of war, or negative peace (see Peace and Conflict Resolution), is included within UN documents about conflict but is “only one human right among others, although it is certainly an essential one, since war destroys the possibilities for fuller life that the five areas of human rights – civil, political, social, economic, and cultural – seek to guarantee. However, once we try to specify characteristics of a peaceful society, this formulation is inadequate.”⁵ Positive peace, on the other hand, is multidimensional, inclusive of equitable and participatory institutions as well as economic, social, and cultural conditions that guarantee diversity, well-being, and protection of the vulnerable. While these characteristics can be found within international human rights conventions, they have been emphasized most often through the lens of Western norms and standards rather than equally through the cultures and experiences of the Global South (see Human Rights and Development and Human Rights and Democracy).⁶

This conceptual separation between peace and human rights also has a negative impact on development and governance approaches. When development is simply “latched onto” modernization efforts in the Third World, Said argues, “there can be no lasting peace or meaningful human rights while mass poverty remains and basic human needs are neglected.”⁷ Further, human rights take precedence over peace in democracies when the security needs of some groups are in conflict with the sense of justice of other, more privileged groups. In dictatorships, on the other hand, governments may prioritize security (negative peace) by seeking to maintain control over competing groups through force.⁸ Said also points out that although “human rights figure prominently in the rhetoric of democratic and market reform … a case can be made that the kinds of economic policies imposed on most states by global capitalism aggravate socioeconomic inequality and undermine many social and economic rights.”⁹ At least conceptually, Dr. Said argues, the international community has had to face “a basic choice between the state system and national sovereignty on the one hand and a more effective and meaningful human rights regime on the other.”¹⁰ He asserts that we must find “ways out of this impasse if the full potential for positive change latent in the contemporary human rights regime is ever to be released.”¹¹

Despite their separate discourses, Professor Said identifies an emerging dialogue between peace and human rights promising “a cognitive reconnection that will squarely face the dilemma of understanding our humanity.”¹² Drawing on John Burton’s work on human needs theory, he and Lerche argue that promoting the full range of human rights “is necessary if today’s deep-seated conflicts are to be transformed into peaceful and creative relations among the groups concerned.”¹³ Ultimately, “either we as human beings have to accept the oppression, violence, and injustice in the world as fundamental to the human condition and therefore irremediable, or we accept the premise of human needs theory that there are basic norms and needs that, when reflected in our institutions and processes of governance, should foster social peace, stability, and progress.”¹⁴ While the texts of international agreements suggest that the international community increasingly accepts the latter view, the question is how it can be effectively accomplished. An important area of focus within his work on peace and conflict resolution, Said points to the power of dialogue to enable the current human rights system to “become even more cosmopolitan in both theory and practice if it is to continue to provide the rationale and the foundation for positive peace.”¹⁵ He found promising the UNESCO-sponsored initiative of “dialogue of civilizations,” which had recently begun at the time of his writing. Dialogue “is based on sharing knowledge in order to achieve knowledge,” he explains, and “is a key to effective communication that can help us to pierce through the walls of misperception and mistrust and gather valuable insights, lessons, and opportunities that enrich us all.”¹⁶ Said also identifies the role of spirituality in the quest to join human rights and peace and conflict resolution: “this project requires both a renewed and a new spiritual consciousness; outer peace has always reflected and, at least to some extent, depended on inner peace.”¹⁷

The convergence of peace and human rights might on the surface seem straightforward, but conventional theories have treated them as distinct, with challenging consequences. Said’s work makes clear their inextricable links. Indeed, he proclaims, “peace is not only a right essential to the preservation of human dignity; it is equivalent to life itself.” Yet negative peace, he asserts, is only “a space. The space must be filled with a process of positive peace – a process that, if it is to succeed, must in the end encompass the entire planet. Like human rights, positive peace is a universal need and aspiration, and like human rights, it must find a universal expression.”¹⁸

Notes