and media coverage), and that which offers the building blocks of a counter-narrative. The mainstream discourse argues that post-Cold War conflicts are internal and bi-partisan in nature, as well as apolitical and at times irrational, and therefore posits them as detached from wider systemic dynamics at the international level.
An example from the 1990s of this preoccupation with the internal is Ramsbotham and Woodhouse's concept of ‘International Social Conflicts’ (ISCs), situations
which are neither inter-state conflicts…nor contained within the resources of domestic conflict management…There are many other terms for this level of conflict, most commonly ‘internal conflict’ or ‘civil war’, but these do not capture the further twin characteristics of ISCs: a) that they are rooted in relations between communal groups within state borders (the ‘social’ component) and b) that they have broken out of the domestic arena and become a crisis for the state, thereby automatically involving the wider society of states (the ‘international’ component) (1996: 87).
The preoccupation with the internal also pervades the humanitarian sector, which objectifies such situations through terms such as ‘complex emergencies’, ‘complex humanitarian emergencies’ or even ‘complex political emergencies’ (CPEs). These are all terms which entered into humanitarian vocabulary following the creation of a safe haven with military peacekeepers in northern Iraq,1 an event which marked a dramatic shift in the nature of UN interventions in a range of situations globally (Ramsbotham and Woodhouse 1996: 70).
Notwithstanding references to conflicts being rooted in ‘relations between communal groups’, the mainstream discourse simply adapts ‘the Clausewitzian analysis of inter-state wars’ (Keen 2005: 2) to an intra-state context, but sustains the same basic model of two-party wars which is so deeply embedded in the field of international relations and the related practical fields of mediation and conflict resolution (see, for example, Kelman 1992, Crocker 1999, 2001). In this model third parties are only written into the picture in a responsive capacity. Even in interventions based on a social-psychological perspective ‘that sees conflict at least partly and at times predominantly as a subjective social process’ (e.g. Fisher and Keashly 1996), the assumption prevails that third parties come in solely to help the conflicting parties sort out their internal muddle and play no generative role in creating that muddle.
The internal model of war is underpinned by two alternative explanations of what motivates the people who are visibly involved. Both of these largely exclude the possibility of political explanations. One is the substantial body of literature which regards such ‘internal’ conflicts as based on economic rationales. The perspective that simple ‘greed’ is what motivates people (more specifically, rebels), has tended to predominate, and is forcefully articulated by Collier (2000). A more nuanced economic perspective is provided by Stewart (2002), who explores the role of horizontal economic inequalities in creating a sense of grievance. Berdal and Malone (2000) argue that, although ‘the presence of economic motives and commercial agendas in wars is not so much a new phenomenon as a familiar theme’, the economic dimensions of civil conflict have not in fact been given sufficiently systematic attention; they therefore seek to explore how economic motivations, violence and destitution all reinforce one another and give rise to ‘a particular dynamic of conflict’ (Berdal and Malone, 2000; 1–2).
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
