Responding to Ethno-religious Violence: A Conflict Resolution Framework
Ethno-religious violence can emerge for a variety of reasons. Deep-rooted socio-cultural drivers, such as entitlement complexes and existential fears of a group, and exceptionalisms that result in the impunity of perpetrators, can lay the foundation for violence. Meanwhile, economic, political, social, and cultural fault lines and disputes can lead to ethno-religious tensions in particular contexts. A trigger event of some kind can then escalate such tensions to violence.
This article proposes a conceptual framework on how to respond to ethno-religious conflict. The framework is illustrated in Figure 1.
This conflict resolution framework contains three distinct response activities.
First, addressing the drivers and fault lines of conflict is crucial to ethno-religious conflict resolution. Drivers of conflict can include entitlement complexes, where a group believes the country or a specific area ‘belongs’ to them, or claims to be the more authentic inhabitants of the country or the specific area. Moreover, a group may perceive threats to their status or position in the country or the specific area, and therefore harbour existential fears. Some groups, and particular individuals, such as political and religious leaders, may also enjoy exceptional status, which enables them to engage in divisive politics and instigate conflict with impunity. These drivers underlie ethno-religious conflict in a society, and can create conditions in which violence can occur. Sustainably preventing ethno-religious conflict requires these drivers to be confronted and transformed through long-term educational and cultural reform.
There are also secondary factors that operate at a local level. Specific economic, political and socio-cultural fault lines exist at this level, and contribute towards antagonisms, heightened tensions, and eventually, ethno-religious violence. Such fault lines usually concern economic competition, disputes over land and sacred sites, and political contestation between groups. These secondary factors must also be confronted if ethno-religious violence is to be prevented in a sustainable manner.
Second, the framework features the prevention of escalation (from tensions to violence) as a distinct activity. In some cases, complex drivers of conflict cannot be addressed in the short- to medium-terms, and may require generational projects of cultural transformation.[1] In such contexts, avoiding some underlying ethno-religious tensions becomes exceedingly difficult. Therefore, strategies for preventing such tensions from escalating into violence need to be adopted. One typical strategy would be to engage trusted community interlocutors in a locality to work together to ‘de-escalate’ tensions among rival groups. Religious leaders and other actors who enjoy particular legitimacy within society may be ideal to play a role in ‘de-escalation’.
The third and final activity featured in the conflict resolution framework is the containment of violence. This activity is pragmatically necessary when initiatives that aim to prevent violence (i.e. addressing drivers and fault lines, and preventing escalation of tensions) are unsuccessful. On occasion, factors beyond the control of violence prevention mechanisms may emerge to cause ethno-religious violence. It is crucial that effective mechanisms are in place to contain such violence, both in terms of intensity and geographical spread. This activity inevitably contemplates the involvement of law enforcement authorities. However, there are occasions on which law enforcement authorities refuse to act decisively to contain violence, and even participate in the violence. In such contexts, mechanisms need to be in place to draw public attention to state inaction, and animate law enforcement authorities to discharge their duties.
As illustrated in Figure 1, these three activities correspond to the two objectives embedded in the conflict resolution framework. Activities 1 and 2 relate to ‘violence prevention’, as they essentially seek to prevent all forms of ethno-religious violence from taking place. Activity 3 relates to ‘violence mitigation’, as it seeks to contain violence when it takes place.
The conceptual framework also features two distinct approaches to conflict resolution.
First, a ‘proactive’ approach is required to prevent violence. This approach essentially entails activities that seek to address drivers and fault lines of conflict. It contemplates detecting, confronting, and attempting to resolve some of the factors that underlie ethno-religious conflict within target communities. It is ‘proactive’, as it anticipates the emergence of tensions and violence, and attempts to neutralise the possible causes of such tensions and violence before they materialise. A proactive approach requires at least three factors to be in place: (1) knowledge and understanding of such drivers and fault lines; (2) the political and communal will to address such drivers and fault lines; and (3) the means and resources for addressing such drivers and fault lines.
Second, a ‘reactive’ approach is required to prevent and mitigate violence. When ethno-religious tensions heighten, and physical or non-physical violence is imminent due to a ‘trigger event’, decisive responses are required to prevent such violence from taking place. Admittedly, the line between ‘proactive’ and ‘reactive’ is not always clear, as it could be argued that preventing escalation is a form of being ‘proactive’. However, for the sake of convenience and clarity, it is reasonable to describe measures designed to respond to tensions when they emerge as ‘reactive’ rather than ‘proactive’ in terms of the overall objective of preventing violence. Reactive measures to prevent escalation require at least two factors to be in place: (1) the existence and willingness of community interlocutors to mediate de-escalation; and (2) state measures that deter escalation.
When ethno-religious violence takes place, reactive measures are also needed to contain it. In such instances, the primary factor that determines containment is effective law enforcement. There is a point in the spectrum of violence at which community interlocutors alone are no longer capable of de-escalation. They may continue to call for restraint, and motivate the intervention of law enforcement authorities and political actors. However, at this point, the emphasis ultimately shifts to the effectiveness of law enforcement.
Mechanisms designed to respond to ethno-religious violence need to adopt a variety of measures that are both proactive and reactive. Depending on their specific strengths, they need to prevent the occurrence of violence through proactive peace-building activities, intervene to de-escalate ethno-religious tensions, and ultimately, contain ethno-religious violence if it occurs.
[1] See Gehan Gunatilleke, The Chronic and the Entrenched: Ethno-religious Violence in Sri Lanka (Equitas & International Centre for Ethnic Studies 2018).
This conceptual framework was developed in the context of a study on inter-faith conflict resolution mechanisms conducted in Sri Lanka in 2018.