Guardian UK: We can best stop terror by civil, not military, means

from the Guardian UK's Comment is Free:



We can best stop terror by civil, not military, means

Initiatives that nurture all our human relationships defeat the appeal of those who cultivate hatred and violence between groups

Amartya Sen
Friday November 9, 2007
The Guardian


Increased prevalence of terrorism and political violence in the contemporary world has led to many initiatives in recent years aimed at removing the scourge. Military efforts to secure peace have been rapidly deployed, with better informed justification in some cases than in others. Yet group violence through systematic instigation is not exclusively, nor primarily, a military challenge. It is fostered in our divisive world through capturing people's minds and loyalties, and through exploiting the allegiance of those who are wholly or partly persuaded. Some recruits are "inspired" into joining movements for promoting violence against targeted groups, but a much larger number of influenced people do not take part. They can nevertheless hugely contribute to generating a political climate in which the most peaceful of people come to tolerate the most egregious acts of intolerance and brutality on some hazily perceived grounds of self-defence, or retaliation, against the identified "enemy".

The Commonwealth Commission report Civil Paths to Peace, published today, focuses particularly on causes and ways of preventing the terrorism and cultivated violence that have been in the ascendancy for some years, and afflict or threaten the lives of billions in Commonwealth countries and the rest of the world. The report does not argue that military initiatives are never justified, but does argue that when they are based on wrong information or weak reasoning, or inadequately linked to civil measures, they can generate immensely counterproductive results. Systematic civil initiatives, at the national as well as global level, are essential for successfully confronting organised violence and terrorism.

Central to the civil approach is the recognition of the need to overcome the influence of confused and flammable readings of human relations that generate group-specific disaffection and hatred. Even though all human beings have many affiliations, with many distinct patterns of sharing (including the important commonality of a shared human identity), these multiple identities are systematically downplayed in the cultivation of group violence, which proceeds through privileging exactly one affiliation as a person's "real identity", thereby seeing people in an imagined confrontation against each other across a single line of prioritised divisiveness.

Indeed, even the gigantic violence of the first world war, which made so many Europeans act as willing participants in an unnecessary war, drew on singularly prioritising the identity of nationality, ignoring all else. Today, the divisiveness of a singled-out priority is increasingly based on the championing of religious - rather than national - identity, ignoring all other affiliations. The cultivation of such confrontational incitement, often aimed against the west, actually receives implicit support in the west from the increased popularity of classifying the population of the world almost exclusively by religion, or by membership of "civilisations", defined primarily in terms of religion (supplemented by the thesis that different civilisations are prone to "clash" with each other). ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2208072,00.html