Understanding Complex Stresses in the Age of “all else kept constant”
The world is on a losing streak. Extreme events like wildfires, droughts, floods, as well as changes in patterns of rainfall and seasonal temperatures are contributing to social, political and economic stresses. Large numbers of migrants and refugees have become a new reality. In 2018, 70.8 million people, more than at any point in human history, were displaced by conflict and extreme weather events. These unprecedented developments occur at a time when more people have been moving to cities, increasing demand for consumption and challenging capacities of governments. Similarly, resource depletion is a credible threat— water scarcity will cost as much as 6 percent of the GDP for some regions.
As these processes unfold, they interact not only amongst each other, but also with pre-existing vulnerabilities of societies. In doing so, they are creating new, or reigniting previous concerns around governance, identity, inequality, and politics of distribution. How these interactions shape geographies of violence and instability are crucial to understand, especially so for those engaged in development and conflict resolution. Bereft of a high-resolution picture, policies are bound to exacerbate situations (exhibit A: Afghanistan, Syria, Libya) as they will be based on piecemeal, or worse, flawed, understanding. Making sense of how these dynamic phenomena are interacting with ground realities of different regions and countries is thus, urgent.
These processes are already coming together, increasing in frequency and complexity. For instance, in the Sahel region where tribal, ethnic, and religious cleavages run through societies, armed groups with radical ideologies have become players in conflicts among governments, farmers, and pastoralists. Regional and global players have become embroiled, contributing to further instability. In Colombia, a country with a history of organized crime and insurgency, and an ongoing peace process, a large number of Venezuelan migrants are being recruited by armed groups. It is difficult to determine if this is a new normal. In Latin America, a diverse region that reports some of the highest levels of violence and organized crime, freshwater resources are facing significant stresses from global climate change. Extreme climate events such as hurricanes, extended droughts, and flash floods are displacing millions, and destabilizing societies around the world.
Juxtaposition of elements in Mumbai (Photo by Malhar Garud on Unsplash)
These emergent realities can go either way—a society may experience conflict, or a tenuous violent balance may be reached. Yet, what tips the scales? What conditions and mechanisms connect individual grievances to social and political spheres of claim-making? Is it environmental degradation contributing to discontent that aligns social and political groups with armed actors? Or, do armed actors with radical ideologies find a window of opportunity to do so on the basis of religion and (or) ethnicity? What role does corruption and mismanagement of resources play? When does a local situation threaten regional and global security? For instance, although violence levels in the Sahel are high—in 2016 alone, more than 4000 people died in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali—do these numbers illustrate civil conflict, non-state conflict, terrorism, organized crime, or a combination of all these conceptual categories?
Similarly, what do we mean by urban conflict? Does it entail high levels of violence in cities? Some cities in Latin America already reach civil war body counts, even though violence there is mostly attributed to organized crime. Or, does urban conflict only apply to warfare as experienced in Baghdad, Mosul, Tripoli, Mogadishu, or Aleppo? How do we make sense of interactions of “real” governance and politics shaped by violence cycles, corruption, and deregulated service delivery with stresses related to climate change, resource scarcity (say, water), and influx of migrants and refugees? In Karachi, for instance, the issues of water scarcity (partly attributable to climate change in the Indus Basin), preexisting social and political unrest, and a governance vacuum created by a receding state have come together to create an indecipherable mix for scholars and policymakers alike. The city has become a basket case of the future that awaits or is already unfolding in the Global South. The local landscape in the city already consists of armed actors including organized crime, religious groups with sectarian ideologies, and armed cadres of political parties. Violence among political parties is punctuated with interludes of peace brokered by military operations. Like many cities in the world, the state is not the sole provider of water. In effect, informal means are more reliable than formal sources. If in such a city, political contestation increases over resources through traditional politics as well as through means of violence, does it signify conflict, or business as usual?
We do not have the vocabulary yet to define these situations as they fall within grey spaces in respective literatures. As well, we need to acknowledge that these are emergent and interactive problems. Depending on the discipline one belongs to, they may be defined within concepts that make the most sense. This in turn determines development, humanitarian, and military responses.
Similar confusion is at play in conflict research, where despite advances, scholarship appears to be stumped by the adaptive nature of problems. Dominant approaches continue to frame the conversation between the extremes of “conflict” and “not-conflict”, defined by political opposition to and overthrow of governments. This framing (of conflict) is narrow and misses the processes that lead to political and social instability. Instead, it focuses on body counts or defined political opposition—when in any society, by the time individual and social grievances enter the political discourse, they have festered for a while. Similarly, social groups may have criminal and political purposes of carrying out violence to challenge legal authority, without planning an overthrow of governments.
Beyond providing an understanding of broad trends, our reliance on conflict datasets is of limited use. While previous conflicts were waged mainly between states, conflicts today increasingly involve multiple players including local and transnational armed groups, militaries, mercenaries etc. Violence levels may also be under-counted, providing a flawed view.
Although efforts have begun in some circles to investigate the “changing nature of conflict”, it is not as much that conflict has changed, but that the problems have become interactive across scales. Or, they were interactive all along. But in a deeply connected world, these interactions do not remain localized anymore. For instance, high food prices in a wheat-importing country (think Egypt), resulting from droughts and wildfires in wheat exporting countries in distant regions (think China and Russia in 2008 and 2010 respectively), in combination with previous political grievances against government repression and corruption, may lead to protests and overthrow of governments in a region long considered “stable” by experts.
The time for a conventional stove-piped approach of finding causality is over. Unlike in the past when “all else kept constant” was a possibility, now all pieces of the puzzle are adaptive and interactive with feedbacks and system effects, disrupting societies across the globe. This means that the need of the hour is to explore new analytical approaches that embrace complexity instead of bracketing it, and account for emergence. We can ignore the changed dynamics at our own peril.
At the heart of these emergent struggles lie ordinary people, vulnerable and yet feared of joining ranks of armed groups. At the same time, societies around the world are turning increasingly inward, and multilateralism experiences considerable strain. The rise of populist parties and leaders has contributed to sharpening of social and political polarization, with little appetite for spending on volatile distant lands, and lesser patience for arrival of migrants and refugees.
No one country can be expected to shoulder the responsibility of responding to emergent and unfolding crises. It is during these momentous times that we need global players like the United Nations to shape collective responses and prevent conflict.
As conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan demonstrate, once conflicts unfold, not only are they harder to reverse, but also the humanitarian and development costs are steep. Understanding how existing political orders in different societies interact with stresses, whether they experience an increase in violence, resource competition, protests and social movements, or conflict, is thus, urgent.
