Peace and Conflict Studies

Abstract

The recent attention of peace studies scholars to the role of the "public" parallels an increased interest of democratic theorists in the legitimacy of "mini-publics:" initiatives that bring small groups of citizens together to discuss policy issues. In fact, democratic activists and peace activists who seek to engage the public face similar theoretical and practical challenges. The purpose of this article is to contribute to an emerging dialogue between the disciplines of democratic theory and peace studies. Such a dialogue can be beneficial in at least two ways: it allows an exploration of the role of legitimacy in public peace processes and the burdens that legitimacy put on the institutional design of such processes, and it allows an exploration of more ambitious models of public participation in the peace process. Introduction Traditionally, peace studies understood peacemaking as the realm of diplomats. This is no longer the case. Many scholars of peace studies believe that peace must be made by publics, not politicians. Sustainable peace requires a "public peace process:” “sustained action by citizens outside governments to change the fundamental relationship between groups in conflict” (Chufrin and Saunders 1993, 155-6). Indeed, Gawerc (2006, 440) notes that in recent years peace studies scholarship “have given voice to the critical role that private citizens, local The “Public” in "Public Peace Process" and in "Mini-Publics" Peace and Conflict Studies • Volume 17, Number 2 348 initiatives, and people-to-people activities have in building peace, as well as in maintaining conflict.” Practically, peace scholars and activists who embrace the notion of a “public peace process” focus on grassroots initiatives that try to create ongoing productive dialogue among groups of citizens within and across the belligerent sides. These initiatives operate at two levels. At one level, they seek to modify the views of the participants themselves. At the same time, the hope and expectation is that this change of minds will trickle wide and up, so to speak, and lead to a similar change of minds in the public at large and among policy makers. The recent theoretical and practical interest of peace studies scholars in the role of the public parallels similar trends in democratic theory. Scholars and practitioners of participatory and deliberative democracy are exploring the idea of "mini-publics:" initiatives that bring small groups of citizens together to discuss policy issues (Fung 2003; Goodin and Dryzek 2006). There are obvious similarities between initiatives of "public peace process" and "mini-publics." Both try to generate a small-scale model, a microcosm, of a process that has to take place in society at large. The underlying belief of both is that citizens can change their minds when they encounter different perspectives, and that they need to have the opportunity to do so for the desired social change to be possible. Furthermore, both kinds of initiatives also face similar difficulties. They are mostly local initiatives and typically with limited budgets (Ross and Rothman, 1999, 9, describe them as “bootstrap operations;” see also Dajani and Baskin, 2006, 75, 107-8). They often take place in hostile environments which question the very legitimacy of the initiative, and the attention that these initiatives receive from politicians and the media is mostly scarce and fickle. The “Public” in "Public Peace Process" and in "Mini-Publics" Peace and Conflict Studies • Volume 17, Number 2 349 Given these theoretical and practical similarities, it is surprising that there is very little dialogue between democratic theory and peace studies. One reason for the lack of dialogue is probably the different orientations of the two fields: the theoretical orientation of democratic theory vs. the practical orientation of peace studies. Yet, these orientations too are changing. Democratic theorists are increasingly interested in on-the-ground experiments in democracy, and peace studies scholars are engaging in theoretically sophisticated reflections about their practices. Within this fertile ground, a dialogue between peace studies and democratic theory begins to emerge, and the purpose of this paper is to contribute to this dialogue by examining the relevance of works done in democratic theory to the theory underlying public peace process initiatives. I argue that a conversation between the two research-action areas can be beneficial in at least two ways. First, generally speaking, peace studies understand the role of public participation in conflict resolution through the framework of social-psychology (for example Azar and Burton 1986; Kelman 1997). Public participation is a way to shift the discussion from the political dimension to the level of inter-personal relationships (Kelman 1999). In contrast, within democratic theory public participation is understood as a pre-condition for achieving legitimacy. Even if officials can reach a stable agreement, the only way to know whether this agreement is legitimate is through a process of reflective scrutiny by those who will be affected by the terms of the agreement. A dialogue between democratic theory and peace studies allows an exploration of the role of legitimacy in public peace process. This is not merely a theoretical or philosophical question. The claim for legitimacy depends on aspects of institutional design of the public peace process. To be sure, practitioners in both camps generally engage in an uphill The “Public” in "Public Peace Process" and in "Mini-Publics" Peace and Conflict Studies • Volume 17, Number 2 350 battle in which institutional design is dictated more by the limited perseverance of funding agencies and participants than by what is required for gaining legitimacy. Nevertheless, democratic theorists take more liberty to imagine ideal conditions of more control over design and therefore engage in a comparative analysis of the legitimacy of different models of institutional design. Their conclusions speak directly to similar issues in public peace processes. The second benefit of such a conversation is that it allows an exploration of more ambitious models of public participation in the peace process. In particular, I refer to the model of Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform that took place in British Columbia (2004) and Ontario (2008). In these cases, the provincial government assembled a group of citizens who were selected randomly and asked them to study electoral systems and recommend electoral reforms to the province if they find that reforms are needed. What was unique in these cases was not just that the government invested comparatively vast resources in the process, and the length and depth of the deliberative process itself, but also the fact that the government committed itself to submit the recommendations of the assembly to a referendum (Lang 2007; Warren and Pearse 2008). Thus, the government took itself outside of the process of decision-making and allowed a deliberative body of a small group of citizens to make recommendations to the public at large. I believe that this model serves as a precedent for citizens’ involvement in policy making that should excite the imagination of scholars of peace studies (the limited success of the assemblies in the referenda and then many differences between electoral reforms and peace agreements notwithstanding). Peace scholars can and should build upon this precedent and study the viability of more ambitious models of public involvement in the peace process. The “Public” in "Public Peace Process" and in "Mini-Publics" Peace and Conflict Studies • Volume 17, Number 2 351 The scope of the discussion is therefore limited to the questions that emerge from a dialogue between these two kinds of practical initiatives and the academic scholarship about them. It does not purport to offer a comprehensive survey of the relationship between democracy and peace-making. Furthermore, my focus here is on the question of legitimacy. While I believe that both mini-publics and public peace processes are promising and important kinds of social activism, I am in no position to assess within the scope of this article the likely effectiveness of such initiatives in any particular setting. Background The last two decades witnessed a dramatic change in the terrain of democratic theory. While previous generations of democratic theorists understood democracy to be a mechanism for fair aggregation of preferences via the mechanism of voting, the "deliberative turn" in democratic theory shifted the scholarly attention to the important role of reasonable debate in democracy. In this latter view, the mere fact that a majority of the citizens favors a policy or a candidate provides only weak grounds for claiming legitimacy for this decision. Democracy can and should make a stronger claim for legitimacy, which is that democratic institutions provide a site for exchange of reasons. Democratic decisions are legitimate not only because they won a plurality or majority of votes but because they are an outcome of public debate. Strong democracy, then, requires a viable public sphere where citizens can freely exchange opinions and debate policies. Furthermore, the strength of democracy depends on the quality of the discussion in the public sphere. Even a viable public sphere would not be legitimate if arguments of certain participants are systematically silenced or marginalized. The public, in this view, is not simply The “Public” in "Public Peace Process" and in "Mini-Publics" Peace and Conflict Studies • Volume 17, Number 2 352 an aggregate of individual opinions but a social sphere where different players demand and give justifications for public policies. However, when viewed through the lenses of deliberative democracy, many established democracies face a deficit, if not a crisis, of democratic legitimacy. Most citizens choose to remain ge