Residual Weapons and the Politics of In Security

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Residual Weapons and the

Politics of InsecurityA Peacebuilding Analysis of Mine Action and WeaponsReduction in Cambodia

Martin John Child

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in Development Studies, University of Auckland, 2010.

Supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Ken Jackson and Dr. Yvonne Underhill-Sem.


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Abstract:

The presence of residual weapons complicates the already fragile social, political and

economic climate of postconflict societies. Two broad categories of weapons are

particularly notorious for their widespread destabilising effects: landmines and Explosive

Remnants of War (ERW), and Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW). The physicaland psychological insecurities sustained and perpetuated by the presence of these two

weapons have elicited technical responses from national departments and theinternational community in the form of Humanitarian Mine Action (HMA), and Weapons

Reduction (WR). Although these responses are widely recognised as being vital

components of broader peacebuilding operations, their specific contribution to anoverarching agenda of peace is often assumed to be automatic and has received little

interrogation. As a result, the way in which weapons programmes really advance the goal

of fostering sustainable peace remains unclear, and deserves more attention. Drawing on

the postconflict experience of Cambodia as a case study, this thesis will consider HMAand WR from a peacebuilding perspective. A distinction will be made between the time-

bound, basic peacebuilding that most commonly finds its way into project cycles, and thecontiguous, comprehensive peacebuilding that is actually required for sustainableoutcomes. It will be argued that both HMA and WR can contribute to peacebuilding if

they are implemented in a contextually relevant way, and if opportunities for inter-agency

cooperation are seized upon to maximise the added value of complementarypeacebuilding outcomes. Finally, this paper will cautiously suggest lessons from

Cambodias experience that might be transferable to other postconflict contexts.


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Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank the Peace and Disarmament Education Trust (PADET), whose

generous funding made this project possible. I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr.

Yvonne Underhill-Sem and Prof. Ken Jackson, for all of their support and understanding

in the face of my flexible interpretation of deadlines. My sincerest thanks and admirationgo to all the people (past and present) at CMAC, CMAA, MAG, the Center for

Peacekeeping Forces, EU-ASAC, JSAC and WGWR; your work has inspired me in waysI cannot describe. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all those who gave up

their time to participate in interviews and contribute to this research. Special thanks go to

Mr. Touch Pheap, Mr. Khun Ratana, Mr. Jamie Franklin and Ms. Melinda Kosal forfacilitating my research at their respective organisations. Special thanks also go to the

MAG personnel in Battambang province who so graciously accommodated by site visit.

Finally, I would like to thank all my friends, family and colleagues in Cambodia and New

Zealand that helped in some way, however small, to make this research happen, andespecially Amy, without whom I could never have survived this process.


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v

Table of Contents:

Abstract.iii

Acknowledgements...iv

List of Figuresvi

List of Acronyms..vii

List of Participants.viii

Chapter 1: Residual Weapons and the Politics of Insecurity1.1: Peacebuilding and Postconflict Pathologies.1

1.2: Year Zero and the Years that Followed.41.3: Methodology.5

1.4: Structure of this Thesis.....6

Chapter 2: A Comprehensive Peace Perspective2.1: Peace, Conflict and Other Conceptual Nightmares16

2.2: Basic and Comprehensive Peace232.3: Comprehensive Peace Analysis..30

Chapter 3: Residual Weapons and the Logic of Response

3.1: Landmine and Explosive Remnants of War Impacts and the Logic of Removal...353.2: Small Arms and Light Weapons Impacts and the Logic of Reduction..43

3.3: Culture of Violence, Climate of Fear..49

Chapter 4: Clearing the Way for Peace4.1: Negative Peacebuilding Aspects of Humanitarian Mine Action63

4.2: Positive Peacebuilding Aspects of Humanitarian Mine Action......71

Chapter 5: Tackling the Tools of Violence5.1: Negative Peacebuilding Aspects of Weapons Reduction...80

5.2: Positive Peacebuilding Aspects of Weapons Reduction.88

Chapter 6: Programming Santran

6.1: The Peacebuilding Connection...996.2: Reflections on this Research.103

6.3: Toward a Comprehensive Peacebuilding.104

References...110


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vi

List of Figures:

Figure 1: Basic and Comprehensive Peace24

Figure 2: Components of Comprehensive Peace...29

Figure 3: CPA Threat Mapping.32

Figure 4: Reported Landmine and ERW Casualty Trends in Cambodia Since 197937

Figure 5: Most Commonly Referenced Landmine and ERW Impacts..42

Figure 6: Proportion of SALW Inside/Outside Government Control in Cambodia since

199146

Figure 7: Most Commonly Referenced SALW Impacts....49

Figure 8: CPA Analysis of Landmine and ERW Impacts.61

Figure 9: CPA Analysis of SALW Impacts...62


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vii

List of Acronyms:

APM

ATM

ATTCAL

CBU

CBMRRCBDCCM

CMAA

CMAC

CMVIS

CPA

CPPCRC

DDR

EODERW

EU-ASAC

GICHD

GISGTZ

HALOHMA

ICBCBICBL

IMAS

JSAC

MAG

MAPUMBT

MMRRT

MRENPA

PADET

RBA

RCAFRCG

SALW

SASSOP

SNAP

Anti-Personnel Mine

Anti-Tank Mine

Arms Trade TreatyCambodian Arms Law

Cluster Bomb Unit

Community-Based Mine Risk ReductionCommunity-Based DeminingConvention on Cluster Munitions

Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance

AuthorityCambodian Mine Action Centre

Cambodian Mine-Victim Information System

Comprehensive Peace Analysis

Cambodian Peoples PartyCambodian Red Cross

Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration

Explosive Ordnance DisposalExplosive Remnants of War

European Union Assistance on Curbing Small Arms and

Light Weapons in CambodiaGeneva International Centre for Humanitarian

Demining

Geographic Information SurveyDeutsche Gesellschaft fr Technische Zussamenarbeit

Hazardous Area Life Support Organisation (Trust)Humanitarian Mine Action

International Campaign to Ban Cluster BombsInternational Campaign to Ban Landmines

International Mine Action Standards

Japan Assistance Team for Small Arms Management inCambodia

Mines Advisory Group

Mine Action Planning UnitMine Ban Treaty

Mobile Mine Risk Reduction Team

Mine Risk EducationNorwegian Peoples Aid

Peace and Disarmament Education Trust

Rights-Based Approach

Royal Cambodian Armed ForcesRoyal Cambodian Government

Small Arms and Light Weapons

Small Arms SurveyStandard Operating Procedure

Security Needs Assessment Protocol


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viii

List of Participants:

Bottomly, Ruth. MAG Southeast Asia Community Liaison Manager.

Diep, Soth. MAG Mine Action Quality Assurance Manager.

Franklin, Jamie. MAG Country Programme Manager.

Guest, Nick. MAG Technical Operations Manager.

Kanith, Roath. CMAC Director of Training, Research and Development.

Onn, Oum Sang. CMAC Director of Planning and Operations.

Pheap, Touch. Former JSAC Project Officer.

Rotha, Chan. CMAA Deputy Secretary-General.

Sambath, Chan. CMAC Project Management and Mine Risk Education Coordinator.

Savoeun, Ker. National Center for Peacekeeping Forces and Mine/UXO RemovalDirector of Peacekeeping and Public Relations.

Sinthay, Neb. Former WGWR Executive Director.

Sokhoeun, Khuy. Former JSAC Project Officer.

Sprangemeijer, Adrian. Former EU-ASAC Weapons Destruction Officer.

Tepvitchet, Prak. Former WGWR Executive Director.

SSR

UNDP

UNIDIRUNPoA

UNTAC

UXOWfD

WGWR

WR

Security Sector Reform

United Nations Development Programme

United Nations Institute for Disarmament ResearchUnited Nations Programme of Action on Small Arms

United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia

Unexploded OrdnanceWeapons for Development

Working Group for Weapons Reduction

Weapons Reduction


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Martin Child 40629111

Chapter 1: Residual Weapons and the Politics of Insecurity

1.1: Peacebuilding and Postconflict Pathologies

I was told by a high-ranking Cambodian official that when you cry for a very long period

of time you eventually run out of tears, and at that moment you must simply continue

living. On reflection this does not seem to be indicative of either a Buddhist resignation

with the impermanence of life, or the desensitisation to violence often posited by Western

psychologists. Rather it conveys a particular feeling of fatigue often associated with so-

called postconflict societies. Postconflict is a semantically misleading, always-

suspicious label invoked when a formal settlement between antagonistic factions has

been arrived at but violence remains entrenched, divisions sharp and conflict on the

ground ongoing, if sometimes in less conspicuous ways. Postconflict is a misnomer

because in reality conflicts do not abruptly end, and certainly not with the signing of a

treaty; conflicts persist through physical, psychological and social upheavals.1

Conflicts

do change however, and the objective of most postconflict interventions is to shift the

engagement in conflict from violent to non-violent means, hence the traditional

peacemaking focus on mediated negotiation.2

The spectacular ascent of intra-state conflict on the peacemakers agenda in the years

following the end of the Cold War, coupled with their equally spectacular record of

failure in this area, provoked some degree of re-strategising of the international response

to postconflict emergencies. There was a general realisation that peacemaking gains

among political elites were not being paralleled by correlative gains on the ground, that

restoring the status quo often included recreating conditions conducive to a renewal of

hostilities, and that formal ceasefires were easily undermined if the physical,

psychological and ideological legacies of armed conflict remained unaddressed.3

1 German Initiative to Ban Landmines, Mine Action Programmes from a development-oriented point ofview (The Bad Honnef Framework), revised and reaffirmed at the Second International Conference ofExperts (Bad Honnef II), 21st-23rd June, 1999, p.1.2 Martina Fischer, Recovering From Violent Conflict: Regeneration and (re-)Integration as Elements ofPeacebuilding, Paper from the Berghof Centre for Constructive Conflict Management, 2004, p. 4.3 See for example Michael Dodson, Postconflict Development and Peace Building: Recent Research,Peace & Change, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2006, pp. 244-252, Stein Tonnesson, Strategic Deficits in PeaceBuilding and Conflict Prevention, Conflict, Security and Development, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2004, pp. 465-472,


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Provoked by this state of affairs, peacebuildinga marriage of top-down peacemaking

and institutional reform with bottom-up humanitarian reconstruction and reconciliation

became a standard intervention in postconflict scenarios.4

One of the most potent manifestationsboth real and symbolicof the legacy of armed

conflict is the contaminating presence of residual weapons. Residual weapons further

complicate the already fragile social, political and economic climate of postconflict

societies. Their potential to frustrate efforts at establishing peace and development and to

undermine human capacities at all levels has been widely acknowledged.5

Two broad

categories of weapons are particularly notorious for their widespread and destabilising

effects: landmines and Explosive Remnants of War (ERW), and Small Arms and Light

Weapons (SALW). The physical and psychological insecurities sustained and perpetuated

by the presence of these weapons have elicited technical responses from national and

international agencies in the form of Humanitarian Mine Action (HMA), and Weapons

Reduction (WR). Although these responses are widely recognised as being vital

components of broader peacebuilding operations, their specific contribution to an

overarching agenda of peace is often assumed to be automatic and has received little

interrogation.6 As a result, the way in which these activities really advance the goal of

fostering sustainable peace (if they do at all) remains unclear, and deserves more

attention.

It is often stated in the relevant literature thatover the last decadeboth HMA and

WR have experienced a profound transformation from being relatively isolated, task-

and Ana Cutter, Peace-Building: A Literature Review,Development in Practice, Vol. 15, No. 6, 2005,pp. 778-784.4 See for example Johan Galtung, Three Approaches to Peace: Peacekeeping, Peace-making and Peace-building, in John Galtung (Ed.), Peace, War and DefenceEssays in Peace Research, Copenhagen:Christian Eljers, 1975, pp. 282-305, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali,An Agenda for Peace: PreventiveDiplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-keeping, report of the Secretary-General, 17 June 1992.5 See for example German Initiative to Ban Landmines, 1999, International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

The Landmine Monitor Report 2007, available at: http://www.icbl.org/lm/2007 (accessed 01/09/08), SAS,Caught in the Crossfire: The Humanitarian Impacts of Small Arms, in Small Arms Survey 2002:Counting the Human Cost, 2002, pp. 154-201, SAS, Obstructing Development: The Effects of SmallArms on Human Development, in Small Arms Survey 2003: Development Denied, 2003, pp. 125-167, andGeneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, opened for signatures in Geneva on 7 June2006.6 Kristian Harpviken and Bernt Skara, Humanitarian Mine Action and Peace Building: Exploring theRelationship, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 5, 2003, p. 809, and Christina Wille, Finding theEvidence: The Links between Weapon Collection Programmes, Gun Use and Homicide Rates inCambodia,African Security Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2007, p. 72.


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1.2: Year Zero and the Years that Followed

Cambodia has had a long and tumultuous history of violence and conflict marked by

territorial encroachments by its neighbours and domination by foreign powers.8 However,

it is Cambodias history since 1970 that is the common referent in qualifying for

postconflict status. The story of Cambodia since the coup of 1970 is one of almost

constant civil war between capitalist, communist and royalist factions, sometimes acting

as proxies for competing foreign security interests, and sometimes directly supported by

foreign military deployments or actions.9

During this time, the country has experienced

totalitarian regimes, foreign occupations, one of the worst genocides of the twentieth

century, UN-administered elections, incessant political in-fighting, and the almost total

uprooting of traditional structures for the maintenance of social capital. Cambodia was

also one of the first test cases for the new peacebuilding paradigm that emerged in the

wake of the Cold War, playing host to one of the largest UN operations ever launched.

By the time of the Paris Peace Accords in 1991, residual weapon contamination was

massive. Cambodia was recording the highest number of landmine and ERW casualties

in the world, with approximately 2,500 people having been killed or injured that year

alone.10 SALW were also a problem with post-settlement armed violence actually

increasing, and almost half of the conflict weapons-pool circulating outside of

government control; as much the result of leakage and diversion as of retention by

recalcitrant combatants.11 Basic peace was finally achieved in 1998 with the surrender of

the Khmer Rouge and the arrival of some semblance of stability in the Cambodian

government.

More than a decade later residual weapons remain as an obstacle to peace and security

in Cambodia, although now often subordinated to arguably more pressing development

priorities. Efforts to collect and control SALW have slowedif not ceased completely

8 An authoritative history of Cambodia can be found in David Chandler,A History of Cambodia, Boulder:Westview Press, 2008.9 Chandler, 2008, and Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia: New information revealsthat Cambodia was bombed far more heavily than previously believed, The Walrus, 2006.10 CRC, Cambodia Mine/UXO Victim Information System Annual Report 2007, Phnom Penh: CRC, 2007,p. 16.11 Christina Wille,How Many Weapons Are There in Cambodia?, Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2006, p.91.


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in the wake of the departure (effectively declaring mission accomplished) of the EU-

ASAC and JSAC missions in 2006 and 2008 respectively. However, the HMA sector

appears to be stronger than ever, despite some reductions in capacity this year due to

budget shortfalls.12 Taken together, the collective efforts to address residual weapons in

Cambodia are among the largest, most enduring and most ambitious of their kind. Many

techniques now common in both sectors were proven or pioneered here, and many people

have acquired years or even decades of experience working in their respective fields.

There is also a general consensus that both HMA and WR have been executed fairly well

and have achieved relative success in Cambodia, which may seem to some to offer a

contrast in sectors that are marred by some pretty monumental failures.13

As a result,

conditions in Cambodia are ideal for research seeking in the first instance to draw

retrospective insights on the contribution of HMA and WR to peacebuilding; insights that

hopefully have potential to inform a peacebuilding approach to similar programmes and

initiatives elsewhere in the world.

1.3: Methodology

In addition to the review of articles, reports and policy documents, a period of seven

weeks was spent in the field collecting data for this research. The core information was

collected in fourteen unstructured interviews with English-speaking participants who had

significant experience with HMA programmes, WR programmes, or both. Participants

were mostly departmental directors, identified for their experience by the relevant heads

of organisations in the preliminary meetings regarding access and permissions. In total,

fourteen interviews were conducted. Nine HMA interviews were conducted with

participants from the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC), the Cambodian Mine

Action and Victim Assistance Authority (CMAA), the Mines Advisory Group (MAG)

and the Center for Peacekeeping Forces and Mine/UXO Removal. Five WR interviews

were conducted with participants relating their past experiences with the European Union

12 CMAC,Integrated Work Plan 2009, Phnom Penh: CMAC, 2009.13 See for example Bernt Skara, Risky Business or Constructive Assistance? Community Engagement inHumanitarian Mine Action, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 5, 2003, pp. 841-842, and Sami Faltas,Glenn McDonald and Camilla Waszink,Removing Small Arms from Society: A Review of WeaponsCollection and Destruction Programmes, Small Arms Survey occasional paper, 2001, p. 7.


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Assistance on Curbing Small Arms and Light Weapons in Cambodia (EU-ASAC), the

Japan Assistance Team for Small Arms Management in Cambodia (JSAC) and the

Working Group for Weapons Reduction (WGWR). In addition, there were ample

opportunities for participant observation at the offices of the various organisations and

during a site visit to a MAG minefield in Boh Knor village, Battambang. Finally, a

number of hard copy documents that were not available electronically (and therefore

largely inaccessible from New Zealand) were obtained from participating organisations,

and additional victim information was obtained from the offices of the Cambodian Red

Cross (CRC). The field component of the research was entirely funded by the Peace and

Disarmament Education Trust (PADET), and was carried out with the approval of the

University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee (UAHPEC).14

1.4: Structure of this Thesis

Chapter 2 establishes a basic analytic framework through which to examine the

contribution of HMA and WR to building sustainable peace in contaminated postconflict

societies. Peace is a concern of all social disciplines, if not of all human beings. Peace is

often considered to be more than the mere absence of violent conflict (although this is

usually a precondition); rather it is a positive and aspirational process. It is also widely

acknowledged that the antithesis of peace is not conflict, which is an inevitable and

potentially creative feature of human relationships, but instead relates to violence and

insecurity.15 Violence is most visibly antithetical to peace, and is significant whether

manifested as direct and episodic or indirect and structural. However, it is insecurity

defined as the experience or anticipation of episodic or structural violencethat is the

true nemesis of peace. Considering its diverse theoretical, cultural, religious and personal

interpretations, it is safe to say that there is not one kind of peace, but many. It is also safe

to say that the formulation of a theory to encapsulate all of them would be prohibitively

difficult, if not impossible, if not outright self-defeating in such a case where the diversity

of peace is actually a critical factor in making peace work.

14 UAHPEC reference 2009/158.15 Helen Ware (Ed.), The No-Nonsense Guide to Conflict and Peace, London: New InternationalistPublications, 2006.


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Confining this thesis to the realm of the possible, just two broad types of peace will be

identified: basic and comprehensive peace. The former condition is that following a

peace agreement when conflict is temporarily frozen (manifested in a ceasefire) or has

been formally ended by political elites but is not necessarily accompanied by

improvements in the security situation faced by civilians on the ground. By contrast, the

latter condition (and the focus of this thesis) directly concerns the wellbeing of local

populations in postconflict zones, and combines the short term security of basic needs

with the long term expansion of freedoms and opportunities. Comprehensive peace is

thus characterised by positive trends in the security, development and rights of

communities and the individuals therein. The concept of basic and comprehensive peace

is in many respects not dissimilar from the Khmer notion of the difference between

santepheap (meaning the absence of war) and santran (meaning a higher plane of peace

in which human needs are met and people live without fear).16

Traditionally, the separation of security, development and rights actors roughly

coincided with their associated disciplines; security was claimed by political science,

development by economics and rights by law. The traditional compartmentalisation of

these concepts has been gradually eroded by the advent of human development and

human security as additions to the older human discourses of human rights and human

needs.17 These concepts represent more than merely an attempt to humanise existing

state-centric discourses; they represent tentative steps toward transforming the rhetoric of

theory into programmatic practice.18 To inform the peacebuilding success criteria for

HMA and WR programmes in this thesis, I propose an analytic framework called

Comprehensive Peace Analysis (CPA), which incorporates a critical understanding of the

four human discourses. The basic premise is that the requirements of security,

development and rightswhich together constitute human needsmust be met in order

to progress from basic to comprehensive peace, and that peace must be comprehensive in

16 These concepts were first explained to me in an interview with CMAC Director of Training, Researchand Development Roath Kanith, and subsequently re-explained in personal communications from sameparticipant.17 Des Gasper,Human Rights, Human Needs, Human Development, Human Security: RelationshipsBetween Four International Human Discourses, Working Paper No. 445 from the Institute of SocialStudies, 2007.18 Des Gasper, Securing Humanity: Situating Human Security as Concept and Discourse,Journal ofHuman Development, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2005, p. 223.


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order to be sustainable. In assessing the contribution of HMA and WR to comprehensive

peace, I have found it useful to extend Johan Galtungs concept of negative and positive

peace to consider the negative peacebuilding (in which obstacles to peace are removed)

and positive peacebuilding (in which positive security, development and rights trends are

established) aspects of such programmes.19

While it is necessary in fitting with the objectives of this thesis to engage with

inherently vague and value-laden concepts such as (post)conflict, violence, (in)security,

development, rights andabove allpeace, I have nevertheless attempted to treat the

voluminous theoretical literature at arms length to avoid degenerating into a tired

rehearsal of unsolvable conceptual debates. Theory is important and useful insofar as it

can be practically applied, however its relevance tends to diminish somewhat when

practitioners go out into the field and find that local communities have their own ideas

about conflict, security and peace. It is hoped that the framework presented in Chapter 2

is broad enough to be transferable, but specific enough to be useful.

Chapter 3 is driven by the research question: What are the peacebuilding implications of

residual weapons? Firstly, this chapter examines current impact analysis of residual

weapons andby extensionthe logic governing programmes that seek to reduce or

eliminate them. It is important to understand limitations in current impact analysis and

how they may be an obstacle to more peacebuilding-relevant interventions. Secondly, this

chapter refocuses attention on the implications of residual weapons for peacebuilding by

considering how they affect relations between people. CPA threat mapping will be used

to demonstrate how a peacebuilding perspective might contribute to the expansion of

residual weapons impact-comprehension and analysis.

Landmines and ERW attracted a great deal of international attention during the 1990s

with growing awareness of their indiscriminate impact on civilians long after war has

officially ended.20 The result was a global popular movement that culminated in a ban on

the production and stockpiling of landmines and, more recently, a similar ban on cluster

munitions. SALW have attracted similar attention recently with the mobilisation of a

19 Johan Galtung, An Editorial,Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1964, pp. 1-4.20 See for example Cameron Maxwell, Robert Lawson and Brian Tomlin, To Walk Without Fear: TheGlobal Movement to Ban Landmines, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998.


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global movement in support of a comprehensive Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), highlighting

in particular the way in which the illicit trade in these weapons undermines peace and

fuels violent conflict, earning them the epitaph: the real weapons of mass destruction.21

The threat posed by landmines and ERW to people living in postconflict zones is

different from that posed by SALW in that where the former is often construed as a

passive threat, that latter actually requires an active agent. However, these weapons have

very similar medical, developmental and psychological impacts; they have similar

potential to kill, injure and disable; they have similar potential to obstruct development

and compromise human rights; they both help to sustain and entrench a culture of

violence; and they both contribute to a generalised sense of insecurity thatin a worst

case scenariocould potentially reignite violent conflict.

Research on the impacts of residual weapons has increasingly moved away from a rigid

preoccupation with the threat of immediate death or injury to consider their broader

implications.22

It is also widely acknowledged that the presence of these weapons is

detrimental to peace and a major obstacle to postconflict peacebuilding, thus HMA and

WR are taken-for-granted features of peacebuilding operations.23 However, the

conceptualisation of threats posed by these weapons is still quite limited. Even in

instances where it is acknowledged that the threat from residual weapons is complex

beyond the mere physical presence of landmines in the ground or small arms in

circulation, little effort is made to understandlet alone incorporate into programming

these more complex dimensions.24 There are four possible explanations for why this is

the case, all of which probably play a role: 1) A holistic understanding of the residual

weapons threat likely requires in-depth, qualitative research for which intervening

agencies do not have the resources; 2) Donors tend to only be interested in quantitatively

measurable outputs, and are reluctant to earmark additional funds for impact research;

21

IANSA, Small Arms The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction, available athttp://www.iansa.org/action/ia_pr.htm (accessed 03/03/09).22 See for example Kristian Harpviken, Ananda Millard, Kjell Kjellman and Bernt Skara, Measures forMines: Approaches to Impact Assessment in Humanitarian Mine Action, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 24,No. 5, 2003, pp. 889-908, Charles Mather, Maps, Measurements and Landmines: The Global LandminesCrisis and the Politics of Development,Environment and Planning, Vol. 34, 2002, pp. 239-250, and JoelWallman (Ed.), Small Arms and Light Weapons: A Call for Research, Harry Frank GuggenheimFoundation, 2005.23 Harpviken and Skara, 2003, pp. 809-822.24 Borrie and Randin, 2006, p. 11, 19,


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3) The prevalence of military thinking tends to favour the logic that removing the residual

weapon automatically overcomes the threat irrespective of its more complex dimensions;

4) In emergency postconflict situations where the emphasis is on urgent response,

spending time and resources on impact research may seem like an unjustifiable, even life-

threatening delay.25 However, both donors and practitioners must understand the broader

implications of their interventions, even in an emergency context. They must also

understand that the threat as it is perceived by the threatened is paramount, regardless of

how rational or irrational this perception seems to observers; perceived insecurity does

not necessarily correspond to a credible threat, yet there is little value in improving

security if people do not thenfeel secure.26

Further development of methodologies for

rapid information gathering in difficult environmentsand especially of methods that

privilege local understandings of peace and security (such as SNAP)is necessary to

maximise the impact of peacebuilding interventions.27

Furthermore, a broad analytic

framework such as CPA may be useful from the outset to consider and map residual

weapons threats and thereby highlight potential sites for risk-management contingencies

and cooperation with other peacebuilding actors.

Chapter 4 builds on the CPA threat-mapping of landmines and ERW in the previous

chapter to explore the primary research question: In what ways can HMA contribute to

postconflict peacebuilding? HMA impacts will be considered both from a negative peace

perspective and a positive peace perspective, with some attention also being paid to the

risk-management dimension of these perspectives.

Contributing to negative peace does not mean limiting the activities of HMA agencies to

a technocratic preoccupation with clearance. Removing landmines and ERW from the

ground can make a strong contribution to an overarching peace operation by freeing up

land for agricultural development, reducing local and urban-rural inequality, undermining

25 These points emerged explicitly or implicitly in several interviews undertaken in the field, the last pointis also echoed in Craig Williams and Christine E. Dun, GIS in Participatory Research: Assessing theImpact of Landmines on Communities in North-west Cambodia, Transactions in GIS, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2003,pp. 395-396.26 Gasper, 2005, p. 241.27 A detailed explanation of SNAP can be found in Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick, The Security NeedsAssessment Protocol: Improving Operational Effectiveness through Community Security, UNIDIR,Geneva: UN Publications, 2008.


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a climate of fear and allowing for the repatriation and resettlement of refugees and

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). However, ensuring that such impacts contribute to

comprehensive peace requires that HMA agencies go beyond a rigid reliance on the logic

of automatic cause and effect (ifyou remove the obstacles to peace and development then

peace and development will happen) and consider the more complex array of variables

that often characterise postconflict societies. In reality, further action is often required

either by the demining agency itself or in concert with a relevant organisationin the

form of parallel social interventions and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) packages to

verify their impact and sustainability. Experience in Cambodia demonstrates significant

opportunities for HMA agencies to broaden their activities and organisational networks to

ensure that development happens, security is provided, and rights are respected.

The contribution of HMA to positive peacebuilding is always determined by the manner

in which HMA activities are undertaken and what additional steps are taken by

implementing agencies to have an added value for comprehensive peace. Organising

localised peacebuilding efforts around a concrete activity such as HMA can foster re-

engagement of former belligerents and help begin a process of trust-rebuilding.28 In

addition, the symbolic potency of dealing with remnants of war may be essential to

creating a peace dividend and building community confidence in the immediate aftermath

of conflict, especially when it is likely that other substantial visible benefits of peace

(such as development infrastructure) are likely to be much slower to materialise.

Experience in Cambodia demonstrates that there is significant potential for HMA

agencies to transcend their ostensibly apolitical status and engage actively in positive

peacebuilding by absorbing ex-combatants, facilitating cooperation between former

enemies and involving local communities directly. Mine Risk Education (MRE) is a

critical but underutilised area in the transition from a culture of violence to a culture of

peace; if the role of landmines and ERW as weapons is made clear (instead of being

problematised as illegitimate and therefore perceived more as naturalised hazards than

remnants of war), then MRE could be integrated into a broader educative message of

peacebuilding. This could also help reposition the audience of MRE from being passive

28 This conclusion consistently emerged in interviews with HMA practitioners, but was also establishedearlier in Harpviken and Skara, 2003, pp. 809-822.


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recipients of a dont touch message to being active agents of peacebuilding in their

communities.

One of the difficult questions for any postconflict development practitioner to ask is: Is

there a chance that my effortshowever well-intentionedcould actually be detrimental

to the cause of peace? It is important to ask the same of HMA, perhaps even more so

because of the perceived obviousness of the sectors contribution to peacebuilding.

Contrary to the mantra that any clearance is good clearance, there are in fact many risks

which must be managed in postconflict HMA; cleared land may be seized by elites, land

conflicts may be created or exacerbated, the way that agencies interact (or do not interact)

with communities can foster mistrust, the areas chosen for clearance can create feelings

of inequity, and even just the physical presence of clearance teams can put stress on poor

communities. It is therefore important to manage these risks in any HMA intervention,

and especially in a postconflict peacebuilding context. Once again this highlights the

importance of planning interventions based on good information about local

circumstances and solid impact data.

Chapter 5 builds on the CPA threat-mapping of SALW in Chapter 3 to answer the

primary research question: In what ways can WR contribute to postconflict

peacebuilding? As in the previous chapter, WR impacts will be considered from both

negative peace and positive peace perspectives with integrated risk-management.

Although there are obvious flaws in the logic that simply reducing the number of SALW

in circulation will automatically reduce violence and thereby contribute to negative

peace, empirical evidence from WR project areas in Cambodia suggests that such

programmes have indeed had an impact, especially in the reduction of armed violence as

a proportion of overall violence.29 However, as there is no way to disaggregate the

statistical impact of WR from other important variables (improved socio-economic

circumstances, temporal conflict distance, increased state capacities etc.), it is impossible

to determine with any precision how such programmes contribute to comprehensive

29 See for example Adrian Wilkinson and Anya Hart-Dyke, Evaluation of the EU Small Arms and LightWeapons Assistance to the Kingdom of Cambodia (EU-ASAC), Belgrade: SEESAC, 2006, David de Beer,Lessons Learned from the EU ASAC Project for Guidelines for Setting Up a SALW Security andManagement Project, Phnom Penh: EU-ASAC, 2004, and Wille, 2007, pp. 57-73.


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peace. In Cambodia much emphasis has been on promulgation of the Arms Law to both

local communities and enforcement agents, together with some limited human rights

education. Because the objective here is to prevent transgressions and not necessarily to

build a culture of peace, we can identify these impacts as contributions to negative peace.

In addition (and like with HMA), consolidating impacts requires going beyond a

technical focus on weapons collection to consider broader supply and demand

interventions, otherwise WR may just create vacuums to be filled by a resurgent arms

trade, or people will find other ways to fulfill their purpose (perhaps by making

homemade firearms as has become quite common in some areas of Cambodia). Once

again, good information-gathering and inter-agency cooperation is key to achieving

sustainable impacts and building comprehensive peace.

The positive peacebuilding impact of WR in Cambodia is much more elusive. The most

conspicuous efforts typically revolve around public destruction of SALW and

postconflict symbolism, especially in the Flames of Peace ceremonies. Although the

effects of such projects have generally been positive, they have nevertheless suffered

from a lack of transparency, a lack of local engagement, and the absence of any clear

linking of disarmament and peacebuilding messages. Community confusion and

controversy over destruction being limited to old and dysfunctional weapons also

undermines the positive peacebuilding potential of WR. There are nevertheless numerous

opportunities for SALW destruction to contribute to comprehensive peace if it is clearly

integrated into a broader educative message of peace, and if more confidence-building

measures (such as destroying weapons at the point of collection) are taken. Beyond

destruction, another major area for bolder intervention is in building the capacity of the

state to deal with the misuse of SALW, both internally and externally. It seems that a

great deal of time and resources has been spent on convincing communities to surrender

their weapons without actually addressing the reason for their insecurity: state

incompetence. There is an unwelcome perception that this may be too sensitive and too

interventionist, however if it is approached in a constructive, sincere and non-

confrontational way, it is likely that WR organisations and their donors will find a


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receptive audience.30 Just as there is little value in improving security if people do not

then feel secure, there is no point in convincing people to feel secure without actually

making sure that they are secure.

One of the major issues from a peacebuilding risk-management perspective is the matter

of who is responsible for actually collecting weapons; in other words, to what extent is

responsibility given to governments, or reserved by international organisations? This

question is further complicated by the possibility that neither governments nor

international organisations have much credibility in postconflict situations. If WR is not

conducted in a fair and transparent manner, then it may be little more than a thinly veiled

attempt to disarm or even punish opposition factions and sympathisers. WR can also

serve as a mechanism for elites to extort money from local communities, or to

appropriate land and assets while the postconflict climate of legal ambiguity persists.

Such risks must be managed by intervening organisations by building state capacities and

closely monitoring implementation, in conjunction with local NGOs and media where

possible.

Chapter 6 draws together the conclusions of the previous two chapters to identify

common features of a best process of HMA and WR in building comprehensive

peace.31 It will be argued that not only are HMA and WR good for peacebuilding,

peacebuilding is also good for HMA and WR. Considering operations and objectives

from a comprehensive peace perspective has the potential to reveal important areas where

additional interventions or cooperation with other agencies can have considerable added

value and make the core outcomereduced impact of residual weaponsmore

sustainable. More lives saved, more livelihoods improved. This thesis does not offer a list

of specific technical activities for agencies or donors to tick off as they move from

country to country. Rather, the success and shortcomings of the Cambodian case study

indicate that the following processes and attributes are generally desirable: 1) A

comprehensive threat assessment that considers the more complex dimensions of residual

weapons impacts; 2) A comprehensive threat assessment that privileges local understands

30 SAS, Caught in the Crossfire: The Humanitarian Impacts of Small Arms, in Small Arms Survey 2002:Counting the Human Cost, 2002, p. 158.31 Miller and Rudnick, 2008.


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and perceptions of insecurity, and is matched by projects that value and respond to these

perceptions; 3) A long term funding cycle that matches the long term programme

objectives necessary for comprehensive peacebuilding; 4) Matching of state capacity-

substitution with simultaneous state capacity-building, with local ownership being the

objective; 5) Close monitoring to ensure transparency of both implementers and project

partners (especially authoritative state agents such as police); 6) Close engagement with

local communities and participation whenever possible and appropriate; 7) Integration of

educative messagesoften simply tacked on to HMA and WR programmesinto a

broader message of non-violence and peacebuilding; 8) Close cooperation with all

relevant peacebuilding actors to ensure complementarity, sustainability and minimal

overlap. If HMA and WR can address the politics of insecurity created by residual

weapons as well as the residual weapons themselves, then they can make a solid

contribution to building sustainable peace.


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Chapter 2: A Comprehensive Peace Perspective

2.1: Peace, Conflict and other Conceptual Nightmares

Conflict and peace are universal concerns of human beings, and fluctuation between is a

natural and inevitable feature of human relationships.32

Yet these phenomena are

experienced and interpreted in vastly different ways across space and time, thus it is not

surprising that reducing them to simple definitions is problematic. Conflict analysis (and

therefore peace analysis) has traditionally been dominated by Western political science

and all of the cultural baggage it imports.33

However, in recent decades there has been a

broadening and deepening of conflict analysis and conceptualisation, partly reflecting

changes in post-Cold War security dynamics in which intra-state complex emergencies

have become salient, but also partly as a result of a general realisation that conflict is

most costly for civilians and not for the politico-military elites that hold the attention of

peacemakers.34

In addition, the need for systems of enquiry that can relate to local

experiences of conflict, insecurity and peace is increasingly felt among both analysts and

practitioners who have witnessed peacebuilding failures resulting from the imposition of

external points of view.35

Conflict has largely come to replace war as the favoured term given to a

confrontational relationship between antagonistic parties. Although the latter term has

reappeared in recent years mainly for rhetorical use, it nevertheless evokes images of

conflict between states and therefore has diminished utility in a global security

environment in which intra-state conflict is prevalent.36 The changed security landscape

is also acknowledged in the popular distinction between old and new conflicts, where

32 Ware, 2006.33 See for example Alexandra Kent, Reconfiguring Security: Buddhism and Moral Legitimacy inCambodia, Security Dialogue, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2006, p. 344, and Daniel Christie, What is PeacePsychology the Psychology of?,Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 62, No. 1, 2006, pp. 1-2.34 Ken Booth (Ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics, Colo: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005,Mary Kaldor,New and Old Wars, Cambridge: Polity, 2006.35 Miller and Rudnick, 2008, Kent, 2006, p. 345, 347.36 Kaldor, 2006, Michelle Gawerc, Peace-Building: Theoretical and Concrete Perspectives, Peace &Change, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2006, p. 436.


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the former indicates a formal condition entered into by nation-states and the latter

represents the failure and disintegration of the state apparatus.37 The intra-state character

of new conflicts precludes any retreat of combatants behind demarcated borders, and the

divisions of conflict often run through communities as well as between them. Inevitably

then, such conflicts do not end with a bang but usually with whimper after whimper

after whimper38

This also requires a broadening of the term postconflict to capture a

broad range of conditions that include continued low-level hostilities, entrenchment of

chronic violence, and physical, psychological and structural residue from settled

conflicts.

Definitions of the role and manifestation of conflict violence have also evolved as

concepts from peace psychology have been incorporated into conventional conflict

analysis. Most importantly, the inclusion of structural violence has broadened the

traditional focus on episodic violence, contributing to a more holistic perspective on both

the causes and solutions to violent conflict:

Examples of episodic violence can vary in scale from interpersonalaggression, such as bullying, to the organized form of interstate violencecalled war. In contrast, structural violence is an insidious form of violencethat is built into the fabric of political and economic systems, both withinand between nations, and results in slow death through the deprivation of

human need satisfaction. Thus, if people are starving and there is food inthe world to feed them, then structural violence is taking place.39

This helps (to some extent) to bring conflict analysis more in line with explanations of

peace and conflict in scholarship in the majority world, which tends to have a strong

causative emphasis on social (in)justice.40

It also highlights the reality that violent

conflict is complex and participants have varied motivations that are the result of a

confluence of destructive inputs rather than a single activating factor.41 Furthermore, this

reveals the autocatalytic nature of new conflicts and especially the role of the violence-

37 Kaldor, 2006, Jean Eishtain, New Wars, Old Violence,International Studies Review, Vol. 3, No. 1,2001, pp. 139-141.38 Martina Fischer, Recovering From Violent Conflict: Regeneration and (re-)Integration as Elements ofPeacebuilding, Paper from the Berghof Centre for Constructive Conflict Management, 2004, p. 3.39 Christie, 2006, p. 5.40 Ibid. p. 3.41 Christie, 2006, p. 6.


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poverty nexus; although poverty may not cause conflict, it is often critical in sustaining it

by impairing non-violent strategies for survival.42

Another consequence of considering the broader impacts and experiences of violence is

the revealed importance of psychological impacts, manifested in insecurity. The concept

of insecurity is best understood as the experience or anticipation of structural or episodic

violence. The inclusion of anticipated violenceor perceived insecurityhas a profound

impact on the scope and focus of conflict analysis, because it forces analysts and planners

to consider the security climate from the perspective of the insecure. This also means

paying attention to security threats that arefrom the observers point of viewnot

real.43

Perceived insecurity is of particular importance to this thesis because of the

salience of the psychological threat posed by residual weapons. In the case of landmines

and ERW, much recent emphasis has been on their fear-based impact in relation to land

access and development, and in the case of SALW, perceived insecurity underwrites the

retention (and sometimes the use) of weapons in the aftermath of conflict. This reveals

that security threats as they are perceived by the inhabitants of postconflict societies are

at least as important as and likely more so thanthe threats identified as being real

and credible by external observers and intervening actors. Insecurity is the true antithesis

of peace insofar as it precludes popular confidence in basic social structures, support

networks and state instruments, and confuses the distinction between war and peacetime,

thereby diminishing any dividend that peace might bring and encouraging spoilers to the

peace process.

While seemingly obvious when used as part of everyday vernacular, peace is a

conceptually vague and inherently imprecise term. This is never so apparent as when

used in the context of peacebuilding, in which discussion of the concept of peace

inevitably devolves into a discussion of measurement. As peacebuilding actors come

under increasing pressure to deliver demonstrable results, the concept of peace comes

42 See for example Aldo Benini,A Semi-Parametric Spatial Regression Approach to Post-War HumanSecurity: Cambodia 2002-2004, paper from the Centre for the Study of Civil War and the InternationalPeace Research Institute, Oslo, 2006.43 Gasper, 2005, p. 241.


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under greater scrutiny and the question of how to measure it comes to the fore.44 Such

pressure is incited by the prevailing influence of positivist traditions that seek to

objectively measure quantifiable outputs.45 War recurrence (or the absence of) tends to be

the favoured empirical measure of peacebuilding success or failure, however even such a

basic indicator is hopelessly flawed whenin a security environment dominated by new

conflictsthere is no standard definition or measurement of what exactly constitutes a

condition of war and therefore war recurrence.46

As Charles Call notes regarding a

series of peacebuilding studies:

How reliable can quantitative studies be if the same group of scholarsreport such variation in the rates of civil war recurrence? Part of thisdifference relates to the divergent methods used to calculate war

recurrence rates. In addition, datasets reflect very different criteria forinclusionRates of success and failure are less compelling whenspecialists disagree so seriously on what constitutes a civil war at all.47

The absence of consistent criteria for war recurrence has provoked an unfortunate

tendency to conflate peacebuilding success with traditional measures for macro-level

economic growth that do not necessarily reflect peacebuilding gains. On the contrary

such gains often coincide with the funneling of economic benefits to elites, exacerbating

structural inequalities which often underwrite new conflicts.48 Nevertheless, there are few

other quantitatively measurable indicators to provide evaluation criteria and policy

guidance for peacebuilding interventions. It is clear that using data-hungry, quantitative

models in a context of new conflicts that are inherently complex, in which little reliable

macro-level data is available, and in which perceived insecurities are numerous and do

not necessarily correlate to measurable threats, is not a viable approach to assessing

44 See for example Charles Call, Knowing Peace When You See It: Setting Standards for PeacebuildingSuccess, UNDP, 2007, and Reina Neufeldt, Frameworkers and Circlers: Exploring Assumptions inPeace and Conflict Impact Assessment, Paper from the Berghof Centre for Constructive ConflictManagement, 2007.45 Ibid. pp. 2-3.46 Call, 2007.47 Ibid. p. 28.48 See for example Oliver Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Hubris? Virtual Peace in Cambodia,Security Dialogue, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2007, pp. 27-48.


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peacebuilding success.49 Quantitative factors should not be ignored, but neither should

they dominate analysis to the detriment of more detailed enquiry.

Analytic approaches that go beyond crude aggregates to consider the qualitative impacts

of peacebuilding elicit accusations of being too complex to have practical application.50

However, the reality is that new conflicts are inescapably complex, and cramming them

into a simplifying model could prove to be a fatal error. A sound analysis of

peacebuilding gains must consider the complex dimensions of conflict, violence and

insecurity in order to first understand what is notsuccessful peacebuilding and then plan

and implement contingencies accordingly. At the same time, it may not be sufficient to

identify and address the original cause of conflict because conflicts evolve and change

themselves over time:

Ultimately, even if we have a sensible diagnosis that outlines the rootcauses of a particular conflict, addressing these root causes may no longerbe the most appropriate course of action in a post-conflict scenario, as thewhole context may have been transformed by the conflict itself and newcauses may have entered the picture.

51

Applying the rigid positivist template to peacebuilding in the current security

environment is beset by more problems than simply failing to capture the complexity of

new conflicts; it also tends to eclipse local understandings and interpretations of conflict

and peace.52 It is not difficult to imagine how this might seem unproblematic to those

who reify scientific methods and fancy their own analysis to be value-free. Upon

considering the practical simplicity of positivist frameworks in relation to the messiness

of real conflict, one is immediately struck by how compelling objectivity is in theory and

how utterly unrealistic it is practice. In reality:

[demands that] the scope of security should be limited by establishingcriteria independent of specific worldviews are impossible to satisfy. Alldiscourses and practices of security, including ones own, are perforce

49 Fischer, 2004, p. 21.50 See for example Ana Cutter, Peace-Building: A Literature Review,Development in Practice, Vol. 15,No. 6, 2005, pp. 778-784.51 Harpviken and Skara, 2003, pp. 810-811.52 Richmond and Franks, 2007, p. 35, 46.


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socially and culturally positioned, and they are therefore inescapablyplural.53

The imposition a specific and particularistic conceptualisation of peace not only

compromises potential peacebuilding gains by having limited relevance for local people,it also undermines the credibility of intervening agencies by acting as a form of cultural

imperialism.54

It must be remembered that peace is not a condition in a social vacuum; it

is cultivated within and among communities of human beings. Therefore it makes no

sense to exclude the communities in question when setting the criteria for peacebuilding

success. However, this does not mean that peace theory imported by intervening actors is

of no use and should be discarded, far from it; peace theory as it has been developed in

numerous academic traditions and contributed to by the collective experience of many

practitioners is critical to informed peacebuilding policy. Instead, analysts and

practitioners should seek commonality between various local and external understandings

of what it means to have peace and what it takes to achieve it:

Such methods are not about challenging scholars to choose between eitherunhesitatingly imposing their theories upon other peoples or utterlydeconstructing them. Rather, these methods engage scholars in a processofrelating their own realities to those of others.55

Participation and community liaison are valuable tools insofar as they can accomplish

this by helping to identify parallels and areas of complementarity. However, these tools

must be accompanied by a wholehearted commitment to the principles of participation

and with the objective of empowerment, and not simply delivered as tick-the-box

technocratic cargo in which the square peg is mutilated until it fits in the round hole. A

positive step in this direction is the development of the Security Needs Assessment

Protocol (SNAP), which involves a rapid assessment of local security needs as identified

by local informants.56 In principle, SNAP balances the need for urgency in a postconflict

53 Kent, 2006, p. 345.54 See for example Christie, 2006, p. 11, and Neufeldt, 2007, p. 14.55 Kent, 2006, p. 347.56 Miller and Rudnick, 2008.


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crisis against the need for a comprehensive study of security requirements; time and more

testing in the field will reveal the breadth of its utility.57

The (post)conflict and security analysis that has been conducted in/on Cambodia has

had somewhat of a dystopian social character to it. It is frequently posited that the climate

of fear and mistrust engendered by the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge was so deeply

ingrained, and the ensuing destruction of social capital and village support networks was

so total, that the nature of kinship ties was fundamentally transformed and the

individuals trust in her neighbour permanently impaired.58

While decades of war and

genocide of the like experienced by Cambodia inevitably has profound and lasting social

impacts, including on community spirit and trust, the extent of this impact thirty years

later seems to be prone to exaggeration and construes the present-day Cambodian

demeanor as being hopelessly mistrustful. This may be partly explained by some analysts

uncritically extending the conclusions of a few field studiesconducted in remote parts

of the hinterland that have yet to see the change experienced in other parts of the country

or where community divisions were particularly strong during the warin order to apply

them to the whole of Cambodia.59 Thus, although the breakdown of social capital is an

ongoing problem in the aftermath of Cambodias war, more recent and more detailed

research has redirected attention toward two other social legacies: 1) Both the duration

and intensity of the conflict in Cambodia have contributed to the normalisation of violent

means of resolving disputes (a culture of violence); 2) State incompetence, corruption,

weak capacity and apparent impunity, together with the fact that many Cambodians

perceive the government as the central conduit for the history of violence they have

experienced, have contributed to an acute mistrust of agents of the state, particularly

in remote rural areas far from the checks and balances of Phnom Penh.60

57 Miller and Rudnick, 2008.58 See for example Eve Zucker, Transcending Time and Terror: The Re-emergence ofBon Dalien afterPol Pot and Thirty Years of Civil War,Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 527-546.59 Such as the Eve Zucker study referenced above.60 Mneesha Gellman, No Justice, No Peace? National Reconciliation and Local Conflict Resolution inCambodia,Asian Perspectives, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2008, p. 42. See also Robert Muggah and Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan (Eds.), Whose Security Counts? Participatory Research on Armed Violence and HumanInsecurity in Southeast Asia, report commissioned by Small Arms Survey and Nonviolence International,2003, p. 23.


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The autocatalytic nature of the former (autocatalytic because violenceif unchecked by

interventionbreeds more violence) and the persistent incidence of the latter have meant

that their significance has not been so diminished by the passing of years since the end of

the war. The fact that Cambodia experienced relatively little political violence during the

last election is an encouraging sign, however feelings of mistrust and resentment

persist.61

2.2: Basic and Comprehensive Peace

During the field research for this project, I asked all of the participants whether or not

they believed Cambodia had achieved peace, or if they believed peacebuilding to be an

ongoing process. Variation in responses often correlated to the proximity of participants

to government interests. Those more closely aligned with the government were adamant

that peace had been unequivocally achieved, and also expressed a belief that definitions

of peace should be clear, finite and limited to the absence of war. However, most

participants were more critical in their interpretations of peace and more ambivalent

about whether or not Cambodia had really achieved it. Many felt the need to create a

distinction between two different possible interpretations or measures of peace, which I

have called basic and comprehensive peace. Some participants referred to the difference

between negative and positive peace, others to external and internal peace, and some

referenced the Khmer concepts ofsantepheap and santran. These distinctions reveal a

common understanding about definitions of peace, if not a common language. The

fundamental difference is that where basic definitions are preoccupied with the absence

of violent conflict, comprehensive definitions emphasise thepresence of peace,

manifested not only in the provision of security but also in the realisation of rights and

development. The consensus among participants who offered this distinction was that

Cambodia had largely achieved basic peace following the cessation of large-scale

political violence in the late 1990s, however comprehensive peace remains elusive for a

variety of reasons including ongoing contamination with residual weapons.

61 Richmond and Franks, 2007, p. 45.


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Basic and comprehensive peace are necessarily imprecise categories, however a number

of generalised traits can be identified to help distinguish one from the other, as presented

in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Basic and Comprehensive Peace

Basic peacebuilding operations are epitomised by interventions of the early post-Cold

War era, including UNTAC, by their impact if not by their intent.62

Although such

peacebuilding initiatives ostensibly aim to transform war into politicsusually through

rapid democratisation and liberalisationthey rely heavily on a conflict managementapproach that maximises the role of peacekeeping forces to keep a lid on hostilities. 63

The locus of intervention tends to be at the macro-level of political and economic

62 Amitav Acharya, Conclusion: Asian Norms and Practices in UN Peace Operations,InternationalPeacekeeping, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2005, p. 146.63 Call, 2007, p. 29.


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institutions, and efforts are concentrated around reform and temporary capacity-

substitution.64 Efforts at building residual government capacities are for the most part

limited to developing and consolidating the military capacity for repression.65 External

peacemakers predominate and are typically preoccupied with politico-military elites.

Objectives and priorities are frequently and to a significant degree dictated by annual or

biannual project funding cycles resulting in planning uncertainties andultimatelyin

fatal short termism.66

Likewise, the measure of success is confined to short term criteria

(such as relapsing into conflict within five years) and the threshold for failure is high

(such as having so many thousand conflict deaths).67

Interventions are also time-bound

and often have inflexible deadlines, meaning an activity stops on dayx irrespective of

whether or not its objectives have been achieved. Perhaps most significantly, many basic

peacebuilding operations tend to emphasise reconstruction which, in the context of new

conflicts, may involve recreating the status quo ante bellum, and therefore the conditions

of violent conflict:

Re-construction implies that one reconstructs society to resemble what itwas like before the conflict. (...) Most of todays conflicts are subnational,and caused by the inability or the unwillingness of governments to ensurethat there is a recognition of equity, exemplified through structural,political and economic issues that serve all communities equally. To talk

of reconstruction in a post-settlement stage implies going back to a pastwhich exemplifies the very factors that created the conflict.68

Basic peace is underwritten by an ideological commitment to the liberal peace project

that privileges order and stability over equality, justice and rights.69

Irrespective of their

touted intentions and objectives, basic peacebuilding interventions tend to result in a kind

of temporary, virtual peace in which grassroots emancipatory change is postponed

indefinitely.70 From the outset security and insecurity are exclusively defined from the

outside and imposed inward. The neorealist security paradigm from which most concepts

64 See for example Dodson, 2006, pp. 244-252.65 See for example Booth, 2005.66 See for example Cutter, 2005, p. 783,67 See for example Cutter, 2005, p. 780.68 Fischer, 2004, p. 3.69 Call, 2007, p. 29.70 Richmond and Franks, 2007, pp. 27-48.


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and definitions are drawn emphasises the potential threat posed by sub-state insurgencies

to fragile transitional governments, and does not seriously consider the threats posed by

such governments to their client populations.71 As a result, the needs and concerns of

individuals and communities are essentially desecuritised in the service of a national,

elitist security agenda. Similarly, postconflict development is usually captured by

neoliberal reform with its hallmarks of privatisation, liberalisation and structural

adjustment and its associated deficits in social spending.72

The devastating impact of such

reforms on fragile postconflict economies (which usually differ little from conflict

economies) does not need to be reiterated here; the point is that grassroots human

developmenta process that requires long term commitment and local partnershipis

sacrificed at the altar of rapid macro-level stabilisation.73

Human rights are generally not

considered at all because Rights-Based Approaches (RBA) are perceived as being too

complex, theoretical or ethnocentric to be realistically applied in postconflict contexts.

The large-scale violation of human rights is instead accepted as an inevitable symptom of

the postconflict condition.74

None of this is to say that basic peace cannot be an improvement from the horror and

chaos of violent conflict. However, basic peace rarely represents lasting change other

than for elites and other potential spoilers who are bought off, and without meaningful,

concrete and sustainable improvements on the ground where violence occurs, any

positive impacts of basic peace will surely be temporary. It is widely held that in the

aftermath of conflict, a significant proportion of energies that were invested in fighting

are simply redirected to other violent activities (such as armed crime).75 However,

considering the prominence of wartime shadow economies maintained by combatant

participation in criminal activities, such a redirection is little more than a semantic one;

observers might call the same activity conflict violence or violent crime depending on

whether or not the context is during conflict or postconflict, but how much difference

does that really make to the victim, or to the perpetrator? Interventions that simply

71 Booth, 2005.72 See for example Richmond and Franks, 2007, pp. 27-48.73 Heiko Nitzschke and Kaysie Studdard, The Legacies of War Economies: Challenges and Options forPeacemaking and Peacebuilding,International Peacekeeping, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2005, pp. 222-239.74 Richmond and Franks, 2007, p. 30.75See for example Nitzschke and Studdard, 2005, pp. 222-239.


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rename a situation (or systematically redefine the criteria of success until they meet it)

rather than actually seeking to change a situation cannot sensibly be called

peacebuilding.

By contrast, a comprehensive definition of peace pays attention to the security,

development and rights of communities and the individuals therein. Concepts of peace as

an aspirational goal or indefinite process do not serve as justifications for indefinite

intervention; rather they reflect an awareness of the fact that any plan for the long term

realisation of peace must be a long term one:

that while there is considerable knowledge about what makes forsuccessful peace-building, these lessons have not been entirely learned orinstitutionalised in terms of strategic planning for post-conflict operations

and how programmes are implemented. A lesson common to all theliterature is the need for sustained attention. Peace processes are not one-to two-year events. It takes ten years or more for the objectives of thepeace agreement to be ingrained in society.76

At the heart of comprehensive peace is the recognition that human security, human

development and human rights are manifestations of a fourth human discourse: needs,

and that all of these are interdependent and indivisible.77

An environment in which

security is provided, development facilitated and rights protected not only undermines the

structural logic of violent conflict, it makes possible the transformation of episodic

conflict in human relationships into creative compromise and other positive channels.

Conversely, an environment in which security is compromised, development obstructed

or rights violated is often conducive to the normalisation of violent systems of conflict

and dispute resolution.78

Peacebuilding interventions that do not take steps to reverse all

of these negative trends will likely fail to differentiate their phase of postconflict

operations from previous phases of conflict. This in turn is unlikely to dissuade

combatants from violent activities, especially when there is a widespread perception

characteristic of new conflictsthat membership in belligerent factions is one of few

76 Cutter, 2005, p. 783.77 Gasper, 2007.78 See for example Muggah and Moser-Puangsuwan, 2003, p. 23.


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available avenues offering relative security and economic opportunities.79 An atmosphere

of insecurity also creates opportunities for spoilers who have benefited from wartime

shadow economies (such as trafficking in SALW, narcotics, minerals and people) and

whose material interests are heavily invested in the continuation of violence.80 Of course,

the continuation of violent conflict further undermines human security, development and

rights, instigating an autocatalytic process of social disintegration that puts peace (by

anyones definition) firmly out of reach.

Because the security, development and rights of individuals and communities are

indivisible and interdependent and because serious deficiencies in any one of these may

be enough to catalyse a degenerative cycle of perpetual insecurity, their protection is

integral to comprehensive peace. Traditionally, the separation of security, development

and rights actors roughly coincided with their associated disciplines; security was

claimed by political science, development by economics and rights by law. Contributing

to the increasing convergence of these agendas in the 1990s was the advent of human

development and human security as additions to the older human discourses of human

rights and human needs. The interdependence of these concepts means there is an

inevitable overlap between their respective jurisdictions, thus locating a specific issue on

the security-development-rights continuum will usually depend on the type of language

invoked; for example, a human development narrative on caloric intake could just as

easily be constructed as a discussion of food security, or of the human right to nutritious

food. It should be emphasised that far from making these concepts redundant, multiple

overlaps actually reveal a need for considering an issue from multiple perspectives.

While narrow definitions might be useful in establishing clear mandates, they also carry

the risk of areas of overlap always being considered someone elses problem if they are

not clearly captured by any one definition or concept.81

An indication of the growing awareness of the convergence and interdependence of

security, development and rights is the identification of six types of security now

79 See for example Nordstrom, Carolyn. Backyard Front, in Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin (Eds.),The Paths to Domination, Resistance and Terror, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.80 Nitzschke and Studdard, 2005, pp. 222-239.81 SAS, 2002. p. 158.


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frequently used by many organs of the UN family; personal, political, economic, food,

health and environmental security.82 Each of these concepts represents a point of overlap

between human security, development and rights. Drawing together these concepts and

their overlaps, we now have all the ingredients of a basic recipe for comprehensive peace,

as illustrated in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Components of Comprehensive Peace

With the concerns of security, development and rights of all persons in postconflict

societies at its core, a comprehensive peacebuilding intervention seeks to transform a

culture of violence into a culture of peace. Thus peacebuilding activities are as concerned

with challenging structural violence as they are with maintaining order and stability.

Consideration of security, development and rights elicits the sustained attention necessary

82 See for example Taylor Owen and Olav Slaymaker, Toward Modeling Regionally Specific HumanSecurity Using GIS: Case Study Cambodia,Ambio, Vol. 34, No. 6, 2005, pp. 445-449.


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to achieving long term peacebuilding goals. Likewise, a long term perspective elevates

sustainability as an agenda priority, resulting in more effort directed at localisation and

capacity-building rather than temporarily substituting for government capacities.

Utilisation of pre-existing local structures has logistical benefits for service delivery, but

even more significantly it has the potential to nurture local government and civil society

organisations in a bottom-up process of peacebuilding to complement top-down

peacemaking.83

The confluence of all these attributes makes comprehensive

peacebuilding an altogether more durable, sustainable and emancipatory approach than

one that seeks merely to reduce factional fighting and episodic violence.

2.3 Comprehensive Peace Analysis

The need for comprehensive peacebuilding that pays attention to security, development

and rights is well established both in the literature on the subject and in the mandates,

mission statements and policy documents of numerous peacebuilding missions as far

back as UNTAC.84 However, peacebuilding actors demonstrate a remarkable capacity to

adopt the rhetoric of a comprehensive and holistic peace while remaining resistant to its

actual application.85 For some reason the lessons learnt from failed (basic)

peacebuildingand the record of failure is extensivedo not seem to have been

internalised by either peacebuilding actors or the international community at large.86 This

is evidenced by the enduring compartmentalisation of organisations and agencies that

align themselves exclusively with the security agenda, the development agenda or the

rights agenda, and fail to either see or acknowledge the common ground these agendas

share:

The arbitrary compartments of humanitarian activities and development do

not transfer well to real-world societies, where the fragility of peace andthe persistence of violence make it difficult to draw distinctions betweenthe conflict and postconflict periods. Humanitarian operations focus onquick response and short term planning, while development agencies are

83 See for example Skara and Harpvikken, 2003, pp. 809-822.84 Security Council Resolution 745 (1992), adopted unanimously at the 3057th meeting, February 28 1992.85 See for example Cutter, 2005, p. 783.86 Ibid. p. 783.


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often slow and inflexible. Both tend to focus too much on mandates ratheron the needs of those affected by war and neither seems to rely on theknowledge and expertise of the other that may help improve operations.

87

The urge to focus on a particular activity with no regard for what other agencies are

doing is understandable, especially in the convoluted aftermath of new conflicts where

even otherwise simple tasks might seem impossibly complex. However, this myopic

approachoften accompanied by a mind your own business attitude toward inter-

agency cooperationinvites decision-making processes based on the structures and

capabilities of the intervening agency rather than on the espoused needs of those

receiving assistance.88

This obviously diminishes the value of the peacebuilding

intervention from the perspective of those living in the postconflict zone and may even

make a situation worse, as illustrated by the case of El Salvador where rivalry among

agencies delivering out-of-step programmes and competing for the attention of the

populace severely weakened the peacebuilding process.89

Using a CPA-type framework to consider threats from multiple angles allows an

understanding of how any given activity fits into an overarching agenda of peacebuilding,

highlights areas of overlap, complementarity and sites of potential cooperation between

intervening agencies, and might lay the foundation for a risk-management strategy.

Anticipating the potential effectsadverse or otherwiseof a peacebuilding intervention

on the security, development and rights of individuals and communities allows an

intervening agency to plan and coordinate in such as way as to give sustainable,

comprehensive peace the best possible chance. This means not only maximising the

direct impact of activities but also taking advantage of the added value of parallel,

complementary interventions. CPA will be used in this thesis to consider the threats to

peace posed by residual weapons and the peacebuilding impact of programmes that seek

to address them, using a simple table mapping security, development and rights

dimensions and overlap (such as the one below).

87 Fischer, 2004, p. 7.88 Cutter, 2005, p. 782, and Acharya, 2005, p. 149.89 Dodson, 2006, pp. 245-246.


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Figure 3: CPA Threat Mapping

The purpose of this kind of analysis is not to derive a detailed blueprint of intervention,

but to expand thinking on a particular activity beyond its traditional disciplinary

confinements and operational compartmentalisation. In light of the neoliberal flavour of

many post-Cold War peacebuilding operations, it would not be surprising for the reader

to conflate an intervention that sought to address all the multiple threats to peacebuilding

simultaneously with the complete and rapid overhaul of existing institutions, or a kind of

peacebuilding shock therapy. However, one can easily make a distinction between the

rhetoric of such interventions, which may reference or invoke the language of security,

development and rights, and their actual implementation which largely ignores them.

There is also a danger that comprehensive peace may be misinterpreted as demanding a

panacea, but considering even the simple fact that a CPA framework accepts the long

term necessity of peacebuilding, we can clearly see that this is not the case. It is

unrealistic to expect security, development and rights to be immediately realised, but is

not unrealistic to expect specialised agencies in each of these fieldsor in related or

overlapping areasto take measures to coordinate their efforts and thus maximise their

impact:

With many small interventions, even if they have continuity to them, theydo not necessarily connect to each other. Trying to plan something


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systemic is pretenti

Documents

Residual Weapons and the Politics of In Security