rogermacginty

There was an arresting comment at the Alliance for Peace/United States Institute for Peace conference last week: “Neuroscientists are the new rock stars of peace studies”. It was made by a leading figure in a US policy and practice organization. As such, it is important. A number of people suggested that if this person deems this topic important then other people, organizations and resources will follow. The herd leader has spoken. The herd will follow.

Basically, advances in neuroscience are suggesting that the impetus for violence is often chemical-biological and there are interventions (basically peace drugs) that can – in some circumstances – deter individuals from violent acts. I won’t pretend to have expertise on the science, but my sceptical antennae were immediately raised by the prospect of administering some sort of ‘peace serum’ to the pro-government militias in Sudan who are engaged in extreme violence against civilians.

Maybe such drugs would work, but it seems just too simple. For a start it – yet again – locates the ‘solution’ to the world’s problems among the technologically advanced peoples of the global north – where the largest pharmaceutical companies are based. The idea of a peace drug replaces the white saviour complex with a chemists in white coats complex. Secondly, if private pharmaceutical companies stand to gain from the development of peace drugs then what are the ethical restraints on them gaming the system – fomenting conflict in order to magically appear on the sidelines to offer their pacific (and profitable) services?

Thirdly, the idea of peace drugs shifts attention away from all of those contextual socio-economic factors that cause and sustain violent conflict: unequal trading relationships, global capital that moves without responsibility, national and international elites who are spectacularly corrupt and exploitative. To concentrate on peace drugs risks taking attention away from the structural issues that often implicate us in the global north in the political economies of war and peace. Fourthly, can these drugs differentiate between the precipitants of actual violence (imminent direct violence) and support for violence by others? It is not only the violent actors (individuals and members of militaries) who are responsible for violence but also the long chain of enablers that includes arms manufacturers, politicians, and voters. To put it bluntly, would a peace drug administered to Tony Blair in the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq have helped to avert the tens of thousands of deaths he is responsible for?

And then there are a range of practical and ethical questions about who would have access to these drugs, who would administer them, what level of consent would be involved, who would make the bio-ethical decisions (clinicians or judges or politicians or military actors) ….?

So there is an endless list of questions, but I get the impression that some of those who would consider themselves to be connected to peace studies are about to go off on a wild goose chase. Every dollar and hour invested in that is a dollar and hour not invested in thinking about poverty, inequality, the arms trade, militarism, bad choices by political leaders …

I have been reading yet another WWII memoir. This one is Fighting through to Kohima: A memoir of war in India and Burma by Michael Lowry. It is a great reminder that WWII was not all about direct confrontations between the British, United States, Russians, Germans and Japanese. WWII as rendered by Hollywood often boils down to brave GIs, dastardly German prison guards, wily U-Boat commanders, beastly Japanese, stiff upper lip Brits and a cannon-fodder Red Army. The highly localised nature of this global war is often overlooked.

There are some good ‘home front’ movies, that do something to redress the massive gender imbalance of representations of WWII, but again these tend to concentrate on the perspectives of the principal Atlanticist players: the UK, France, US, and Germany.

Lowry’s memoir is pretty standard fare of WWII memoirs go. It is largely a-historical and unreflective – a narrative of what happened when he was a young man. But his account of his time in North West India – the border country of present day Afghanistan and Pakistan is startling (to me at any rate) for bringing to the fore a forgotten front. The British fought against a continuous Afghan insurgency in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Most of the casualties were ethnic Indian soldiers of the British Army so received little attention in the UK – this was especially the case since the UK was facing its own existential threat from 1940.

There were some fears that various Afghan tribes would ally themselves with the Germans, but the real motivation behind Afghan tribal militancy was unrelated to WWII. Tribal groups were pushing back against Britain’s unfinished state-making process in greater India. They were jockeying for position (as allies or foes of the British and their local proxies) and seeking to maximise rents.

The parallels with today – and the on-going pacification of Afghanistan – are plain. The text echoes the current anti-Taliban counterinsurgency. The British government had ‘political agents’ in the field. In today’s parlance these are stabilisation officers. There was a mis-match of capabilities – the tribes relied on captured and home-made weaponry – the British and their proxies had artillery and an air force. Not unlike the situation today in which the international coalition have drones, spy-planes and all sorts of hi-tech weaponry at their disposal. The weather matters and has a direct impact on the movement of troops and the timing of offensives. The depictions of how local people live are securitised: ‘Most villages and houses in these tribal areas were strongly built with walls some two feet thick … invariably a village would have a watch tower’. In the modern era were have seen a similar securitisation of Afghan housing – with the Taliban having ‘compounds’ – rather than houses. There were collective punishments and house demolitions. While this has not been a much reported feature of the post-2001 wars in Afghanistan, it is clear that entire villages have been destroyed by the US-led coalition.

Lowry’s book is a good reminder that WWII contained multiple insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. It was not all set-piece battles between the principal actors. Modern day Ukraine, Indonesia, Iran, Burma and many other places saw apparently local disputes become part of a much wider conflict. These tend to have been written out of the dominant histories of WWII.

A podcast interview with me talking about Writing About Violence From 19 minutes and 35 seconds you can hear an interview with me talking about Writing About Violence. It was recorded after I gave a talk on that topic at Kings College London.

In a blog post earlier this week I wrote about the possibility of the mid-size parties in Northern Ireland doing something brave and courageous: stepping outside of their guaranteed cabinet positions in the Northern Ireland Assembly and becoming opposition parties. I forecast that none of the mid-sizd parties (the Ulster Unionists, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and the Alliance Party) would have the bravery to do this. But, lo and behold, the UUP have decided to become an opposition party. It is a very brave move. It puts pressure on the SDLP and Alliance to justify their stance of propping up a deeply dysfunctional and sectarian Assembly.
I probably disagree with the UUP on most things, but on this issue they have made a very brave decision and Mike Nesbitt has shown leadership.