“With commitment and vision, it is possible to build a bridge between potential partners and communities whose work is of relevance to peace-building initiatives.”
INTRODUCTION ON POLITICAL CONFLICT:– Political conflict is conflict perpetrated by people or governments to achieve political goals. It can describe violence used by a state against other states (war) or against non-state actors (most notably police brutality or genocide). It can also describe politically-motivated violence by non-state actors against a state (rebellion, rioting, treason or coup d’etat) or against other non-state actors. Non-action on the part of a government can also be characterized as a form of political violence, such as refusing to alleviate famine or otherwise denying resources to politically identifiable groups within their territory.Due to the imbalances of power between state and non-state actors, political violence often takes the form of asynchronous warfare where neither side is able to directly assault the other, instead relying on tactics such as terrorism and guerrilla warfare, and often include attacks on civilian or otherwise non-combatant targets that are perceived as a proxy for the opposing faction. Many groups and individuals believe that their political systems will never respond to their demands and thus believe that violence is not only justified but also necessary in order to achieve their political objectives.
POLITICAL CONFLICT BACKGROUND:– political conflict never disappears, the problems of creating and sustaining consensus are ongoing. One source of consensus is the development of mutual trust among political actors through incremental steps of cooperation (Axelrod 1984). Another is the incorporation of previously disadvantaged groups into the polity through a combination of political and economic changes. Finally, consensus develops through the process of socialization that transmits values from one generation to the next. Families and schools are important agents in this process. The degree to which political regimes self-consciously strive to inculcate a supportive consensus varies, but the increasing difficulty of controlling access to divergent values makes the success of such efforts fragile.
THE ROLE OF CONFLICT AND SECURITY STATISTICS IN RESEARCH:- Conflict and security statistics are primarily employed in research on the causes, dynamics, and structures of political conflicts. In addition, these statistics are relevant for the measurement of political regimes and political fragility as well as for early warning of political conflict and benchmarking of development aid policies. The most widely used dataset for analyzing the patterns of intranational conflicts are published by UCDP and PRIO. Of central importance are also the datasets by COW, MAR, PITF, as well as by Fearon and Laitin. While some articles refer to the original data, many add self-compiled data to suit their specific explanatory focus. This may be a hint to deficits regarding the main databases on political conflicts as they apparently do not always satisfy the needs of researchers. However, the existence of a multitude of datasets enables robustness tests. In fact, some research articles employ more than one dataset in statistically assessing their hypotheses.
CIVIL WAR:– In this conflict there was not only polictical war there was also civil war which as follows A civil war, also known as an intrastate war in polemology. is a war between organized groups within the same state or country. The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region or to change government policies. The term is a calque of the Latin bellum civil which was used to refer to the various civil wars of the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC.A civil war is a high-intensity conflict, often involving regular armed forces, that is sustained, organized and large-scale. Civil wars may result in large numbers of casualties and the consumption of significant resources. Most modern civil wars involve intervention by outside powers. According to Patrick M. Regan in his book Civil Wars and Foreign Powers (2000) about two thirds of the 138 intrastate conflicts between the end of World War II and 2000 saw international intervention, with the United States intervening in 35 of these conflicts. Civil wars since the end of World War II have lasted on average just over four years, a dramatic rise from the one-and-a-half-year average of the 1900–1944 period. While the rate of emergence of new civil wars has been relatively steady since the mid-19th century, the increasing length of those wars has resulted in increasing numbers of wars ongoing at any one time. For example, there were no more than five civil wars underway simultaneously in the first half of the 20th century while there were over 20 concurrent civil wars close to the end of the Cold War Since 1945, civil wars have resulted in the deaths of over 25 million people, as well as the forced displacement of millions more. Civil wars have further resulted in economic collapse; Somalia, Burma (Myanmar), Uganda and Angola are examples of nations that were considered to have had promising futures before being engulfed in civil wars.
INTRODUCTION OF ARMED CONFLICT :- the nature of armed conflict are Armed conflicts within States are political conflicts involving citizens fighting for internal change. Some are secessionist movements, generally spearheaded by a group of people, more often than not a minority within a community, who take up arms to fight for the establishment of either an autonomous entity within an existing state or an entirely new and independent state of their own. Fighting in most conflicts is usually intermittent, with a wide range in intensity. It usually occurs not on well defined battlefields but in and around communities, and is often characterized by personalized acts of violence, such as atrocities committed by former neighbours and, in extreme cases, genocide. In some cases, the fighting spills over to neighboring countries used by one of the parties in the conflict as supply routes or hideouts for combatants. Particularly disturbing is the increasing use of young children as soldiers. The Swedish Save the Children Fund reported that one quarter of a million children, some as young as seven, were used as soldiers in 33 armed conflicts in 1995 and 1996 alone. They worked as cooks, porters and messengers or participated in active combat as executioners, assassins, spies and informers. Regardless of what these child soldiers are assigned to do, they work in close proximity to combat. In Sierra Leone, abducted children were forced to witness or take part in the torture and execution of their own relatives. This made them outcasts in their villages and forced them to cling to rebel groups. Another effective tactic used by rebels to spread terror is the execution of the village chief by the youngest boy.
THE CAUSE OF ARMED CONFLICT :- Many complex factors lead to armed conflicts within States. Some conditions that increase the probability of war include the inability of Governments to provide basic good governance and protection for their own populations. In many instances, weak Governments have little capacity to stop the eruption and spread of violence that better organized and more legitimate Governments could have prevented or contained. Armed conflicts can also be seen as the struggle for power by a section of the elite that has been excluded from the exercise of power in authoritarian systems of one-party rule. Democratic Republic of the Congo, a number of complex factors, including the desire to get a share of the country’s rich potential wealth in minerals, especially diamonds and gold, have drawn six States in the region into a battle either for or against the Government. In Sierra Leone, control of the diamond mines by RUF has been a source of power and wealth for the rebel movement. Rebels, according to reports, purchased arms through the sale of diamonds and paid in diamonds Liberian soldiers who fought alongside their counterparts in the RUF/Armed Forces Revolutionary Council.
THE IMPACT OF ARMED CONFLICT IN SOCIETY:- Present-day internal wars typically take a heavier toll on civilians than inter-State wars, and because combatants increasingly have made targeting civilians a strategic objective.This disregard for humanitarian norms and for the Geneva Conventions on the rules of war also extends to treatment of humanitarian workers, who are denied access to victims in conflict zones or are themselves attacked. Societies ravaged by armed conflicts have paid a massive toll in loss of human life and economic, political and social disintegration. More than four million people are estimated to have been killed in violent conflicts since the fall of the Berlin Wall.United Nations humanitarian and development agencies have come to recognize the internally displaced as a distinct category of persons requiring attention. Since 1992, a representative of the Secretary-General has been monitoring the global situation of displaced persons. In 1994 the Office of the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator was formally designated as a reference point for requests for assistance and protection of internally displaced people. In his 1997 reform programme, the Secretary-General reaffirmed the responsibility of the Office for ensuring continued assistance to displaced people.21 There seems to be a growing recognition of the need for a comprehensive approach to the situation of refugees and internally displaced persons, given the sharp increase in the numbers of the latter and the problems they have in common with refugees.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN POLITICAL VS ARMED CONFLICT:- POLITICAL WAR:- 1. Political war may be combined with violence, economic pressure , subversion , and diplomacy , but its chief aspect is “the use of words, images and ideas”. The creation, deployment, and continuation of these coercive methods are a function of statecraft for nations and serve as a potential substitute for more direct military action. 2. Children are frequently abducted during the course of armed conflicts and displaced from their families and communities, with some being forced into the military against the provision of Article 38 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which limits the involvement of children under the age of 15 in any branch of the armed forces.3. Demographers and population scientists have generally approached population policy as a scientific question. However, as this article argues, population policy is determined as much by politics and ideology as it is by demographic data. Politics may be regarded as the lens through which demographic data is viewed.
ARMED CONFLICT:-1.In 2016, armed conflicts killed more than a hundred thousand people; countless survivors were maimed, tortured, raped, forcibly displaced, or otherwise seriously abused. By the end of 2016, 65 million people around the work remained displaced by armed conflict; the largest number ever recorded. 2. According to law Armed conflicts are governed principally by international humanitarian law (IHL), which is also known as the laws of war. IHL is a set of rules – either codified in treaties or recognized through custom – that limits the permissible behavior of parties to a conflict.3. All parties to the conflict must take measures to minimize harm to civilians and civilian objects (such as residential buildings, schools and hospitals), and must not carry out attacks that fail to distinguish between civilians and combatants, or which cause disproportionate harm to civilians.
CONCLUSION:- disrupted expectations cause conflict behavior,power shapes conflict,freedom minimizes violence,cooperation and conflict behavior are independent,change produces conflict,conflict takes place in a situation,individual perceptions and expectations condition conflict,sociocultural distances affect conflict. These empirical conclusions get their meaning and substance from a perspective on conflict. This is that:conflict is a process of establishing a balance of powers in a social field;peace, harmony, and cooperation are a structure of expectations congruent with a balance of powers;conflict tends to become less intense and frequent and peace more enduring.
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