Research on the front line

Advising on peace settlements in countries ranging from Georgia and Moldova to Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo, the Cambridge–Carnegie Project has been combining cutting-edge academic work with practical action for over a decade. Now supporting negotiations to implement the January 2011 referendum result in southern Sudan, the research effort involves an international team comprising 40 leading specialists in ethnic conflict around the world.

War: the only remedy?

The struggle for ethnic identity and national self-determination has been a persistent cause of internal conflict since the conclusion of the Cold War. Instead of a world dominated by proxy wars fuelled by superpower competition, internal conflicts have claimed more and more victims and international attention. The dreadful disasters of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Caucasus, Rwanda, the Great Lakes Region and Sri Lanka were only the most prominent examples of this fact. Some 40 other internal conflicts remained active or re-ignited during this period.

Conflicts over who controls the state are difficult enough to settle. The United Nations (UN) and African Union have attempted to address this issue in Liberia and Sierra Leone for several decades now. Only very recently, Cote d’Ivoire was added to this list along with the crises over governance in Egypt, Bahrain and Lybia.

However, when the contestation over state power is combined with a quest for ethnic dominance within the state, or with a demand for formal autonomy or even secession, the conflict has traditionally been deemed unresolvable. The international system has been very reluctant to involve itself in what was regarded as essentially a domestic matter potentially affecting the very existence of the state concerned. Short of international action, the only remedy has traditionally been war.

Some 70 self-determination conflicts outside of the colonial context have been fought since 1945. Up to the end of the Cold War, only a handful of these were ultimately settled through peace agreements. The others either continued, sometimes over decades (Burma), or were eventually terminated by way of decisive victory for the central government (Biafra).

A new departure was possible in the early days of the New World Order that was envisaged around 1990. UN-sponsored peace settlements in Namibia, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique and Central America seemed to demonstrate that peace was, after all, possible. In other instances, the outbreak of internationally unacceptable violence demanded international action – in relation to Kosovo in 1999, even to the point of significant military engagement by NATO.

It was at this point that the Centre of International Studies, in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), launched its major international project addressing internal peacemaking. The Cambridge–Carnegie Project commenced in 2000, with the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and is still ongoing.

In Kosovo, for instance, the research team was involved in the official Ahtisaari mediation and the eventual drafting of the constitution for independent Kosovo. Indeed, more or less the entire system of minority governance – a particularly sensitive issue in the country – was designed by the members of the Project, from the law on the protection of national minorities to the statute of the Presidential Minority Consultative Council.

Complex power-sharing

Although independent statehood is no longer precluded as a negotiation outcome, the Cambridge–Carnegie team has however mainly focused on attempts to ensure the continued territorial integrity of existing states. Towards this end, a step-by-step approach was adopted, commencing with path-breaking work on the doctrine and practice of complex, internationally supported power-sharing as an alternative to secession.

Power-sharing aims to dilute unipolar sovereignty allocated only to the central institutions of the state. Instead, public authority is distributed widely among regions and stakeholder groups. This is backed up by modest autonomy for territorially compact ethnic groups, by a strong human and minority rights regime, and by provision for the equitable sharing of state resources. Moreover, cross-border co-operation is encouraged, along with international stabilisation measures during the initial phase of conflict transformation.

In a further phase of the Project, we considered independence options more particularly, including the creation of complex, asymmetrical autonomy options. Asymmetrical autonomy retains the overall structure of the central state, but grants strong devolved autonomous powers to some regions.

The next major area to be addressed concerned the ways and means of enhancing political participation of non-dominant groups in the state. As opposed to majoritarian democracy, which asserts that the majority group in a state makes the decisions, we explored and developed softer forms of state design that enable numerically smaller groups to gain influence in public life, encouraging them to develop a sense of shared ownership of the state. And, in a new phase of the Project, we are now considering the use of human and minority rights mechanisms within threatened states as a means of achieving stability.

Our raw material, which has resulted in several major books¹, will be available through an online database on ethnic peace settlements, to be launched later this year. And, in a major new development, we shall be leading the effort to develop model clauses for internal peace settlements, along with practical guidance for mediators and the parties engaged in negotiations, for the UN.