The next (and possibly most important) strand of the evolution of the understanding of peace is the civil peace. According to this approach, every individual in society has the capacity to mobilize for peace from a variety of different perspectives, whether for disarmament, for international cooperation, or against violence, discrimination, and oppression. It relates to the historical phenomena of social direct action for political, economic, and identity reasons, of citizen advocacy and mobilization, in the attainment or defence of basic human rights and values. It is also related to pacifism in its main forms, where civil action is non-violent in principle. It has been strongly influenced by a wide range of social mobilization dynamics. Without the civil peace and its social forms of mobilization, international and constitutional frameworks would not be able to connect with ordinary people in order to represent their interests, identities, needs, and aspirations.
The civil peace often arises from localized organizations and their campaigns, which are normally connected transnationally to other similar movements around the world. Civil society develops as local organizations, communities, and political actors coalesce around the various dynamics and requirements of social justice. It has often represented a direct and open challenge to structural and direct violence embedded in the hierarchies of the state system or within society itself (i.e. a negative peace). It was crucial in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when civil campaigns against slavery, for the vote, welfare, disarmament, and for women’s enfranchisement had a very significant impact on the nature of the state and who was represented or who controlled politics legitimately.
Social and advocacy movements began to emerge on a large scale during the 19th and 20th centuries. Two distinct pathways can be observed, including secular or religious orientations. They may have been derived from the secular emergence of liberal internationalism, associated with campaigns against conscription, ideological and feminist movements against war and for conventional disarmament, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, and environmental movements. Many resistance movements have also described themselves as peace movements, whether they were resisting authoritarian or colonial rule.
It is also important to note the significance of the American Revolution, which from 1774 rejected European aristocratic forms of leadership, in favour of republicanism and liberalism, and the French Revolutions from 1789, which saw the monarchy replaced by popular mobilization for similar principles of equality, citizenship, democracy, secularism, and basic human rights. These revolutions sought to devolve power to the population away from the lineage of royalty or colonialism, to attain personal freedom and representative government. Consequently, in the light of the realization of the potential of the political role of the individual and the possibilities of mass mobilization, often in non-violent ways, non-state actors began to gain a significant political role. This was not just by campaigning for more rights but also in responding to conflict, specifically in the context of human rights, multiple forms of discrimination, and humanitarian assistance.
Momentum grew in the 19th century through the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the mobilization of various social justice oriented movements, the abolition of the slave trade by the English Parliament in 1807, the campaigns for and introduction of voting rights for women (which began first in Sweden in 1718), the development of international law, and the growing popularity of disarmament campaigns. Many other activities organized by non-state actors were aimed at political, social, and economic reform.
Pacifist movements are sometimes related also to various long-standing peace churches, notably the Quaker and Mennonite movements, dating back to the 16th century. They have made an important contribution, as have public debates about non-violent resistance, the actions of conscientious objectors, civil disobedience, and even various forms of anarchism, especially in the 20th century. These dynamics formed an important strand of the evolving debate on how the civil peace could be achieved.
As international humanitarian law gradually influenced the state’s understanding of war, this reinforced a more inclusive discourse of peace within the international system. By the 20th century, individuals had begun to lobby elites, leaders, and officials for peace in an organized manner. Partly because of such mobilization, The Hague peace conferences of 1899 and 1907, the International Court of Justice, and the 1910 and 1913 Universal Peace Congresses all pointed to the need for international law, self-determination, and an end to colonialism. Non-state actors were directly involved with the International Labour Organization from its establishment, and though they were excluded from The Hague Conferences in 1899 and 1907, their very exclusion was also an acknowledgement of their significance. Later, the League of Nations also provided non-state actors with informal consultative status. Such developments illustrate that there was a realization that peace could only be constructed if civil society was directly involved.
Such organizations soon began to proliferate: the International Rescue Committee (IRC) began its life rescuing Jews from Europe during World War II, and was later to be involved with retrieving Hungarian refugees after the failure of the 1956 uprising and Cuban refugees after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959. Other such organizations followed, including the Catholic Relief Service, World Vision, and the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (OXFAM).
Such efforts put positive forms of peace at the forefront of international and academic thinking. There was a growing recognition of the requirement of social justice for individuals and communities, and not just treaties or disarmament for or between states if peace was to be both just and sustainable. These were beginning to uncover the more subtle forms of power that blocked peace. These forms include bias towards hegemonic or elite interests, or towards the state or markets over society. They influenced the way power was exercised, the nature of the state and international community, and so the form of peace that was coming into being.
This view of a positive peace for civil society had an impact on the international system too. The Non-Aligned Movement, for example, wanted to propose an alternative approach to politics and development during the Cold War. This view was quietly influential, and the movement now includes nearly two-thirds of the UN’s member states.
Non-governmental organizations played an important role in highlighting the need for human rights to be included in the UN Charter at San Francisco in 1945, and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They have been significant in advocating for, and drafting, different UN treaties and conventions spanning issues from the elimination of discrimination against women (1979) to the rights of children (1989). They have played important roles in many other human rights-related UN working groups, as well as in the creation of the position of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Humanitarian law provides the legal context in which NGOs operate. One of the key early examples of contemporary humanitarianism was the Biafra crisis of 1968, when the Igbo people attempted to secede from Nigeria, causing the Nigerian Civil War. Despite their challenge to the sovereignty of Nigeria during this crisis, humanitarian aid NGOs mobilized regardless of international disapproval. This was repeated several times during the 1970s, in various crises in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Cambodia. Civil societies and NGOs were beginning to mobilize around the world to advocate for human rights, democracy, and emergency humanitarian assistance for the victims of war.
From these strands developed a powerful body of actors, and a development of a language of rights and norms that undermined the absolutism of Westphalian sovereignty and reinforced the view that individuals had legitimate rights for security, basic needs, autonomy, and to their own identity. International organizations and NGOS might intervene if states proved unable or unwilling to protect their own citizens.
There are now so many NGOs around the world it is almost impossible to count them, especially those local NGOs working in post-conflict and development contexts. The most familiar international NGOs working on peacebuilding and human rights include International Crisis Group, International Alert, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Amnesty International, for example, was founded in 1961, part of the huge international human rights movement that was emerging. The Helsinki Final Act reflected the growth of civil society movements, NGOs, and the support of human rights in 1975.
Many NGOs formed in the 1990s as a response to the broad requirements of the synthesis of peacebuilding, humanitarianism, human rights monitoring, and advocacy. They were to support a burgeoning civil society in post-conflict zones, which would then form the basis for a social contract and the liberal peace. It was partly because of civil society activism for human rights that humanitarian intervention emerged, meaning that states may now intervene in the affairs of other states for humanitarian reasons.
Organizations like ICRC, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and the International Crisis Group (ICG), among many others, have also played an important role in other aspects of civil society, development, and assistance. NGOs are now a recognized part of the UN system, hold consultative status within the United Nations’ platform on economic and social issues ECOSOC, and are an integral part of the humanitarian discourse. Under Article 71 of the UN Charter, ECOSOC is empowered to consult with NGOs on economic and social issues, as well as on matters relating to refugees, the environment, and development. This is particularly important in the context of debates about human security and the emergence of a ‘global civil society’, meaning that there is solidarity across the world’s societies which may support peace and security where states fail.
However, humanitarian assistance may have contradictory effects. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), created in 1949 to provide relief and development for more than 5 million Palestinian refugees after the 1948 and 1967 wars in the Middle East, fulfilled an important role in aiding Palestinian refugees. Nevertheless, there is also a strong argument that it has supported the Israeli occupation by helping to maintain the post-war status quo.
Since the end of the Cold War numerous forms of conflict resolution, citizen diplomacy, and informal forms of mediation have emerged as a result of civil society actors and capacities,often supported by international donors in places such as Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Israel/Palestine, and Northern Ireland. As a result, understandings of peace in policy and in practice have begun to include an everyday dimension of peace. This means that it is not enough to have a ceasefire or a peace treaty at the state level, but that society must also be safe to conduct everyday life. NGOs have become important actors in these processes, especially where they provide conflict resolution capacities, early warning of a possible impending conflict, and construct the institutions necessary for democratization and the rule of law to become integral to an emerging peace.
For example, two London-based organizations, Conciliation Resources and International Alert, work on the premise that the denial of human rights leads to conflict and they support local solutions to conflicts. The Carter Center, based in Atlanta, Georgia (USA), also operates on issues related to democratization, human rights, and conflict resolution. Organizations like International Crisis Group, based in Brussels, seek to report on, advocate, and draw attention to conflicts all over the world. Such organizations often draw on the funding of international donors and work closely with the UN, as well as with local NGOs, governments, and other actors in conflict and post-conflict zones around the world.
In addition, organizations such as UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) endeavour to connect international peace institutions to the civil peace. It has worked in a range of areas on developing a culture of peace, from education to gender and children’s rights. This attempt to connect civil society and NGOs to international organizations aims to support a culture of peace across all levels.
At the end of the Cold War, a series of UN General Assembly resolutions called for humanitarian assistance to victims of emergencies and natural disasters, for access for accredited agencies, the establishment of relief corridors, and the establishment of the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs to coordinate humanitarian intervention (though bound to the rules of sovereignty). Furthermore, during the Kurdish crisis in northern Iraq, UN Security Council Resolution 688 of 5 April 1991 facilitated humanitarian intervention involving a number of NGOs. In Bosnia, Security Council Resolution 771 of 13 August 1992 called for humanitarian organizations to have unimpeded access, but it became a point of controversy between the opposing sides in the war. However, during the collapse of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the international community found it very difficult to offer humanitarian assistance while the war was still in process. Similarly, in Somalia, after the collapse of the state in 1991, the UN was supposed to create conditions for the strengthening of civil society and offer humanitarian relief operations. The UN Secretary General’s Special Representative attempted to bring in NGOs to facilitate this in order to involve local groups in the peace process. Similar patterns of subcontracting essential assistance for civil society were also tried in Haiti, Rwanda, and in Liberia, among many others during the 1990s, with varying degrees of success.
The civil peace has had a significant impact on world affairs; it implies a more positive form of peace can be created, and also that different societies may have different aspirations or understandings of peace. It has driven the development of a range of rights and important UN conventions. These included among others the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948; the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948; the Convention on the Political Rights of Women in 1952; the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960; the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1966; the Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace in 1984; and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. There have been many conventions, all aimed at producing a more positive form of peace in which institutions and states act in the interests of their citizens. They also point towards a hybrid form of peace.
The Millennium Assembly of the UN in 2000 and the Millennium Development Goals followed this logic. The UN agreed to focus on achieving the following goals by the year 2015: eradicating extreme poverty, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, and, finally, ensuring environmental sustainability and establishing a global partnership for development.
Not one of the targets set has so far been reached, but much progress has been made.
Many other non-governmentally influenced international campaigns have aimed to improve the lot of the peoples of the world. Such civil peace campaigns, in unison with international institutions, have highlighted the importance of avoiding the creation of dependency, being sensitive to the needs of local ownership, and being careful not to offend local or district officials and governments. They adhere to the injunction ‘do no harm’, often now written into the mandates of various international organizations.
Such dynamics mean that civil society actors are often described as ‘norm entrepreneurs’. They privilege democracy, human rights, and forms of development in their micro-level interventions in society as well as in the realm of international relations. They contribute to a local, grassroots peace, based upon local community consent and legitimacy in the context of a global, transnational civil society of networks between civil society organizations. The work of OXFAM, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and many other groups concerned with issues like development and human rights, contributes to the civil peace.
Conversely, some commentators argue that NGOs and non-state actors are thinly veiled fronts for powerful state interests, in that they are dependent on state funding and so support state interests, particularly with respect to foreign policy, trade, and the extraction of primary resources such as oil. Donor states, agencies, and IFIs generally subcontract work to NGOs precisely because of their access to, and legitimacy within, civil society, and also because humanitarian, social, educational, conflict resolution, and developmental tasks play a significant role in the reconstruction of the state. Sometimes, however, it may be the case that organizations in civil society represent views and groupings opposed to peace, such as those resting on nationalist or sectarian identities or links, or engage in unequal and exploitative relationships with other socio-economic groups in society.
The development and mobilization of the civil peace and its civil society actors has helped alter the nature of the state from one that was often feudal or authoritarian to one that was more democratic, observing the rights of its diverse citizens, and also working for a modicum of equality between them. Many states, subject to civil and international pressure in the last century or more, eventually changed their focus from predatory behaviour at the expense of their own citizens, or territorial aggrandizement, to providing a degree of welfare and equality enshrined in law. This follows the old idea of a progressive, liberal social contract between citizen and state, but also indicates the citizen’s capacity to campaign for change and reform at the international level.
These developments have enabled a re-envisioning of peace since the latter part of the 20th century, making a necessary contribution to the liberal peace. It depends on a range of processes in close association with major donor states (mainly northern states), international organizations like the UN, agencies like the United National Development Programme (UNDP) or United National High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), or the World Bank. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Trade Organization, among many others, now encourage state relationships with civil society (even if some critics would argue that unmitigated capitalism undermines civil society at the same time). Overall, however, this has further enabled the civil peace to develop from the bottom up and from within society.
Recent human security approaches follow this logic. They involve a commitment to a just and sustainable settlement to conflict, the reframing of security debates to include human security, and the involvement of external non-state actors and indigenous non-state actors. This concept has been widely accepted in key policy circles and in global civil society’s interconnected space that links civil society, NGOs, international agencies, and development donors.