October 17, 2023 • 53 mins
In the latest episode of the Conflict Tipping podcast from Mediate.com, meet Dr Louise Ridden, a specialist in nonviolence and Unarmed Civilian Protection. We talk about:
- What is Unarmed Civilian Protection? Where is it used?
- How does UCP 'happen' in conflicts?
- What is the role for mediation and mediators in UCP?
- False binaries in war and peace
- The role of peace-keeping and UCP in violent conflicts
- Spaces, bodies, and time in conflict
About Louise:
Louise Ridden is a postdoctoral research fellow working on the sustainable security practices project , hosted by the Politics Unit in the Department of Management and Business and Tampere Peach Research Institute (TAPRI). She holds a PhD from Aberystwyth University, UK, where she was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Her thesis 'Making alternative worlds: Unarmed civilian protection and nonviolent imaginaries of conflict' studied nonviolence as a way of knowing, doing, and being in armed conflict through the practice of unarmed civilian protection.
Her current research interests include: principles and practices of unarmed civilian protection, the politics of nonviolence, Feminist IR theory, existentialist theory, knowledge production, and the intersection of nonviolence and political narrations of embodiment, space, and temporality.
Connect with Louise:
- Twitter: @louise_ridden
- Faculty page: https://www.tuni.fi/en/louise-ridden
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:10):
Hello and welcome to the ConflictTipping podcast from Mediate.
com.
The podcast that explores socialconflict and what we can do about it.
I'm your host, Laura May.
And today I have with me Dr.
Louise Ridden.
She did her PhD at Aberystwythuniversity and is now a postdoctoral
research fellow working on sustainablesecurity practices at Tampere Peace
(00:32):
Research Institute in Finland.
She is interested in unarmedcivilian protection, the politics
of non violence, and feministinternational relations theory.
So welcome Louise!
Hi, Laura.
Thanks so much.
I'm very excited to have you herebecause you're also a twin in the
sense that we've both just movedcountries to take up new roles.
(00:55):
And so we're both in this zone ofchaos and yet we've come together
to talk about your research.
So first things first, what isUnarmed Civilian Protection?
So, Unarmed Civilian Protectionor UCP is a nonviolent method
of civilian to civilian andcivilian self protection in war.
(01:17):
So really what it is, is aboutdifferent ways for civilians to protect
themselves and each other and to buildkind of networks and communities and
practices of self protection within war.
So rather than necessarily waiting forexternal armed peacekeepers that can often
bring a lot of problems with them, UnarmedCivilian Protection is really a practice
(01:40):
that is centered around local actors whoget to decide kind of their own piece and
their own version of protection and whatthat looks like in that one community.
So it's really focused around communityrelationships, being locally led.
Things like early warning and earlyresponse mechanisms and kind of
conflict monitoring, understandingwhat's happening within the conflict.
(02:03):
And the main principles are being nonviolent, fundamentally non violent.
So civilians can't go away andget a mandate for weapons in the
way that peacekeepers maybe can.
And the primacy of local actors.
So it's not about having a big topdown peacekeeping mission that tries to
include local actors, which often meansyou have this off the shelf blueprint,
(02:27):
and then you have inclusion wherelocal actors can then come and sit at
the table and everyone feels better.
It's really not about that.
It's fundamentally locally led, and it'sfor civilians to protect the communities.
There's also this principleof creating space for peace.
So UCP isn't about creating peace initself, it's not about negotiating
(02:50):
a big peace settlement that willfix a conflict in a whole country.
But it's about reducing levels of directphysical violence against civilians to
give them the space to kind of exploreand pursue what peace might look like
.And can you give me a concrete example when UCP has taken place in
a country and what that's looked like?
(03:11):
Yeah, so it happens in lots of differentconflict affected areas, . So Nonviolent
Peace Force is the largest UnarmedCivilian Protection organization.
And they are operationalin many countries.
One country where they work is SouthSudan, and something that they do
is they have protective presenceand protective accompaniment roles.
(03:35):
So on a night you might havean international volunteer
and a national volunteer.
So someone that's originallynot from South Sudan and someone
who is, and they'll team up.
And they'll just do patrols of areas wherethere might often be violence or civilians
feel under threat and they talk to localpeople, they find out what's going on.
They make their presence knownthere and people know if they have
(03:58):
any issues or questions or feelunsafe, they can go and talk to them.
And a lot of that is about patrolling,but it's not a police patrol, they have
no weapons, but just making their presenceknown and there are people there to help
if you want them to be able to help.
And what they do is buildrelationships with people in all
(04:18):
different positions of power.
So they might build relationshipswith local authorities, with some
armed actors, with unarmed actors too.
So if, for example, someone needs toget to a hospital, but it's dangerous
for them to get there because UnarmedCivilian Protection practitioners
live and work within the communityand they know people really well.
They can often negotiate safepassage for people to receive
(04:41):
medical treatment and food and aid.
So they're not there providing the aidand they're not there with armoured
vehicle to push through areas of conflict.
But they make it known that theywill be coming through with civilians
who are not part of the conflict andthey're seeking aid and it's good
for everyone within the community toallow people to receive this aid.
(05:03):
And they have women's protections teamstoo, where women can do these patrols,
and that's, that's particularly helpful,especially around issues like gender based
and conflict related sexual violence.
When women go to collect fire water andwood, they're often at a higher risk
of things like sexual violence, andwhat will happen is UCP practitioners
(05:26):
and women's protection teams willaccompany the women that are doing that.
And then you have witnesses and youhave accountability and they're embedded
within the community structures.
So you have accountability notthrough violence but through
relationships and through communities.
And does this also happen in other places?
So in the US there's unarmed civilianprotection at the US Mexico border by
(05:49):
a few organizations, and also communityresponse teams within cities in the US
is something that's increasingly growing.
And some organizations like MetaPeace Team, for example, run what
they called bystander interventiontraining, where they train people in
non violent protection techniques.
(06:10):
And it can be things as simple asengaging in dialogue and distraction.
And the idea really is that you woulddo bystander intervention training, and
that doesn't mean you then fly off to aconflict zone that you know nothing about.
But if you're walking down the streetand you see the police harassing
someone, you have some kind of trainingand tools and you know what to do.
(06:32):
You know how to record what's happening,how to intervene if you should intervene.
Maybe you stand between people andput your body in the way, maybe you
don't, maybe you try to distract theaggressor and someone else takes the
person who's being harassed away.
So there's many different things thatcan happen but really it's not about
solving the core of conflict, it's justabout creating enough space that you can
(06:56):
reduce physical violence in the moment.
And how formal is it?
I mean, can I just decide formyself that as of today, I,
Laura May, am an unarmed civilianprotection officer or what have you?
Or is it something peoplesign up to or get training in?
Or is it something thathappens spontaneously?
(07:17):
How does it actually happen?
So it's really context dependent is ahuge part of UCP, which again is why
it's a big difference that we havefrom more traditional peacekeeping
practices that are rolled out.
So it's really context dependent.
And different organizations work quitedifferently but training is a really
(07:39):
important part of it so that no one wouldever advise you to go and physically
put your body in the way of a fight,not training and, you know, there,
So you're saying I can't go be avigilante that's not in my cards today.
that's not what I'm advising to do.
Thank you, Louise.
You know, I was in danger for a momentthere, but no, all right, you've
(08:00):
saved me from this course of action.
Thank
Yeah, so training is super importantto learn techniques and learn
your rights and human rights law.
All of these things are super important.
Also a knowledge and an understandingof the context that you're operating
within is really important as well.
Because conflict is so contextual andwhat UCP is trying to do is not solve
(08:23):
kind of geopolitical conflicts, but tojust provide safer spaces for civilians
to operate in and often, so conflictis something that's an experience.
Christine Sylvester says that we reallyneed to think of war as an experience.
It's something that people livethrough and they try to raise their
(08:43):
children and go to work and paytheir bills during armed conflict.
It's really this kind of thing thatwe feel and live through our bodies.
And that's, UCP really has akind of acknowledgement of that.
And it's really about relationshipsand relationships between people
and conflict and people andspaces and all of these things.
(09:04):
And so I was wondering in Unarmed CivilianProtection is there space for mediators?
I have to ask.
Is that a role that isactually used in that context?
So there's often kind of informalpractices of mediation, so again
UCP is not trying to mediate andnegotiate at this kind of state
(09:28):
level to then to say war is over,or dictate these kinds of terms.
But they might facilitatemediation within communities.
So, if there are two actors orgroups that are in conflict, then UCP
practitioners might act themselves, orthey might try to engage other people
(09:49):
in the communities, maybe religious orcommunity leaders, maybe older people.
People that have authority and statuswithin their community, they might try to
act and mediate between different parties.
And again, that often exists outside ofwhat is traditionally seen as this kind
of liberal democratic justice systemthat is often imposed and used to do
(10:14):
away with and replace more traditionaljustice practices and architectures.
So I think there is space for mediationand that definitely does happen, but
it's it's less formal again, becauseit's about community relationships and
reconciliation, which absolutely can besupported, but again, it's not top down
(10:34):
. I love how you framed this actually because it actually for me, captures
a bit of a, almost a centralconflict in mediation as a field.
Because I myself learned it in the contextof peace mediation, and I learned about
it theoretically and practically there.
And then I used to run the InternationalMediation Institute, and obviously
this podcast is now for Mediate.
(10:55):
com.
Where it's the other side of things,it's the people who mediate on a day
to day basis, whether it's corporate orfamily or community or what have you.
And so it's just fascinating to me becauseit sounds like in UCP, it's actually these
people who work on the day to day basiswith the families and with the community.
And that's the skill setthat's locally needed.
(11:16):
More than what we think of when wethink about peace mediation and sort of
diplomats' work or what have you, whichis, "oh, no, we'll solve this overall
conflict and sign a peace agreement.
Everything will be fine".
So, but to me, it also highlights thatthese groups need to work together
and to support, I guess, a processtogether in some way as well, right?
(11:36):
Yeah, absolutely.
And this is really abouteveryday experiences and everyday
pieces and everyday violences.
It's really zoomed in, but also,again, that's where conflict is
lived and enacted and practiced.
We talk about war, as though it hasa life of its own and it's an event,
but war happens when it's practiced,because people do the practicing.
(12:01):
Someone can send in military, but thereare people in that military that have
many different complex identitiesand relationships and they're not
just soldiers, they're also friendsand sisters and football players and
everything else that they might be.
So it's really justtaking down to this level.
Maybe they can mediatewith a local police chief.
(12:22):
That might not be in the peaceagreement, but maybe they know him and
they can figure things out that way.
Okay.
And so who else actuallydoes this work then?
There are organizations that haveformal projects that are happening.
So Nonviolent Peace Force, forexample, they will have kind of
(12:42):
head of country in each countrythat is responsible for staff there.
You often have a lot of volunteers,but volunteers have received a
lot of training and are part ofwider teams because obviously,
there's a principle of do no harm.
You don't just show up in a countryand hope that you can do something.
But also the kind of principlesbehind unarmed civilian protection
(13:05):
are something that means thatit can happen quite quickly.
And often when we talk about upscalingdifferent practices, what we usually
mean is how do we do it bigger?
So, my PhD thesis was originallysupposed to look at the possibilities
and limits of upscaling UCP.
And what that meant was, okay, it'shappening in five or six countries.
(13:26):
How do we make it happenin 10 or 20 or 30?
Do we go to the UN?
What do we do?
But quite quickly, I realized that justit didn't feel like the point to do that.
And also that I.
You know, it wasn't for me tosit very comfortably in mid
Wales and give instructions topeople of what they should do.
Because actually when practiceslike Unarmed Civilian Protection and
(13:49):
commitments to everyday peace practicesexpand, rather than being vertical and
getting into the UN or NATO or any ofthose things, they tend to be horizontal,
so they'll move from one town to thenext, one city to the next, maybe one
village, one family to the next family.
And it often spreadsorganically and horizontally.
(14:10):
So defining the strict boundaries ofthis is an Unarmed Civilian Protection
practice and this isn't is messyand blurry and there is a lot of the
practitioner community about that.
And Nonviolent Peace Force have hadthese big workshops where they've been
bringing practitioners from many differentcountries and there's often lots of
(14:30):
debates around different things andwhat constitutes UCP and what doesn't.
I think really the factors thatconstitute it are being local ownership,
the centrality of relationships andrelationship building and it being
non violent rather than just unarmed.
(14:50):
It's really a non violent practice andthere's a commitment to not only not
using arms but to never using them, wewill never take up arms, that isn't what
this practice is about, because it'sseeking to just reduce direct physical
violence and create spaces that civilianscan live some kind of normal life in
within wider areas of armed conflict.
(15:13):
I mean, as we're talking about theboundaries to what this is and is
not, I'm really struck by this,maybe slight tension, between what
you've just said in terms of this isabout preventing physical violence.
But at the same time, it's aboutsafe spaces and relationships
(15:34):
and building people together.
Is there also that element ofprotection from more intrinsic
types of violence, which, you know,it's the types of violence where
we're experiencing prejudicialbehavior against us, for instance,
or emotional violence towards us.
Is that also in the mix somehow?
(15:55):
Yeah, that's a really interestingquestion because there's a lot of debates
around the extent to which structuralviolences can be addressed through UCP.
Should they be addressed through UCP?
Is it possible?
Is it realistic?
What should the priorities be?
And there's a lot of people thatsay if we don't address structural
(16:18):
and systemic violences, then wecan never stop physical violences.
And often physical violences aremanifestations of, misogyny and
racism and homophobia and transphobia.
And unless we address these rootcauses, then how can we have non
violence ? And Kimberly Hutchings talksabout ethical political pacifism, but
(16:39):
I would take that to mean non violence.
And she says the commitment to thishas to be both impure and absolute.
So it's impure becausewe will never get there.
We will never get to this endwhere there is this kind of non
violence, and there is no violenceanywhere, and that's okay, that's
necessary, we will never arrive there.
But it also has to be absolute, becauseunless we address other violences, and
(17:04):
not just structural ones, but thingslike militarism, and imperialism,
and patriarchal power structuresthen we also can't have non violence,
so that's one school of thought.
But the practicalities are reallydifficult, particularly when you
have international organizationstrying to facilitate UCP.
(17:27):
So most of the organizations do havecommitments to decolonizing the practice.
And being locally led oftendoes, that's a big part of that.
It's about local ownership of peaceand of security and of protection
networks and architectures.
It gives space to people to create theirown protection architectures, and there is
(17:49):
a real decolonial commitment within there.
But equally, there are methodsof unarmed civilian protection
that instrumentalize, actually,these power structures themselves.
So, in Palestine, for example thereare some organizations that will send
Americans, often who are white, to walkwith and accompany Palestinians in areas
(18:13):
where they might face physical threats,and will very explicitly have their
passports out and they will use theirwhiteness and their privilege and their
passport privilege to provide protection.
And they say, okay, this is awful.
And it's awful that this privilegeexists and it's awful that there
(18:33):
are these imperial power structures,but us staying at home also
doesn't fix those power structures.
And, we can reduce direct physicalviolence that people are facing
right now if we instrumentalize them.
There's also these women's protectionteams, these amazing women that are
providing protection in their owncommunity and really challenging norms
(18:57):
and violences and issues that they face.
But also they can sometimesinstrumentalize the power
structures that put them at risk.
So they're often seen aslacking agency as " just women".
So then what they can do is engage withleaders and chiefs and say, okay, but
you know, they're non threatening becausethey're just women, they're just mothers.
(19:20):
And they can say, ah, but if youlet us handle cases related to
sexual violence, it doesn't matter.
You don't care about that.
Just let us handle them.
Just give that to the women.
And what that means is that ratherthan traditional leaders who are in
charge of sexual violence and genderbased violence who might not take it
as seriously and who might even forceperpetrators to marry the survivor.
(19:46):
These women are in there and they'remaking sure that doesn't happen
and they're finding differentlevels of justice and they're
able to provide so much moreprotection and support to the women.
But in order to do that, they need to leaninto this non threatening image people
have of them, which is in itself violence.
So it's really difficult, and differentorganizations and different practitioners
(20:10):
come down on very different sides of this.
And I had a lot of interviews whenI was doing my thesis and doing
my research, where people reallystruggled with these questions.
And I don't think there's a clear answer.
There is a big commitment and willingnessto decolonize, and a lot of organizations
will be at least 50 percent women.
(20:32):
But then, yeah, particularly withinternational organizations, there's
then questions of agency and ifyou're then imposing your own belief
system and your liberal imaginationsand ideas of peace, then to what
extent is there local ownership?
So it's really difficult and it'sreally complicated and I don't know
(20:53):
that there's a right answer there,but this is a big debate that people
are really struggling with, I think.
What led you down this path?
Why was this the research andthe field that drew you in?
So I have always been interested in kindof peacekeeping and civilian protection.
(21:16):
We have these big debates aboutwar and is it realism or liberalism
and is it the state or power?
What's really interesting?
And to me that wasalways beside the point.
Surely the point is how do we protectpeople from this and how does that happen?
And I've always been really interestedin not just protection, but how people
(21:36):
talk about it and think about it.
And what is it that protection actuallymeans because it's such a loaded word.
And I keep saying Unarmed CivilianProtection , but it's also referred
to as Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping.
Some people use the P to meanpeacekeeping and there's big maybe boring
debates around which we should use.
(21:56):
I love a boring debatein political science.
Yeah.
Yeah, I have many footnotes inmy thesis dedicated to this.
I'd like to imagineyour thesis foot notes.
Yeah.
You're like, there's thisargument, but it's boring.
I'm just not going to include it.
Like, just being totallyreal with the examiners.
Yeah.
So we have these bigquestions about protection.
(22:17):
And my master's thesis was lookingat how the UN Security Council,
the language in Security Councilresolutions when they authorize
peacekeeping, and how do they justify it?
And how do they talk about security?
So then my PhD, the original question was,as they say, the possibilities and limits
of upscaling Unarmed Civilian Protection.
(22:39):
And then I got a few monthsin and I just had this really
strong feeling that I wasn't theright person to do this project.
I wasn't a practitioner and it felt likea very quite positivist and almost like
a policy question I was trying to answer.
And I was lucky that I had a reallygreat supervisor and we had a
(22:59):
chat and I said how I was feeling.
But then there was parts where I wastalking about the project and this
idea of non violence and I thoughtit was so interesting and I was so
excited about that it became clearokay that's what the project is on.
It's on non violence and what nonviolence might mean and then Unarmed
(23:20):
Civilian Protection for me is acase study of non violence because
non violence is so difficult.
And can be quite abstractand difficult to get hold of.
So UCP kind of embodies that non-violencein a way that makes it studyable
.And I just found this idea of non-violence so interesting because
it's so difficult to account for inliterature, in international relations.
(23:43):
It's very easily dismissed.
It's not really there.
And that in itself wasreally interesting to me.
Okay, if we can't talk aboutnon violence, but we often don't
really talk about violence either.
We talk about armed conflict or war or mypersonal favorite is "the use of force".
By who is never really said.
(24:06):
So we have these euphemisms because wecan't even name violence and we don't
need to because it's so deeply embedded.
So then that's how I got intofeminist international relations
that really take seriously thiscommitment to naming violence first
and then trying to move beyond.
So that's how I switched to lookat non violence and how people
(24:27):
talk about it and how we actuallymake sense of armed conflict.
We have all of this knowledge aboutarmed conflict but how do we get it
and what does that mean and whoseknowledge counts is knowledge.
And then for me, what are theroles of violence and non violence
in this production of knowledge?
How do we know what it is that we know?
(24:49):
And is there violence embeddedin our ways of knowing?
As you've been talking, it's actuallyreminded me of this paper I encountered
recently, it was by Liane Hartnett and itwas about this idea of "how love orders"
and it pointed out that in internationalrelations, even when we acknowledge
emotion or acknowledge force, it's abouthatred and yeah, use of force as you
(25:14):
said or armed conflict and this otherstuff, I mean, in your case, nonviolence
and in her case, love as actually a sortof a bonding emotion in international
relations are totally absent.
It's just fascinating to me thatinternational relations as a field.
It does have these strong biases,at least in the literature we learn
(25:34):
from, like, I've also attended Britishuniversities, it's about hatred and who's
outside and how do we throw them out andwho are we violent against as opposed
to actually what brings us together.
What are the things that we do thataren't actually bashing each other
with sticks, which is how I alwayslike to imagine violence when, because
apparently I can't cope with some of thestuff that the conflict researchers do.
(25:58):
And it's just, it fascinates me thatour field has this particular skew.
Yeah, I completely agree and I thinkthere's often this assumption that to
talk about nonviolence or the ethics ofcare or love or, relationships and family
and all of these things, it's somehownaive and you're missing the point.
(26:19):
But I think, really what's importantis being able to embrace the complexity
and the messiness of conflict,because that's what life is, and
if we say that war is experience.
Then that's part of life, and we need totalk about what makes experience and it's
how we think and how we feel and thatmight be scared or courageous or sad, or
(26:43):
in love, and all of these things happenagainst the backdrop of armed conflict,
and I think that's something that alwaysfrustrated me that whenever we talk
about these kinds of, this is a war zone.
The people that live there, we thenhave these very binary understandings
of it's either safe or it's dangerous.
(27:04):
And it flattens people down so they'reeither a soldier or a civilian, or
they're a victim or a perpetrator.
And it gets rid of the kind ofcomplexity and the messiness that
really is what constitutes war.
And ultimately, there is always warwithin peace and peace within war.
And to try and have these binaryunderstandings just misses so much of the
(27:28):
complexity and the experience and it is.
It is ultimately these experiences,to me, that I think should be at
the center of our understandingas a feminist peace researcher.
And that's for me what wasquite interesting about Unarmed
Civilian Protection too.
And I started thinking about, okay,how do we break down these binaries.
(27:49):
Because often one of the biggestbinaries is you have the protector
on one hand and the protected onthe other and the saviour and saved.
And what Unarmed Civilian Protectionpractitioners are doing is saying,
"well, no, we're both right.
We are protecting ourselves andeach other and our communities
and we're creating space thatis safer and reducing violence".
(28:10):
So they're protectors and protectedand they are saving and they are saved.
And I think that's so important tohelp us to think about international
relations and particularly armed conflictin a way that isn't trying to flatten
people down and get rid of the noiseand the mess and the complexity because
(28:30):
I think actually that's the point.
That is what conflict is.
Okay, we might have geopoliticaldrivers, but they are embodied and
they are experienced by people who arecomplicated and who have many identities
and experiences and affective emotions.
So to get rid of them out ofresearch, I think, loses so much.
(28:55):
And it strikes me as well thatof course, war and peace is just
as much of a false binary.
I mean.
I remember when I learned that therewas some arbitrary organization, right?
That decided a war was whenthere's a thousand deaths.
And so before that it wasn't a war andafterwards it was, and it's just, but
yet this whole idea of war is so reified.
(29:18):
Like it's a war now it's real.
And then there was peace beforeand there'll be peace afterwards.
And these are these true blobs.
But in reality.
It's just made up by somebody, what awar is, and it's just this continuum of
violence and non violence and being safeand being saved as you said yourself.
So yeah, it really, I guess,captures that whole fallible notion.
(29:43):
I think, what's really important toremember though is like, okay, this
is very arbitrary, there's this thingthat a thousand and first battle death
is the most important, because that'sthe first one that really counts.
It's the one that makes it a war.
And on the one level, thisis, it's really arbitrary.
It's not a war, it is a war.
Does that matter?
(30:05):
Actually, if something is a warzone, then it allows international
actors to mobilize certain ways anddo certain things, you then, maybe
you have aid, maybe you have armedintervention and the use of force.
Which legitimizes violence inthe protection of civilians.
(30:26):
So we then add more violence.
And you can't do that ifthere's not a war zone.
But you can if there is.
So who gets to decide whether somethingis or isn't a war is really important.
Because on the one hand, it's justwords and it's an arbitrary distinction.
But actually, when everyone agreesand talks about and narrates
(30:46):
something as a war zone, then itbecomes one and it's produced as one.
So it's really important to thinkabout how people talk, particularly
about spaces is that's a, that placeis a war zone and it's dangerous.
So then protection actors go inand they build military fortresses,
(31:07):
essentially, the barbed wire andhigh fences and they have lookout
posts, because it's dangerous outsideand they need to keep that dangerous
Other outside and inside here is safe.
So then they go out with their weaponsand they're on guard against the enemy.
But outside is civilians experiencingwar that two deaths ago wouldn't have
(31:28):
legitimized and necessitated tanksand armored vehicles and this big
military industrial complex moving in.
So it's arbitrary but what thatfacilitates is really, it's real and
it's tangible, and it's violent, andit's really important, these kinds
of distinctions that come after it.
And I actually want to talk a bitmore about the role of international
(31:51):
organizations because I sensed perhapssome frustration from you earlier when you
were talking about top down approaches andthe role of peacekeepers in some contexts.
Is that fair to say isfrustration the right word to use?
I don't know if it's frustration so much.
(32:13):
I think where my frustration lies isthat it's often seen as the only option.
So something has to be done.
And what that something is, isarmed peacekeeping, usually.
But then, it's difficult and I'mnot making normative judgments.
(32:33):
And I'm not saying that, you know,Unarmed Civilian Protection, displaces
the need for armed protection.
I don't know that's not my call.
I am not a policymaker, but I think whenyou have these big bureaucratic structures
that come in, it often displacescivilian agency in a way that I think
(32:54):
is really difficult and can be unhelpfuland can perpetuate more violence because
you then have these really big, unevenpower structures and power dynamics.
Particularly if the kind of saviorsand the protectors are these external
people that are there, particularly whenthey have weapons, there is these huge
(33:15):
power imbalances and power structures.
So then we have these kind of strongmen and it is men, you know, over 95
percent of uniformed peacekeepersare men which is down from 98, so,
guess it's, you know, it's in progress,but then, you know, we then have this
narrative that we have these strongmen come in to save weak women and
(33:39):
children, and we -and Cynthia Enloetalks about this is having kind of
women and children without spaces init so it's one category and one word.
It's not women and theirdependent children.
It's women and children.
So then women become infantilizedand kind of assumed to be children
(33:59):
and treated as them and haveurgency and possibility removed.
Or they're also homogenized.
It's like, okay, but we do this for women.
We include women.
And it's like, okay, butwhat do we mean by women?
You know, again, women are peopleand people are complex and have
different identities, agency.
(34:19):
And the problem is that when wehave this kind of violence, it
again forces us into these binaries.
So are you helpless or areyou a potential threat?
And it's quite difficult to move beyondthese binaries when you have armed
peacekeepers have to make life anddeath decisions in a second, you know,
and we can't take these decisions back.
(34:42):
You know, I don't know what my positionon that is, but I think I have a
frustration with this kind of flatteningof agency and complexity and diversity
of people, and then trying to fix thatby saying, "well, we include people",
because inclusion is better than nothing.
But inclusion implies that youhave your status quo that exists,
(35:05):
and then you can bring people in.
When we talk about inclusion, thatgets rid of any other possibilities.
What if we implode the systemthat exists and rebuild it?
You know, there are so manyother things that can happen.
And I think I get frustrated when theidea is that something must be done.
That means that we have to send peoplein to help these who are helpless people.
(35:28):
There's no acknowledgement of agencyand the protection work that's happening
because ultimately, whether it's armedconflict, whether it's natural disasters.
Whatever it is that's happening, itis communities that are the first
responders to help themselves andeach other and to support each other
and, to support people that may beelderly or struggle with mobility and
(35:51):
have early response and evacuation.
It is communities that are doing this,and rather than supporting communities
in capacity enhancements and allof these things, it's often assumed
that communities are either this kindof dangerous Other, or they're this
infantilized homogenous group that we cango and save and won't they be so grateful.
(36:14):
And I think both of thoseare quite problematic.
Absolutely.
Okay, so let's talk then aboutthe findings of your thesis,
because we've heard about what youstudied and why you studied, but
I want to know what you found out.
And from what I gather so far,you found there were three
key themes in nonviolence.
(36:35):
So what does that mean and what werethe themes and what do they mean?
Tell me all the things, please.
Okay, so I might go back to thebeginning and say what the themes
aren't first in case that's helpful.
So when I first started looking, I waslooking at unarmed civilian protection
and then non violence, and I wanted tounderstand how non violent people and
(37:00):
non violent actors made sense of conflict.
And the way that we're taughttraditionally in international
relations, is that there are threethemes that you have power and you
have the state and you have security.
So my first year, I was like, okay,each of these is a thesis chapter.
I'll write them all upand then I'll be done.
And
That was literally the titleof a course in my undergrad,
(37:23):
Power, State, and Security.
It's definitely a dominant theme in IR.
Yeah, these, this is howwe're taught to think.
And I remember telling my supervisor,I'm going to have these things.
And she was like why, wherehave you got them from?
It was just like, what do you mean?
These are the themes.
(37:45):
Why would I ever need to justify them?
So then I startedinterviewing practitioners.
And then first of all, I realized, okay,power is complicated and it's embedded in
lots of different things and separatingout power and nonviolent power was just
not something that I thought worked.
(38:05):
And people have written aboutnonviolent power, and often as the
power of nonviolence and particularlywith things like resistance and
strikes and protests and boycotts.
It just wasn't what I was doing.
So I thought, it's fine, I stillhave the state and security.
And then I asked people,
My two themes.
They're still there.
(38:26):
you know, two chapters each will be fine.
And then I asked people howthey thought about the state.
And honestly, people saidthey didn't really that much.
But when they did talk about the state,what they were talking, it seemed like
a proxy for talking about actuallythe spaces that they operated in.
Because often, the state eitherdidn't really exist in the way
(38:50):
that we're taught that it does.
in IR, , and it was actually the spacesthat were really important and contested.
So what kind of spacesare you talking about?
So, like physical spaces, so certaintowns or villages or geographical
regions were really important andborders, international borders
might be important in the sense ofit's difficult to get across them.
(39:12):
Yes, because the state is guardingthem, but the state exists really
when it's practiced and when it'sembodied and lived by people, right?
So like, I've been in Finland three weeksnow and I've had many interactions with
the state and the state bureaucracy.
And you've enjoyed everyminute of it, right?
(39:34):
been amazing, I've learned so much.
But really what that means is that I've...
When I've interacted with thestate, I have spoke to people.
I've sat in the tax office andI've sat in the police stations.
To get my ID I need togo to the police station.
And when I sat in the police station,I was very quiet and I didn't want to
(39:55):
answer the phone because you're in thisspace that is, I wouldn't be arrested
or physically hurt with violence fordoing that, but that space, being
in that space and being in a policestation disciplines you to behave in
a certain way and when I was at the taxoffice, there was a lot of discussion
(40:17):
around Brexit rules and it was a bitfrustrating and I felt I could push back.
When I had a similar conversationthe police station I didn't.
And it wasn't until I left the buildingI thought maybe I should have, but
there's something about that physicalspace that makes us behave a certain
way, expects behaviors from us.
And you have the very hard seats andit's uncomfortable and the police are
(40:39):
walking around projecting this, thisauthority to use legitimate violence.
So physical spaces can be reallyimportant, and the physical architecture,
but also the social construction andproduction of what these spaces mean.
An example of a river might bea space where communities meet.
(41:01):
And often particularly for women whomight go and get water and they can
meet and build relationships and havefriendships and often build relationships
across lines of armed conflict.
And that can be really greatfor protection, or it could be
a space of armed conflict ofpeople fighting over resources.
And then that's a dangerousspace rather than safe space.
(41:24):
But we can't say rivers are one thing,it's the same river, but it has different
social and political assumptions andrelationships and things around it.
Never the same river twice.
yeah, exactly.
This is why the river is such a niceexample because it's not just about
this water and actually it's producedand the meaning of it is produced through
(41:46):
relationships and relations with it.
And when we speak in English and oftenWestern languages and particularly
colonial languages, we talk about thingsand language is very individualistic.
So a river is a river.
We have a word for that and we havea word for water, whereas actually
in some indigenous languages.
(42:08):
The word for water, there isn'tjust water or river, but it
matters what that water is doing.
So if water is flowing, it's aboutthe relationship between water
and the mountain that it's flowingdown, or the glass that it's in,
or the person that's drinking it.
So we think of things in these verybinary ways, everything is a thing.
(42:28):
And actually, what if maybe it'srelationally produced and the meaning of
things are produced through relations.
So that's a bit of a tangent, butthat's how I got to, to space.
And I had an interview with someonewhere I was asking, okay, how do
you make sense of conflict what isit that helps you make sense of it.
(42:49):
And in this interview they werereally nice and really friendly but
very formal and they had this Zoombackground on it, and they kept saying,
is that the right answer is that okay.
And every time if they would swear itwas like, I'm so sorry, and then at
some point their dog came flying intothe shot and it disrupted the background
and it was chaotic and they turned offtheir background and introduced me to
(43:12):
their dog and then showed me aroundtheir house and I showed them around
mine and we had this big chat aboutliving alone during Covid- it was 2020.
And how lonely we bothwere and scared sometimes.
And then we restarted the interviewand it was just completely different.
It was so different.
And then they went back andsaid, actually, can I say
(43:32):
more about this and this?
So it became so clear to me howimportant spaces are in how we make
sense of things in the world and howwe talk about them and narrate them.
So spaces was one.
And then the bodies that producethe spaces, I keep talking
about war as an experience andhow we feel is so important.
(43:53):
And also the gendered andracialized body, things like
age are really important.
We often assume that age is thiskind of binary fact, but actually,
things like the category of youthin South Sudan is anywhere between
18 and 45, and it depends, do youhave children, are you married.
It's socially produced.
(44:13):
So all of these things that aremapped on to bodies to give them
political and social meaning,were also really important.
And then the final thing, the final themeand chapter that seems quite out there,
is temporality and time and how we talkabout and narrate what time might be.
(44:34):
So I was interviewing someone and theywere saying, with non-violence, we're
just trying to take a little bit of timeand slow everyone down and violence
is so fast and non-violence is slow.
And there's this idea that non-violencehas to be repeated again and again,
it's less sticky than violence somehow.
But practitioners didn't think that wasa bad thing, and actually, they thought
(44:57):
that was good because they didn't wantto be locked in to one kind of peace
agreement forever, it was let's keepcountering violence and re routing
aggression Time and how we imagineit is in so many of our metaphors.
We allude to it all of the time,
Right then.
yeah,
exactly.
Yep.
You know, " it's our time now"and particularly politicians and
(45:20):
foreign policy talk about the futureand the past and they politicize
them in this really important way.
I think an example is, there'soften a narration of time, it's
this kind of singular linear path.
And that can be a big problembecause that can be used to justify
colonialism and colonial interventionsand imperial interventions.
(45:44):
So, if all states are on one singular pathand one singular timeline, states that
don't look like, say the US, for example,are therefore in, they're in the past.
So they're these children andwe need to go and help them.
And maybe we need to use someviolence to do that, because
maybe children need to learn.
And after 9 11 GeorgeBush had given a speech.
(46:07):
And it was about how we, as in, in theWest and the UK and the US in particular,
we've seen this kind of violence before.
We had this kind of evil inWorld War II and we defeated it.
And therefore we need to intervene.
Because it then means that Afghanistanand Iraq are not separate distinct
(46:27):
countries, but they're in our past.
And we've been there and we've donethat and we can intervene because
we did this before, and we won.
So we'll go back and show them.
And again, it reduces any kind ofcomplexity to talk about the flow of
time in this way because it's, you are inour past, so therefore we're the adults
(46:48):
. And there's this idea that the presenttense, the space that we're in now, we're
simultaneously as wise as we've ever been,we're stood on the precipice of all of
our history and the culmination of theknowledge and the experience we have.
But then we're simultaneouslyat the precipice of the
future, and we need to act now.
Now is the time for action and we'venever had more capability or capacity to
(47:12):
make this decision than we do right now.
It's never been more urgent than it is.
Second, there's this perpetual
I feel anxious you even sayingthese words, I'm like, oh my
god, I've got to do things.
What am I It's
No, I'm sorry, we don't need to do things.
There's this kind of, there's thislike utmost urgency of the present.
(47:33):
So we always need to act now.
And were always justified to do sobecause we as, actors in the West,
we're the kind of sole occupiersof the present, because other
States are in our violent past.
And it's the West who singularlyoccupies this present.
Therefore, it's only Western actorsthat have the authority and the
(47:56):
wisdom and the legitimacy to act.
So although these discussionsaround time feel quite abstract,
there's real tangible parts to them.
And for non violence, I think oftencreate space to think about times and
temporalities in a bit of a different way.
So practitioners talk a lot about cycles.
(48:18):
So, so we have cycles of violence.
People accept that, but by takingreally seriously war as an experience
in the everyday, they also talk aboutcycles of season and environmental
cycles and how that fits in.
Cycles of volunteers andinterventions and political cycles.
And also life cycles.
(48:38):
Yeah.
I was gonna say there aregenerational cycles as well.
We hear about generational trauma,around conflict also not around conflict
and that's also another cycle, right?
These things keep coming backand recurring and the wheel
keeps spinning and so on.
Yeah, exactly.
And often when we talk about gender,we often use that as a euphemism for
(48:59):
women and it's not, men are genderedas masculine and often young boys
are pressured to, in this pursuitof adulthood and pursuit of manhood,
they perform their masculinity throughviolence to go from being boys to men.
You do this through violenceand that's important.
It's demonstrating you are a mannow, particularly when you have
(49:21):
these permeable age categories.
And being able to engage with that andchallenge that is really important too.
So, non violence is something that I thinkis really interesting when we think about
time because when you have non violentpractitioners and you take a non violent
political understanding of armed conflict,you don't have this definitive start
(49:44):
date and this definitive end date becauseactually, what you see is that conflict is
happening everywhere all of the time andactually it's not the conflict that's the
problem, it's when that conflict is rootedthrough violence, trying to constantly
reroute conflict is why nonviolence hasto keep happening, keep being practiced.
And that's often why it's dismissed,you know, "it's doesn't work", quote
(50:08):
unquote, people often ask me, "doesUnarmed Civilian Protection work",
and I always say, "well, it dependswhat you mean by protection, and
it depends what you mean by work.
And really, it depends what I mean byyes, and it depends what I mean by no".
Because it's not that simple, and it's notthat binary, because we will always have
to commit to re routing aggression, andto trying to interrupt cycles of violence.
(50:33):
And that's only possible if we stepaway from this idea of this one
singular timeline and we'll progress.
We...
We will inevitably, but eventually,get to this place where there's
no violence and there's no war.
So okay, we might need to dosome more violence now to speed
that up, but ultimately the endswill be justified by the means.
But once you take away those ends andyou say, but maybe we don't have the
(50:56):
ends because time is a bit more cyclicalthan that, then you need to think a lot
more carefully about your means as well.
If I can, you've used the wordroot, I know this is not the type
of root you're talking about,but in some ways I'm hearing it's
a bit like a garden bed, right?
And you know, if you're gardening,you need to pull out the weeds
(51:19):
every year, so that they don'ttake root and they don't grow.
And in this context, theweeds are the violence.
It's not that you weed the garden bed onetime and then no other sources of conflict
and no other weeds will ever blow in.
It's like, no, no, this is acyclical thing or a cyclical thing.
You need to keep doing it and keeppracticing and keep maintaining.
And then maybe you'll endup with a beautiful garden.
(51:40):
Maybe you won't if you'renot a gardener like me, but.
You have to keep weeding.
Yeah, I think that is a perfectmetaphor and the more you do the
weeding, it gets easier and you getmore tools, and it becomes quicker
or, more of a second nature, butyeah, you have to keep doing it.
And also for people that love gardening,it's nice to have the nice garden at
(52:02):
the end, but the gardening is the point.
And I think that's what'sreally important here.
The protection is the point, it's notwe use it to get to this utopian end.
It's the protection is the point becausethat's how people are living their lives
and experiencing the armed conflict.
So that is the point as well thecomplexity and the practice of engaging
(52:25):
and building relationships is the points.
Beautiful.
So on that note, Louise.
Thank you so much againfor joining me today.
And for those who are interestedin learning more about you and
your work, where can they find you?
So I'm on Twitter atLouise underscore Ridden.
(52:46):
And you can find my email onthe Tampere website, which is
Tampere University Finland.
And if you search myname, I'm on there too.
You are very easy to Google, actually.
I mean, there's not that manyLouise Riddens out there it seems.
It's a niche name.
Good job.
Well, look, thank you so much againand everyone else until next time,
(53:08):
this is Laura May with the ConflictTipping Podcast from Mediate.com.
Hello and welcome to the ConflictTipping podcast from Mediate.
com.
The podcast that explores socialconflict and what we can do about it.
I'm your host, Laura May.
And today I have with me Dr.
Louise Ridden.
She did her PhD at Aberystwythuniversity and is now a postdoctoral
research fellow working on sustainablesecurity practices at Tampere Peace
(00:32):
Research Institute in Finland.
She is interested in unarmedcivilian protection, the politics
of non violence, and feministinternational relations theory.
So welcome Louise!
Hi, Laura.
Thanks so much.
I'm very excited to have you herebecause you're also a twin in the
sense that we've both just movedcountries to take up new roles.
(00:55):
And so we're both in this zone ofchaos and yet we've come together
to talk about your research.
So first things first, what isUnarmed Civilian Protection?
So, Unarmed Civilian Protectionor UCP is a nonviolent method
of civilian to civilian andcivilian self protection in war.
(01:17):
So really what it is, is aboutdifferent ways for civilians to protect
themselves and each other and to buildkind of networks and communities and
practices of self protection within war.
So rather than necessarily waiting forexternal armed peacekeepers that can often
bring a lot of problems with them, UnarmedCivilian Protection is really a practice
(01:40):
that is centered around local actors whoget to decide kind of their own piece and
their own version of protection and whatthat looks like in that one community.
So it's really focused around communityrelationships, being locally led.
Things like early warning and earlyresponse mechanisms and kind of
conflict monitoring, understandingwhat's happening within the conflict.
(02:03):
And the main principles are being nonviolent, fundamentally non violent.
So civilians can't go away andget a mandate for weapons in the
way that peacekeepers maybe can.
And the primacy of local actors.
So it's not about having a big topdown peacekeeping mission that tries to
include local actors, which often meansyou have this off the shelf blueprint,
(02:27):
and then you have inclusion wherelocal actors can then come and sit at
the table and everyone feels better.
It's really not about that.
It's fundamentally locally led, and it'sfor civilians to protect the communities.
There's also this principleof creating space for peace.
So UCP isn't about creating peace initself, it's not about negotiating
(02:50):
a big peace settlement that willfix a conflict in a whole country.
But it's about reducing levels of directphysical violence against civilians to
give them the space to kind of exploreand pursue what peace might look like
.And can you give me a concrete example when UCP has taken place in
a country and what that's looked like?
(03:11):
Yeah, so it happens in lots of differentconflict affected areas, . So Nonviolent
Peace Force is the largest UnarmedCivilian Protection organization.
And they are operationalin many countries.
One country where they work is SouthSudan, and something that they do
is they have protective presenceand protective accompaniment roles.
(03:35):
So on a night you might havean international volunteer
and a national volunteer.
So someone that's originallynot from South Sudan and someone
who is, and they'll team up.
And they'll just do patrols of areas wherethere might often be violence or civilians
feel under threat and they talk to localpeople, they find out what's going on.
They make their presence knownthere and people know if they have
(03:58):
any issues or questions or feelunsafe, they can go and talk to them.
And a lot of that is about patrolling,but it's not a police patrol, they have
no weapons, but just making their presenceknown and there are people there to help
if you want them to be able to help.
And what they do is buildrelationships with people in all
(04:18):
different positions of power.
So they might build relationshipswith local authorities, with some
armed actors, with unarmed actors too.
So if, for example, someone needs toget to a hospital, but it's dangerous
for them to get there because UnarmedCivilian Protection practitioners
live and work within the communityand they know people really well.
They can often negotiate safepassage for people to receive
(04:41):
medical treatment and food and aid.
So they're not there providing the aidand they're not there with armoured
vehicle to push through areas of conflict.
But they make it known that theywill be coming through with civilians
who are not part of the conflict andthey're seeking aid and it's good
for everyone within the community toallow people to receive this aid.
(05:03):
And they have women's protections teamstoo, where women can do these patrols,
and that's, that's particularly helpful,especially around issues like gender based
and conflict related sexual violence.
When women go to collect fire water andwood, they're often at a higher risk
of things like sexual violence, andwhat will happen is UCP practitioners
(05:26):
and women's protection teams willaccompany the women that are doing that.
And then you have witnesses and youhave accountability and they're embedded
within the community structures.
So you have accountability notthrough violence but through
relationships and through communities.
And does this also happen in other places?
So in the US there's unarmed civilianprotection at the US Mexico border by
(05:49):
a few organizations, and also communityresponse teams within cities in the US
is something that's increasingly growing.
And some organizations like MetaPeace Team, for example, run what
they called bystander interventiontraining, where they train people in
non violent protection techniques.
(06:10):
And it can be things as simple asengaging in dialogue and distraction.
And the idea really is that you woulddo bystander intervention training, and
that doesn't mean you then fly off to aconflict zone that you know nothing about.
But if you're walking down the streetand you see the police harassing
someone, you have some kind of trainingand tools and you know what to do.
(06:32):
You know how to record what's happening,how to intervene if you should intervene.
Maybe you stand between people andput your body in the way, maybe you
don't, maybe you try to distract theaggressor and someone else takes the
person who's being harassed away.
So there's many different things thatcan happen but really it's not about
solving the core of conflict, it's justabout creating enough space that you can
(06:56):
reduce physical violence in the moment.
And how formal is it?
I mean, can I just decide formyself that as of today, I,
Laura May, am an unarmed civilianprotection officer or what have you?
Or is it something peoplesign up to or get training in?
Or is it something thathappens spontaneously?
(07:17):
How does it actually happen?
So it's really context dependent is ahuge part of UCP, which again is why
it's a big difference that we havefrom more traditional peacekeeping
practices that are rolled out.
So it's really context dependent.
And different organizations work quitedifferently but training is a really
(07:39):
important part of it so that no one wouldever advise you to go and physically
put your body in the way of a fight,not training and, you know, there,
So you're saying I can't go be avigilante that's not in my cards today.
that's not what I'm advising to do.
Thank you, Louise.
You know, I was in danger for a momentthere, but no, all right, you've
(08:00):
saved me from this course of action.
Thank
Yeah, so training is super importantto learn techniques and learn
your rights and human rights law.
All of these things are super important.
Also a knowledge and an understandingof the context that you're operating
within is really important as well.
Because conflict is so contextual andwhat UCP is trying to do is not solve
(08:23):
kind of geopolitical conflicts, but tojust provide safer spaces for civilians
to operate in and often, so conflictis something that's an experience.
Christine Sylvester says that we reallyneed to think of war as an experience.
It's something that people livethrough and they try to raise their
(08:43):
children and go to work and paytheir bills during armed conflict.
It's really this kind of thing thatwe feel and live through our bodies.
And that's, UCP really has akind of acknowledgement of that.
And it's really about relationshipsand relationships between people
and conflict and people andspaces and all of these things.
(09:04):
And so I was wondering in Unarmed CivilianProtection is there space for mediators?
I have to ask.
Is that a role that isactually used in that context?
So there's often kind of informalpractices of mediation, so again
UCP is not trying to mediate andnegotiate at this kind of state
(09:28):
level to then to say war is over,or dictate these kinds of terms.
But they might facilitatemediation within communities.
So, if there are two actors orgroups that are in conflict, then UCP
practitioners might act themselves, orthey might try to engage other people
(09:49):
in the communities, maybe religious orcommunity leaders, maybe older people.
People that have authority and statuswithin their community, they might try to
act and mediate between different parties.
And again, that often exists outside ofwhat is traditionally seen as this kind
of liberal democratic justice systemthat is often imposed and used to do
(10:14):
away with and replace more traditionaljustice practices and architectures.
So I think there is space for mediationand that definitely does happen, but
it's it's less formal again, becauseit's about community relationships and
reconciliation, which absolutely can besupported, but again, it's not top down
(10:34):
. I love how you framed this actually because it actually for me, captures
a bit of a, almost a centralconflict in mediation as a field.
Because I myself learned it in the contextof peace mediation, and I learned about
it theoretically and practically there.
And then I used to run the InternationalMediation Institute, and obviously
this podcast is now for Mediate.
(10:55):
com.
Where it's the other side of things,it's the people who mediate on a day
to day basis, whether it's corporate orfamily or community or what have you.
And so it's just fascinating to me becauseit sounds like in UCP, it's actually these
people who work on the day to day basiswith the families and with the community.
And that's the skill setthat's locally needed.
(11:16):
More than what we think of when wethink about peace mediation and sort of
diplomats' work or what have you, whichis, "oh, no, we'll solve this overall
conflict and sign a peace agreement.
Everything will be fine".
So, but to me, it also highlights thatthese groups need to work together
and to support, I guess, a processtogether in some way as well, right?
(11:36):
Yeah, absolutely.
And this is really abouteveryday experiences and everyday
pieces and everyday violences.
It's really zoomed in, but also,again, that's where conflict is
lived and enacted and practiced.
We talk about war, as though it hasa life of its own and it's an event,
but war happens when it's practiced,because people do the practicing.
(12:01):
Someone can send in military, but thereare people in that military that have
many different complex identitiesand relationships and they're not
just soldiers, they're also friendsand sisters and football players and
everything else that they might be.
So it's really justtaking down to this level.
Maybe they can mediatewith a local police chief.
(12:22):
That might not be in the peaceagreement, but maybe they know him and
they can figure things out that way.
Okay.
And so who else actuallydoes this work then?
There are organizations that haveformal projects that are happening.
So Nonviolent Peace Force, forexample, they will have kind of
(12:42):
head of country in each countrythat is responsible for staff there.
You often have a lot of volunteers,but volunteers have received a
lot of training and are part ofwider teams because obviously,
there's a principle of do no harm.
You don't just show up in a countryand hope that you can do something.
But also the kind of principlesbehind unarmed civilian protection
(13:05):
are something that means thatit can happen quite quickly.
And often when we talk about upscalingdifferent practices, what we usually
mean is how do we do it bigger?
So, my PhD thesis was originallysupposed to look at the possibilities
and limits of upscaling UCP.
And what that meant was, okay, it'shappening in five or six countries.
(13:26):
How do we make it happenin 10 or 20 or 30?
Do we go to the UN?
What do we do?
But quite quickly, I realized that justit didn't feel like the point to do that.
And also that I.
You know, it wasn't for me tosit very comfortably in mid
Wales and give instructions topeople of what they should do.
Because actually when practiceslike Unarmed Civilian Protection and
(13:49):
commitments to everyday peace practicesexpand, rather than being vertical and
getting into the UN or NATO or any ofthose things, they tend to be horizontal,
so they'll move from one town to thenext, one city to the next, maybe one
village, one family to the next family.
And it often spreadsorganically and horizontally.
(14:10):
So defining the strict boundaries ofthis is an Unarmed Civilian Protection
practice and this isn't is messyand blurry and there is a lot of the
practitioner community about that.
And Nonviolent Peace Force have hadthese big workshops where they've been
bringing practitioners from many differentcountries and there's often lots of
(14:30):
debates around different things andwhat constitutes UCP and what doesn't.
I think really the factors thatconstitute it are being local ownership,
the centrality of relationships andrelationship building and it being
non violent rather than just unarmed.
(14:50):
It's really a non violent practice andthere's a commitment to not only not
using arms but to never using them, wewill never take up arms, that isn't what
this practice is about, because it'sseeking to just reduce direct physical
violence and create spaces that civilianscan live some kind of normal life in
within wider areas of armed conflict.
(15:13):
I mean, as we're talking about theboundaries to what this is and is
not, I'm really struck by this,maybe slight tension, between what
you've just said in terms of this isabout preventing physical violence.
But at the same time, it's aboutsafe spaces and relationships
(15:34):
and building people together.
Is there also that element ofprotection from more intrinsic
types of violence, which, you know,it's the types of violence where
we're experiencing prejudicialbehavior against us, for instance,
or emotional violence towards us.
Is that also in the mix somehow?
(15:55):
Yeah, that's a really interestingquestion because there's a lot of debates
around the extent to which structuralviolences can be addressed through UCP.
Should they be addressed through UCP?
Is it possible?
Is it realistic?
What should the priorities be?
And there's a lot of people thatsay if we don't address structural
(16:18):
and systemic violences, then wecan never stop physical violences.
And often physical violences aremanifestations of, misogyny and
racism and homophobia and transphobia.
And unless we address these rootcauses, then how can we have non
violence ? And Kimberly Hutchings talksabout ethical political pacifism, but
(16:39):
I would take that to mean non violence.
And she says the commitment to thishas to be both impure and absolute.
So it's impure becausewe will never get there.
We will never get to this endwhere there is this kind of non
violence, and there is no violenceanywhere, and that's okay, that's
necessary, we will never arrive there.
But it also has to be absolute, becauseunless we address other violences, and
(17:04):
not just structural ones, but thingslike militarism, and imperialism,
and patriarchal power structuresthen we also can't have non violence,
so that's one school of thought.
But the practicalities are reallydifficult, particularly when you
have international organizationstrying to facilitate UCP.
(17:27):
So most of the organizations do havecommitments to decolonizing the practice.
And being locally led oftendoes, that's a big part of that.
It's about local ownership of peaceand of security and of protection
networks and architectures.
It gives space to people to create theirown protection architectures, and there is
(17:49):
a real decolonial commitment within there.
But equally, there are methodsof unarmed civilian protection
that instrumentalize, actually,these power structures themselves.
So, in Palestine, for example thereare some organizations that will send
Americans, often who are white, to walkwith and accompany Palestinians in areas
(18:13):
where they might face physical threats,and will very explicitly have their
passports out and they will use theirwhiteness and their privilege and their
passport privilege to provide protection.
And they say, okay, this is awful.
And it's awful that this privilegeexists and it's awful that there
(18:33):
are these imperial power structures,but us staying at home also
doesn't fix those power structures.
And, we can reduce direct physicalviolence that people are facing
right now if we instrumentalize them.
There's also these women's protectionteams, these amazing women that are
providing protection in their owncommunity and really challenging norms
(18:57):
and violences and issues that they face.
But also they can sometimesinstrumentalize the power
structures that put them at risk.
So they're often seen aslacking agency as " just women".
So then what they can do is engage withleaders and chiefs and say, okay, but
you know, they're non threatening becausethey're just women, they're just mothers.
(19:20):
And they can say, ah, but if youlet us handle cases related to
sexual violence, it doesn't matter.
You don't care about that.
Just let us handle them.
Just give that to the women.
And what that means is that ratherthan traditional leaders who are in
charge of sexual violence and genderbased violence who might not take it
as seriously and who might even forceperpetrators to marry the survivor.
(19:46):
These women are in there and they'remaking sure that doesn't happen
and they're finding differentlevels of justice and they're
able to provide so much moreprotection and support to the women.
But in order to do that, they need to leaninto this non threatening image people
have of them, which is in itself violence.
So it's really difficult, and differentorganizations and different practitioners
(20:10):
come down on very different sides of this.
And I had a lot of interviews whenI was doing my thesis and doing
my research, where people reallystruggled with these questions.
And I don't think there's a clear answer.
There is a big commitment and willingnessto decolonize, and a lot of organizations
will be at least 50 percent women.
(20:32):
But then, yeah, particularly withinternational organizations, there's
then questions of agency and ifyou're then imposing your own belief
system and your liberal imaginationsand ideas of peace, then to what
extent is there local ownership?
So it's really difficult and it'sreally complicated and I don't know
(20:53):
that there's a right answer there,but this is a big debate that people
are really struggling with, I think.
What led you down this path?
Why was this the research andthe field that drew you in?
So I have always been interested in kindof peacekeeping and civilian protection.
(21:16):
We have these big debates aboutwar and is it realism or liberalism
and is it the state or power?
What's really interesting?
And to me that wasalways beside the point.
Surely the point is how do we protectpeople from this and how does that happen?
And I've always been really interestedin not just protection, but how people
(21:36):
talk about it and think about it.
And what is it that protection actuallymeans because it's such a loaded word.
And I keep saying Unarmed CivilianProtection , but it's also referred
to as Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping.
Some people use the P to meanpeacekeeping and there's big maybe boring
debates around which we should use.
(21:56):
I love a boring debatein political science.
Yeah.
Yeah, I have many footnotes inmy thesis dedicated to this.
I'd like to imagineyour thesis foot notes.
Yeah.
You're like, there's thisargument, but it's boring.
I'm just not going to include it.
Like, just being totallyreal with the examiners.
Yeah.
So we have these bigquestions about protection.
(22:17):
And my master's thesis was lookingat how the UN Security Council,
the language in Security Councilresolutions when they authorize
peacekeeping, and how do they justify it?
And how do they talk about security?
So then my PhD, the original question was,as they say, the possibilities and limits
of upscaling Unarmed Civilian Protection.
(22:39):
And then I got a few monthsin and I just had this really
strong feeling that I wasn't theright person to do this project.
I wasn't a practitioner and it felt likea very quite positivist and almost like
a policy question I was trying to answer.
And I was lucky that I had a reallygreat supervisor and we had a
(22:59):
chat and I said how I was feeling.
But then there was parts where I wastalking about the project and this
idea of non violence and I thoughtit was so interesting and I was so
excited about that it became clearokay that's what the project is on.
It's on non violence and what nonviolence might mean and then Unarmed
(23:20):
Civilian Protection for me is acase study of non violence because
non violence is so difficult.
And can be quite abstractand difficult to get hold of.
So UCP kind of embodies that non-violencein a way that makes it studyable
.And I just found this idea of non-violence so interesting because
it's so difficult to account for inliterature, in international relations.
(23:43):
It's very easily dismissed.
It's not really there.
And that in itself wasreally interesting to me.
Okay, if we can't talk aboutnon violence, but we often don't
really talk about violence either.
We talk about armed conflict or war or mypersonal favorite is "the use of force".
By who is never really said.
(24:06):
So we have these euphemisms because wecan't even name violence and we don't
need to because it's so deeply embedded.
So then that's how I got intofeminist international relations
that really take seriously thiscommitment to naming violence first
and then trying to move beyond.
So that's how I switched to lookat non violence and how people
(24:27):
talk about it and how we actuallymake sense of armed conflict.
We have all of this knowledge aboutarmed conflict but how do we get it
and what does that mean and whoseknowledge counts is knowledge.
And then for me, what are theroles of violence and non violence
in this production of knowledge?
How do we know what it is that we know?
(24:49):
And is there violence embeddedin our ways of knowing?
As you've been talking, it's actuallyreminded me of this paper I encountered
recently, it was by Liane Hartnett and itwas about this idea of "how love orders"
and it pointed out that in internationalrelations, even when we acknowledge
emotion or acknowledge force, it's abouthatred and yeah, use of force as you
(25:14):
said or armed conflict and this otherstuff, I mean, in your case, nonviolence
and in her case, love as actually a sortof a bonding emotion in international
relations are totally absent.
It's just fascinating to me thatinternational relations as a field.
It does have these strong biases,at least in the literature we learn
(25:34):
from, like, I've also attended Britishuniversities, it's about hatred and who's
outside and how do we throw them out andwho are we violent against as opposed
to actually what brings us together.
What are the things that we do thataren't actually bashing each other
with sticks, which is how I alwayslike to imagine violence when, because
apparently I can't cope with some of thestuff that the conflict researchers do.
(25:58):
And it's just, it fascinates me thatour field has this particular skew.
Yeah, I completely agree and I thinkthere's often this assumption that to
talk about nonviolence or the ethics ofcare or love or, relationships and family
and all of these things, it's somehownaive and you're missing the point.
(26:19):
But I think, really what's importantis being able to embrace the complexity
and the messiness of conflict,because that's what life is, and
if we say that war is experience.
Then that's part of life, and we need totalk about what makes experience and it's
how we think and how we feel and thatmight be scared or courageous or sad, or
(26:43):
in love, and all of these things happenagainst the backdrop of armed conflict,
and I think that's something that alwaysfrustrated me that whenever we talk
about these kinds of, this is a war zone.
The people that live there, we thenhave these very binary understandings
of it's either safe or it's dangerous.
(27:04):
And it flattens people down so they'reeither a soldier or a civilian, or
they're a victim or a perpetrator.
And it gets rid of the kind ofcomplexity and the messiness that
really is what constitutes war.
And ultimately, there is always warwithin peace and peace within war.
And to try and have these binaryunderstandings just misses so much of the
(27:28):
complexity and the experience and it is.
It is ultimately these experiences,to me, that I think should be at
the center of our understandingas a feminist peace researcher.
And that's for me what wasquite interesting about Unarmed
Civilian Protection too.
And I started thinking about, okay,how do we break down these binaries.
(27:49):
Because often one of the biggestbinaries is you have the protector
on one hand and the protected onthe other and the saviour and saved.
And what Unarmed Civilian Protectionpractitioners are doing is saying,
"well, no, we're both right.
We are protecting ourselves andeach other and our communities
and we're creating space thatis safer and reducing violence".
(28:10):
So they're protectors and protectedand they are saving and they are saved.
And I think that's so important tohelp us to think about international
relations and particularly armed conflictin a way that isn't trying to flatten
people down and get rid of the noiseand the mess and the complexity because
(28:30):
I think actually that's the point.
That is what conflict is.
Okay, we might have geopoliticaldrivers, but they are embodied and
they are experienced by people who arecomplicated and who have many identities
and experiences and affective emotions.
So to get rid of them out ofresearch, I think, loses so much.
(28:55):
And it strikes me as well thatof course, war and peace is just
as much of a false binary.
I mean.
I remember when I learned that therewas some arbitrary organization, right?
That decided a war was whenthere's a thousand deaths.
And so before that it wasn't a war andafterwards it was, and it's just, but
yet this whole idea of war is so reified.
(29:18):
Like it's a war now it's real.
And then there was peace beforeand there'll be peace afterwards.
And these are these true blobs.
But in reality.
It's just made up by somebody, what awar is, and it's just this continuum of
violence and non violence and being safeand being saved as you said yourself.
So yeah, it really, I guess,captures that whole fallible notion.
(29:43):
I think, what's really important toremember though is like, okay, this
is very arbitrary, there's this thingthat a thousand and first battle death
is the most important, because that'sthe first one that really counts.
It's the one that makes it a war.
And on the one level, thisis, it's really arbitrary.
It's not a war, it is a war.
Does that matter?
(30:05):
Actually, if something is a warzone, then it allows international
actors to mobilize certain ways anddo certain things, you then, maybe
you have aid, maybe you have armedintervention and the use of force.
Which legitimizes violence inthe protection of civilians.
(30:26):
So we then add more violence.
And you can't do that ifthere's not a war zone.
But you can if there is.
So who gets to decide whether somethingis or isn't a war is really important.
Because on the one hand, it's justwords and it's an arbitrary distinction.
But actually, when everyone agreesand talks about and narrates
(30:46):
something as a war zone, then itbecomes one and it's produced as one.
So it's really important to thinkabout how people talk, particularly
about spaces is that's a, that placeis a war zone and it's dangerous.
So then protection actors go inand they build military fortresses,
(31:07):
essentially, the barbed wire andhigh fences and they have lookout
posts, because it's dangerous outsideand they need to keep that dangerous
Other outside and inside here is safe.
So then they go out with their weaponsand they're on guard against the enemy.
But outside is civilians experiencingwar that two deaths ago wouldn't have
(31:28):
legitimized and necessitated tanksand armored vehicles and this big
military industrial complex moving in.
So it's arbitrary but what thatfacilitates is really, it's real and
it's tangible, and it's violent, andit's really important, these kinds
of distinctions that come after it.
And I actually want to talk a bitmore about the role of international
(31:51):
organizations because I sensed perhapssome frustration from you earlier when you
were talking about top down approaches andthe role of peacekeepers in some contexts.
Is that fair to say isfrustration the right word to use?
I don't know if it's frustration so much.
(32:13):
I think where my frustration lies isthat it's often seen as the only option.
So something has to be done.
And what that something is, isarmed peacekeeping, usually.
But then, it's difficult and I'mnot making normative judgments.
(32:33):
And I'm not saying that, you know,Unarmed Civilian Protection, displaces
the need for armed protection.
I don't know that's not my call.
I am not a policymaker, but I think whenyou have these big bureaucratic structures
that come in, it often displacescivilian agency in a way that I think
(32:54):
is really difficult and can be unhelpfuland can perpetuate more violence because
you then have these really big, unevenpower structures and power dynamics.
Particularly if the kind of saviorsand the protectors are these external
people that are there, particularly whenthey have weapons, there is these huge
(33:15):
power imbalances and power structures.
So then we have these kind of strongmen and it is men, you know, over 95
percent of uniformed peacekeepersare men which is down from 98, so,
guess it's, you know, it's in progress,but then, you know, we then have this
narrative that we have these strongmen come in to save weak women and
(33:39):
children, and we -and Cynthia Enloetalks about this is having kind of
women and children without spaces init so it's one category and one word.
It's not women and theirdependent children.
It's women and children.
So then women become infantilizedand kind of assumed to be children
(33:59):
and treated as them and haveurgency and possibility removed.
Or they're also homogenized.
It's like, okay, but we do this for women.
We include women.
And it's like, okay, butwhat do we mean by women?
You know, again, women are peopleand people are complex and have
different identities, agency.
(34:19):
And the problem is that when wehave this kind of violence, it
again forces us into these binaries.
So are you helpless or areyou a potential threat?
And it's quite difficult to move beyondthese binaries when you have armed
peacekeepers have to make life anddeath decisions in a second, you know,
and we can't take these decisions back.
(34:42):
You know, I don't know what my positionon that is, but I think I have a
frustration with this kind of flatteningof agency and complexity and diversity
of people, and then trying to fix thatby saying, "well, we include people",
because inclusion is better than nothing.
But inclusion implies that youhave your status quo that exists,
(35:05):
and then you can bring people in.
When we talk about inclusion, thatgets rid of any other possibilities.
What if we implode the systemthat exists and rebuild it?
You know, there are so manyother things that can happen.
And I think I get frustrated when theidea is that something must be done.
That means that we have to send peoplein to help these who are helpless people.
(35:28):
There's no acknowledgement of agencyand the protection work that's happening
because ultimately, whether it's armedconflict, whether it's natural disasters.
Whatever it is that's happening, itis communities that are the first
responders to help themselves andeach other and to support each other
and, to support people that may beelderly or struggle with mobility and
(35:51):
have early response and evacuation.
It is communities that are doing this,and rather than supporting communities
in capacity enhancements and allof these things, it's often assumed
that communities are either this kindof dangerous Other, or they're this
infantilized homogenous group that we cango and save and won't they be so grateful.
(36:14):
And I think both of thoseare quite problematic.
Absolutely.
Okay, so let's talk then aboutthe findings of your thesis,
because we've heard about what youstudied and why you studied, but
I want to know what you found out.
And from what I gather so far,you found there were three
key themes in nonviolence.
(36:35):
So what does that mean and what werethe themes and what do they mean?
Tell me all the things, please.
Okay, so I might go back to thebeginning and say what the themes
aren't first in case that's helpful.
So when I first started looking, I waslooking at unarmed civilian protection
and then non violence, and I wanted tounderstand how non violent people and
(37:00):
non violent actors made sense of conflict.
And the way that we're taughttraditionally in international
relations, is that there are threethemes that you have power and you
have the state and you have security.
So my first year, I was like, okay,each of these is a thesis chapter.
I'll write them all upand then I'll be done.
And
That was literally the titleof a course in my undergrad,
(37:23):
Power, State, and Security.
It's definitely a dominant theme in IR.
Yeah, these, this is howwe're taught to think.
And I remember telling my supervisor,I'm going to have these things.
And she was like why, wherehave you got them from?
It was just like, what do you mean?
These are the themes.
(37:45):
Why would I ever need to justify them?
So then I startedinterviewing practitioners.
And then first of all, I realized, okay,power is complicated and it's embedded in
lots of different things and separatingout power and nonviolent power was just
not something that I thought worked.
(38:05):
And people have written aboutnonviolent power, and often as the
power of nonviolence and particularlywith things like resistance and
strikes and protests and boycotts.
It just wasn't what I was doing.
So I thought, it's fine, I stillhave the state and security.
And then I asked people,
My two themes.
They're still there.
(38:26):
you know, two chapters each will be fine.
And then I asked people howthey thought about the state.
And honestly, people saidthey didn't really that much.
But when they did talk about the state,what they were talking, it seemed like
a proxy for talking about actuallythe spaces that they operated in.
Because often, the state eitherdidn't really exist in the way
(38:50):
that we're taught that it does.
in IR, , and it was actually the spacesthat were really important and contested.
So what kind of spacesare you talking about?
So, like physical spaces, so certaintowns or villages or geographical
regions were really important andborders, international borders
might be important in the sense ofit's difficult to get across them.
(39:12):
Yes, because the state is guardingthem, but the state exists really
when it's practiced and when it'sembodied and lived by people, right?
So like, I've been in Finland three weeksnow and I've had many interactions with
the state and the state bureaucracy.
And you've enjoyed everyminute of it, right?
(39:34):
been amazing, I've learned so much.
But really what that means is that I've...
When I've interacted with thestate, I have spoke to people.
I've sat in the tax office andI've sat in the police stations.
To get my ID I need togo to the police station.
And when I sat in the police station,I was very quiet and I didn't want to
(39:55):
answer the phone because you're in thisspace that is, I wouldn't be arrested
or physically hurt with violence fordoing that, but that space, being
in that space and being in a policestation disciplines you to behave in
a certain way and when I was at the taxoffice, there was a lot of discussion
(40:17):
around Brexit rules and it was a bitfrustrating and I felt I could push back.
When I had a similar conversationthe police station I didn't.
And it wasn't until I left the buildingI thought maybe I should have, but
there's something about that physicalspace that makes us behave a certain
way, expects behaviors from us.
And you have the very hard seats andit's uncomfortable and the police are
(40:39):
walking around projecting this, thisauthority to use legitimate violence.
So physical spaces can be reallyimportant, and the physical architecture,
but also the social construction andproduction of what these spaces mean.
An example of a river might bea space where communities meet.
(41:01):
And often particularly for women whomight go and get water and they can
meet and build relationships and havefriendships and often build relationships
across lines of armed conflict.
And that can be really greatfor protection, or it could be
a space of armed conflict ofpeople fighting over resources.
And then that's a dangerousspace rather than safe space.
(41:24):
But we can't say rivers are one thing,it's the same river, but it has different
social and political assumptions andrelationships and things around it.
Never the same river twice.
yeah, exactly.
This is why the river is such a niceexample because it's not just about
this water and actually it's producedand the meaning of it is produced through
(41:46):
relationships and relations with it.
And when we speak in English and oftenWestern languages and particularly
colonial languages, we talk about thingsand language is very individualistic.
So a river is a river.
We have a word for that and we havea word for water, whereas actually
in some indigenous languages.
(42:08):
The word for water, there isn'tjust water or river, but it
matters what that water is doing.
So if water is flowing, it's aboutthe relationship between water
and the mountain that it's flowingdown, or the glass that it's in,
or the person that's drinking it.
So we think of things in these verybinary ways, everything is a thing.
(42:28):
And actually, what if maybe it'srelationally produced and the meaning of
things are produced through relations.
So that's a bit of a tangent, butthat's how I got to, to space.
And I had an interview with someonewhere I was asking, okay, how do
you make sense of conflict what isit that helps you make sense of it.
(42:49):
And in this interview they werereally nice and really friendly but
very formal and they had this Zoombackground on it, and they kept saying,
is that the right answer is that okay.
And every time if they would swear itwas like, I'm so sorry, and then at
some point their dog came flying intothe shot and it disrupted the background
and it was chaotic and they turned offtheir background and introduced me to
(43:12):
their dog and then showed me aroundtheir house and I showed them around
mine and we had this big chat aboutliving alone during Covid- it was 2020.
And how lonely we bothwere and scared sometimes.
And then we restarted the interviewand it was just completely different.
It was so different.
And then they went back andsaid, actually, can I say
(43:32):
more about this and this?
So it became so clear to me howimportant spaces are in how we make
sense of things in the world and howwe talk about them and narrate them.
So spaces was one.
And then the bodies that producethe spaces, I keep talking
about war as an experience andhow we feel is so important.
(43:53):
And also the gendered andracialized body, things like
age are really important.
We often assume that age is thiskind of binary fact, but actually,
things like the category of youthin South Sudan is anywhere between
18 and 45, and it depends, do youhave children, are you married.
It's socially produced.
(44:13):
So all of these things that aremapped on to bodies to give them
political and social meaning,were also really important.
And then the final thing, the final themeand chapter that seems quite out there,
is temporality and time and how we talkabout and narrate what time might be.
(44:34):
So I was interviewing someone and theywere saying, with non-violence, we're
just trying to take a little bit of timeand slow everyone down and violence
is so fast and non-violence is slow.
And there's this idea that non-violencehas to be repeated again and again,
it's less sticky than violence somehow.
But practitioners didn't think that wasa bad thing, and actually, they thought
(44:57):
that was good because they didn't wantto be locked in to one kind of peace
agreement forever, it was let's keepcountering violence and re routing
aggression Time and how we imagineit is in so many of our metaphors.
We allude to it all of the time,
Right then.
yeah,
exactly.
Yep.
You know, " it's our time now"and particularly politicians and
(45:20):
foreign policy talk about the futureand the past and they politicize
them in this really important way.
I think an example is, there'soften a narration of time, it's
this kind of singular linear path.
And that can be a big problembecause that can be used to justify
colonialism and colonial interventionsand imperial interventions.
(45:44):
So, if all states are on one singular pathand one singular timeline, states that
don't look like, say the US, for example,are therefore in, they're in the past.
So they're these children andwe need to go and help them.
And maybe we need to use someviolence to do that, because
maybe children need to learn.
And after 9 11 GeorgeBush had given a speech.
(46:07):
And it was about how we, as in, in theWest and the UK and the US in particular,
we've seen this kind of violence before.
We had this kind of evil inWorld War II and we defeated it.
And therefore we need to intervene.
Because it then means that Afghanistanand Iraq are not separate distinct
(46:27):
countries, but they're in our past.
And we've been there and we've donethat and we can intervene because
we did this before, and we won.
So we'll go back and show them.
And again, it reduces any kind ofcomplexity to talk about the flow of
time in this way because it's, you are inour past, so therefore we're the adults
(46:48):
. And there's this idea that the presenttense, the space that we're in now, we're
simultaneously as wise as we've ever been,we're stood on the precipice of all of
our history and the culmination of theknowledge and the experience we have.
But then we're simultaneouslyat the precipice of the
future, and we need to act now.
Now is the time for action and we'venever had more capability or capacity to
(47:12):
make this decision than we do right now.
It's never been more urgent than it is.
Second, there's this perpetual
I feel anxious you even sayingthese words, I'm like, oh my
god, I've got to do things.
What am I It's
No, I'm sorry, we don't need to do things.
There's this kind of, there's thislike utmost urgency of the present.
(47:33):
So we always need to act now.
And were always justified to do sobecause we as, actors in the West,
we're the kind of sole occupiersof the present, because other
States are in our violent past.
And it's the West who singularlyoccupies this present.
Therefore, it's only Western actorsthat have the authority and the
(47:56):
wisdom and the legitimacy to act.
So although these discussionsaround time feel quite abstract,
there's real tangible parts to them.
And for non violence, I think oftencreate space to think about times and
temporalities in a bit of a different way.
So practitioners talk a lot about cycles.
(48:18):
So, so we have cycles of violence.
People accept that, but by takingreally seriously war as an experience
in the everyday, they also talk aboutcycles of season and environmental
cycles and how that fits in.
Cycles of volunteers andinterventions and political cycles.
And also life cycles.
(48:38):
Yeah.
I was gonna say there aregenerational cycles as well.
We hear about generational trauma,around conflict also not around conflict
and that's also another cycle, right?
These things keep coming backand recurring and the wheel
keeps spinning and so on.
Yeah, exactly.
And often when we talk about gender,we often use that as a euphemism for
(48:59):
women and it's not, men are genderedas masculine and often young boys
are pressured to, in this pursuitof adulthood and pursuit of manhood,
they perform their masculinity throughviolence to go from being boys to men.
You do this through violenceand that's important.
It's demonstrating you are a mannow, particularly when you have
(49:21):
these permeable age categories.
And being able to engage with that andchallenge that is really important too.
So, non violence is something that I thinkis really interesting when we think about
time because when you have non violentpractitioners and you take a non violent
political understanding of armed conflict,you don't have this definitive start
(49:44):
date and this definitive end date becauseactually, what you see is that conflict is
happening everywhere all of the time andactually it's not the conflict that's the
problem, it's when that conflict is rootedthrough violence, trying to constantly
reroute conflict is why nonviolence hasto keep happening, keep being practiced.
And that's often why it's dismissed,you know, "it's doesn't work", quote
(50:08):
unquote, people often ask me, "doesUnarmed Civilian Protection work",
and I always say, "well, it dependswhat you mean by protection, and
it depends what you mean by work.
And really, it depends what I mean byyes, and it depends what I mean by no".
Because it's not that simple, and it's notthat binary, because we will always have
to commit to re routing aggression, andto trying to interrupt cycles of violence.
(50:33):
And that's only possible if we stepaway from this idea of this one
singular timeline and we'll progress.
We...
We will inevitably, but eventually,get to this place where there's
no violence and there's no war.
So okay, we might need to dosome more violence now to speed
that up, but ultimately the endswill be justified by the means.
But once you take away those ends andyou say, but maybe we don't have the
(50:56):
ends because time is a bit more cyclicalthan that, then you need to think a lot
more carefully about your means as well.
If I can, you've used the wordroot, I know this is not the type
of root you're talking about,but in some ways I'm hearing it's
a bit like a garden bed, right?
And you know, if you're gardening,you need to pull out the weeds
(51:19):
every year, so that they don'ttake root and they don't grow.
And in this context, theweeds are the violence.
It's not that you weed the garden bed onetime and then no other sources of conflict
and no other weeds will ever blow in.
It's like, no, no, this is acyclical thing or a cyclical thing.
You need to keep doing it and keeppracticing and keep maintaining.
And then maybe you'll endup with a beautiful garden.
(51:40):
Maybe you won't if you'renot a gardener like me, but.
You have to keep weeding.
Yeah, I think that is a perfectmetaphor and the more you do the
weeding, it gets easier and you getmore tools, and it becomes quicker
or, more of a second nature, butyeah, you have to keep doing it.
And also for people that love gardening,it's nice to have the nice garden at
(52:02):
the end, but the gardening is the point.
And I think that's what'sreally important here.
The protection is the point, it's notwe use it to get to this utopian end.
It's the protection is the point becausethat's how people are living their lives
and experiencing the armed conflict.
So that is the point as well thecomplexity and the practice of engaging
(52:25):
and building relationships is the points.
Beautiful.
So on that note, Louise.
Thank you so much againfor joining me today.
And for those who are interestedin learning more about you and
your work, where can they find you?
So I'm on Twitter atLouise underscore Ridden.
(52:46):
And you can find my email onthe Tampere website, which is
Tampere University Finland.
And if you search myname, I'm on there too.
You are very easy to Google, actually.
I mean, there's not that manyLouise Riddens out there it seems.
It's a niche name.
Good job.
Well, look, thank you so much againand everyone else until next time,
(53:08):
this is Laura May with the ConflictTipping Podcast from Mediate.com.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.