PART II: UNEQUAL, TRANSITIONAL CONTEXT
2. Introduction: ‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts’
2.7 An intersectional conception of long-term peacebuilding
Braithwaite (1979:8) distinguishes between nominalist and realist definitions. According to him ‘[n]ominalist definitions consist of objective indicators … whereas realist
definitions incorporate the meaning of the definition for those to whom it is applied. He concedes that realist definitions depict a ‘more meaningful sociological category, and thus facilitates a clearer understanding of the phenomenon’. However he suggests that definitions should be linked to one’s purposes. Following Braithwaite, I do not seek
‘maximum understanding’ of long-term peacebuilding, but I seek to understand whether restorative justice contributes to it by taking cultural violence, which justifies and legitimates trans-historical inequality (structural violence) and its relationship to crime (direct violence) into account (p.8). As Ricigliano (2003:449) argues ‘the imperative for academics and practitioners in the field of peacebuilding is to develop a mechanism to push the field in the direction of better understanding and using integrated approaches.’
Drawing on Yellow Horse Brave Heart’s (2011) notion of the historical trauma (the soul wound)10 of colonised people; Fanon’s notion of internalised oppression (1967) and its opposite internalised superiority; Volkan’s notion of ‘derivatives of aggression’ (2006:6) Galtung’s notions of negative and positive peace (1967:12) and cultural-structural-direct violence (1996:2); and Lambourne’s typology of substantive and symbolic justice (particularly economic and social justice) in the context of long-term peacebuilding (2004:22), I conceptualise long-term peacebuilding in South Africa in intersectional and practical terms from my subjugated standpoint as:
10 The concept ‘soul wound’ is ascribed to Duran (2006).
66 Appropriate pacing and sequencing of multiple political, economic, social,
psycho-social, psycho-dynamic action underpinned by substantive and symbolic justice. These include an honest appraisal of the history of cultural, structural and direct violence associated with material dispossession, intergenerational and lifespan trauma and its present
consequences, as exhibited by colonised and oppressed people, beyond the limited mandate of the TRC. Acknowledgement (and not denial (Cohen, 2001:293) of how this history intersects with present nested inequality and racialised constructions of crime/social harm and the criminal. In short, cultural-structural-direct violence (Galtung, 1996:2), counter-violence (Gil, 2006:502) and individual propensity for both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (Zimbardo, (2007:289) must be understood and/or addressed for structural peace to be achieved.
This is not a pragmatic definition. This conception embraces within it an understanding of long-term peacebuilding that does not replace one set of asymmetries with another, nor does it privilege symbolic over substantive justice or white over black. It is normative in nature, as it takes human dignity, equality (of all human beings) and material equity as its point of departure. Whether long-term peacebuilding activities can be monitored and evaluated and therefore limited and confined to funding criteria and funding cycles of the international community and the state, is secondary. This conception seeks to move from a pre-occupation with relationship focused reconciliation by the compassionate privileged (which leaves dispossession intact) to a multidimensional focus on substantive and
symbolic justice that will deal with cultural, structural, relationship and individual issues.
Such a grounded utopian conceptualisation of long-term peacebuilding would facilitate a process whereby black South Africans confront their socialised and internalised
inferiority rooted in the past, and understand the correlates of uninterrupted and growing inequality in the present, despite the few that are deemed to have deracialised the middle class. It would also facilitate a process whereby white South Africans confront their socialised and internalised superiority and uninterrupted privilege based on a past that favoured them, regardless of political orientation. In this conception long-term
peacebuilding is process and product, which allows for multiple macro and micro- processes consisting of inter- and intra-personal, inter and intra-group and inter and intra- national work. This resonates with Mamdani’s (2001:18) study of the genocide in
Rwanda which was conducted in part to understand ‘what it can tell us about ourselves as political beings, as agents with a capacity to tap both the destructive and the creative potential in politics’. It is also to learn about interaction of the creative and destructive
67 potential within individuals (beyond constructions of race, class gender and other
categories) and how this human duality interacts with social, economic, political, legal and other social phenomena that Zimbardo (2007:289) draws attention to. It is based on grounded, concrete utopianism and not a fanciful utopian ideal.
De Gruchy’s words about a utopian vision for South Africa resonate. Speaking from a theological perspective at a 1992 conference about South Africa’s proposed TRC, De Gruchy (cf. Boraine, Levy & Scheffer, 1997:142) suggests that theological discourse is needed to keep alive Karl Mannheim’s notion of “concrete Utopian vision”. He argues that the debate about how to deal with the past ‘should not be allowed to avoid the greater issues in terms of transformation in the process of transition’. He argues that in South Africa, ‘there is an ongoing pressure that is not only moral but also theological’. For him,
‘the theological goes beyond the moral. The moral says there must be justice; the theological concurs, but adds that justice must lead to reconciliation and that
reconciliation must acknowledge the need for justice’. There is, according to him, ‘more at stake than morality’. At the same conference Heribert Adam (cf. Boraine, Levy &
Scheffer,1997:144), draws attention to the fact that South Africa did not only have a criminal regime, it was also a criminal society. On this view, South Africans need to confront the biased constructions of who the criminal is, what constitutes crime, and the fact that the past is implicated in many of the crimes/social harms that are perpetrated in the present. The past is still visible in the apartheid architecture of the country, ownership of the commanding heights of South Africa’s economy, property ownership, and visible privilege of most white people and a growing number of black middle class people. Yet those who fill the prisons are not those who are responsible for the trans-historical cultural-structural-direct violence (Galtung, 1996:2). The people who fill the prisons are those upon whom the triad of violence was unleashed inter-generationally, for centuries – yet their direct and counter-violence (Gil, 2006:509) are individualised and processed in an acontextual and ahistorical manner.
This conception of long-term peacebuilding is a standpointist addition to other
conceptions of peace that have been crafted from an ‘objective’, rather than a subjective location - to fill out a broader understanding of long-term peacebuilding that includes a subjugated voice. The expansive, backward- and forward- looking, micro-macro and
68 cross-cutting conception of long-term peacebuilding where the notion of peace is
intricately interwoven with substantive and symbolic justice, resonates with Lederach’s notion of justpeace (2005:82).