3.5 Theoretical Framework
3.5.1 Theory of Positive and Negative Peace
Developed by Galtung in 1969, the Theory of Positive and Negative Peace states that peace is about the structural organisations of people who voluntarily choose to pursue co-operation for the benefit of mankind (see Sandy & Perkins, 2000). Thus, in the management and sharing of water resources, people may co-operate to ensure maximum benefits accrue to every user. For Groten and Jurgen (1981), positive peace is meeting people’s basic needs or providing the minimum for subsistence. Thus, policies for water access should be tailored to ensure every community member in the community receives water for basic use. Positive peace involves the search of positive conditions which can resolve the underlying roots of conflict which produce violence. Lack of access to water leads to conflict in most instances (see Chapter Two, section 2.2).
Gerwin (1991, p. 77) defined positive peace as a condition of society in which relationships between individuals and social groups are conducted on the basis of honesty and consent, and there is a known disposition for all parties to continue such practices. Individuals are free to do, be or become what they desire unless this infringes upon the ability of any others to do the same (Young, 2010, p. 6). From the discussion above, it is clear that positive peace entails people having the right to access water. However in doing so, the right to access water should not discriminate against some individuals in society. The deeper right would be the human right to water enshrined and enacted within national constitutions.
There are two types of peace i.e. positive peace and negative peace. It is not enough to talk about positive peace without negative peace. In the same way, there is structural violence and direct violence. According to Galtung (1990, p. 290), direct violence insults human needs with the deliberate intention to hurt and harm; structural violence does so more indirectly. Thus, with water, direct violence involves a physical contestation for water sources or physical violence among groups competing for a water reservoir. Direct violence constitutes the tip of an iceberg, with the vast majority of the formation (structural and cultural violence) hidden
73
below the water’s surface as shown in the Figure 3.2 below. Thus direct violence is a more visible form of conflict over water, whilst structural violence, is hidden in water instruments and is legitimised by cultural violence, which are buzzwords to justify water deprivation.
Figure 3.2: Violence (Source: HEKS, 2012)
Structural violence occurs when people are deprived of their potential by the structure of society (see Groten & Jurgen, 1981; Galtung, 1981; Anderson, 1985; Varobej, 2008; Isakovic, 2001). Naidu (1986) posited that structural violence is legalised human suffering without direct and overt use of violence. Structural violence is a hidden form of violence: “it is for this reason that research into peace needs a violence typology in a similar way that the field of medicine needs pathology as a precondition of its work” (Galtung, 1981, p. 3). Structural violence is exploitation and injustice, much of which is institutionalized and also culturally and psychologically internalised. Considering these arguments, it can be deduced that policies and legal instruments can be used to deny a certain group of people access to water for productive uses. As shown in Chapter One, the Zimbabwe Water Act of 1976 was a legal instrument used to give priority to water for irrigation to colonial settlers at the expense of the native Zimbabweans. Thus, the capacities of the blacks to produce food through agriculture was severely inhibited.
Galtung (1981, p. 3) argued that:
In order to be able to discuss the structural violence category, we need to have some idea about a structure of violence as well as a vocabulary in order to identify the individual aspects of the violence structure and to determine how its individual aspects relate to the need categories. As far as I am concerned, exploitation represents the main part of an archetypical violence structure. This means nothing
74
more than a situation in which some people, namely the top dogs, draw substantially more profit from the interaction taking place within this structure ...
than the others, the underdogs ...”
Human life can be destroyed through starvation, lack of health care, human generated environmental pollutions and ecological disasters (Exploitation A) (see Table 3.3 below).
Similarly, when people suffer from preventable diseases, a kind of violence is occurring, even if no bullets are shot or no clubs are wielded (Exploitation B). The ‘underdogs’ live in a permanent involuntary state of poverty, which usually encompasses malnutrition and illness (Muller, 1993 p. 4). All this happens within complex structures and at the end of long and ramified legislation chains and cycles. The ‘top dogs’ in the above argument refers to the powerful elites represented by politicians, commercial farmers and multi-national companies, who use large quantities of water, in most scenarios overusing the water and paying very little.
These ‘top dogs’ have a huge influence on water policies and legislation, due to their big budgets. The ‘underdogs’ are the rural residents, living mostly through subsistence agriculture and are ‘consulted’ only occasionally by the elites using sophisticated legal language to secure their ‘buy-in’. They are usually affected by pollution through discharges into rivers and water for commercial purposes is deliberately more expensive to them. They are therefore under structural violence as they are kept in chronic poverty.
Table 3.3: Violence typology according to Galtung (Source: Galtung, 1990)
Violence typology according to Galtung
Need groups
Survival (negation:
death)
Well-being (negation:
poverty, illness)
Identity / purpose (negation:
alienation)
Freedom (negation:
oppression)
Direct violence Killing Injury, siege, sanctions, poverty
De-socialisation, re-socialisation, underclass
Repression, imprisonment, expulsion, deportation Structural
violence
Exploitation A Exploitation B Penetration, Segmentation
Marginalisation, fragmentation
75
Isakovic (2001, p. 39) drew attention to the fact that people die or suffer serious harm unnecessarily as a consequence of distribution of water resources rather than overall scarcity.
A society commits violence against its members when it forcibly stunts their development and undermines their well-being through lack of access to water, whether because of religion, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual preference, or some other social reason. Structural violence can include impoverishment, deprivation, humiliation, political repression, lack of human rights, and the denial of self-determination.
Galtung (1990, p. 291) argued that exploitation is strengthened by components contained within the structure of society. These components are: penetration, segmentation, marginalisation and fragmentation (see Table 3.3). Their function is to prevent awareness and mobilisation of this awareness, which are two of the conditions needed to be successful in fighting exploitation. By penetration, elements of the ‘top dogs’ reach the consciousness of the
‘underdogs’; this penetration is linked to segmentation, which only allows the underdog a limited view of reality. Thus, rural people are deliberately given little to information about their potential rights to access water. This results in two processes, marginalisation and fragmentation. This involves forcing the ‘underdogs’ increasingly to the edge of society, condemning them as insignificant, dividing them and keeping them away from each other (divide and rule) (Galtung, 1981, p. 5). The argument points to a society where the opinions of water users are rarely given attention and their needs are subordinate to the whims of the elites.
According to Haessly (2011, p. 8), structural violence takes place at macro and micro-levels.
At the macro-level organised, structural violence includes the establishment of state-sponsored social, political and economic systems, structures, policies and practices within a country that results in an inequitable distribution of water resources. Such policies lead to increases in poverty, hunger, a lack of health and environmental pollution. This is relevant to this study, as formal policies for water formulated at the macro-level have an influence on how people access and use water resources for various purposes. Structural violence at the micro-level manifests through discriminatory practices that result in unequal life chances. Examples are group acts that limit access to necessities of life, thus threatening or shortening the lifespan of individuals.
There are cultural expectations that lessen freedom of choice that oppresses or repress others – lessening the quality of life for both individuals and groups. This research is rooted in informal practices to water in a rural community, making it imperative to explore how group rules (customary law) have an effect upon individuals’ access to water resources.
76
Structural violence can also be against nature. Activities may not be intended to destroy nature but nevertheless do so, for example, the pollution and depletion associated with modern industry, leading to dying forests, ozone holes, global warming, and so on (Galtung, 1990, p. 293). Structural violence is a serious form of social oppression, which can also be identified with respect to treatment of the natural environment.
Galtung (1990, p. 292) stressed that cultural violence is understood as those aspects of moral culture that are referred to in order to justify or legitimise the application of direct or structural violence. “Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right - or at least not wrong” (p 292). Parts of the Indian caste system or patriarchal societies can be given as examples for this (see HEKS, 2012, p. 9). Cultural violence works by changing the moral colour of an act from wrong to right or at least to acceptable; it makes reality opaque, so that we do not see the violent act or fact, or at least not as violent (Galtung, 1990, p. 292).
Bashiriyeh, (2010, p. 137) contended that “the culture preaches, teaches, admonishes, eggs on, and dulls us into seeing exploitation and/or repression as normal and natural, or into not seeing them (particularly not exploitation) at all”. Thus, words such as ‘development’ can be a form of cultural violence used to forcibly remove people from area for dam construction and resettle them in semi-arid regions, thus depriving them of economic livelihoods. Value systems and beliefs and behavioural patterns are reproduced across generations; though because of many factors, such as social contact especially with members of dissimilar groups, these reproductions may be partially or even totally altered.
Positive peace is only achieved if direct, structural and cultural violence are eliminated (Galtung, 1969, p. 4). Positive peace includes structures and values which enhance mutual respect and the unfolding of the full potential of all people. This means respecting people’s rights to water and enacting policies that do not only lead to access to clean water but to enhancing productive capacities as well. Varobej (2008) argued that peace should mean an opportunity for aesthetic, intellectual and moral development and a chance of seeking happiness. Positive peace focused on peace building, the establishment of non-exploitative social structures, and a determination to work toward that goal even when a war is not ongoing or imminent. Happiness comes through income derived from products realised from water and participation and recognition of the voice of user groups in water management.
77
Galtung (1969) defined ‘negative peace’ as the cessation of direct violence and ‘positive peace’
as the overcoming of structural and cultural violence as well. To achieve positive peace, therefore, injustice must be removed. Various types of ‘differences’ distinguish sets of human beings: gender (male domination) and class (perpetuation of socio-economic advantage and disadvantage through birth, not merit). Thus, gender and class differentiation to water access and management must be removed and water shared equitably between men and women and all classes of people in society. At an intrapersonal level, positive peace goes beyond absence of anxiety and embraces the idea of deep inner peace through integrity (wholeness) of being, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Positive peace entails:
...equity, as opposed to exploitation. In this process there is reciprocity, as opposed to the mental conditioning of one by the other. There is Integration in the sense of all relating to all, as opposed to fragmentation. There is Holism, the use of many faculties in all of them, as opposed to segmentation. And there is Inclusion of them all, as opposed to exclusion, marginalization. (Galtung, 1997, p. 1).
Galtung’s argument reiterates the inclusion of multiple voices in managing water. Positive peace therefore refers to developing the quality of life in society by promoting economic growth, a more just society, and ecological balance, thereby improving life in a holistic way (Cavanaugh, 2000, p. 2). Young (2010, p. 6) maintained that society cannot be truly at peace until all forms of social, political and economic inequality and exclusion (from water institutions in this case) have been removed from the structures that exercise power within it.
If society is filled with equality and other values, beliefs and practices that counteract structural violence, a state of positive peace is reached (HEKS, 2012, p. 6).
In conclusion, the Theory of Positive and Negative Peace as argued by Sandy and Perkins (2000, p. 3), postulated that positive peace entails decentralisation of power and authority in water management. This reduces the feelings of anonymity and powerlessness amongst local water users. It facilitates the development of relationships which can restore and preserve community values and spiritual needs and this lead to self-actualisation (Naidu, 1986).
Readorn, cited by Sandy and Perkins (2000), contended that positive peace is the sense of the full enjoyment of the entire range of human rights to water by all people. This concurs with Galtung’s peace as a positively defined condition. According to Goodhand and Hulme (1999, p. 15), peace is not purely about an absence of physical violence but is intimately connected to the analysis and practice of social and economic development. In relation to water, the study
78
will analyse various positive peace indicators that are: recognition of rights, universal access, participation, protection of the environment development and sustenance.