Is Conflict Necessary?
Part of the aim of a good foreign policy would be to reduce the level of violent conflict, right?
In the Middle East, for example, we see violence in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. People die daily as a result of civil war, aerial strikes, suicide bombings, and targeted killings. Surely, any rational foreign policy would seek to limit this death and suffering. Surely, any rational foreign policy would seek peace. Right?
Probably. But not every scholar of war or country-development thinks this way. I’m going to walk us through an academic argument on the necessity of conflict.
Let’s use Yemen as our example.
Yemen is home to a population of about 28 million people. It’s estimated that about 65% are Sunni muslim, while about 35% are Shia muslim. And Yemen is a comparatively poor country, with a GDP per capita (per person) of $1,300.
Violence has been a fixture of the country’s history: including a thirty-year span of periodic warfare prior to 1990, its own manifestation of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, and the current persisting and devastating conflict and proxy warfare in the area.
Currently, Yemen is classified as a government ‘in transition.’ This means that there is not clarity on who is ‘in power’ in Yemen, like we understand the White House is in the United States, or the Communist Party is in China.
But what does being ‘in power’ mean?
What do the White House and the Communist Party, with their vastly different structures and approaches, have in common?
They are “states.”
And a commonly used scholarly definition of a state is
- A political body that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force over a given territory and population.
Let’s break that down.
- A political body. You, the state, set policies. The state is a body that makes decisions about how things will be run or organized in the given territory. If you are a state, you are more than just a military, in that you are designing the administration of a population.
- Monopoly. You are the only one who has this power.
- Territory and population. Quite simply, you might have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and design a system of governance and administration for a small island you discover, but if there are no residents, it is not a state. A great example? Antarctica. Similarly, a group of people without a recognized territory, like the Kurds, are also not a state.
- Legitimate use of force. Force, in this case = violence. This means it is your right, as a state, to use violence within your territory. If we pretend you are a monarch (king or queen), it means that you have the right to decide whom to behead, whom to imprison, and with whom to go to war.
But, wait, what about Yemen?
So if the government in Yemen is in transition, that means there’s some question about who the “state” is. And it means it’s unclear who should have the legitimate use of force over the territory.
The way academics and researchers see it: In order to gain legitimacy*, the various sides competing to “become” the state must use force. To be the victor, to be the one who is “allowed” to use violence, a group must first actually be violent.
Thus, we have the paradoxical nature of state-making: perhaps violence is actually necessary to create order. Scholars Youssef, Cohen, and Brown even argue, “collective political violences indicates neither order nor decay.”
Broad academic concepts such as this are helpful insofar as they can get us started on the right track, but they often lack the nuance to identify, explain, and manage dynamics on the ground.
So does this explain the violence in Yemen?
Not necessarily. This represents one in a vast constellation of factors and influences on the current violent conflict in Yemen. This teaching is not an indicator that the productive path forward is to say, “Yemen is just going through the necessary steps in state-formation! Things will settle themselves.” Reality is far more complicated than that.
Creating and implementing foreign policy on violence conflict is intricately complicated. What is “right” is often unclear.
What is clear, however, is that the people of Yemen, mothers and brothers and sisters and fathers, are trapped in a grave outbreak of violence. With a state unable to provide for their safety, the international community must come to their aid. 500 of those mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, and people died in August alone.
Educate yourself on how you can support the humanitarian efforts in Yemen today. It’s our duty to help.
*The question of how and who awards legitimacy is a deep and interesting one. Perhaps another topic for another day.
