Conflict resolution and human rights in peacebuilding exploring the tensions.

• Author: Babbitt, Eileen F.
• Position: Essay

Preventing wars and massive human rights violations, and rebuilding societies in their aftermath, requires an approach that incorporates the perspectives of both human rights advocates and conflict resolution practitioners. This is easier to assert than to achieve. These two groups make different assumptions, apply different methodologies, and have different institutional constraints. As a result, they tend to be wary of one another.

In the short run, both seek to end violence, loss of life, and other suffering as quickly as possible. In the long run, both human rights and conflict resolution practitioners try to assist societies in taking steps to ensure that the violence does not recur and that the rights of every human being are respected. Yet the methods each uses to achieve these goals, as well as their underlying assumptions, are different. As a result, at times they adopt contradictory or even mutually exclusive approaches to the same problem. For example, conflict resolvers, eager to achieve a negotiated settlement to a conflict with minimum loss of life, may insufficiently factor in the relevance of human rights to the long-term success of their work and to the protagonists they seek to bring together. Human rights advocates, by limiting their activities to shaming, negative publicity, and judicial condemnation of responsible individuals, may miss opportunities for human rights improvements that could be achieved through the use of negotiation and diplomatic techniques upon which conflict resolvers rely.

In order to explore these apparent differences more explicitly, I worked with a human rights colleague, the late Ellen Lutz, to commission a set of case studies of conflicts in which both human rights and conflict resolution professionals have worked extensively: Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Northern Ireland. Our purpose was to see how these two agendas proceeded in each case, and whether constructive interaction between their activities was achieved. Our case studies uncovered two crucial dilemmas that must be addressed if we are to see better understanding and synergy between human rights and conflict resolution in peacebuilding practice. One is the tension between establishing sustainable non-violent relations between contending groups within a country, and prosecuting the members of such groups for human rights abuses and/or war crimes. The second is the significant role that the international community plays in supporting or...