By Jack Kennedy
In the new EPLO documentary, “MARIAMA”, we meet Mariama Diomande, a young Ivorian woman who has dedicated herself to building peace in her community in Abidjan, in the wake of the violence that engulfed Côte d’Ivoire following the 2010 election. Mariama’s story is inspiring; it is a demonstration of what a small group of determined, civic-minded people can do if they put their minds to it. It is also about the marks left by the conflict, and the hopes that Ivorians of all ages have for a better future.
More broadly, Mariama’s story is about the importance of social cohesion in communities trying to recover from and/or prevent conflict. It is a concept applicable across the globe, in a wide variety of post-conflict and conflict-vulnerable societies. Building social cohesion is key to the work of many of EPLO’s member organisations.
Social cohesion
What is social cohesion?. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) notes that “much of the value of the [social cohesion] concept lies in its adaptability and the thinking, debates and descriptions that support discussions of its definition, characteristics and contribution to peace”. In other words, it is complex and malleable, and the process of discussing what social cohesion might mean in a given context is often more valuable in itself than any universal definition of it. Nonetheless, the same report characterises it broadly as “the extent of trust in government and within society and the willingness to participate collectively toward a shared vision of sustainable peace and common development goals.” One might also describe it as the degree to which all the people in a society see themselves as part of a single collective, where the welfare of all members is intertwined, and respect for and protection of minority groups is ensured. Describing the time before the 2010 crisis, Mariama says that Ivorians “didn’t care if someone came from the North or from the West. Everyone was considered a brother.”
Social cohesion is both a cause and a result of effective peacebuilding. Achieving better social cohesion strengthens peace, but other kinds of work to lay the foundations for peace will frequently serve to strengthen social cohesion. It will also be difficult to build lasting cohesion if structural inequalities or political problems are not addressed. Cohesion has a similar relationship to conflict; the outbreak of civil conflict requires some breakdown or lack of social cohesion in the first place, which will be damaged much further as the violence proceeds. Social cohesion can therefore be viewed both as a metric for the success of peacebuilding and as a means through which peace is built.
Mariama’s work, particularly with the organisation Jeunesse Unie pour le Développement (JUD), often focuses on building social cohesion directly. The JUD organises events like football matches, which bring people from different social groups together to enjoy themselves and get to know each other. Such micro-level interaction is especially important in a post-conflict context, where fighting which split a society along ethnic or religious lines may have degraded many people’s ability to imagine themselves living peacefully together with people from the other side of those divisions. This is especially true for anyone who has memories of loved ones injured or killed during the conflict and, as Mariama notes, may find themselves living in the same neighbourhood as the perpetrator of those killings. Facilitating dialogue and positive interactions can therefore help to restore a sense of normalcy and aid people in seeing each other as potential neighbours or co-workers, rather than merely as members of opposing groups.
More than just fostering friendly social interactions, it is very important to facilitate dialogue that actively deals with healing from conflict and planning a society’s shared future. Looking to the past, cohesion is difficult to maintain if various groups have mutually-exclusive narratives about what took place before and during a conflict, and feel that no justice has taken place. Only when the harm of the past has been acknowledged, a collective memory built, and ongoing accountability ensured can a community begin to move on. Work in this area takes many forms, from the Colombian diaspora women’s truth, memory and reconciliation commission to identifying corruption and lack of transparency in the Kyrgyz justice system.
Since cohesion is dependent on a sense of shared goals and values, going forward it is vital to create spaces for non-adversarial dialogue, where people from every part of a community can come together to determine their own collective future.. Examples from EPLO members include holding a conflict prevention workshop for local leaders in Hurungwe, Zimbabwe, bringing together civil society groups from across Kosovo and Serbia, and holding a community resilience forum in Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso. Taken as a whole, this process of addressing the past and planning for the future ideally uncovers and deals with the structural causes of conflict, whether it is a matter of political representation, economic opportunity, land disputes, etc.
In the present, any persistent negative aspects of intra-community relations must be addressed. Issues like hate speech, harassment and discrimination are not just symptoms of poor social cohesion; they actively impede its improvement and risk pushing a society back towards a more serious breakdown of peace. Education campaigns and official condemnation, among other measures, may be necessary to deal with these problems.
The role of young people
Young members of a community must be at the heart of any social cohesion project, if it is to be just and successful. Young people represent the future of any society, so the work they do and are included in necessarily has long-lasting impacts. The younger generation’s framework for how they view and interact with their community also tends to be more fluid than their elders’, so they are ideally suited to be the leaders of change. Mariama notes that cohesion “must be a culture, must be taught” and this is much easier done the earlier you begin.
On the flip side, young people also need social cohesion more than most; trying to grow up, learn and develop in a society riven by divisions, discrimination and violence is exceptionally difficult. Young people frequently have little to no voice in political processes, and by definition are born into conditions they had no role in shaping. Any inclusive peacebuilding process must make special effort to include them, something on which there is an emerging policy consensus in the past few years.
As Mariama puts it: “These young people, who today may be involved in questions of social cohesion, despite religious or ethnic differences, have realised that we are, in fact, the most vulnerable. So young people (…) are starting to realise the role they play and the power they have over questions of peace.” The success of JUD’s work on social cohesion in Abidjan is proof of what can be achieved when young people act as leaders of change; peacebuilders should take their cues from them.
Looking to the long term
Social cohesion-building is necessarily a slow process. While this should not discourage the pursuit of projects with great aplomb, it does mean that time must be given for results to emerge. Practitioners must draw encouragement from small victories and gradual movement of the needle.
Social cohesion has a mutually-reinforcing relationship with other aspects of peacebuilding. The cohesion-building process will proceed more quickly and with fewer setbacks if it happens in concert with the likes of political and institutional reform, addressing material needs and inequalities, establishing dispute-resolution mechanisms, monitoring for signs of conflict re-emergence, and so on. People find it much easier to view each other as members of a collective with common interests and goals if none of them are left out, discriminated against, deprived, or underrepresented; but these reforms are also easier to accomplish an environment characterised by a basic level of mutual trust. There is no specific starting point or linear path for this kind of work. Social cohesion is just one of the pillars holding up peace, and all pillars must be built up simultaneously.
This is also why cohesion-building can never be reactive. It is by its nature something that reduces the risk of conflict over years or even decades, rather than a response to an acute problem, but when solid foundations are laid, it is extremely powerful. This, again, underscores the particular importance of working with young people, to weave social cohesion into the fabric of a community.
Looking to her own work, Mariama is clear-eyed about the nature of peacebuilding: “We cannot say that our actions have outright pacified the situation, but we have contributed to reducing the tension, which is still there.” She adds that the post-conflict tension is “something that will pass with time” but ultimately “there is no peace without cohesion.”
eploblog.wordpress.com 