An Interview with Dr. Tetsushi Ogata

Dr. Tetsushi Ogata is a lecturer in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, at George Mason University, where he received his Ph. D in Conflict Analysis and Resolution, he was the director of the Genocide Prevention Program. An inspirational academic and teacher on the topic of genocide studies, he has also supported governments with genocide prevention in many different ways. One in particular is his support in the launch of the Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes (GAAMAC) network.

Some questions…

1. Which East African conflict (concerning Rwanda, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Sudan), in your opinion, is the most significant and why?

This obviously depends on standards of what it means to be ‘significant’, but in my opinion “significant conflict” of the four is Sudan and Sudan/South Sudan. We tend to see Darfur 2003 as genocide. This is not wrong (although debated by some and argued differently by the UN-convened International Commission in 2005), but if we consider the conflict still persists (see Eric Reeves’ continuous coverage of the Sudan conflict), we see that the genocidal onslaught in the first decade of 2000s was only one manifest form of mass violence in Sudan (the most vicious one), which still lingers today and manifests itself slightly in a different shape, but with the shared roots. That is, just because we don’t see ‘genocide’ as was the case around 2003, we should not separate what it is today and a decade earlier. To see the continuum is precisely a kind of perspectives we should bring in conflict resolution studies.

Furthermore, there are Sudan/South Sudan conflict, and even within South Sudan, a country that was much celebrated after their rightful exercise of national referendum to gain independence, we saw a spike of ethnic conflict within the county which was about to descend into a total civil war. This shows that creating a new territorial boundary for self-determination was not the answer to resolving the latent conflict potential in the region.

2. What do you think are the most important tools needed for effective conflict resolution? What about with tribal or ethnic conflicts?

This is a broad question. There are many tools and their level of effectiveness is partly determined by cases of conflict. An analogy is perhaps this one: a “+” driver is effective when the screw is “+” and in this case “-“ driver will be completely useless. So we should have an idea of what shape of drivers is demanded by the screws we have in hand. I think the most important insight of conflict resolution is to be able to analyze deep rooted causes of conflict, from social, cultural, and historical dimensions, and come to see what response (or even prevention) is called for by those roots.

3. Do you think the international community should become more or less involved in global conflicts?

Yes and no, depends on what “involve” entails. If involvement is synonymous to ‘intervention,’ then I would be weary. If forms of involvement can encompass multi-dimensional approach – something similar to Pillar 1 and 2 of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) – then I can see that the international community can play more active roles to encourage states’ endogenous capacities for self-governance. In other words, the international community should be more “involved” to help.

4. With regard to Rwanda, the genocide left society in need of extreme reconstruction, especially with regard to rebuilding Rwandan identity and lessening the tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis. Do you think the reconciliation processes in Rwanda were effective enough to rebuild society?

It was necessary but not sufficient. There are individual cases of reconciliation that has taken place but that seems to be on a case-by-case basis. We don’t know as yet how human relationships would look like at the societal level where the former perpetrators and victims could come together, without condoning the past crimes and without compromising the integrity of the identity needs of both former perpetrators and victims. We tend to want only a simplified account of identifying who we are. For many, to have a dual identity (i.e. taint of the past wrongs & need of righteous self at present) is conflicting. The result is often ‘functional coexistence’ in which you can coexist and function properly but without fully connecting. But that does not mean ‘functional coexistence’ is something to be disliked. It is good and effective; it’s not yet good enough for what we aspire to achieve.

5. In your opinion, what aspects of the attempts at reconciliation and conflict resolution need to be addressed and looked into further?

Building on what I said earlier, the process of reconciling the former enemies is inherently challenging. You are addressing the past crimes in present terms for future needs. It is one thing to uncover truthful accounts of what happened and assign appropriate responsibilities for the past, but it is yet another thing to make sense of what that means in the present relationships between them. What complicates more is how “a” society reconciles with “a” society where it’s not the society who killed but actually the people in it; but of those people, some were soldiers who killed while others were not. What kind of collective responsibility can we talk about if “the” society has multiple faces? This is why conflict resolution needs to analyze what is at stake for the needs of both people and societies, transcending past, present and future.

6. Kenya’s Sisi Ni Amani Organisation demonstrated the importance of technology in peace building, but technology (the radio) was also used to spread hate propaganda during the electoral violence in 2008. In your opinion, how do you think technology should be used in the future, especially regarding the extremely rural places in Uganda and Kenya that may be hard to reach out to?

Just like the technology was used to disseminate hateful and dangerous speech, the same technology can be used to disseminate a kind of speech that inoculates such propaganda. Susan Benesch is a leading scholar on this front, in terms of how to combat hate propaganda. Technology is a neutral tool. It is up to us how to use it. With that said, even rural areas of Uganda and Kenya, there are self-organizing communities there. Precisely because they are hard to reach, they have their own rules and traditions of how to govern/live themselves. It is possible to expand a network of local community leaders and, if so, we may make use of cellphones to facilitate their own horizontal and/or bilateral connections. A resilient community that resists discrimination and segregation on the basis of human identity is where people are connected. If we can facilitate such connections with basic tools, which is not impossible, we may be able to make a difference there.

7. What in your opinion constitutes a culture of peace?

It is the one in which people come to acknowledge and appreciate shared commonalities among & within differences without eliminating those differences; people come to respect and embrace the diversity of those differences even if they may appear contradictory; and people come to perceive their inherent connections with others within and beyond their immediate living environment. This is not an academic definition but I would like to see it that way.