 |
One of the most difficult challenges of intervening in and attempting to resolve a conflict is facing the question: Is this intervention making society better or worse? Am I preventing the perpetuation of a struggle that should persist, because one side of this conflict is truly just? The international development professional faces a similar moral question--in reverse: Am I causing serious conflict in the society or village in which I am intervening? Are my interventions making matters worse or better? How can I justify my work if it leads to destructive conflict, or repression, or even murder?
These ethical dilemmas occur every day to countless well-intentioned international development workers around the world, who see their work as rooted in the promotion of social justice. To others in the international development community, however, particularly in its upper echelons, these dilemmas do not occur enough, and their absence affects negatively and even afflicts those citizens of the world who are at the receiving end of international intervention. At the heart of international development work, for many of its practitioners, is the desire to do what is just for the world’s citizens, to enable poor societies to be self-sustaining, to eradicate absolute poverty, poverty-related diseases and suffering. For others, however, international development has become a self-interested occupation that has wreaked havoc on certain parts of the world.
A major part of the problem involves the inattention to the moral underpinnings of stated social goals and their mixture with the self-interested character of most human activity. This occurs especially when a moral goal, such as social justice or poverty relief, is made into policy, bureaucratized and professionalized, and its aims are mixed, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unconsciously, with other aims, such as an agency’s prestige, simple financial profits, the satisfaction of internal governance concerns, and, of course, national interests.
We want to confine our research to the ways in which this problem with human institutions leads to destructive conflict generation processes among recipients of aid, and how conflict resolution theory and practice may be able to avert this eventuality. We also want to highlight the critical importance, as an antidote to this problem, of moral reflection at every stage of the operationalizing and professionalizing of moral goals.
In this paper I will examine 1. the ways in which international development often results in conflict, sometimes deadly conflict, 2. the way in which conflict resolution as an intervention in society and international development express competing concerns, with disparate social and moral goals, that professionals and lay people often have difficulty reconciling, and 3. the ways in which these two interventions might work together in a new integrated strategy.