In his inaugural lecture delivered in December, Van Leeuwen half-jokingly observed that he should use the word "war" rather than "peace" more often in his text. ‘It gets you quoted much more often.’ Which is why study programmes often put 'conflict' in their title, he says, referring to one of his own institute's courses. 'Our course Contested Resources, Sustainable Peace suddenly became a lot more popular when we changed the name to Natural Resources, Conflict and Governance.'
Van Leeuwen sees conflict as part of any society: there are always opposing interests or different views on how best to organise society. 'It’s about designing and governing a society so that conflict is dealt with in a peaceful manner. Violence is only one of the ways to address this, and not the best one. The policy fails when the conflicts that always exist result in violent manifestations.'
Violence has many faces
According to Van Leeuwen, you can only really understand - and prevent - violence when you realise that it is much more than just direct confrontations between people resulting in casualties. Violence has many more faces, he says: 'These are the structural forms, the violence that lies in the way a society is organised.’ Think of structural exclusion of groups of people, of inequality in access to public resources, to education, to fulfilment. 'In this light, diminished life prospects, of slum dwellers for example, could be called a form of structural violence.'
It is essential to consider these underlying forms of violence and people's sense of having been wronged when maintaining and restoring peace, says Van Leeuwen. In the problematic relationship between Israel and the Palestinian territories, for example, the distribution of scarce water plays a significant role. Despite joint agreements, in practice, with unequal power relations, people in the Palestinian territories come off worst. 'Such deeper causes of inequality must have a place in a peace process to have any chance of succeeding.' The professor points out that structural violence is often hard to see and difficult to assess objectively. 'With regard to water distribution, for example, the lack of good governance in Palestinian areas also plays a role.'
There is no such thing as one path to peace
Structural violence unfolds differently everywhere, meaning that the one universal path to peace does not exist. In his inaugural lecture, Van Leeuwen criticises the international peace operations that so often go wrong precisely for their overly global approach and assumed universal values: a top-down approach with limited local relevance and therefore low local support. ‘Not everything that is good is necessarily good for peace,’ is how Van Leeuwen summarises global, well-meaning intentions in his inaugural lecture.
Only by zooming in on local practices can you learn to see through violence, according to Van Leeuwen's mission. Just as you have to look at water distribution in Gaza, in his own research he looks at land administration in Congo and Burundi. His and his team’s work has produced numerous studies showing that conflicts over land (governance) play a crucial role in the civil wars in those countries.
Violent conflicts abound in his study areas, and here again the observation that the international peace approach misses the boat: focusing on land registration or conflict mediation, but not on the elephant in the room, large-scale inequality in the distribution of agricultural land. 'As with the failed peace processes in Gaza, this is partly because the agenda of those in power is considered more important than that of the local population.'
Attention to the 'forgotten crises'
Van Leeuwen sometimes marvels at the huge international attention and protests for the Palestinian people. With regard to his own study areas, Congo and Burundi, such solidarity is rare, despite the evident interconnectedness between 'there' and here', think of crucial raw materials coming from Congo: 'You only have to look at the contents of our mobile phones.'
You can grumble about the lack of attention for a 'forgotten crisis' in Sudan, as highlighted by the Red Cross, but Van Leeuwen prefers to use the focus on Gaza to continue to draw attention to structural violence elsewhere in the world - including in the Netherlands. 'Attention to the structural violence in a society is advisable, anywhere in the world. War never comes out of the blue.'
Foto: Emad El Byed via Unsplash