key: cord-0060043-na2060va
authors: Murphy, Joanne
title: Introduction: Why It Matters
date: 2020-08-18
journal: Management and War
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-49252-6_1
sha: 04b6dd53d463163032280ffee21d8c9a4457c93e
doc_id: 60043
cord_uid: na2060va

War and conflict are a reality of life throughout the world. While much is written about the impact of violence and disorder, how people and organisations adapt to these environments is poorly understood. This book tells the often hidden story of organisational actors managing through violent conflict and building peace. It is written for both general readers and academic specialists, combining first-person interviews, insights from witness seminars and informal conversations, with scholarly research.

War and conflict are a reality of life throughout the world. While much is written about the impact of violence and disorder, how people and organisations adapt to these environments is poorly understood. This book tells the often hidden story of organisational actors managing through and beyond violent conflict. It is written for both general readers and academic specialists, combining first-person interviews, insights from witness seminars and informal conversations, with more scholarly research. In this sense it often chooses to privilege the voices of organisational actors in the frontline over more distant academic perspectives. However, I hope it still provides a solid scholarly foundation and a lens of analysis with which to better understand the core dynamics of how people manage through and after conflict. The best way to do this seemed to be to focus on those with decision-making authority within organisations, delivering services, building and maintaining businesses, overseeing community interfaces while simultaneous facing ethno-political violence or handling the transition beyond combat. The individuals and teams engaged in these endeavours are often organisational managers and leaders at different levels of seniority and with different skills and knowledge. Many of those I spoke to had been with the same organisation for their entire careers and had grown up through conflict and its shadow. Their experiences are key because many were previously unrecorded or unrecognised. I was struck by how often those who took the time to sit down with me had rarely, if ever, spoken to another academic about their experiences. This is in contrast to the conversations I have with political actors and community leaders. For that reason, this book largely avoids explicit political elites and those operating within community organisations. It does this not because these people are unimportant: it is already recognised that they are vital-which is why so much of the literature around conflict and transition focuses on them. Instead, it strives to explore mid-level policy implementation under duress and the practices of organisational actors at all levels, who inspire and focus their colleagues in the worst of times, and get little recognition for those interventions. it is a story which is rarely sought, but one which holds a wealth of experience on how we can better manage and resolve intractable, long-term violence. In seeking to explore these aspects of organisational life, this work takes the view that both time and context are important. For that reason, it investigates the long-term impact of conflicts which have lasted within states and societies for years, sometimes decades. It understands that time cycles and 'histories' are central: as are commemorations, anniversaries and traditional holidays that have taken on another identity associated with loss or violence. We talk about histories, not history, because different communities often have radically different understandings of what past events mean and why they are still relevant. It also starts from the premise that the exercise of individual agency within disrupted, dangerous and damaged environments can make the difference between an organisation continuing to deliver on its core purpose-whether that is housing, health or business development, as well as its ability to proactively peace-build within societies of conflict. Individual decisions and decision-making is central to the exercise of tacit political skill and the construction of policies and practices that build accord. While this is not yet a core area of business and management research, it is a newly emerging subdiscipline. As such, any study of this type needs to draw from existing work which is disparate and spread across business, management and organisation studies and associated research. This also includes analysis from conflict studies itself.

When we think about conflict, violence and disorder we tend to focus on both human suffering and economic damage. Some of us see the evidence of violent conflict on our TV screens every day. Others in their streets, their workplaces and their lives. Unfortunately, environments riven by disorder and war seem to be becoming more common, rather than less.

As we move from the bipolarity of the Cold War, to a unipolar and now a multipolar world, there are good reasons to fear the deterioration of global peace. Conflict spikes in the Middle East and North Africa, the growth and activity of internal terrorism and insurgency movements and a destabilisation of what were regarded as previously established states, all contribute to an international environment where old certainties have been discarded (IEP 2018). The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 will no doubt lead to even greater uncertainty and competition for scarce resources. However, there is another story among these difficult images and broken communities that can also be observed, if not yet fully understood. It is the story of how people within organisations manage and lead during and through periods of turbulence and what this experience tells us about organisations who are able to persist in their purpose in extreme circumstances and contribute to conflict transformation. The aim of this book is to relay some of those experiences and to provide an organisational perspective on conflict and peacebuilding processes. Within that central purpose are two main objectives. The first is to establish a theoretical framework for understanding how organisations, organisational life and decision-making are impacted by violent conflict. The second is to explore the empirical experience of organisational actors in such environments, before drawing some conclusions about how to move forward this area of research. It is important to define the scope of this work because while significant scholarship exists on conflict processes, hardly any has looked at how organisational actors, taking crucial mid-level decisions, navigate, negotiate and influence the reality of conflict and political transitions to stability. This emphasis emerged from an understanding that ethnopolitical conflict and war are organisational as well as a political processes and that moving beyond conflict cannot be successfully achieved without a recognition of organisational actors as key to that resolution process. Much of the work in the area of conflict studies has focused on the political or the community dimensions of what happens during war and violence. This perspective is incredibly important in its own right, but it is only part of the story. Another facet is the organisational scaffolding around communities and societies that sometimes reinforces partisan division and, at other times, actively works against it. In reality, this framework consists of people managing outside the realm of formal authority in a context of extreme uncertainty. To do this, they must weigh the benefits of progress against the risks of personal safety and organisational survival, and act strategically in relation to organisational partners, modes of delivery and even legal and financial matters outside the official approval processes. This book contains many examples of managers demonstrating that they have had to be both accountable officers and peacebuilding entrepreneurs to achieve strategic objectives in complex and challenging operational realities. These risks are often largely obscured by organisational structures and processes and leave actors vulnerable professionally and personally to the vicissitudes of political engagement. Some of these interactions occur at a micro level, others are macro in their sweep and impact. The organisational dimensions of managing through and beyond entrenched political conflict have to date been under analysed and as a consequence, little understood. There is a gap in our knowledge academically and practically. This should concern us for two reasons. Firstly, it would seem that the distinct fields of management and organisation studies (MOS) and conflict studies have an obvious area of overlap or subfield. This subfield can be defined as an area of work that focuses on the environments, and practices, of managing through conflict and transition. The second concern is that unfortunately, the lived experience of organisational life within conflict environments is an area of growth. Everywhere is increasing instability, divergence and ethno-political unrest. Alongside though, we see individuals and organisations delivering services, managing businesses and binding together communities. A clear-sighted understanding of how organisations can manage through violence and turbulence and also contribute to building stability and peace has never been more vital. This book is an attempt to fill that gap. To do that it focuses on the lived experiences of organisational actors within three locations: Northern Ireland, the Basque country and Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia). Each of these areas has experience of ethno-political conflict at varying intensity, over extended timescales. This allows the research to draw on a broad spectrum of public, private and non-profit management experience of violent political conflict and its legacy at community, organisational and political levels. The data relied upon is drawn from over 60 interviews and witness seminars with managers and leaders in the three central locations and additional interviews from other areas. Much use is made of existing research, other primary data sources and some very interesting country-and conflict-specific reports produced by international agencies.

The book is structured to first provide a theoretical background to the organisational dimensions of conflict and peacebuilding. Part I outlines a broad sweep of the insightful work which this study draws on. It was important to provide a scholarly overview of the fields of managing and leading in extreme contexts, organisational resilience, managing in fragile and conflict-affected states and the challenges of public sector reform in unstable and unsafe environments. Many of these areas will be familiar to those interested in organisational behaviour and organisational studies more generally. Others will be recognisable for those who reach this book from an interest in conflict studies. Drawing these theoretical positions together provides a way to understand where managing in conflict environments sits in both literatures. This first part goes on to offer a brief background analysis and history of the areas and locations featured. It is as detailed as possible but inevitably limited given both the restrictions of space (which unfortunately include even books) and because I have tried not to either overestimate the existing knowledge of the reader or underestimate the complexity of the conflicts featured. Many of those who go on to build peace by small and large initiatives (often quietly, diplomatically and carefully) have begun the journey when the situation around them was much more dangerous and frightening. This part also includes a chapter that was originally unplanned. It is titled 'Before Peace' and represents an attempt to convey not the everyday reality of ongoing violence but the experience of those living through acute conflict flares-whether it be in Sarajevo during the Bosnian wars or Northern Ireland at the beginning of the Troubles. I had not originally meant to include this piece, but there seemed to be something grave and important about the phased nature and varying intensity of conflict that those experiences convey and set apart. It is hard to talk to people about peace and its creation without also talking about war, with its terror, its brutality and its fear. I felt that in order to present the most complete picture possible, it was essential to look even briefly at the experience of war as an organisational phenomenon, and as such, the practice of the people within it. So this chapter seeks to present a backdrop to efforts of conflict resolution and peacebuilding within organisations, by providing a different kind of context: the reality of what it is like to be in the midst of war and extreme civil disturbance.

In Part II the book goes on to focus on the sectoral challenges and emergent ideas from the data itself, through a series of thematic chapters which focus on policy areas particularly important to organisational life. These include managing space, economic regeneration including the experience of entrepreneurs, the delivery of public services like housing and the provision of utilities, attempts to 'reimage' locations of notoriety, and the role of heritage and the arts amid unrest and disorder. Some of these subjects are directly engaged in what might be called conflict management especially through periods of conflict flares. Others deal with the reality of conflict and its legacy tangentially and through the challenges of delivering public services fairly or supporting economic regeneration either as entrepreneurs or as governmental officials. The data includes a diverse range of perspectives from those managing public services, engaged in the third sector and in business and private sector organisations. It is important to say that the research is not spread evenly across all chapters. Readers will see that some parts emphasis one location, or one issue, more than others. That is simply a reflection of the substance of interviews and the inaccessibility of some sectors in some places. The themes themselves are not exhaustive areas of interest but do largely reflect core considerations of how society is organised and managed. I am conscious that taken individually they also represent enormous areas of scholarship in their own right and regret that this work cannot give them the 'deep dive' of policyfocused analysis which they deserve. I have largely steered away from subjects that deal directly with policing and security-either in relation to security sector reform projects (as experienced in Northern Ireland and Bosnia 1 ) or in terms of policing's engagement with insurgent and radical movements (all of our cases), although a brief consideration of some of these issues appears in Part III of the book. This omission is deliberate because of the great deal of work which is already in the public domain about these areas and a recognition that policing and security is generally well considered in such contexts. The purpose of this book is to move beyond orthodox approaches and to provide an understanding of the other factors which are equally important within conflict and conflict transformation. Again, I justify this through a willingness to be led by the data and the voices of those engaged in such complex and nuanced activity. Many of the cases and experiences detailed in these chapters appear along a broad spectrum, from the all-out warzone of Sarajevo under siege to the day-to-day tensions of the flag protests in Belfast and the background rumble of the legacy of the civil war in the Basque country. Through all of this I have tried to keep in mind the words of Scott Bollens (Bollens 2011) and his own declaration that he has approached his exemplary scholarship as an "engaged individual with views and feelings" (Bollens 2011: 4) .

The book goes on in Part III to draw some of these concerns together in an analysis of management challenges in persistently distrustful and often structurally divided societies. To do this it uses three alternate theoretical lenses to understand better organisational activities and practices in conflict and transition. The first of these is the experience of organisations operating in a liminal space between conflict and peace and how 'threshold' experiences impact actor behaviour. The second draws on the decision-making dilemmas of those managing in environments of violence and utilises Primo Levi's concept of 'the grey zone' (Levi 1986) to understand better how organisational actors decision make when there is no good options or outcomes. The third builds on the potential of organisational actors to behave as peacebuilding entrepreneurs, creating networks, brokering relationships and mainstreaming conflict resolution as an organisational activity. The book concludes with some reflections on this area of work and a future research agenda for those interested in the organisational dimensions of conflict and peacebuilding.

City and Soul in Divided Societies

Global Peace Index. Sydney: Institute for Economics

Policing for Peace in Northern Ireland