Cascades of violence: war, crime and peacebuilding across South Asia

Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović

Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović is a Full Professor of Criminology, Faculty of Special Education and Rehabilitation, Belgrade University and director of the Victimology Society of Serbia, Belgrade Serbia.

Contact author: vnikolicristanovic@gmail.com.

John Braithwaite and Bina d’Costa, Cascades of violence: war, crime and peacebuilding across South Asia. Acton: Australian National University Press, 2018, 683 pp., ISBN: 9781760461898 (print), 97817600461904 (eBook).

The book Cascades of violence: war, crime and peacebuilding across South Asia is one of the major results of the unique and highly ambitious global research project named Peacebuilding Compared Project. The Peacebuilding Compared Project has been initiated and developed over almost twenty years (since 2004) by John Braithwaite, world-leading scholar in the fields of restorative justice, criminology and conflict and peacebuilding studies. The book itself, as the authors explained (30), ‘was initially developed as part of the Peacebuilding Compared Project, and then took on a life of its own’. Theoretical and empirical findings presented in this book are the result of thirteen years of intensive cooperation between John Braithwaite and Bina d’Costa, researcher and expert in the South Asian region’s politics.
The book Cascades of violence: war, crime and peacebuilding across South Asia offers fascinatingly broad insight into how violence cascades, on the connection between war and crime as well as into what kind of measures may be efficient to prevent violence from cascading. Based primarily on detailed empirical research implemented in South Asia, it also puts the South Asian region in a wider perspective of all kinds of conflicts in other parts of the globe (both contemporary and from the past). These materials are then used to test ten cascade propositions that are the focus of the book. Thus, as the authors claim, their ambition was a bigger-picture (a grand regional and globally relevant) story ‘of how cascades of violence spread and how they can be prevented’ (6). In this way, the research presented in the book has important practical implications for further investment in local peace-making and reconciliation efforts, as well as for UN peacekeeping to be able to react in a way that prevents cascades of violence from spreading. Moreover, the authors suggest that restorative justice and reconciliation politics can be used ‘to flipping cascades of violence to cascades of nonviolence’ (10).
The book is divided into three parts: Part I – ‘Cascades on a broad canvas’; Part II – ‘South Asian cascades’; Part III – ‘Refining understanding of cascades’. Each part contains chapters on specific topics. Before Part I there is a lot of introductory material presented (boxes and tables, figures, maps and plates, abbreviations, foreign terms) as well as a Preface. A summary of proposition conclusions for each country is given in the Appendix.
However, when reading this large book, understanding the research methodology used and the connection between this and other parts of the Peacebuilding Compared Project, as well as keeping track throughout of the extremely large amount of information that it presents, is not easy. In that regard, the effort the authors have made throughout the book to stress connections and main ideas is an important help.
Part I of the book, ‘Cascades on a broad canvas’, is a theoretical and methodological introduction of the book. In addition, the approach and the structure of the book are explained. In this part, the idea of cascades of violence and their prevention on the basis of an analysis of the largest cascades of violence that happened in the world during the past century is explained. For this purpose, the histories of World War I, World War II, the wars of the Great Lakes region of Africa and of the Middle East across to Afghanistan and Kashmir are described as examples of huge cascade phenomena with possible complex points of cascade prevention. Insights from fieldwork the authors carried out both in South Asia and other parts of the globe as well as wider scholarship on the history of war and peace since 1911 are used to inductively develop ten propositions about cascades of violence that are listed in this part of the book.
Moreover, this part provides valuable and interesting insights into the methodological approach used in the Peacebuilding Compared Project in general, and in this book in particular. The authors stress that for this kind of research it was inevitable to combine a macro and micro approach, i.e. to use both quantitative and qualitative counterfactual analysis. The counterfactual analysis is of particular importance for understanding both cascades of violence and non-violence since it enables the emergence of ideas about questions such as ‘whether a war would have occurred in the absence of a proximate cause that seemed to start it’ (38). While the most important sources were secondary ones, many other ways of coming to research data are used as well in this book, such as participant observation and interviews with various actors, including high-level politicians and military personnel as well as human rights activists, refugee groups, political activists in exile, etc. The choice of interviewees clearly mirrors the researchers’ inclusive approach which tends to ‘identify and document multiple and varied voices and silences’ (28). In this part of the book the authors also describe some interesting experiences on how they managed to secure interviews with some people difficult to access, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan (27-33).
Part II, ‘South Asian cascades’, offers a description and analysis of the narratives of more recent South Asian cascades, including more than a few dozen wars across seven South Asian countries. This part presents a detailed description and analysis of cascades within conflicts in India, Kashmir, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In addition, this part also considers countries at the periphery of South Asia, such as Bhutan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Myanmar. As the authors explain, these countries were important for cascades analysis since events within these countries cascaded violence in the wider region, from South Asia into Central Asia and the Middle East on one side, and towards East Asia on the other.
Part III, ‘Refining understanding of cascades’, offers the ten propositions revised in light of the pattern of evidence found by mid-2017, while also suggesting further policy implications. From my point of view, the main contribution of the book to restorative justice and peacebuilding theory and practice is explained in the part where cascades of non-violence are considered as an alternative path to cascades of violence. As the authors stress, ‘this book can be read as an attempt to specify the beginnings of an explanation of why at most moments the imperative is to heal, to reconcile and to prevent. At the same time, it is an attempt to specify the nature of the exceptional circumstances in which it is right for us to kill in spite of the risk that killing tends to induce more killing’ (35). The authors argue in favour of abandoning the static ways of thinking about deterrence which are the cause of too much suffering throughout the world. Bearing in mind the complexity revealed by their study of the cascades, they suggest that ‘developing evidence-based strategies to combat cascades of violence is less important than developing a practical meta-strategy’ as a ‘strategy to responsively order promising strategies’ (36).
In sum, the book – complex as it is – is a great source of information and ideas that may be useful and inspiring for both researchers and practitioners in the field of criminology, restorative justice as well as victimology, conflict and peacebuilding studies. However, readers need to be aware of the limitations this broad approach inevitably has in terms of losing details about (particularly the history of) individual countries. The risk of such a wide approach leading to the possibility of ‘flawed and partial oversimplification’ was mentioned by the authors themselves, who are aware that their research is ‘radically incomplete’ (23). One completion could be – for learning more about local communities and regions and getting more accurate insights about violence and non-violence cascades experienced throughout their longer history – to include in further research more local resources and researchers, including those available only in local languages.