Archaeology, Violence, and Conflict: A Conceptual Case for Rivalry

Identity-based conflicts, due to their atypical intractability and protractedness, seem to be bound to experience violence, whether shaped in a direct (physical) or indirect (structural) fashion (Rubinstein, 2007). From the early 1990s, in several sub-fields of IR (Peace Studies and War Studies) several concepts and approaches emerged to understand and eventually transform identity-based conflicts: among them, Azar's (1990) and Kriesberg's (1993) definition of protracted social conflict, Burton's (1990) definition of deep-rooted conflict based on his theory of Basic Human Needs, and Diehl and Goertz' s (1993) definition of rivalry. Forming the basis of top-down and bottom-up frameworks to peacefully transform an intractable conflict (Webel and Galtung, 2007), after years of implementation, they seem to have failed their main goal- as the endless stagnation of fragile negotiation in Northern Ireland and between Arabs and Israelis show. This paper argues that these approaches have been unable to transcend intractable violence because of their flawed explanation of conflict emergence. Based on materialistic ontology and rationalistic assumption, they see intractable conflict as triggered by resource scarcity, with psychological factors being responsible for its intractability and protractedness. Therefore, to go beyond these assumptions, this paper makes a conceptual case for a revisited concept of rivalry. This revision is based on an interdisciplinary approach informed by Agamben's Theory of Signature (2009), Leon Festinger's Theory of Social Comparison (1954), and René Girard's Theory of Mimetic Desire (2003). First, the concept of rivalry is chosen because it empirically showed a new reality about war: not all actors have an equal likelihood of becoming involved in violent conflict with all other actors (Goerzt and Diehl, 1992, 2000). Instead, the condition of rivalry (perception of existential threat, atypical feeling of enmity, use or threat of violence) raises actors' propensities for engaging in violent conflict relations with certain other actors. However, by focusing on the emergence of rivalry, the interdisciplinary approach is used to highlight unique characteristics of rivalry: 1) the (non-materialistic) relational nature of identity violence; 2) the (non-rationalistic) psychological nature of the emergence of identity-based conflicts. From this standing point, violence cannot be resolved by building more sounding institutions for a fairer allocation of resources between the parties in conflict. The violence has no origin. It can be understood and, thus, transformed, only by using an archaeological process that highlights its 'moment of arising'. In the case of identity-based conflicts when the identity of both parties became 'contested object' or conflictual. To undertake that process, an alternative theoretical framework informed by Festinger's and Girard's theories will be provided.