Human development AFTER the war : from complexity to hyper complexity
By Philippe Parnet
Peace is born of war.
Inevitably, in the more or less long term, history proves that peace comes from war. But history too often stops at the simplest notion of peace, that peace which in the common sense corresponds to the peace of weapons. This peace that the history books close with a date, the date of the signed treaty that puts end to the hostilities.
This peace is a civil peace.
But at this point, true peace is not definitive because peace has many detentions. To have a chance of lasting peace, civil peace must first be quickly followed by social peace. To ignore this reality is to run the risk of the emergence of a dictatorship, nationalism, fundamentalism or of one of the most destructive and pernicious forms of war, civil war.
Thus, the peace of weapons, an essential stage in any possibility of development or neo-development, must be followed, in order to be sustainable, by social peace to enable true peace to be established.
For peace will be complete only when the peace of souls is found again, at least this is the dearest wish of any man who has ever seen himself confronted with war.
In this quest for a new beginning, this path of peace of souls will undoubtedly be the hardest, the most complicated and the longest to take because this path is an inner and proper path for each individual.
However, this individual journey will inevitably be conditioned by the environment in which it can take place, and here joint actions for the return of social peace take on all their importance.
In the post-conurbation context, the development space has been modified.
Post-conflict actors have been bruised, their loved ones killed, their environment destroyed, their beliefs undermined, some have been displaced, the «brains», sections of well-to-do but possessing basic administrative knowledge, of Finances and techniques have fled abroad, age groups have lost years of education, training .... in the context of war or survival instinct may have led to reactions
individualistic, resentments towards the neighbours of yesterday and today have been created and exacerbated.
The actors lost their bearings, their past ideas led them to the conflict, their means of action were destroyed or looted, their living space remained but was radically transformed.
So the restoration of civil peace, the return to social peace, requires what is commonly called reconstruction.
If, as a result of a conflict, from the point of view of the shock of images, the need to physically reconstruct space is an obvious one, the definition of what it means «the reconstruction» is far from being so.
Thus, “Reconstruction” is the determining factor in establishing social peace.
"Reconstruction” is facing enormous challenges. It must respond to immediate vital needs while avoiding the creation of structures organized in an emergency that could last and repeat, or even create dysfunctions in society that could relaunch the war in its civil form.
Thus the social war of which «reconstruction» is the main instrument is a struggle that is played out on a register or diplomacy, military force and emergency humanitarian aid must be only fragments of a complex whole. Because this whole is a space where the spheres of influences and competences such as politics, economy, sociology, history, culture, and all the elements of the physical construction of space coexist: geography, engineering and architecture (spatiality).
A group that belonged to the population and that it must reclaim as soon as possible.
In essence, the sciences of the city with their extension in the planning of the territory must impose themselves as the central vector of the organization and management of the social war. Indeed, by taking into account the various factors inherent in these spheres of influences and competences, its strategic analysis will make it possible to know the environment of all the actors involved in «Reconstruction», to understand their motivations and objectives, and then to create the necessary synergies for the establishment of coordinated modes of action capable of generating peace.
HDA - June 2010
