| |
Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Combating HIV/AIDS – the German input
US study warns of dramatic rise in the HIV infection rate
There is no
formula for peace
Care for caregivers
EU Group on training for crisis management
Qualification for BMZ staff
International evaluations
of peace promotion
Responding to Conflict
01/2003
|
|
Civil Peace Work
How to become a peace worker?
By Christine Freitag
The Civil Peace Service (ZFD) was
established by Germany’s Federal
Ministry of Economic Cooperation and
Development (BMZ) in 1999 as a venture
jointly operated by government
and non-government organisations.
Two years later, the ministry commissioned
an evaluation report on
the start-up phase and discovered
two major weak points (see E+Z
2002: 10,268). In this article,
Christine Freitag, co-author of the
concluding report presented in May
2002, explains where the difficulties
lie in selecting and preparing
personnel for the service.
Criteria for the selection
of peace workers As with
workers for any other form of development
cooperation, the first step in the
selection process here is to identify personal
and professional aptitude, which needs to be in
line with the requirements formulated by the partner
organisations.1 Apart from the normal aptitude-testing
problems encountered throughout the labour market,
selection for development work presents an added difficulty:
for first-time candidates for overseas service at
least, aptitude needs to be forecast, anticipated for living
and working conditions which are largely
unknown. Selecting peace workers entails even more
problems:
Is there a specific job description for peace workers?
The non-specific nature of ZFD projects makes it
difficult at present to distinguish them from other
development cooperation projects. It has yet to be
established whether what seems typical of the ZFD in
practice is also meaningful for the ZFD. “Not every
(non-military) activity intended to promote peace is
a form of civil peace service.”2 As regards
personnel selection: “Irrespective of the
secondment organisation, very marked
differences exist in the kind of professional
specialisation required and the relevance
of personal assignments to civil conflict
management. The question of specialisation is
not confined to assignments explicitly associated
with civil conflict management. [...] An exhumation
project in Guatemala, for example, is clearly a postconflict
management operation and a forensic anthropologist
assigned to it needs to be highly specialised.
However, a similar degree of specialisation may
be supposed for a lecturer in music at a Catholic university
in Mozambique. Because of unclear project
agreements, though, the ZFD-specific element of
the lecturer’s activity is not apparent.”3 Ultimately,
this problem of definition leads to the question
of a job description for peace workers: is there such
a job description identifying project-independent
qualifications which define basic selection criteria
and skills that can be acquired through preparatory
training.
Are there reliable studies on the situation in the
field? During the start-up phase at least, with its organisational
imponderables, peace workers frequently
found the situation in the field very different from the
jobs advertised. In practice, peace workers and partner
organisations often seem to come to an arrangement.
Nevertheless, some country reports speak of inadequate
involvement of partner organisations in project
planning and a marked lack of information. For the
selection of peace workers, this invariably means that
candidacy conditions and selection criteria can differ
from the qualification profiles required in the field.
Most workers interviewed feel they are properly placed
in their projects but unclear criteria still pose a fundamental
problem for selection.4
Are there enough qualified applicants? Something
else that became clear in the startup phase is that
there are not enough qualified applicants for the positions
advertised. However, the secondment organisations
report marked changes for the better in this
respect. Even so, some of the peace workers currently
in the field do not meet the requirements set out by secondment
organisations. For example, “people with no
overseas experience [were] seconded, although
according to the secondment organisations this experience
should actually be a major selection criterion”.
Similar shortcomings were also noted with regard to
other job-relevant qualifications.5
Preparation and qualification
of peace workers
The preparation and qualification concepts of six German
providers were examined along with those of one
provider in Austria an another in the UK.1 For the
preparation and qualification of peace workers, too,
the first task that needs to be addressed is to answer
the fundamental questions relating to the preparation
of workers for any form of development cooperation.
Preparation concepts presume that any qualifications
lacked by candidates for project assignments
can be acquired through anticipatoryii
learning. The need to “learn the language(s) of the
host country!” seems to be accepted by all concerned,
even though language training programmes vary
considerably and the duration of training is not
always long enough to ensure confidence in the
active use of the language. Even professional qualifications,
e.g. in tropical medicine for medical personnel,
appear widely accepted.
For those involved in the preparation of peace
workers, the debate about the specificity of civil conflict
management activities prompts the question:
how comprehensive and how good does peace-workspecific
training need to be? Does a medic, an organisation
developer or an agricultural economist qualify
as a peace worker because he applies his expertise
in a crisis zone and thus helps stabilise or restore
peacebuilding structures? Or is the first requirement
a qualification in civil conflict management, without
which no civil peace service would be possible at
all? Put another way: is development cooperation
in crisis regions the same as peace work service?
In the preparation concepts of the secondment services,
a fundamental preference can be seen for a good
grounding in conflict management theories and
methods.6 Preparation practice at present, however,
shows that – contrary to the ideas of the ZFD – savings
are made by omitting other preparation-relevant
topics.7
Qualification concepts for civil
conflict management
Some qualification concepts for civil conflict management
are significantly older than the Civil Peace
Service. These are the fruit of a tradition of civil commitment
to peace and conflict management. When the Civil Peace Service was launched, development
services which had not previously
engaged in civil conflict management
themselves were able to draw on such
traditions and either second their
workers to existing programmes or,
like the DED, develop their own programmes
building on the experience
of other organisations. The qualification
landscape is thus broadly
defined by the experience of the
peace services. Use is also made of
the programmes of foreign organisations,
notably the Austrian
Studienzentrum für Frieden
und Konfliktlösung (Study
Centre for Peace and Conflict
Settlement) in Stadtschlaining
and the Birminghambased
British organisation
“Responding to Conflict”,
both of which are highly
regarded in Germany.
In the principal report on preparation and qualification,
the existing range of programmes is explicitly
praised. Above all, it is acknowledged that there
are no standard recipes for any kind of training and
that different people have different ways of learning.
Even so, there are a number of basic criteria by which
the quality of programmes can be judged.
Minimum standards
for content
In December 2001, standards for the selection, qualification
and preparation of Civil Peace Service workers
were set out in a document entitled “Standards and
Quality Management for Sponsors”.8 The professional
competence agreed in it spans the following areas of
civil conflict management:
-
knowledge of conflict and conflict development
theory and models;
-
knowledge of culture-specific conflict models
and their response patterns;
-
knowledge of the concepts, methods and instruments
of conflict intervention, education for peace, trauma
management, mediation, human rights work, reconciliation
work;
-
knowledge of the concepts and instruments of
freedom from violence.
The document also mentions host country knowledge,
which encompasses history of conflict, awareness of
civil social actors, etc.
The very general nature of these standards
is probably due to the fact that the document
is a “least common multiple”. All the
same, a look at the various qualification
concepts shows that the areas of competence
it sets out are covered more
or less fully in all the proposals. To speak of a uniform conflict theory or uniform education
for peace, however – especially in the light of the
experiences reported by trainers and participants –
would be rash.
Duration of training
The time allotted to civil conflict management by
different training providers ranges from fourteen days
to three months.9 Considering that every organisation
and every team of trainers also give the training
a different bias, the question of minimum standards
of content appears in yet another new light, especially
as there is no apparent connection between the
length of training during the preparation period and
qualifications that peace workers may have previously
acquired. What is interesting to note at this
point is the fact that even participants on courses
spanning ten weeks or more complain of being
rushed through individual course topics.
The basic idea of developing
elements of civil conflict
management to suit
the actual situation in the
host country is understandable
and seems generally
accepted. Where job
information is inadequate
during the preparation
period, this idea is torpedoed.
Running conflict
analyses on scenarios that
are actually expected and
not just going through the
motions in “dry runs” seems very plausible. As for
the question of peace workers’ own role in projects,
it would also seem helpful to establish the extent
to which a partner organisation is party to the conflict
itself, so that peace workers are duly aware of
the possibility of a dilemma between neutrality and
loyalty.10
Task relevance of
preparation
It will never be possible, of course, to fully bridge
the gap between the content of preparation programmes
and actual job requirements. Hence the
special importance of further training for peace
workers during the course of the project. The
synthesis report states that “further training tailored
to requirements is possible only if peace workers
have access to adequate information about programmes
available in the region and at international
level.”11
One apparently practicable suggestion
made by peace workers in the field is to
enable peace workers, during their preparatory
period, to spend a number of weeks in
the country where they will later be
deployed. “This could help ensure more
effective preparation and gear it much more
closely than at present to the actual issues
and problems of the job.”12
Increasingly, specialisation courses are being
offered to better meet the special needs of
individual peace workers.
Participant-oriented
training
If people are to be taken seriously, their
personal and professional experience respected
and the fruits of what they learn harnessed
for the future, all training measures need to be
participant-oriented. Turning the educational
focus onto the heterogeneity of the
group itself, on the other hand, is controversial.
One way in which it seems heterogeneity
can be constructively harnessed
is by forming participants into international
groups. This is what can be concluded,
at any rate, from the respect generated
by the programmes run in Birmingham
and Stadtschlaining. In both places, it is seen as
particularly desirable that participants should bring
different cultural viewpoints to bear in addressing and
tackling conflict situations and – especially in Birmingham
- are catered for by a programme with a content
shaped very much by the examples and cases presented
by participants. In Birmingham, when participants are
selected for the ten-week course “Responding to Conflict”,
care is taken to ensure that, wherever possible,
groups contain no more than two persons from the same
country of origin. Furthermore, the addressee group are
persons already engaged in peace work, so peace workers
in their preparatory period need to be viewed more
as the exception.13 Aside from exposure to different cultural
viewpoints, the special advantage peace workers
get from participating in this course evidently resides in
the fact that their co-participants are people who have
been active for some time in civil conflict management
and are using the distance from their jobs to take new
bearings. What this interaction teaches is beyond the
scope of most dedicated preparatory courses for peace
workers.
Where controversy starts is with conflicts that
arise in the group. To what extent is it acceptable to
make those conflicts the subject of conflict analysis
and management? It is a dispute that has at times been pointedly called a clash between
the “group dynamicists” and the
“eyes front” camp. The surveys conducted
for the evaluation, however,
showed that such pointed remarks
have little justification in fact.
Reflection on personal behaviour in
a conflict seems central to all courses
and where group conflicts are
used as subject matter for training,
this is done only with the consent of
the persons concerned.
Conclusion.The really serious deficiencies
in the selection, preparation
and qualification of peace workers are
rooted in the lack of conceptual clarity
of the Civil Peace Service, especially in
the lack of distinction between its
assignments and other forms of development
cooperation work. This affects
the tailoring of projects and thus has a
special bearing on the selection of
personnel – which then also raises
questions, of course, about the
nature of the qualifications
needed.
The secondment of inadequately
qualified peace workers
has always been explained by
those responsible as a consequence
of organisational weaknesses
in the start-up phase. In many
instances, this explanation is plausible,
fuelling the hope that certain shortcomings will no
longer occur in the future.
Nevertheless, on the issue of minimum standards of
preparation and qualification alone, the ZFD consortium
needs to do more to define and improve the standards
of its programmes. A first major step would be to
advance from the least common multiple to the highest
common denominator in the development of standards.
Dr. Christine Freitag, Research Assistant, School of Educational and
Cultural Studies, Osnabrück University.
christine.freitag@uos.de
This article refers to the principal evaluation report “Development of the Civil
Peace Service, Phase 2, Preparation and Qualification”, with volume of appendices
(publ. BMZ, Bonn, February 2002, abbrev. PR) as well as the synthesis report
on the evaluation “Development of the Civil Peace Service” (publ. BMZ, Bonn,
June 2002, abbrev. SR).
1) Synthesis Report Page 64,
2) Synthesis Report Page 46
3) Synthesis Report Page 64 f.,
4) Synthesis Report Page 65, 72 f.
5) Synthesis Report Page 66,
6) PR Page 12-29
7) PR Page 66,
8) Appendix 14, volume of appendices to PR.
9) Tabular overview in PR. Page 12f.,
10) For the self-perception of peace workers
in the field who have encountered this dilemma, cf. SR. P. 72f.
11) Synthesis Report Page. 70,
12) Synthesis Report Page 70
13) PR Page 32-34
|
