Transforming Political Conflict: Egypt as Example

In several countries we currently witness increased spates or prolonged situations of violence. These examples are highly complex. Fixing conflict is the general approach of governments, diplomatic parties and international relief NGOs of good will. Furthermore, replacing governments or crushing “insurgents” is not an enduring and sustainable solution. Politics does not occur only at the State level; it occurs within society, the home and at the conscious level of the human. Therefore, transforming politics in the private is a political act of consequence and, in fact, part of the solution towards security and peace.

By drawing on Ken Wilber’s AQAL (all-quadrants, all-levels) integral framework that includes exterior and interior dimensions, we can apply a broadened map to include all areas that are integral to solving conflict. By going beyond the State and main international actors, we can locate emergent properties, multiple causality, relations, and other variables that offer an integral map of how transformation can really be enacted to transform political conflict. In specific, we can better determine the contributions of otherwise marginalized dimensions to the development of civility, wellbeing and peace.

Interior (Individual, upper-left)

Individual values and subjectivity

Consciousness

Exterior (Individual, upper-right)

Behavior towards goals

Competency

Interior (Collective, lower-left)

Civil society values

Political Culture

Exterior (Collective, lower-right)

Civil society actors’/State’s behavior/ and larger systems

Context

The Four Quadrants for Political Conflict Analysis, adapted from Ken Wilber’s AQAL model

In the lower right-hand quadrant we gain some idea of how State and societal actors behave. This is the dimension analysts and media cover most, yet partially. Here we usually learn of a State exerting force for which either compliance or resistance is understood to be the only reactions. For example, in Egypt analysts and media reports zone in on how infuriated young revolutionaries took down a despotic authoritarian government, then soon after the military government’s exit was replaced with a tyrannical Islamist government. Then we acquire a perspective of a precarious Islamist State that had to be overthrown by infuriated secular revolutionaries. The next perspective is of a secular interim military State dealing with hate-inciting Islamists angry after being ousted. These perspectives are partial and biased and the narration always similar.

The larger system of politics is ignored and we learn near to nothing of interventionist strategies and the real role of international players. The inaccuracy is however even greater as we gain no perspective of how upper-right quadrant power is exercised to circumvent the binary of resistance and compliance. We gather nothing in terms of how the lower-left quadrant political culture dictates how individuals, groups and the State all act actually in similar fashion, regardless of the “Islamist”, “authoritarian” or “interim” names.

Coverage is so biased to binaries and rationalities of conflict that the only role players of the upper-right quadrant have is, again, to hold the State accountable and, therefore, in reaction to a dominating State protest or comply. But that is not how societal actors pursue interests for the most part. Actors are not static in the sense that they cannot expand or choose other goals or in fact have other desires. These change through time in reference to changing consciousness, changing political culture or other variables within the larger context. Thus, when societal actors in Egypt developed competencies through the experience of greater hardship, they took to the streets and finally demanded rights. They demanded rights beyond the western secular construct of political freedoms. They demanded and continue to demand freedoms in regards to, first and foremost, economic conditions. Importantly, protest was borne out of a growing awareness and competencies gained.

These competencies are derived first in the upper-left quadrant as an awakened consciousness in specific areas of being. An awakened consciousness on the individual level arises from, for example, participating outside the home in organizational capacity and learning new ideas and behaviors from others. Some individuals I have interviewed in Egypt explained that they gained new awareness from studying or travelling abroad where they saw how people lived in greater political, social or economic freedom or in these places discussed ideas that were new to them. This awakened consciousness in turn, however, can result from sub-variables in one’s own political culture, or the lower-left frame whereby, for example, democratic principles have been nurtured over time yet were not as dominant as an authoritarian culture. Such is nurtured through civil behavior repeated through time, observable in the upper-right quadrant.

The importance of using a more holistic framework, such as the AQAL integral perspective is in the ability to view how conflict not only arises but can be addressed through more perspectives than that which is observed and studied at the State level or even between the State and society. Civil acts, thought and being precedes societal and State behavior. It is nurtured in political culture. It is nurtured in the individual self as one changes understanding of options and therefore goals and means towards those emerging goals. Such a framework illuminates that it is important to actively nurture civility within all frames to which the individual self is of enormous consequence.

By Wanda Krause, author of Spiritual Activism: Keys for Personal and Political Success, CHOICE OATs 2013 award winning bookCivil Society and Women Activists in the Middle East, and book Women in Civil Society.