How is peace work related to conflict?
The obvious response is that peace is the opposite of conflict, but closer study reveals that this is not so (see Lesson 1.1). Many peace work activities are even cases of escalation of conflict. In the segregated South of the USA, people had to use different toilets, restaurants, schools etc, and the front seats on the buses were reserved for people with white skin. When African-American Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front of the segregated bus, she knew it would create a reaction and escalate the conflict. She did it to expose inequality and injustice and bring it to public attention; she wanted to make more people take a stand. In communist Poland, Lech Wałęsa led strikes and occupations of the Gdansk shipyard because he knew it would escalate the conflicts with the government.
Many examples of peace activities are cases of conflict escalation, but with peaceful means. That is a crucial difference from what is meant by escalation in most textbooks about conflict, where it is usually understood as escalation of violence. This is due to a common misunderstanding of some basic concepts.
Firstly, not all conflicts are not necessarily bad. Almost all development of individuals and societies includes conflicts. Problems arise when one or more actors take up violent means. The most successful cases of conflicts solved with nonviolent means i.e. the most peaceful ones, are often underreported, invisible and undocumented. The media and academia tend not to recognize conflict unless it is very violent, at both individual and societal levels.
When a couple has a quarrel it is only heeded if there is physical violence, and even this is often ignored or even condoned, especially violenceagainst women. When countries are internally divided or in conflict with others, interest focuses on the disasters - for instance, much more attention was paid to the violent break-up of the former Yugoslavia than to the peaceful division of Czechoslovakia.
One sad consequence is that we hear much more about how not to act in conflicts than about interesting examples of peace work. Many conflicts are handled wisely and peacefully, but they are rarely acknowledged.