title: International crisis and peace processes as autopoietic systems in world society: examples from Greek-Turkish relations
Creators: name: Vathakou, Eugenia
Publisher: name: University of Kent
Year: 2003

description: The subject of this thesis is the emergence and development of crisis and peace processes in modern society. It examines two Greek-Turkish crises and several peace processes undertaken in their aftermath as well as what is described here as a system of co-operation that emerged after a devastating earthquake in Turkey. Mainstream theory of crisis and peace processes has adopted an instrumental approach to crisis and peace processes conceptualizing them as the means to achieve specific aims. Nevertheless, this approach recognizes the difficulty it has to integrate different levels of analysis and explain the dynamics of the complexity involved in these phenomena. This thesis employs Niklas Luhmann's theory of social autopoiesis as an analytical tool in the research and analysis of crisis and peace processes. Luhmann's theory is a radical constructivist approach, which focuses on multiple causality, complexity and contingency. The main argument of the thesis is that in modern society, which is functionally, not hierarchically, differentiated, crisis and peace processes are autopoietic that is self-reproduced social systems which are constituted through communication. The findings of this thesis demonstrate that crisis and peace processes involve not only segments of the society like leaders and elites but they are selections made by the whole of modern society in the course of its blind evolution which is based on the variation and selection of communication. Society consists of autonomous but interconnected function systems like politics, media, the military and civil society organizations, which operate guided by already established social structures such as expectations, values, social practices, institutions, roles and persons. Social systems increase complexity and contingency in society through their normal operations. Given the appropriate conditioning, increased complexity can enforce the emergence of crisis or peace processes as combined selectivity towards the direction of conflict or co-operation. This thesis demonstrates that in a self-organizing society crisis and peace processes cannot be reduced to a particular reason or rationale like the protection of national interests or the desire for peace. Their dynamics depend on the connectivity and selectivity of communication about crisis/conflict and peace/co-operation. Thus, these processes are neither necessary nor impossible; they are contingent. This thesis demonstrates that Luhmann's theory provides us with sophisticated tools to explore the processes and the mechanisms involved in the emergence and development of crisis and peace processes. The project is based on fieldwork conducted from 1999 to 2002 in both Turkey and Greece and which involved the collection of primary source material gathered from more than 80 interviews with Greek and Turkish politicians, diplomats, journalists, academics, civil society representatives and military officers. It also covers an extensive range of theoretical and empirical secondary source literature.