UNREST MAGAZINE

Conflict Resolution educators most often seek “realistic” representations and exercises in an attempt to prepare students for practice in the “real world.”   What they fail to realize is that a consistent desire for realism undermines the ability of students to develop the kind of creative and critical thinking skills they will need when they enter that real world.  There is an important role for fantasy in conflict resolution education.  This article is the story of how Mr. Fox, along with his family and friends, made my conflict resolution courses better – or as one of my students wrote in a reflection on the activity, “engaging and somewhat ridiculous.”  
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There is famous church in Israel, in the town of Abu Gosh, known as the Crusader Church of the Resurrection.  I visited it fifty-plus years ago as a student.  The main part of the church, still in use, was built in the twelfth century by Christian invaders of the Holy Land.  “This place is really old!” you think – but then you take a staircase down one level and find yourself in a chapel built by the Romans more than a thousand years earlier, and apparently used by soldiers of the Tenth Legion in Jesus’ time.   A dizzying temporal drop . . . but it doesn’t end there.  Another stone-cut staircase leads to a level deeper still, where a freshwater pool bubbles among the rocks, fed by an underground spring.  The pool dates back to the Canaanite era and was apparently considered sacred even then.  Two millennia before the Crusades, people were worshiping at this same spot.

Certain theological controversies remind one of the Crusader Church.  They take place on a level from which staircases plunge downward into the remote past.  An example is the current dispute between the Mormons and their adversaries over the nature of Jesus Christ.  The dispute involves other beliefs as well, but the Latter Day Saints’ position on Jesus is the principal reason that Baptist minister Robert Jeffress called Mormonism “a false religion” and a “cult.”  While Billy Graham’s fire-breathing son, Rev. Franklin Graham, denied that Mormons were Christians, American Family Association radio host Bryan Fischer went even further, charging that since Milt Romney worshiped a “false god,” his election as president would weaken the nation spiritually.[1]  I want to reflect briefly on this controversy and its origins, and then ask why theological disputes of various sorts are popping up so frequently in American political discourse and what can be done about that.  
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We submit to the peaceful production of the means of destruction, to the perfection of waste, to being educated for a defense which deforms the defenders and that which they defend.  Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964, ix)

The inner dynamic of capitalism . . . necessitates the revival of the radical rather than the minimal goals of socialism.  Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972, 5)

Capitalism has long been armed with its own theories of work and wealth; labor has not. In order to build an alternate vision for labor, this essay will attempt to re-think a critical philosophical analysis of work, the origins of wealth, and the human condition, including the contemporary propensities toward war. Given recent global economic dislocations, the time is ripe to produce a revitalized theory of society grounded in a critical understanding of human working, wealth-building, activity.
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This essay aims to provide a conceptual integration of deliberative, i.e. communicative approaches to conflict transformation with discursive, i.e. systemic analyses of hegemony and power. Underlying the work is the assumption that the recourse to military force and war, as well as the tacit acceptance and legitimation of structural forms of violence is rooted in hegemonic discursive structures that cause public approval, compliance, or at least the lack of dissent to perceptions which render violence a legitimate form of action. In attempting to answer the question of how such hegemonic discourses may be disqualified and replaced by emancipatory counter-discourses of non-violence and peace, a two-level model of conflict resolution is suggested. This model claims to provide an analytical tool for linking intersubjective dialogue with a systemic, and therefore a societal approach to conflict resolution, while at the same time contrasting the limits of solely process-focused conceptions of deliberation. In brief, the two-level model suggests the need to conceptualize conflict transformation as a process that contains the following integrative and interrelated dimensions: 1) the formation of a public sphere as a deliberative space across enemy lines and 2) the transformation of the public discourses of all parties to the conflict. To this end, the work draws amongst others from first and second generation Critical Theorists, most notably that of Jürgen Habermas. However, the two-level model proposed here claims to provide a somewhat more practicable, but also more radical approach to conflict resolution than that which is laid out by Habermas in his discourse ethics. It is more practicable in that it does not simply take the willingness to engage in communication with ‘the other’ as pre-given, and it is more radical in that it complements deliberative processes of an ‘ideal speech situations’ with an approach to ‘selective intolerance’ in favor of non-violence, justice and peace.

Key Words: emancipation, discourse theory, dialogue, critical theory, communication, discourse ethics, enemy-images, selective intolerance, constructivism, philosophy of science, cognitive interests, hegemony, identity
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In an editorial in the Washington Post titled “Where’s the American empire when we need it?” (Kaplan, n.d.), Robert D. Kaplan worries about the recent decline in America’s capacity to respond to events that threaten to destabilize the international security system. Kaplan is concerned that the slow but steady erosion of American power will leave the current administration little choice but to recalibrate its international security commitments to better reflect America’s increasing inability to effectively fulfill its security obligations as the lone superpower in the post-Cold War era. If the United States is compelled to vacate some of its international security responsibilities, then for Kaplan the important question is who among the other powers in the system will assume the obligations that the United States can no longer fulfill?
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In August of 2010, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) released a special report titled, “Graduate Education and Professional Practice in International Peace and Conflict.” The report details findings from a study conducted to measure the level of academic preparedness of graduate students and professionals looking to establish careers within the field of international conflict. The results of the study do not bode well for graduate students or their academic institutions. In fact, Carstarphen, Zelizer, Harris, and Smith (2010) state, “Graduate-level academic institutions are not adequately preparing students for careers in international peace and conflict management” (p. 1). And this is just the first sentence of the summary.
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