UNREST MAGAZINE

‘Twitter Revolution’[1], ‘Facebook Revolution’[2], ‘Revolution 2.0’[3] – mainstream Western media headlines have been saturated by such bold expressions. The purpose of these headlines is to paint strong, cyber-utopian imagery of social movements and revolutions perceived to be orchestrated solely through the use of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, SMS and the like. And while the imagery is strong, the message it sends is misguided and misleading. Can a single technology really be responsible for mass movements? Does the presence of Facebook mean an inevitable revolution is on the horizon? The simplest answer is no. And while there is general agreement that social media technologies have played an important role in shaping the ways in which its users’ participate in social affairs, what terms like ‘Twitter Revolution’ and ‘Facebook Revolution’ ignore is that political and social movements belong to the people not to the technology. Twitter, Facebook and the like are technological tools used by groups of people who are motivated to create change. If the headlines have shown us anything as of late, it’s that we need a more holistic understanding of these digital tools, because they are what people make of them.
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Greetings Unrest readers worldwide.

Welcome to the fourth issue of Unrest Magazine. Derek Sweetman starts this issue off with a critical reading of the actions and treatment of Bradley Manning as a response to activism under neoliberalism.   Caitlin Currie Turner puts social media in context against the backdrop of the uprisings sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.  Tom Richardson interrogates our sympathies toward humanitarian intervention in the wake of events in Libya.  In Discourse, Melanie Hartmann presents a two-level model for conflict resolution aimed at challenging the hegemonic dominance of the discursive structures of war and violence.  The Fringe is a new section we are excited to introduce in this issue of Unrest designed to test the limits of thinking and action in our responses to conflict.  Roi Ben-Yehuda and Andrea Bartoli push the boundaries by imagining the development of conflict resolution commandos in light of the Gaza Flotilla campaigns.  We also feature a poem by Georgian civil rights lawyer and advocate Anna Dolidze in Right Hemisphere.  Issue Four also contains pieces by Jay Filipi, Richard E. Rubenstein, and Michael D. English.  Additional articles will roll out over the course of July with a pdf version of the Issue Four available for download at the end of the month.
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This month a new flotilla is scheduled to set sail to Gaza. As will be recalled, in May 2010 a violent confrontation at sea between Israeli naval forces and pro-Palestinian activists led to the death of nine people and many more injured; before a Turkish vessel aiming at breaking the Israeli blockade of Gaza was escorted to a port. As a consequence, relations between Israel and Turkey dramatically soured and Israelis standing in the international community further eroded. Judging by the rhetoric of the parties involved today another collision seems imminent, with more flotillas forthcoming in the future.

As scholars of conflict resolution, we believe that such situations call for constructive adaptation on the part of those involved. To that end we propose the IDF take initiative and create the first ever Conflict Resolution Commando unit.
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For the better part of 2011, I have, due to much self-interest, bugged Roi Ben-Yehuda to write a piece for Unrest. Roi is a colleague and a fantastic writer who even when I firmly disagree with him, still manages to push the boundaries of my own assumptions about the meaning, purpose, and practice of conflict resolution. You can imagine my excitement then when Roi proposed publishing a piece he had co-written with Andrea Bartoli, world-renowned scholar, practitioner, and now Dean of The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. You can also imagine my, shall we call it surprise, when I read the following article on the creation and deployment of conflict resolution commandos (or CRCs). Were they serious? I felt like I had walked in on the middle of a joke and was about to make Unrest the butt of it by publishing a piece that sits uncomfortably between deadly seriousness and total absurdity.
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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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Fringe is designed to test the limits of theory and action in response to today’s complex problems.  Here we dare to gaze into the abyss and ask, “What if?”  Fringe is designed as a communicative space where creative propositions are articulated and also challenged by the thoughtful critiques they deserve.  Leading thinkers in the field of peace and conflict research are given a chance to pursue unconventional ideas in a forum that moves beyond today’s prescriptive responses to issues of war and violence.  Additionally, readers of Unrest are given the opportunity to react to the ideas presented and suggest their own visions for future engagements or interventions.
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