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?
Read More…
We drove through Over-the-Rhine on a cold Sunday morning a few weeks back in December. If Cincinnati is empty during the business week, it looks like a ghost town on weekends. I wanted to see if any murals were left from Shepard Fairey’s retrospective Supply and Demand at the Contemporary Art Center. Fairey installed a score of them as part of a huge street-meets-gallery-meets-endearing or not-so-endearing public showing in the city. The murals are dispersed throughout the metro and surrounding areas. Controversy waited eagerly for the exhibit and some pieces were painted over hours after they were put up for being…well…controversial and thought provoking. As art should be.
Read More…
The peace educator dreams of a class full of students who, after a flicker of insight, stand up and rush to the streets. However, as anyone involved in the struggle for peace knows, dreams are seldom reflected in reality. What is much more common is for students to show that they have understood what they have learned, even state their agreement with it, and then go about their lives as if nothing has changed.
In 1977, George Kent published “Peace Education: Pedagogy in the Middle Class,” in the journal Peace and Change.[i] His primary concern should sound familiar to anyone teaching courses related to peace and social justice. He noted that the predominant approach in these classes was to try to convince students that they lived in a system where many people are oppressed, including in most cases the students themselves. However, while students would easily agree about the existence of oppression, they would strongly resist defining themselves as oppressed. While the traditional approach was to simply teach harder, Kent proposed an alternative interpretation:
Read More…
In Reform or Revolution, Luxemburg (1900, reprinted 1970) argues that the act of reform within the capitalist system, regardless of its potential to benefit the workers, is ultimately a destructive act because reform serves to extend and perpetuate the capitalist system. Revolution is the only possible way to truly change the system, though in this work she does not indicate whether or not non-violent revolution is possible. This question is key for the field of conflict analysis and resolution because whether we agree with Luxemburg or not indicates how we conceptualize the field and how we approach conflict. Are we attempting to mitigate or manage the most violent conflict, to shift it to less violent forms, to stop the killing; or are we working to be catalysts for greater change and focused beyond ending physical violence? There seems to be merit to both approaches ñ clearly no one interested in resolving conflict would argue that allowing people to die is a good thing. However, it is quite clear that imperfect resolutions can result in more people dying in the long term, so resolution for resolutions sake is also not the answer. The Rwandan genocide, which resulted in part from the failure to resolve an earlier conflict through the Arusha Accords makes this clear. In re-reading Reform or Revolution it is helpful to apply Luxemburg’s ideas to something other than revolution in the sense of a proletarian uprising, and to instead look at how the questions affects conflict resolution.
Read More…
One of the goals of Unrest is to investigate the theoretical spaces not commonly addressed in our analysis of contemporary conflict and our attempts to address it. We hope to contribute to the development of Critical Conflict Theory (CCT), which has the opportunity to provide insights traditional conflict theory cannot. This essay argues that heterogeneous conflicts should be a fertile ground for critical work and, in so doing, hopes to point at least some of the CCT work toward this underrepresented area.
Read More…
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.
Read More…
