UNREST MAGAZINE

The Coming Turn Toward the Goal of Radical Transformation

The editors of Unrest Magazine asked me to write briefly about the future of education in the field of conflict analysis and resolution – CAR for short.  But I find it impossible to do this without inquiring more generally into the future of the field, which incorporates both an academic discipline (or disciplines) and a practical profession (or professions).  These diverse but related forms of collective activity can be described as an ensemble, in Michel Foucault’s language, as a “discursive formation.”  Despite their diverse, polymorphous, often inconsistent forms of expression, such formations contain cross-cutting ideational correspondences and resonances – conceptual themes, if you like – such as Foucault’s “docile bodies” and “biopolitics.” [1]  Moreover, the knowledge that new disciplines generate and deploy bears a complex, inter-determined relationship to power which Foucault labels Power/Knowledge.  New academic or professional fields subtend new fields of power, and vice versa.  
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Thank you very much for the most generous welcome and indeed the very generous words from everybody.  It is really great to be here, because, as Sandy says, I do have a long association with George Mason even though this is actually my first visit to the University and especially to S-CAR.  I think you are in a wonderful place.  You know the research that goes on here is really very important in the field of conflict and peace research.  And I would say for international politics actually, so I’m very much looking forward to our interactions this evening.  What I want to do is not to be so theoretical this evening, but nevertheless you’ll see that the theory and the conceptualizations that I work with are very much there in the journey that I am going to take you through.

Now what is that journey?  As you know and as you have seen from the publicity for this lecture, the title is Human Rights, Sovereign Rights, and the Potentials of Conflict Resolution.  In a sense I see a challenge that’s being presented to us now in the 21st Century and that challenge is that we are witnessing the extremes of violence going on across the world.   The challenge is, how do we respond intellectually and, if you like, praxiologically?  How do we respond?
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Warning:  This article is not for the faint of heart or “do-gooders.”  It is written so as to engender (pun intended), unrest.  It contains violent images.

It was a Tartentino moment—-Jabri’s Lynch Lecture, delivered before a cadre of faculty, students and friends of the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.  She assembled her argument and then slashed the jugular of “liberal peacebuilding-as-enterprise,” and its lifeblood spattered across the faces of all those who believed in peacebuilding, as well as those who held it in deep suspicion.  In my view, the neoliberal approach to peacebuilding that has undergirded conflict resolution practice, collapsed twitching on the floor of that auditorium, gasping for breath, with pleading eyes turned toward faculty and students who themselves aspired to be “instruments for peace,” and then it died.  Gruesome and beautiful was its death.  I was delighted, only to be horrified, days later, to see Liberal Peacebuilding Zombie doing the walk of the undead in the corridors and peering into the classrooms of the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, where once again, the conversations were about reflective practice, problem-solving workshops and dialogue, aimed to “help” others in conflict, while neutrally extending the sovereign power of the state and its discursive apparatus, its narratives about itself.
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 “Foucault argues that since we can only have a knowledge of things if they have a meaning, it is discourse – not the things-in-themselves – which produces knowledge.” -   Stuart Hall, Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Discourse. [1]

Michel Foucault’s ideas as conveyed here by Stuart Hall indicate that discourse produces our knowledge of objects. If we accept this premise as true, it would be wise for students of conflict analysis and resolution to pay close attention to the development of new objects in conflict settings.  Unmanned aerial vehicles (also known as UAVs or drones) are a prime example of such objects. Over the past ten years, lethal drones have changed the nature of warfare by allowing the United States’ “war on terror” to become increasingly clandestine and asymmetrical. Since the U.S. government has not provided basic information about its covert drone program – such as where drones are used, how targets are selected, and how many people have been killed – the discourses both championing and opposing drones are often backed by flimsy evidence. Yet these discourses are powerful nonetheless. How we talk about drones affects our understanding of them. Discourses that promote drone warfare are particularly dangerous because they encourage killing in spite of their lack of substance.  Given that the subject of drone warfare is new, anti-drone advocates still have an opportunity to shape the public’s perception of drones. To begin, we must examine the pro-drone discourse with a critical lens and draw attention to its dangerous implications.
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In a little less than two months, the year 2012 will draw to a close and so will the Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign.  Whether or not Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is captured or killed is to some extent irrelevant given the success of Invisible Children’s efforts to make him internet-famous and a household name.  While I am in awe of the visibility the Kony 2012 effort captured, I find myself more concerned with what it revealed about the current state of conflict work.  Conflict work in this case is defined as actions taken by parties who intervene in societies experiencing or recovering from violence.  Such work is generally connected to conflict resolution, development, human rights peacebuilding, and other related types of third party intervention.  Although Invisible Children is only one particular NGO and Kony 2012 one intervention attempt, combined they are a particularly telling example of the disunity of what is considered appropriate when it comes to conflict work.  Invisible Children’s ability to organize and market their cause set a bar unmatched in recent memory; nevertheless, as a precedent for future interventions it comes with a steep price.  Kony 2012 might be a very successful piece of propaganda, but it is an equally disastrous piece of conflict practice.
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Every four years in American society, critical theorists are offered a veritable human circus of entertainment, as we bear witness to the farce of electioneering.

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