Interviews with people we think the world ought to know about.
Nino Chubinishvili has created her own Alter-Modern world in Tbilisi. She is not self-described adherent of Deleuzian Multiplicities or Hardt and Negri’s Multitude. She has just created her own world. Sometimes this happens at her own studio in Arts Academy, in some cases in her own house on Mtatsminda region, or sometimes even at “Mukha Tsakatukha” Café, where many alternative artists visit and chat. She smoking a flower like an Eastern woman and is dressed like a Western Woman. But she does not identify with any of those worlds necessarily – she has created her own. One can’t help but think of Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” – the protest of women, who sometimes hid behind the veils and sometimes dressed totally like European women in order to confuse colonizers. In the face of liberal cultural colonization of Georgia, Chubik (as her friends call her since childhood) has discovered her own identity, which is different.
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I’ve been struggling lately – as a student, teacher, activist, writer, vegetarian, wife, you name it. More accurately, I’ve realized how much I have been struggling for a long time. Like many people who want to do good in the world, I have been forced to compartmentalize my life into the situations where I can make a difference and those were I can’t. What I have the time and energy to care about and what I need to ignore. However, this isn’t a sustainable model. Eventually, I am going to burn out or become so callous that I’m not any use to anyone. This essay is prompted by a number of factors: the high rates of burnout, bitterness, and alcohol use I see in conflict resolution practitioners and development workers, the dual questions posed by works such as Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution and Ross’s “’Good Enough’ Isn’t So Bad”, which ask if the system can be reformed or if imperfect actions can be considered “good enough” in a given situation; and my own frustration and misgiving with my own work.
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Sara Potler is the Founder and CEO of Dance 4 Peace (D4P), a global peace education, civic engagement nonprofit that engages young people through dance and creative movement. D4P inspires a generation of leaders and peacemakers through an innovative curriculum that promotes empathy, mediation skills, anger management, and conflict resolution to instill social and emotional competencies for peace.
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“What you really need to ask yourself is, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
Angela was looking straight in my eyes, and didn’t blink for the next seven long seconds.
Silence.
I didn’t have an answer for her.
Who was I – some young, naive American, coming in to the small town of San Andres with broken Spanish, anxious to hear what it’s like to have a husband go to the U.S. for work? What was I going to do with the information she was sharing with me, how it was to finally hear from her brother who had been gone for 34 days after leaving Guatemala to cross by foot the Mexico-Arizona border? Was I just going to write it all up for a grade on my Ethnographic Field School paper? What were my ethical responsibilities as a researcher? As an anthropologist? As someone entrusted with the stories told me?
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Q. In REASONS TO KILL, you study the arguments that pro-war advocates have made throughout American history as we’ve mobilized for war. What reoccurring themes did you find in our rhetorical and philosophical strategies?
Richard E. Rubenstein. This book is not about the factors that motivate elites to make war. Elites have many reasons to fight, including economic interests, geopolitical ambitions, and domestic political motives. The basic question I ask is: What convinces ordinary Americans to send their kinfolk, friends, and countrymen to kill other people and risk their own bodies and minds in battle? The overall answer, I find, is that we are persuaded to fight by appeals to widely shared and deeply held moral values – values associated with what some call our civil religion.
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