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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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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The continued persistence of the Occupy movement is likely both heartening and challenging for readers of Unrest. Heartening because many of us, I presume, are sympathetic to the general goals of the movement and the nonviolent tactics generally used, but also challenging for scholars and practitioners in conflict resolution because it is not immediately clear what role practitioners could or should play in the conflict that the movement is addressing. Not every social or political interaction is a conflict and not all conflicts require the attention of a “conflict worker,” to borrow Johan Galtung’s term (1996, 266). In order to justify a conflict analysis and resolution response, we should be able to identify a unique and helpful contribution to be made. It is my contention here that conflict resolution, as currently thought and practiced, is ill-prepared for this kind of contribution.
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Two growing fields in the social sciences are Conflict Analysis & Resolution and International Development Studies. New programs concentrating on development or conflict are launched every year at universities all over the world. Hundreds of academic journals and trade magazines are devoted to research conducted in the previously mentioned subfields. The recent growth in the two fields has brought many benefits to the study of conflict and development such as the development of more nuanced theories explaining important factors influencing international development and conflict, in addition to a growing number of highly trained scholars and practitioners with in depth training in one of the two subfields.
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