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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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