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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Scholar and author Vivienne Jabri recently gave a fantastic lecture at The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution on the relationship of critical theory to the contemporary practice of conflict resolution and humanitarian intervention. Jabri discusses the contributions of Kant, Habermas, Foucault, and Arendt to the pressing issues of intervention today, specifically in the cases of Western visions for Afghanistan and Syria. Her remarks make apparent the necessity of critical thought to the field of peace and conflict studies, and we at Unrest Magazine look to Jabri as one of the few thinkers within the field who champion the conversation we have tried to help further. Unrest contributor and renowned author/scholar Richard E. Rubenstein is part of the Q&A session in the second video. Rubenstein presses Jabri on the contributions of Marx and materialism, which Jabri connects to the neoliberal project and the need to support post-colonial resistance movements within the above mentioned conflicts. Jabri’s lecture begins around the 16:50 mark of the first video.
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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 article explores Jacques Lacan’s four discourses (Master, University, Hysteric and Analyst) and places them in the context of conflict resolution. This article begins a discussion of what Lacanian thought can do to help the analysis and practice of conflict resolution. Furthermore, there are certain existential problems within the field that are raised by the Lacanian perspective in Conflict Resolution.
Keywords: Lacan, Conflict Resolution, Analysis, Critical Theory, Conflict, Burton
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In the summer of 2009 I published a book arguing that conflict resolution and peacebuilding practitioners needed to work alongside business, both local and multinational, to address contemporary violent conflict. What felt like a innovative approach at the time has rapidly been taken up by organizations and the amount of business-based peacebuilding has been increasing quickly – likely not directly attributable to my work, but longer trends in peace and development work. This can be seen in the work of groups like International Alert, collaborative organizations like UN Global Compact, and the growing literature on conflict-sensitive business practices. In spite of this, I have found myself apprehensive about the very cooperation I was encouraging, in a way that I was not able to fully explain until I spent a semester in a seminar working with Richard E. Rubenstein and joined the Unrest crowd.
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The subject of the study of conflict is conflict, but the subject constituted through the discourse of conflict resolution is something much different. Michel Foucault provides a model for the investigation of the subject within professional-academic discourses through his investigations of mental health,[i] medicine,[ii] and criminology,[iii] but his analyses focus on dominant discourses within society. These subjects are practically universal within the societies considered. What, then, are we to do when faced with a professional-academic discourse like conflict resolution, one that is most definitely not dominant? Within the domestic area, the dominant subject relating to conflict is determined by legal discourse. In the international arena, it is bounded by power politics and realism. Luckily, Judith Butler’s analysis of the subject created by feminism in Gender Trouble[iv] is a good guide. Like conflict resolution, feminism is a subaltern discourse, one that specifically defines itself in opposition to dominant ones. Additionally, feminism, like conflict resolution, is a regulative discourse, one aimed at controlling human behavior.
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