Affective Divides, Conflict in Gaza, and Reformed Public Theology: How the Practice of Confession Could Bring Healing at Home from a Conflict Abroad

Summary Two groups' (Israelis and Irish) attitudes toward each other were compared, along with the attitudes of a control group (Australians) toward both. The groups were divided according to surmised attitudes toward the conflict in their country, Jews vs Arabs and Protestants vs Catholics. Students of education (N = 153) answered open-ended questionnaires about the Northern Irish conflict (in Israel), the Middle Eastern conflict (in Ireland), or both. On the basis of political alignments and Heiderian principles of interpersonal balance it was hypothesized that Israeli Arabs would be more sympathetic toward the Irish/Catholic cause than Israeli Jews, and that Irish Catholics would be more supportive of the Arab side in the Middle Eastern conflict than Irish Protestants. The samples possessed significantly different amounts of both nominal and correct information, revealed different types of misconceptions, and expressed significantly different attitudes. Wherever the expression of an attitude would have created imbalance, evasive techniques were used, including expressions of ambivalence, neutrality, indifference, and rationalization.

This article examines the role of Chinese armaments in recent Middle Eastern conflicts, showing that although their use has increased over the past decade, they remain less numerous or significant compared to those from the United States and Russia. Chinese‐made weapons have been used in conflicts in Gaza, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Lebanon due to affordability, streamlined procurement processes, and improved quality. China's critics have alleged that it has played a negative role in these conflicts through proliferation, claims that Beijing has consistently denied. This research investigates the accuracy of these charges and assesses whether China's role should be considered prominent. The study examines weapons that have been used in five ongoing regional conflicts, including the Gaza war. It finds that, unlike Washington and Moscow, which have deliberately transferred military equipment to the region, China has avoided intentionally directing armaments to Middle Eastern conflict zones. Instead, Chinese arms have been redistributed by third parties. The analysis concludes that China's strategy of balancing its relationships across states in conflict has limited the amount of its weapons in the region and kept the impact of those armaments to a minimum.

The concept Social cohesion is relative and a somewhat difficult concept to define. Many scholars have offered varying degree of definitions but the main challenge noticed in the definition, is the multiple definitions based on individual scholar’s orientation or ideology. Another problem poised by these definitions of the concept is that of multi-level and multi-dimensional nature. Contemporary scholars of social cohesion have defied a way of treating the concept as a phenomenon with a multi-dimensional feature or as a kind of potentially construct concept structured around many varying indices. Academics and policy makers have unanimously arrived at a consensus that, "Social Cohesion" as a concept, is enjoying an ever-increasing popularity. Inspite of this perceived ubiquity in many literatures, the concept of social cohesion is still a hugely ill-defined concept that exact meaning varies from one scholar to another. While some scholars or researchers understand the concept as being synonymous to trust, solidarity and peace; many others tend to be of the view that the concept can incorporate such terms as inclusiveness, poverty and social capital. Sociologists however have associated or aligned the concept to ideas that includes social integration and system integration. In furtherance of the search for a clear definition, sociologists have attempted to simplify the challenges embedded in its definition. They highlighted interest in developing a general theory of social cohesion that is confronted with a complex body of work that involves various definitions of social cohesion and engaged specialized literatures on particular dimensions of social cohesion (e.g., membership turnover, organizational commitment, categorical identifications, interpersonal attachments, network structures) and encourage lines of inquiry that is focused on the specific types of groups (e.g., families, schools, military units and sports teams. The apparent theoretical confusion pointed out by other scholar critically is geared towards a critical view of the concept of cohesion which could be viewed as nothing beyond a "quasi-concept" or "concept of convenience" that can be seen to be flexible enough to allow for tweaking, meanderings and also offer rooms for necessities associated with political action in its everyday activities. The goal of the article therefore is to proffer an in-depth analysis of how the concept of social cohesion has been defined and applied in the literature, taking into cognizance the two traditions used in analyzing social cohesion. The first that has its origin in the disciplines of social sciences such as Political Science, Sociology, Social Psychology etc. Coming after social science discipline is the more recent and increasingly significant approaches that were formulated by policy-makers.

One of the European Union (EU) economic objective is to achieve economic and social cohesion. It is therefore important to analyze the European Union's policies, including structural, impact on cohesion. Establishment of the common market did not itself offer a solution to economic problems faced by member States. The concept of cohesion may be regarded as designed to allow all regions to compete in the internal market. The Union funds should seek to promote equality between levels of development and employment. Economic and social cohesion is very important to strengthen political and economic development of the European Union Member States. European Union cohesion policy provides the possibility to finance various activities in order to promote economic growth in the EU Member States and their regions. The three main objectives of the current EU cohesion are convergence, regional competitiveness and employment and European territorial cooperation. Cohesion policy can be an effective tool to achieve economic convergence, if it is accompanied by a number of financial and non-financial elements such as the labor market situation, investment opportunities, and so on, which are the result of national policy. The article includes an analysis of Lithuania's economic environment compared with other Member States. The article study the subject - financial instruments aimed at social and economic cohesion, and its implementation aspects. This article aims - to explore the features of EU economic and social cohesion in the aspect of structural policy. The research methods used at work - literature and statistical data analysis. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.em.17.4.2999

Social cohesion in Canada Barry Ferguson (bio), Simon Langlois (bio), and Lance W. Roberts (bio) Canada is a diverse society of almost 34 million people. Its population is about half the size of Great Britain and France, the two nations whose colonization projects strongly shaped Canada’s development. For most of the country’s history, the original or Aboriginal peoples have been marginalized despite the many ways in which they contributed to the nation’s economic, social and political development. After the British took Quebec from France, formalized in 1763, the French Canadians relied upon natural increase in order to sustain their population, while Great Britain encouraged mass immigration from the British Isles to increase population, practices which ensured national duality. During the 20th century, Canada recruited more than 13 million immigrants, mostly people of European background, but immigrant recruitment over the past forty years has been increasingly diverse. Canada has become a multicultural society characterized by very diverse ethnic and cultural origins. The Canadian federation is a complex society whose components are provinces with a great autonomy, regions with different resources, a diverse population that include many ethnic groups, two official languages, and fifty-seven aboriginal nations with their own national identities. The remarkable and continuous transformations of the Canadian population over the centuries has deeply marked its social cohesion and posed strong and varied challenges from one epoch to another. [End Page 69] Canadian society is structured so its components – whether these are conceived as individuals, provinces, regions, aboriginal nations or ethnic groups – are weakly subject to a binding normative order; consequently, coordinating the components into an integrated whole is continuously challenging.1 The challenges to Canada’s social cohesion are both unique and general. The unique challenges include issues such as national duality, the underdevelopment of aboriginal nations, and the uneven development of the different regions. More generally, Canada shares many of the same cohesion challenges found in other nations, including the effects of globalization on national economy, growing population diversity, expanding social differentiation, generational effects, and new socio-economic cleavages. This essay will examine aspects of social cohesion that are both specific to Canada and those that are shared with other comparable societies.2 The essay begins by considering some unique issues of Canadian society, specifically its multinational character (linguistic duality, Aboriginal peoples, high immigration) as well as its regional tensions. This is followed by the examination of inclusion/exclusion indicators, the social bonds, and democratic issues commonly referred to in the majority of the studies on social cohesion. Macrosociological issues – some specific to Canada, other common to other developed societies – will complete the analysis. The conclusion gives consideration to the idea that the relatively high level of social cohesion in Canada is related to the extensive level of cross-cutting ties. 1. Population Diversity and Social Cohesion Population diversity has underwritten three specific factors affecting social cohesion in Canada. These factors are the marginalization of Aboriginal peoples, the difficult and lengthy process of recognizing French Canadians, and the integration of an increasingly-diverse immigrant population. Aboriginal Peoples The Canadian Constitution of 1982 and federal and provincial governmental instruments recognize four different categories of Aboriginal peoples: registered status Indians (registered in 605 “Indian bands”), non-status Indians (neither registered nor granted [End Page 70] lands), Inuits (aboriginal peoples of the Arctic region), and Métis (of mixed European and aboriginal ancestry). Aboriginal peoples represent about 4% of the Canadian population. The majority continue to live on separate lands or “Indian reserves” that are governed under the provisions of the federal Indian Act. The majority of reserves constitute a “third world” inside the borders of the Canadian state. Among Aboriginal peoples, life expectancy is lower than that in the general population, and communities typically experience major economic, social and public health problems as well as highly-constrained versions of local self-government. Despite these problems, there are positive developments. The legal and political recognition of Aboriginal peoples was entrenched in the 1982 Constitution Act. And, since that time, the social, economic and political grievances of Aboriginal peoples have been recognized as central to the national public agenda. This recognition is shown by such institutional forms as the...

The study aims at consideration of modern academic and applied approaches to the construction of social and cultural cohesion as a component of social cohesion in order to further explore the prospects for the consolidation of Ukrainian society. Methods. Interdisciplinary approach, axiological approach, structural analysis, methods of political science and sociology are used to study the division of modern societies along the lines of ethnic, linguistic, religious differences, and inequality of opportunities to fully perform their potential through education, access to health care, digital technology, communication, income gap, ideological differences that hinder internal transformations. It is founded that the growing gap in opportunities and inequality exacerbated by the pandemic creates an environment of mistrust both within societies and between collective communities, an atmosphere of alienation and irritation, which often become conflict triggers. Such social fragmentation and differentiation raise the question of inclusion and exclusion of individuals and collective groups (in particular, states) in / from the sphere of social interaction and, as a consequence, generates academic and analytical search for answers to the question of social cohesion as a guarantee of steadily progressive development and hence, security. The deficit of socio-cultural cohesion as a high degree of solidarity and cohesion between groups and members of these groups, which should be a fundamental prerequisite for building resilience, makes the state vulnerable to external threats and makes the national security system poorly managed. It is this context that challenges Ukraine with construction of socio-cultural cohesion as a guarantee of progressive security development and resilience. The study analyses approaches to the interpretation of social and cultural cohesion in the modern search for conflict-free forms of interaction, the dichotomy of social and cultural / social cohesion in the approaches of international governmental organizations to the assessment of political and social transformations. Recommendations are provided for building the social and cultural cohesion of Ukrainian society on the basis of indicators for assessing social and cultural integrity, taking into account the international political context and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

This study relies on existing empirical works in psychology, political science, and behavioral economics to construct a formal model of political blame attribution that captures how individual blame attribution is aggregate into social blaming of sets of agents. Such a framework facilitates an analysis of the mechanisms by which social and political conditions alter the intensity, direction, and distributions of blame attributions. At the second stage of the study we utilize the model to explore the implication of two central macro-level constructs – institutional design and social cleavages – on the way social blame is shaped. For this purpose we introduce two new concepts: blame coherence and blame agreement, and provide formal measures for these concepts. Next, we offer a typology which relates institutional design and social characteristics to the formation of collective blame. Finally, we corroborate the model’s predictions based on the results of existing empirical studies.

(1989). Class contradictions and social cleavages in informationalizing post‐industrial societies: On the rise of new social movements. New Political Science: Vol. 8, No. 1-2, pp. 125-153.

Concerns about immigration and the rising visibility of minorities have triggered a lively scholarly debate on the consequences of ethnic diversity for trust, cooperation, and other aspects of social cohesion. In this accessibly written volume, leading scholars explore where, when, and why ethnic diversity affects social cohesion by way of analyses covering the major European immigration countries, as well as the United States and Canada. They explore the merits of competing theoretical accounts and give rare insights into the underlying mechanisms through which diversity affects social cohesion. The volume offers a nuanced picture of the topic by explicitly exploring the conditions under which ethnic diversity affects the ‘glue’ that holds societies together. With its interdisciplinary perspective and contributions by sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists, as well as economists, the book offers the most comprehensive analysis of the link between ethnic diversity and social cohesion that is currently available.

Purpose This paper aims to examine the devastating effects of the ongoing conflict in Gaza on its education system, a phenomenon termed “Educide”. The study documents the systematic destruction of educational infrastructure, including schools and universities, as well as the targeted killing of students and educators, which impedes current and future access to education. The paper argues that this deliberate dismantling of Gaza’s educational institutions aims to erase Palestinian culture, identity and resilience, thus hindering any prospects for SDG4. The authors emphasize the urgent need for international accountability and support to rebuild Gaza’s education sector, preserving its role in societal development, identity preservation and human rights. Design/methodology/approach This research paper uses a qualitative design, using data gathered through a comprehensive review of both grey and scholarly literature to assess the impact of the ongoing conflict on Gaza’s education system. By analyzing official reports, working papers and conference abstracts, the study compiles evidence of the systematic targeting and destruction of educational infrastructure in Gaza. This approach allows for an in-depth understanding of the conflict’s immediate and long-term effects on educational access, infrastructure and cultural preservation. The methodology underscores the critical implications of these findings and calls for urgent international intervention and accountability to protect education in conflict zones. Findings The paper’s findings reveal severe, systematic destruction of Gaza’s educational infrastructure, including schools and universities, with extensive loss of life among students and educators. The research shows that this “Educide” disrupts educational access for current and future generations, stifles intellectual growth and threatens the preservation of Palestinian identity and heritage. Evidence indicates that such deliberate targeting aims to destabilize Gaza’s social structure and hinder long-term development. The findings highlight the urgent need for international accountability to halt these acts, safeguard education as a fundamental right and rebuild Gaza’s education system to ensure resilience and continuity amid conflict. Research limitations/implications The research faces several limitations, including reliance on secondary sources, such as gray literature and official reports, which may limit firsthand insights and real-time data accuracy. In addition, the ongoing nature of the conflict restricts access to updated information and complicates direct assessment of damage. The study’s qualitative approach may also limit the ability to quantify the full extent of destruction and long-term impacts on educational outcomes. Finally, the challenging political environment may affect the availability and reliability of certain sources, potentially leading to gaps in comprehensive data on Gaza’s educational infrastructure and human resource losses. Practical implications The practical implications of this paper underscore the urgent need for international intervention to protect Gaza’s education sector. Highlighting the concept of “Educide”, the study calls for policies to prevent the targeting of educational institutions in conflict zones and mechanisms to hold perpetrators accountable. It advocates for comprehensive support to rebuild Gaza’s educational infrastructure, ensuring students and educators can safely return to learning environments. This research also serves as a foundation for policymakers, NGOs and human rights organizations to implement sustainable educational recovery programs to preserve Palestinian identity, cultural heritage and long-term development amidst ongoing challenges. Social implications The social implications of this paper are profound, as it highlights the erosion of Gaza’s educational foundations and its broader effects on Palestinian society. The systematic destruction of schools and universities disrupts education and impacts community resilience, cultural preservation and intergenerational knowledge transfer. This “Educide” undermines social cohesion by depriving young Palestinians of safe learning environments, vital support networks and prospects for socioeconomic stability. The study emphasizes the need for global support to restore these educational spaces, ensuring that education can continue to foster community strength, identity and hope within Gaza’s society amid conflict. Originality/value This paper is original in its focus on the concept of “Educide” in Gaza, a term describing the systematic targeting and destruction of educational infrastructure as a means of cultural and societal erasure. By framing the deliberate dismantling of Gaza’s education sector within a genocidal context, the paper offers a novel perspective on the intersection of conflict, education and cultural preservation. It contributes uniquely to academic and policy discourse by combining documented evidence with a call for international accountability, emphasizing the critical role of education as both a human right and a foundation for resilient societies in conflict zones.

This research addresses the notion of political repression which, considering its complexity, requires an interdisciplinary approach that considers in addition to the disciplines of history, political science or social psychology, the contributions of philosophy. In this regard, the complexity is linked to the semantic richness of the word repression that allows formulating some philosophical questions that can be answered from social psychology regarding the notion of trauma and violence, and from political science considering the concept of social control. Thus, the relationships and distinctions between repression and associated concepts are established in a multidimensional way and through mutual influences. It is interesting to specify that political repression has among its objectives, to disintegrate social and political cohesion, by modifying the subject's bond with the world, which has three dimensions: orientation or disposition to action towards and with the other, values personal, social and political and the nexus with the collective. In this study, resonance is understood as the mutual influence or co-variation between the subject and the world in each of these dimensions in a complementary or synchronous way. To this end, the case of the former Fort El Morro (1973-1985), located in the coastal zone of the Biobio region, and with an important historical antecedent of military occupation, which functioned as a clandestine detention and torture center, is being investigated during the Chilean civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990). As a method, case studies are carried out, which consider semi-structured interviews, the objective of which was to account for the experience of repression as a form of harm justified by State agents. Historical information sources that detail the background on the civic military coup in the Biobio region, mainly in the city of Concepcion, and testimonies of survivors of the place that relate the repressive events of which they were direct witnesses were also reviewed. The secondary sources are academic, which in this study constitute the interdisciplinary theoretical contributions to support the notion of repression. The secondary press and audiovisual sources used are of a recent nature and reveal other historical antecedents that allowed the declaration of the site as a historical monument. The main results highlight the notion of resonance as a comprehensive model that allows a broad and complex visualization of social and political phenomena such as the case of repression, emphasizing the interactions between the subjects and institutions that make up a socio-political network. The main finding is linked to the concept of resonance, understood not only as an identification of the group with political ideology but as a proposal that, from the contributions of philosophy, articulates social ties with political values. In this regard, the resonance that considers the social ties sustained in political relationships, favors reconsidering subjectivity and social ties in relation to transcendental political principles that guide subjectivities towards the restitution of social and political cohesion. In this sense, resonance can be considered a fundamental notion since it illuminates the nexus between the social and the political from another perspective. In this way, it can be affirmed that a projection of this study consists of exploring political phenomena attending to historical, spatial and temporal dimensions from different disciplines, particularly highlighting the contribution of philosophy, whose questions can collaborate with the study of historical events from new prospects. https://doi.org/10.16888/interd.2021.38.3.11

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the theoretical basis of the claim that social cohesion is served better by processes within civil society than by government policies. This paper also aims to provide an empirical test using recent UK data. This paper combines literatures from sociology, political science and social psychology in an innovative way.Design/methodology/approachThe approach used was analysis of a range of relevant literatures. Statistical analysis of the DCLG Citizenship Survey to examine aspects of cohesion was also undertaken.FindingsThe civil society argument has both strengths and weaknesses. Group processes and group interests in civil society may lead towards exclusion rather than inclusion. In the UK context, the civil society route to social cohesion is uncertain: the groupings that develop do not necessary promote commitments broadly across society and particularly between advantaged and disadvantaged citizens.Research limitations/implicationsThis article shows the value of social psychological as well as sociological and political science material. It identifies severe limitations as well as strengths in the kind of civil society approaches that have been promoted in recent discussion of the “Big Society”.Practical implicationsThe civil society route to social cohesion is no substitute for the welfare state.Social implicationsMoves to re‐centre social cohesion on civil society processes are unlikely to be successful.Originality/valueThe paper uses a combination of theoretical literatures from different disciplines, including social psychology. The paper uses an empirical test of the civil society thesis using up to date material.

This chapter analyses representations of the Spaniard in Raoul Laparra's opera La jota (Opéra-Comique, 1911) and his writings. In this opera, Laparra represented a fictional episode of the First Carlist War (1833–35) in Spain, and addressed key issues of Spanish national identity, such as the need for territorial, political and social cohesion. Laparra's view of France as a country divided by political and social cleavages such as the Dreyfus affair, regionalist debates, and ideological battles between monarchists and republicans, impinged upon his representation of Spain in La jota. In order to present his audiences with a condemnatory and crude rendition of fratricide wars, Laparra made use of extensive violence and helped to reinforce commonplace views of Spain based on the “black legend” trope. Furthermore, this chapter considers Laparra's substantial writings on Spanish music as an interpretive context for analysing La jota, especially regarding his depiction of Spaniards as “noble savages.”

POETRY AND WOMEN'S CULTURE IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA: EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Charlotte Fürth The essays which make up this symposium were first presented at a daylong meeting of the Southern California China Colloquium gathered at UCLA on October 20, 1990.1 It brought together for the first time in the Anglophone scholarly community feminist researchers who were exploring writings by Chinese from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties (c. 1600-1800). If scholarship on gender issues in China before the twentieth century is no longer a novelty, the present research breaks new ground in its recovery of a very substantial body of literary production by late imperial upper-class women. The collaboration of historians and literary scholars makes it possible for us to hear the literary "voices" of these women through the classical poetry they wrote, and so to explore their intellectual and social worlds in new depth.2 The introduction of women's self-representations makes possible a more sophisticated analysis of historical discourses in which women were involved and gender was constructed, while also opening up new avenues for cross-cultural comparison. The Problem of "Women's Culture" To talk of "women's culture" is to raise basic interpretive questions about the place women have occupied in the creation and transmission of the culture of a major historical civilization like that of China. Women alone neither produced such historically-dominant cultures, nor as subordinates have they shared in them in an unambiguous way. The term "women's culture" as it emerged in American feminist discourse in the 1970s carried with it holistic connotations—implying that women as a gender are a solidarity group like a 1FOr their sponsorship of the original symposium, thanks are owed to the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, the USC East Asian Studies Center, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. 2Research in English has built upon work in the 1980s by scholars in China, notably Hu Wenkai. Besides the contributors to this issue, Kang-i Sun Chang, Grace Fong, Paul Ropp, Pauline Yu and others are already actively adding to the English language scholarship on learned and literary Chinese women. Late Imperial China Vol. 13, No. 1 (June 1992): 1-8© by the Society for Qing Studies 1 2 Charlotte Fürth social class or a race and that these other social cleavages do not fundamentally divide them. It was part of a rhetoric of protest: the search in separation for a sphere of autonomy, a wellspring of creativity, or alternatively an arena where protest or subversion might deploy. The feminist concept of "separate spheres," on the other hand, is more accommodative. It draws attention to those activities and creations of women which men have had no special interest in—whether women's religious activities, rituals, crafts, social networks or domestic skills. Further, it points to those activities of women marked as legitimate in a social/cultural division of labor approved by patriarchial or other male-dominated orthodoxy. In choosing the umbrella of "women's culture" in this symposium, we have had to ask questions about these fundamental problems of the relationship of male and female spheres. Research about women writing in late imperial China places them in an arena which is at the center of the production of Confucian civilization. Writing, for Chinese men, was an ontologically central and civilization-defining activity. It was also a public social practice which legitimized careers and through which men competed for status. Therefore women entering this arena were especially dependent upon a language which they did not create. As writers, women had to define themselves in terms of a long established canonical literary tradition (poetical genres like ci and shi, traditions of classical scholarship like those surrounding the Book of Odes, and even tropes like willow and plum). Here we found it especially difficult to talk about a separate woman's culture or even sphere. What the literary production itself—the poems and letters—appeared to reveal was the presence of a woman's voice or voices. A major theme of all four essays...

How do democratic values affect the willingness of parties to reconcile in the context of protracted conflict? Based on a survey of 2171 students conducted in Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia between 15 November 2015 and 10 March 2016, the results indicate that democratic values and the willingness to reconcile are not necessarily positively correlated; in fact, in some cases, the correlation is negative. The main argument of this article is that neither democratic values nor democratic regimes can guarantee reconciliation or peace, but liberal democratic values and democratic regimes working together can decrease or even help reject the unwillingness to reconcile. The value of justice, just solution, protected values, threat perception, interests, nature and reality of the regime for example, can also explain peaceful attitudes. Finally, this article theorizes that individual and state level actors working together can contribute to understanding democratic peace processes and reconciliation between countries.