Civil Identity and Communicative Practice: The Rhetoric of Liberty in the United States

Abstract

The field of conflict analysis and resolution, along with its sister subfields like peace studies, conflict management, and conflict transformation, drew its primary inspiration from the context of interstate conflict and diplomatic relations between separate and often sovereign powers. As such, much of the focus in the area has been on elites meeting behind closed doors in confidence with one another to maintain strategic silences about technical plans that might lead toward conflict resolution. This is often true of even more grassroots approaches that rely on directing the energies of social movements and the interest groups that support them. As central as these insider processes are, it is just as important to understand how ideas decided upon in settings favorable to reason and rationality play in the mass public, where subtlety is trumped by familiarity, technical efficiency by dramatized emotion, and long-term benefits are subsumed to immediate attributions of moral superiority. This is the realm of communicative practice.KeywordsCivil SocietyConflict ResolutionCommunicative PracticeDemocratic PartyRepublican PartyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.