Intractable Conflict Research Articles

Тренды институционализации общественного участия в Казахстане для устойчивого развития

Experience shows that the most acute and intractable conflicts related to the environment arise between private and public interests. The right to use resources becomes the cause of environmental conflicts. The decisive role of conflict resolution belongs to local authorities, which mediate between participants with different social and economic interests. Consideration of ecosystem services in the process of decision-making by the authorities and understanding of the distribution of costs and benefits associated with the conservation of nature helps to avoid and prevent conflict. The purpose of this article is to examine the prerequisites for the formation and development of the environmental protest movement, caused by the lack of proper communication between the authorities and the public around issues related to urban landscaping. This article examines the chronology of development of factors and mechanisms of public participation on the basis of protest event-analysis, which allows reconstructing the dynamics of civic mobilization and its key characteristics on the basis of various textual sources. It can be confidently claimed that the lack of understanding and the failure of the authorities to take preventive measures will lead to a further escalation of the conflict and its transition into a non-constructive course. The results obtained stress the need and responsibility of government agencies to develop and strengthen the ability of local communities to play an active role in decision-making. Public participation, social partnership increases the number of participants, guaranteeing a new quality of management process in gathering information, identifying priorities, making decisions, monitoring their implementation, evaluating the results.

Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects by Crystal B. Lake

Reviewed by: Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects by Crystal B. Lake Megan L. Cook Crystal B. Lake. Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 272 pp., 4 black and white photos. $34.95. ISBN: 978-1-4214-3650-0. The central thesis of Lake’s work is twofold: first, that her titular category, the artifact, exists as a specific and specifically meaningful category of object, and second, that in the long eighteenth century, that meaning had a distinct political valence that animated writing about artifacts across a wide range of genres and contexts. Both of these arguments derive from the premise that, as historical objects, “artifacts could [End Page 212] communicate matters of fact that no living person could know for themselves” (12). This ability to communicate the past comes with both affordances and limitations. Lake defines an artifact as “a fragment, but one that remains sufficiently intact to support reconstruction of the object’s full shape and history” (6). Its relationship to its moment of origin or use is therefore a vexed one: while the artifact may, as a primary source, appear to offer neutral evidence about the past, “never enough of an artifact persists for either the reconstructions or the resulting interpretations of the object to be conclusive” (6). For Lake, this incompleteness may derive from an artifact’s fragmented state or, more generally, from its detachment from its historical moment. It is in its incompleteness, Lake argues, that the artifact becomes a profoundly generative category of object. Without a doubt, the objects considered in Artifacts are engines of textual production, inviting study, analysis, and speculation in outsize relation to their relatively modest physical dimensions. This book is divided into two parts, the first establishing a broad conceptual and historical framework for the idea of the artifact and the second consisting of case studies on four specific artifactual categories: coins and medals, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods. While the book’s subtitle characterizes artifacts as “found objects,” the discovery of such objects is not a major consideration here (exceptions occur mostly in fiction, such as the ostensible found manuscript containing the story of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or the statue in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”). Instead, the writers in Lake’s study tend to focus on the interpretation of these objects, bringing them to bear on the era’s most intractable philosophical and political conflicts about history, governance, sovereignty, and the explanatory power of physical evidence. Lake’s first chapter, following the work of Arnaldo Momigliano and a host of more recent thinkers, including Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Carlo Ginzburg, and Rita Felksi, establishes eighteenth-century antiquarianism and the study of artifacts as a discourse keyed into the central political concerns of the day. Depending on the way it was interpreted, an artifact might support a royalist or republican position, and might offer evidence in favor of either vitalist or materialist understandings of matter. In such a [End Page 213] context, artifacts function as vibrant, networked objects that invite interpretation and reinterpretation, Felski’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” brought to bear on Ginzburg’s “clues.” In her second chapter, Lake delves more deeply into the intellectual and social contexts in which artifacts circulated during the eighteenth century, focusing on the objects displayed in the famous Don Saltero’s coffeeshop in Chelsea and references to them in periodicals like Richard Steele’s Tatler and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator. The perspective cultivated in these publications, Lake argues, was deeply invested in qualities that anticipate Sianne Ngai’s category of the “interesting,” a category to which artifacts must certainly also belong. Thus, while the case studies of artifacts that follow explore writing across a range of eighteenth-century genres, periodical culture and its sensibilities remain a mainstay throughout. In each of four case studies, Lake combines consideration of texts that seek to understand or document artifacts in their material particularity with those that treat them in a more fictive or literary way. The first explores numismatics, including both coins and medals, in the work of John Evelyn, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and Charles Johnstone’s popular satire Chrysal...

Developing Fact Finders: A Mobile Game for Overcoming Intractable Conflicts

This study describes the design of a serious game for social change (“Fact Finders”) that presents intergroup conflicts through historical inquiry and multiperspectivity. A pre-test post-test experimental design examined the game’s effect on undergraduates’ perceptions of conflicts in history. Participants included 97 Greek Cypriots (direct parties of the conflict) and 79 Slovenians (third parties of the conflict) who interacted with and evaluated the game online. Data sources included a 17-item questionnaire on perceptions of conflicts in history and gameplay learning analytics data. Findings indicated that both groups’ perceptions for historical source evaluation and understanding multiperspectivity changed significantly after the game. The game significantly changed perceptions about the constructedness of history and the ability to overcome their country’s troubled past only for direct parties of the conflict. The study provides empirical evidence demonstrating the potential value of serious games for affecting young people’s perceptions of intractable intergroup conflicts and their desire to overcome troubled pasts.

Policing Insecurity

In environments of seemingly intractable conflict, how should we understand the role of state capacity building and security-sector reform in transitions to peace? Prevailing wisdom suggests that a strong state security apparatus mitigates cyclical violence and aids in transitions to predictable, rule-governed behavior. Yet growing attention to police brutality in institutionalized democracies calls this assumption into question. Drawing on a multiyear study of war making and state making in eastern DR Congo, this article interrogates logics of police capacity building, analyzing how and why reform efforts intended to bolster the state’s monopoly on violence frequently fail to curb the unrest they seek to disrupt. I argue that enhancing the coercive capacity of the police can entrench a wartime political order that makes peace more elusive; when police deploy the image of the state toward destabilizing ends they reinforce the institutions of everyday war, undermining the stability a monopoly on violence is intended to build.

Identity Frame as the Anchor of Interstate Conflicts: The Case of the United States–North Korea Denuclearization Negotiation

Abstract This study examines the fundamental causes of intractable conflict and deadlocked negotiation by centering on identity. The cognitive variables of identity are derived, and the causal layered analysis framework is used to analyze the influencing mechanism among cognitive layers. This research assumes that conflicts are influenced by interactions among key variables of the identity frame in the cognitive layer: “ingroup definition,” “outgroup definition,” and “conflict narrative.” The United States–North Korea denuclearization negotiation case is examined using this framework, seeking to understand how these factors influenced the conflict, policy initiatives and negotiations.

International Climate Cooperation and the Watershed of Policy Streams

This article presents a watershed model of the policy process to examine comparative policy issue contexts associated with global warming and climatic change (GWCC). The watershed model extends the metaphor of policy streams advanced by Lasswell, Kingdon, Howlett et al., and others to characterize the conditions that precede, and sometimes preclude, the effective workings of the policy process. The model considers the confluence of factors that contribute to the formation of policy knots that precede stages of policy agenda setting and policy formation by exploring public trust and public attention as the headwaters that feed the five streams of the policy process. After distinguishing three hydrological zones, the article identifies several critical junctures in the watershed model of the policy process that explore areas where policy “knots” precede intractable conflict.

Supplemental Material for Learning About Dialogue and Partnership Between Rival Groups During an Intractable Conflict

Supplemental Material for Learning About Dialogue and Partnership Between Rival Groups During an Intractable Conflict

Dialogue Intervention for Youth Amidst Intractable Conflict Attenuates Neural Prejudice Response and Promotes Adults' Peacemaking

Dialogue Intervention for Youth Amidst Intractable Conflict Attenuates Neural Prejudice Response and Promotes Adults' Peacemaking

The Voice of Silence: Patterns of Digital Participation Among Palestinian Women in East Jerusalem

Facebook is one of the world’s largest social networks, with more than 2,7 billion active users globally. It is also one of the most dominant platforms and one of the platforms most commonly used by Arabs. However, connecting via Facebook and sharing content cannot be taken for granted. While many studies have focused on the role played by networked platforms in empowering women in the Arab world in general and on feminist movements in the Arab Spring, few have explored Palestinian women’s use of Facebook. During and after the Arab Spring, social media was used as a tool for freedom of expression in the Arab world. However, Palestinians in East Jerusalem using social media witnessed a decrease in freedom of expression, especially after the Gaza war in 2014. This article focuses on the Facebook usage patterns and political participation of young adult Palestinian women living in the contested space of East Jerusalem. These women live under dynamic power struggles as they belong to a traditionally conservative society, live within a situation of intractable conflict, and are under state control as a minority group. Qualitative thematic analysis of 13 in-depth interviews reveals three patterns of usage, all related to monitoring: state monitoring, kinship monitoring, and self-monitoring. The article conceptualises these online behaviours as “participation avoidance,” a term describing users’ (non-)communicative practices in which the mundane choices of when, why, and how to <em>participate </em>also mirror users’ choices of when, why, and how to <em>avoid</em>.

Ethno‐political socialization of young children in societies involved in intractable conflict: The case of Israel

AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of the ethno‐political socialization of young children in the context of intractable conflict, drawing on the case of Israeli society. The analysis is based on the integrative developmental‐contextual theory (IDCT), which proposes that in the context of intractable conflict, from a very early age onward, in‐group members acquire a socio‐psychological repertoire that consists of narratives, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions related to the conflict and to the rival group. IDCT highlights three central components that dictate the nature of this socio‐psychological repertoire: children's normative developmental trajectory, the context in which the development takes place, and the ethno‐political socialization that is performed by societal agents. We discuss the interaction between these components in socializing children's socio‐psychological repertoire, and ways to change the course of socialization in the context of intractable conflict towards peace‐oriented socialization.

Inter-group conflict affects inter-brain synchrony during synchronized movements

Interpersonal synchrony refers to alignment in time of interacting individuals. Recent neuroimaging findings indicate that the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) — a core region of the observation-execution system — is not only activated during tasks that involve synchrony, but also coupled between interaction partners, suggesting a key role for the IFG in mediating interpersonal synchrony. In this study we investigated whether inter-brain synchrony (IBS) is modulated by inter-group relationships. We examined this question in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one of the world's most prolonged and intractable conflicts. Using functional Near Infra-Red Spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning, we measured IBS among ingroup vs. inter-group dyads (same-nationality dyads and Jewish-Palestinian dyads, respectively) while they performed a task entailing 2D movement synchrony. The results point to an increase in behavioral synchrony and greater enjoyment in the ingroup dyads, compared to the inter-group dyads. Critically, IBS in the left IFG significantly increased throughout task and it was higher among ingroup compared to inter-group dyads. Our findings highlight the effect of group membership on IBS plasticity.

‘I’m not your toy’: rejecting a tourism boycott

ABSTRACT As tourists become more politically conscious, the number of boycotts grows. Despite their proliferation, tourism boycotts rarely succeed. This study explores why tourists reject boycotts in the context of mega-events that are often subject to boycott calls. The paper focuses on the attempted boycott of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv, Israel, by the Palestinian activist group BDS. Qualitative and quantitative insights from a questionnaire sent to tourists who attended the event provide several reasons for boycott rejection. Tourists were antagonistic to the boycott and shared concerns about its rationale, deeming it unnecessary and unwarranted. This was motivated by a desire to keep the Eurovision free of the contested politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The findings highlight the potential risks of using boycotts in tourism, where boycott demands of non-consumption rub against the innate desire for consumption (or self-gratification) in tourism. Based on these findings, the paper suggests alternative ways of working for peace through tourism in settings of intractable conflict.

Conflict and cooperation in the age of COVID-19: the Israeli–Palestinian case

Abstract How do disasters influence conflict and diplomacy in conflict areas? The scholarship shows that while they can provide opportunities for cooperation and ‘disaster diplomacy’ between parties to a conflict, they can also intensify tension and hostility. This article uses the Israeli–Palestinian conflict during the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, exploring the impact of the crisis on relations between the rival parties and examining the conditions under which an ongoing pandemic might lead to either conflict or cooperation in a conflict area. The research is based on within-case analysis, comparing three conflict arenas: Israel–Palestinian Authority relations in the West Bank; relations between Israel and the Palestinian community in East Jerusalem; and Israel–Hamas government relations in the Gaza strip. The article outlines the possibilities and limitations of ‘disaster diplomacy’ in intractable conflicts and contributes to the literature by identifying how different contexts, relations and actors in each conflict arena affect the development of patterns of conflict and cooperation with regard to the pandemic. The study analyses the factors that shape how the pandemic affects the conflict, and the COVID-19-related diplomacy, in each sub-case, with attention to three main variables: the structure of the conflict arena, domestic politics and the developments in the pandemic. The analysis addresses the unique conditions of an ongoing global pandemic, as opposed to an isolated disaster event, and traces the changing impact of the pandemic on the conflict and on disaster-related cooperation at various stages.

4대강 재자연화 정책에 따른 갈등의 동태성에 대한 인과순환구조 분석

This study investigated the dynamics of policy conflicts in pursuing the Re-Naturalization Policy of the dismantling the weirs to restore the nature of the 4 major rivers in S. Korea. The study attempted to derive policy leverage points to alleviate the dynamic conflicts created while transitioning from the 4 Major Rivers Development Policy of past government to the Re-Naturalization Policy of current government. It was confirmed that the restoration of the nature of the rivers involves complex interactions of diverse and numerous socioeconomic and ecological factors, producing highly dynamic conflict behavior over time. The analysis shows that the expression of conflict differed by the period in the process of policy transition, and a dominant feedback structure was constructed to identify leverage points in alleviating the intractable conflicts in an arena where various interests groups such as the government, political parties, environmental groups, farmers, and local-area residents, etc. interplay.

Neural rhythmic underpinnings of intergroup bias: implications for peace-building attitudes and dialogue

Intergroup bias is a ubiquitous socio-cognitive phenomenon that, while sustaining human dependence on group living, often leads to prejudice, inequity, and violence; yet, its neural underpinnings remain unclear. Framed within the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and targeting youth, this study utilized magnetoencephalography to describe intrinsic neural oscillatory processes that represent the intergroup bias and may link with engagement in peacemaking in order to shed further light on the neural mechanisms underpinning intergroup conflict. Across the oscillatory spectrum, from very low to very high frequency bands, the only rhythm found to underlie the intergroup bias was the alpha rhythm. Alpha rhythm was continuously activated across the task and integrated a rapid perceptual component in the occipital cortex with a top-down cognitive-control component in the medial cingulate cortex. These components were distinctly associated with the real-life intergroup dialogue style and expressed attitudes that promote active engagement in peacemaking. Our findings suggest that the cortical alpha rhythm plays a crucial role in sustaining intergroup bias and addresses its impact on concrete intergroup experiences. The results highlight the need to provide opportunities for active peace-building dialogue to youth reared amidst intractable conflicts.

The Emergence of Psychoanalytic Metaneuropsychology: A Neuropsychoanalytically Informed Reconsideration of Early Psychic Development.

This paper is principally concerned with reappraising some of the major disagreements that separated the Viennese and the London Kleinians during the British Psychoanalytical Society's Controversial Discussions. Of particular focus are questions pertaining to the genesis of ego development, the beginnings of object-relating, and the role of unconscious phantasy in respect of these phenomena. The aim of the investigation is to inquire into the light that may be shed on the once intractable conflicts surrounding these questions by bringing to bear more recent developments from psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. First, various key issues from the Controversial Discussions are outlined, before the paper turns to work by Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms that bears on these older arguments and the Freudian theories that underpinned them. With these conceptual foundations established, three questions are posed and discussed with a view to understanding the implications of recent neuropsychoanalytic thinking for some of the entrenched conflicts that divided the British Society. These questions include: (1) what does it mean for the ego if the id is conscious? (2) What does recent neuroscientific knowledge tell us about whether the ego should be thought of as present from birth? (3) How can we understand and locate unconscious phantasy if the main part of the mind that Freud thought of as unconscious is not so? Research from the arena of infant development—particularly the material and analysis of infant observation—is drawn on to illustrate various conclusions. The paper ultimately concludes that taking such an interdisciplinary approach can reveal renewed justification for aspects of the Kleinian metapsychology.

Rhetorical expressions of ethos of conflict and policymaking in intractable conflict by leaders: A comparative study of two Israeli prime ministers.

Rhetorical expressions of ethos of conflict and policymaking in intractable conflict by leaders: A comparative study of two Israeli prime ministers.

English

The perpetual search for solutions to societal conflicts, particularly those tagged intractable, that is, irresolvable, took a dramatic turn when South Africa, one of such age-long conflicts, bowed to mediation after about 48 years of fierce existence. Until now, no rigorously deep insight that is capable of accurately and adequately accounting for the dialectics of history that brought apartheid to such an abrupt end. South Africa became a new model of a democratic society in a transition that did not involve an external third-party and bloodshed. A rigorous study of the South African conflict, using critical discourse analysis and navigating through the political theory of nation-building, reveals that a set of theoretical paradoxes may have underlain the peace process as teased out in this paper.   Key words: Apartheid, de-escalation, intractable conflict, transition, sustainability, deconstruction, societal peace.

The calculus of peace and conflict: a contractualist perspective

PurposeIntractable conflict is a long-time violent and self-perpetuating crisis. The peacemaking revolution has the potential to stop the destructive dynamic of the conflict. The purpose of this paper is to present a contractualist model of a peacemaking revolution and its theoretical foundations. It analyzes the revolutionary peacemaking process in Northern Ireland during the 1990s in light of the contractualist model.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a contractualist model to describe the interplay between leaders (policymakers) and people (public opinion) and its impact on the strategy to cope with situations of intractable conflict. The paper includes theoretical background and a case study analysis.FindingsThe peacemaking revolution is a process of dynamic equilibrium between peacemaking policy and public expectations for change. It progresses from one point of equilibrium to the next.Originality/valueThe paper intends to add a fresh perspective to the study of the peacemaking revolution, in general, and the interplay between peacemaking policy and public support in particular. It points out that a consensus-building process, which combines political-elite diplomacy and public diplomacy, has the potential to create the conditions for a peacemaking revolution. Political-elite diplomacy offers diplomatic channels for leaders to begin a peace process, support it and conclude agreements. Public diplomacy offers instruments to involve the people in the peacemaking efforts, prepare them for a change and motivate the leaderships to conclude agreements.

Legitimate Confines of Powers of the National Judicial Council in Appointment of Substantive Chief Judges for States in Nigeria: Gombe State as a Case Study

Since Nigeria`s return to democratic rule in 1999, there has been persistent face-off between the National Judicial Council (NJC) and State Governors in Nigeria over appointment of substantive Chief Judges (CJ’s) for States in Nigeria. While the NJC appears to prefer that the most senior judge in each State State be appointed the substantive CJ on each occasion, the State Governors insist that their appointing powers under the Constitution are discretionary. This standoff which on each occasion polarizes stakeholders, usually leads to tension within and outside the legal profession. In 2014, a face-off between the NJC and the Rivers State Governor in this respect almost led to a constitutional breakdown in the State. Then there was the case of Cross River State in 2020-2021, among others, the most recent being in Gombe State where the NJC in November 2020 rejected the list of names sent to it by the Gombe State Judicial Service Commission on grounds that the list did not contain the name of the most senior judge in the State. This paper is the second part of a two-winged analysis of all issues surrounding this seemingly unending conflict, the aim of the authors being to expose the actual position of law on the subject and to recommend solutions founded on rule of law, realism and democratic constitutionalism. first part titled, The Convention-Constitution Standoff: Resolving the Most-Senior-Judge Conundrum in Appointment of Substantive Chief Judges for States in Nigeria, is devoted to a discussion of the best way out of this intractable conflict between Conventionalism and the Constitutionalism while the present part focuses on delineating the exact scope and boundaries of lawful powers of the JC in the entire process. Acknowledging NJC’s powers to reject a list on deserving occasions, and taking Gombe State as a case study, this paper examines some salient questions: is the NJC under an obligation to offer reasons for rejecting such a list? Can the validity of NJC`s rejection of any such list be impaired by the legality or otherwise of the reasons so offered? paper thus offers clarifications and recommendations with a view to encouraging all stakeholders to keep within the legitimate confines of their respective powers in order to avoid or minimize tensions, interruptions and distractions.