Multifaceted Conflicts Research Articles

‘Rien à ajouter’: The League of Nations and the Rif War (1921—1926)

Despite the fact that the Rif War (Morocco, 1921—1926) and its international repercussions have been frequently explored by historians, not much attention has been devoted to the stance of the League of Nations during the conflict, probably because the League simply declared its lack of authority to intervene in the matter when its intervention was suggested. The aim of this article is to provide a more detailed analysis of the reasons given by the League of Nations to justify its role in the conflict. It will argue that the League of Nations acted in accordance with international legislation of the time when it declined to become involved in the Rif War without being explicitly requested to do so either by the Sultan of Morocco or by the protecting powers (France, Spain). However, it will also highlight the tenuousness of these arguments and the contradictory stances the League took at certain stages of the conflict, especially during the period when the Spanish army was publicly accused of using chemical warfare in Morocco. The article concludes by showing how the complex, multifaceted conflict in the Rif encapsulated many of the problems and difficulties of the post-war colonial system, and forced the League of Nations to deal with a series of dilemmas which foreshadowed the difficult circumstances which it would be faced with in the 1930s.

Inside and Outcast: Multifaceted Stigma and Redemption in the Lives of Gay and Lesbian Jehovah's Witnesses

Homosexuality has become a divisive issue in many religions and congregations. Like many other fundamentalist denominations, Jehovah's Witnesses condemns homosexual acts, thoughts, and feelings. Consequently, gay and lesbian Witnesses experience not just stigmatization and conflict between their sexual and religious identities in the social world, but also a nearly impossible task in their inner world. This inner task adds a new facet to our understanding of stigma (Goffman, 1963). This study explores the written narratives of a subset of gay and lesbian former Jehovah's Witnesses who were able to comprehend, negotiate, and, in most cases, resolve their multifaceted stigmas and conflicts through struggle, self-determination, and eventually connecting with networks of peers who faced or are facing similar stigmas. This research contributes to other work on the intersection of religion, family, and homosexuality; in particular, the findings have implications for the study of other strict fundamentalist religions.

Gay Hmong: A Multifaceted Clash of Cultures

A qualitative study was conducted with 10 gay Hmong, from 6 states, ranging from 18 to 30 years old. The participants described growing up as children of immigrant parents, generational and cultural conflicts, and the racial conflicts, discrimination, and violence they encountered. They present a picture of the dilemma created when family, clan, and religion serve as primary protective factors against the effects of racism while simultaneously presenting primary sources of risk for rejection and discrimination based on sexual orientation. Their descriptions of attempting to manage multifaceted conflicts while they navigated multiple worlds provides insight into how social workers can better assess and intervene with the challenges facing persons with multiple and conflicting identities.

Strategic Realignment: Ends, Ways, and Means in Iraq

Four years into the war in Iraq, the debate rages over whether there are enough troops deployed to accomplish the mission. Congress and the White House continuously argue over resources and the conduct of the war. Meanwhile, American and Iraqi casualties persist at an unacceptable rate. America's political and military leaders suggest progress is being made and we should stay the course; after all, it generally requires eight to ten years to defeat an insurgency. From a historical perspective, they are correct. But the situation in Iraq is not just an insurgency, and labeling it as such is a gross oversimplification of the challenges we face. Iraq is a mega-complex challenge; a collage of complex issues that cannot be readily deconstructed into individual issues and problems, solved, and put back together. Every issue in Iraq has potential second- and third-order effects as well as unintended consequences. Some of the enduring factors that will not be easily resolved are the deep-rooted religious conflict, modernization, corruption, inequitable distribution of wealth, lack of economic development, discontent among young males, the prevalence of militias, and a divided government influenced by sectarian interests. Understanding these issues is essential to comprehending the overall nature of the war. Complicating the situation is the presence of terrorists. Allegedly, in an interview with Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein, the late terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi outlined al Qaeda in Iraq's steps toward world domination and establishment of a caliphate. Al Qaeda has a three-stage strategy in Iraq: to expel American forces, establish an Islamic authority or emirate in Iraq, and extend the jihad to the secular countries neighboring Iraq. (1) current situation in Iraq is the result of three fundamental strategic mistakes. First, the United States, particularly its military, initially was remiss in discerning the nature of the conflict and subsequently failed to reassess the situation as circumstances evolved. Second, the government, as a whole, failed to balance ends, ways, and Third, the government chose the wrong strategy. Instead of adopting a strategy appropriate for the complexities of a multifaceted conflict that includes elements of civil war, insurgency, and terrorism, decisionmakers instituted a strategy predominantly focused on counterinsurgency operations. Not only have decisionmakers failed to recognize the realities of the situation, they have failed to adapt and anticipate. Policy by Other Means It is important to keep in mind that war is a political act. According to Clausewitz, War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. (2) wisdom of the decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime is irrelevant. (3) fact of the matter is the United States is fully engaged in Iraq and needs to remain committed to resolving the challenges it was a party to creating. Although unilateral withdrawal is an option, it further destabilize the entire region or, worse, lead to the implosion of Iraq, plunging the entire Middle East into war. Retired General Barry R. McCaffrey assesses that such a conflict would be a disaster for 25 years. (4) Iraq is essential to regional and global stability, and victory in Iraq is a vital national interest. (5) Nature of the Conflict Accurate determination of the nature of a conflict is the critical first step in understanding the actions required for success. Clausewitz's insight reveals, The nature of war is complex and changeable ... its nature influences its purpose and its means. (6) appropriate strategic solution to any conflict depends on correctly assessing its nature. Iraq is, however, a unique conflict. On the one-hand, it resembles a civil war; on the other, it looks like an insurgency. …

Reframing Involuntary Population Displacement and Resettlement—The Case of the Palestinian Refugees: Causes, Consequences, and Prospects for an Impoverishment Process Reversal

The Palestinian refugees issue is at the core of the Arab-Israeli multi-faceted conflict. This paper relies on a study which investigated the multi-level complexity of the Palestinian refugees case to identify the causes and consequences, and some prospects for its resolution. The study analyzed and compared frames and narratives used by the different parties at several stages of the investigated case, and also integrated lessons from two kinds of involuntary migration. During the Israeli/ Arab peace process, a transformation from exclusionary narratives and one dimensional “either/ or” solutions into a multi-optional synergistic environment was evident. The parties’ frames changed again while this protracted conflict re-escalated. This paper focuses on the Palestinian refugees claim for repatriation, and portrays a process of framing and reframing, of narrative co-creation and re-creation, and to a lesser degree of the creation of alternative options and solutions. The essay links insights from conflict analysis and resolution, and regional planning and development. It introduces an interactive model regarding the interconnections between reframing processes and transformation of intractable conflicts, and concludes with some lessons for this and other population displacement cases with regard to prospects for conflicts mitigation and for voluntary resettlement.

Serving the Natives: Whiteness as the Price of Hospitality in South African Yiddish Literature

Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants who came to South Africa from Eastern Europe were thrust from one racially discriminatory society into another. Ignorant of the languages spoken in the country they had made their refuge, largely unskilled in any trades and poorly educated, these immigrant Jews found themselves ambivalent parts of a social formation that left them marginalised by the white ruling class, but socially and politically privileged over black workers. This dislocating experience was most keenly felt when they sought their livelihoods in the South African trading phenomenon known, in the racist parlance of the day, as 'kaffir eating-houses'. From the turn of the century, white South African racist attitudes held in contempt any occupation that provided basic services for blacks, but prevented the opening of such trade to black entrepreneurs. The only whites prepared to take it on were socially despised Eastern European immigrants, chiefly Jews. By entering the only occupation open to so many of them, these Jewish immigrants became victims of multiple prejudice. They found their existence predicated on the necessity to negotiate an identity for themselves along a number of complex and ever-shifting frontiers. Many of the most profitable of these 'kaffir eating-houses' were run by well-off Jews, generally earlier immigrants who had 'made good'. Having become employers, they in turn employed, for exploitatively low wages, poor fellow-immigrant Yiddish-speaking Jews to do the day-today work. Consequently these severely disadvantaged Jewish immigrants found themselves both the recipients and the administrators of a many-sided exploitation. Empowered whites equated them with the blacks they served at fixed and meagre weekly wages for the profit of those who, socially despised themselves, were nevertheless their sole economic means of support. Yet in dealing on a daily basis with their black clientele, these shop assistants were placed by the discriminatory practices of a discriminatory society in positions of racial superiority over black mineworkers and labourers. The confusion they experienced as a result of their marginalised condition created a site of multi-faceted conflict that South African Yiddish writers repeatedly confront and explore. The predicament of the kaffireatniks, as they were contemptuously called, becomes a metonym for the problem of defining immigrant Jewish identity along the unstable social, economic and political frontiers of racist South Africa. This paper, drawing on seminal texts, investigates the way South African Yiddish fiction problematises questions of race and gender identity formations, and the moral ambiguity inherent in occupational segregation for Eastern European immigrants who found themselves part of a racist social formation that continually demanded ethical compromise as a precondition for social acceptance and economic success.

Conflict Management Learning? Policy Reflections and Institutional Reforms

omplex political conflicts characterized by humanitarian tragedies continue to define the post-Cold War era. As a result, the interna ^^'tional community confronts a crucial issue: Should it attempt to man age challenging intrastate and interstate crises? If the answer is yes, policy makers face the additional task of determining the best means of tackling multifaceted conflicts. Should the international community seek only to alle viate the humanitarian fallout of political instability, or should it involve it self in broader efforts to resolve the crisis? Does a peace need to be secured before international troops are deployed, or can a settlement be imposed on warring parties? Are the Blue Helmets and Blue Berets effective tools with which to tackle multifaceted crises, or are coalition efforts led by a great power the only sure way of securing a lasting peace in nations afflicted with political violence? What are the prospects for developing tools capable of performing more effectively the tasks of post-Cold War conflicts? As the international community works out the answers to such ques tions, it will have to draw on the lessons of the early post-Cold War ex perience. In this article, I utilize data gathered over the course of more than sixty interviews with an elite segment of the conflict management community to explore a crucial issue: Has the international community learned from early post-Cold War conflict management experiences? Those who answer in the negative maintain that learning has been erratic, uncertain, and nonexistent, but those who answer in the affirmative assert that learning has been pragmatic, progressive, and at times profound. Mid way between the optimists and the pessimists stand members of the peace keeping community who have been hesitant to draw firm conclusions re garding conflict management learning. The schools differ not only in their assessments of the peacekeeping community's willingness to engage in se rious reflection but also in their evaluations of recent lessons. Assessment of policy learning requires more than an analysis of the opinions of lead policymakers; fundamentally, it requires attention to policy actions. Having assessed what the international community has learned or failed to learn, I move beyond the realm of words to explore the institutional

Racial Conflict and Multiculturalism: Bernard Malamud's The Tenants

W.E.B. Du Bois warned in 1903 that the main problem of the twentieth century would be the color line; indeed, the burning issues of economic, social, and cultural inequality among racial groups in America were not solved, but instead became ever more complex and urgent. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, American society remains shaped in part by the melting pot and visions of ethnic harmony, but it is just as well, or perhaps even predominantly, characterized by ethnic differences and racial conflict. The political and social reality of this multi-faceted conflict is reflected in many areas of American literature after 1940. Ever since Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), but especially since the 1960s, there has been a flood of depictions of racial and ethnic conflicts in American literary works. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has recently agreed with, as well as expanded upon, the predictions of W.E.B. Du Bois: We might as well argue that the problem of the twenty-first century will be the problem of ethnic differences, as these conspire with complex differences in color, gender, and class. In the same context, Gates pushes his argument further: As actual cultural differences between social and ethnic groups are being brought to bear to justify the subordination of one group by another, the matter of multiculturalism becomes politically fraught. Until these differences are understood in an era of emergent nationalism, the challenge of mutual understanding among the world's multifarious cultures will be the single greatest task that we face, after the failure of the world to feed itself. (Gates, Loose Canons xii) Gates has here introduced one of the most discussed, but also most overused and trivialized expressions of our time: multiculturalism. Many definitions of this term are possible; the one posited by the Afro-American scholar Gerald Early in 1993 is appropriate and comprehensive. Early places multiculturalism into the intellectual environment of postmodernism. and emphasizes the analytical and openly political actions which it necessitates: Multiculturalism, as I have argued, is embedded in the postmodern intellectual movement. Ethnic studies and women's studies programs were indeed simple areas of opportunity for postmodernist intellectual theories to make themselves felt in dethroning the narrative assumptions of American education, simplistically conceived. On one level, Afrocentrism and gynocentrism, for instance, are ways of subverting (a popular postmodernist term) white male western hegemony.... Postmodernism's goal is to expose the bourgeois intellectual order as inherently political and interested, as all political orders are, in maintaining the set of social and political relations that give it both authority and prestige. In short, what postmodernism, through submovements such as gynocentrism and Afrocentrism, wishes to accomplish is undermining bourgeois intellectualism's assumption about a search for universal truth and the ideal of objectivity by arguing that bourgeois intellectualism's fetishization of objectivity and universal truth were illusions to mask its own quest for power by hiding the epistemological roots of its own politicization. (Early, Education 223)(1) One of the initial aims of multiculturalism, to critically investigate the cultural and political relations of individual peoples and races in the United States before a more appropriate national synthesis may be constructed, has recently not been limited exclusively to the social and political spheres. In fact, the creation of literary texts, as well as their critical reception and political role in society, have themselves become highly sensitive areas contributing to ethnic and racial conflict. …

India"s Border Conflict with China: A Perceptual Analysis

The Sino-Indian conflict which led finally to the border war of 1962 was a multi-faceted conflict. That is, it was not limited to a clash of interest over a specific issue, such as territory, but was much more than that. It touched on a wide variety of issues, from the interpreting of the nature of the current and the preferred global system, through the analysis of the relations of both states with the superpowers, to relations with other states in the South Asian subsystem and the bilateral relations between China and India, and involved judgement of the characteristics of the other side's domestic arena. Thus, it was, in fact, a conflict between two different sometimes almost diametrically different world-views, which was externalized and focused on the conflict over territory and border claims and through demonstration of force and the actual use of it. This complex nature of the conflict makes the understanding of perceptions held by the parties to it so important. However, to deal with the definition of the situation of both sides on all issues will be impossible within the space limits of an article; thus we will concentrate on one major facet, that of the bilateral relations as it found expression in mutual perceptions and misperceptions. It is not my intention to discuss the legal details of the SinoIndian dispute or to take a stand on them.' But the legal aspect is relevant to our discussion insofar as the Sino-Indian conflict was a collision between two essentially different patterns of legal thought. Legal claims were crucial in the crystallization of Nehru's position. After the Indian team on the Sino-Indian joint committee on the subject had presented its findings, Nehru concluded that the

The PLO in Inter-Arab Politics

The relationship of the Palestinians to the multi-faceted Arab-Israeli conflict is at the same time the most intimate, the most tragic, and the most complex. While the other entities involved in the controversy seek to achieve a variety of political and economic goals from the vantage point of established sovereignty, the Palestinians have been thrust by circumstance into the role of a victimized people struggling to re-establish their right to self-determination in the land where they once comprised the overwhelming majority. For them, what is at stake is their very existence as a collective identity. As the designated representative of this dispossessed populace, the PLO is charged with the difficult task of protecting the interests of the Palestinians in the intricate power game that has come to surround the conflict. The international actors it has to deal with in this context represent a variety of other interests, most of which are either in conflict with or unrelated to those of the Palestinians. These concerned parties include the Israelis and their supporters in world Jewry, the superpowers, the European Community, the non-aligned bloc, and the Arab states. The Israelis, of course, are the principal adversaries of the Palestinians. The Zionist movement which spawned modern Israel was exclusively