Notion Of Conflict Research Articles

“Thus far and no further”: Inquiry into a dreamless society

AbstractHumans are highly social primates who naturally seek out groups in which to live. Our individual psychology is inherently intertwined with that of the group, forming an inextricable link between the two. In keeping with Bion's insights into group dynamics, we approach contemporary conflicts by examining them through both social and psychoanalytic lenses. Drawing on Foucault's and Deleuze's analyses of societies, as well as considering the impact of technology and the COVID‐19 pandemic, we illustrate how modern societies function under the influence of three behaviors observed by Bion. Activated as a result of a psychological disaster, the ruins consist of the symptomatologic triad of arrogance, stupidity, and curiosity. We have called this functioning Bion's disastrous triad. We suggest that when it is set in motion, it leads to a withdrawal from the beauty of life, as Bion well expresses with the phrase “Thus far and no further.” Using Meltzer's notion of aesthetic conflict, we suggest that while operating under the mandates of the triad, recognition of the other becomes an impossibility. A plea for relationships based on mutual recognition—namely, aesthetic relationships—is in order.

Critical peace education and critical hope: co-researching with middle school students in India to imagine possibilities for social change

ABSTRACT An existing culture of conflict tends to shape practices within schools, which often maintain and in turn, contribute towards perpetuating stratifications at the societal level. Through this study, the author seeks to challenge this culture of conflict by creating a pedagogical space and facilitating possibilities of collective thinking, relationality, and action, with a focus on nurturing a culture of peace. With a goal of gaining insight into how middle school students from two school sites in New Delhi, India, are embodying and interacting with notions of peace and conflict as they make meaning of their social worlds, the author conducts a youth participatory action research (YPAR), which is complemented with semi-structured interviews. A total number of 12 participants collectively engage in a YPAR process across 13 virtual sessions, which were held on a bi-weekly basis. Guided by a critical peace education and critical hope framework, the author examines a ‘moment’, which reveals complexities around how pedagogies of critical hope can engage young people in affective, ethical, and political sensibilities to imagine possibilities for social change.

The Importance of Contrary Forces in Education: On the Notion of Conflict in Tagore’s Religion of Man

Dealing with conflicts seems to be a great challenge in society today. But not only in society. Higher education displays an air of resoluteness with certainty and security that disguises the conflicts and the fear of conflicts in a substantial number of subjects. If not in a state of denial, higher education avoids taking up conflicts over issues, for learning. The detailed investigation of Tagore’s pedagogical writings, with a focus on the importance of conflicts in education, reveals a genuine embrace of conflicts for education. Conflicts are natural and necessary for the development and change of both the individual and society and the start of a ‘creative imagination’ to solve the problems we face in life. Contradictions in conflicts are not incompatible incongruities that are irreconcilable and mutually exclusive, but to the contrary, in need of each other. Contradictions do not represent different worlds but are substantial parts of one world: together they form a unity. Conflicting forces are necessary to create harmony. Creativity, imagination, love, art, and critical encounters are key elements in Tagore’s practical education aimed at finding similarities among people instead of emphasizing differences. Relations between people over the Identity of people. In other words, we need conflicts to become creative and imaginative human beings. The paper continues discussing conceptual and practical issues that seem necessary to get the teaching of conflicts in education off the ground. On the conceptual level, in particular our dealing with uncertainty and fear, the valuation of conflict and the need for uncertainty-researching education. On a practical level, I propose a certain teaching model, a supportive curriculum, a way of choosing genuine conflicts for education and finally, I argue for specific support and education of teachers, acknowledging the vital role teachers play in delivering the education that we need.

Conflict as a Narrative Tool in Postcolonial Writing - The case of Margaret Mascarenhas’ novel ‘Skin’

This study investigates the significance of conflict in Margaret Mascarenhas' novel ‘Skin’ as a literary tool, using Robert Stanton's notions of internal and external conflict. The primary goal is to investigate how conflict progresses the narrative and creates thematic discourse in the text. Internal conflicts are caused by characters' inner struggles with opposing emotions, impulses, and ethical dilemmas, whilst external conflicts are caused by fights with nature or supernatural factors. This study underlines the centrality of conflict in literature, impacting character development, narrative advancement, and thematic exploration. It offers light on the complexity of Goan literature, identity formation, and the interplay between colonial and postcolonial forces, by merging postcolonial concepts and conflict analysis, highlighting the critical role of conflict as a catalyst for narrative development.

The offense of violating the legal provisions regarding the conflict of interests in the case of companies with legal personality

At the conflict of interests designates, in the general sense, that situation in which, when making a decision or participating in the deliberation process for making a decision, a person has a personal patrimonial interest that may have influence regarding the objective fulfillment of the duties assigned to him according to the legislation in force.
 Both in European and domestic legislation, when the conflict of interests is regulated, a distinction is made between persons exercising public dignities and offices and persons exercising their duties within companies with legal personality in the private sector. Of course, in the case of persons who exercise certain dignities or public offices, the principle of the supremacy of the public interest must be respected, which is why, in the case of these persons, the legal regime of the conflict of interests is much more restrictive, unlike the case of persons who carry out their activity in the private sector, in which case they receive the interest of the legal entity within which they exercise their duties. In other words, a distinction must be made between conflict of interests in the public domain and conflict of interests in the private domain.
 Considering the particularities and special importance of the legal regime regarding the conflict of interests in the private field, this paper proposes a detailed analysis of the way in which criminal protection is provided to the legal regime regarding the conflict of interests in the case of companies with legal personality. A clarification is made of the notions of incompatibility, indignity and conflict of interests, by highlighting the common characteristics and aspects that differentiate these notions, highlighting the particularities of the way of criminalizing the conflict of interests in the domestic legislation.

Conflicts With Novelty: Intelligibility Crisis and the Case of the Yugoslav Narrative

"This paper deals with the notion of intelligibility crisis in terms of conflict and harmony. Namely, we will analyze the notion of intelligibility from MacIntyre’s philosophical opus and apply it to the historical case. Intelligibility, according to MacIntyre, is the notion which provides us with contextual meaning and embeds our actions with sense within the specific tradition. Intelligibility crisis is the term that is coined to provide a descriptive account of the phenomenon when we cannot connect ourselves with a new social context in which we find ourselves in. To further elaborate on this and apply it onto an example, we shall use the historical case of the Yugoslavian nation. We will provide analysis between three different contextual narratives – pre-Yugoslav narrative, Yugoslav narrative, and post-Yugoslav narrative. After applying the notion of intelligibility crisis onto this historical case study, we will notice how people of one social narrative lose intelligibility by going into another social narrative. Furthermore, we shall consider the notions of conflicts and harmony as those that are connected to intelligibility. The main argument from the descriptive state of things which was offered would be the following – conflicting sentiments arise when we are not in harmony with the narrative within which we have attained intelligibility. Keywords: intelligibility crisis, Yugoslavia, social narratives, meaning, conflicts, harmony"

The Theory of Hermann Rorschach

Abstract: We trace the development of Hermann Rorschach’s ideas, from his early experiments, interests, and his medical thesis (1912) on reflex hallucinations to the writing of Psychodiagnostics ( 1921 ) in order to demonstrate that he was in the process of constructing a global theory of personality. The key to his experimentation with inkblots was the notion of representational or perceptual conflict, the psychological functioning of the tested person being reflected in the way responses are chosen. He conceived personality as a dynamic structure with a psychic apparatus that operates our relationships with the external and internal worlds of experience, thus highlighting the workings of the conscious/preconscious systems.

Sacred-in-Practice: A Framework for Teaching Religion, Health, and Medicine.

This essay proposes an unconventional approach to teaching "religion and medicine" to American medical students. Received frameworks for such teaching-articulated around faith denomination or "spirituality"-may imply that religiosities and their health effects are grounded in theology or transcendence, respectively. These frameworks may reify, or misrepresent relationships between, religion and science-for example, in supporting notions of conflict, or of an essentially secular character of technical progress. They can neglect ways in which biomedicine and its institutions are themselves engaged with and productive of religious values. In order to move toward fuller student appreciation of diverse religious materialities and embodiments in health and biomedicine, the essay proposes "the sacred, in practice" as an organizing rubric. This pedagogical intervention pivots on notions of sacrality in anthropologies of religion and offers students a wide path to consider a spectrum of material, gestural conditions, and activities-transformative techniques, intensely valued objects, trusted texts, rituals-that mark and propagate religious valences and commitments within and around contemporary biomedicine. This sacred-in-practice approach meshes with standard theological and spiritual framings of the religion/health/medicine nexus, yet offers more capacious and flexible connections to work for which medical students are training, involving vulnerable bodies and material technologies of tremendous life- and world-shaping potency.

Tackling Russian Gray Zone Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era

To undermine U.S. military strength, state actors are increasingly operating in the ambiguous environment between peace and war known as the “gray zone.” These actions test U.S. response by exploiting the West’s rigid notion of conflict. Soviet actions toward the United States and other nations during the Cold War shared many similarities with contemporary Russian strategy. There is no current uniform definition of the gray zone, and the United States has not developed doctrine to address this challenge. Russia has adapted Soviet Cold War techniques for the digital and globalized age and effectively integrates instruments of power against the United States by targeting seams within culture, maintaining ambiguity, and controlling narratives. Countering these tactics requires that the United States modify its mindset toward conflict and improve integration of its own instruments of power.

ANALYZING ANURADHA ROY’S THE EARTHSPINNER: A STUDY OF ETHNO-CULTURAL CONFLICT

The present study discussed the theme of conflict in Anuradha Roy’s The Earthspinner. The novel exhibits multiple themes but the most powerful theme is ethno-cultural conflict which is depicted through various characters and their relation to each other. The study aimed at exploring the notion of ethno-cultural conflict, its causes and impact in the selected novel. Ethno- has been analyzed with the assistance of theory of conflict proposed by Max Weber. This qualitative study implied Max Weber theory of conflict. The study concludes that diverse ethno-cultural community becomes victim of conflict due to non-tolerance among people and lead to sectarian violence in the selected novel. Keywords: The Earthspinner, Anuradha Roy, Ethno-Cultural Conflict

Transaction Scheduling: From Conflicts to Runtime Conflicts

This paper studies how to improve the performance of main memory multicore OLTP systems for executing transactions with conflicts. A promising approach is to partition transaction workloads into mutually conflict-free clusters, and distribute the clusters to different cores for concurrent execution. We show that if transactions in each cluster are properly scheduled, transactions that are traditionally considered conflicting can be executed without conflicts at runtime. In light of this, we propose to schedule transactions and reduce runtime conflicts, instead of partitioning based on the conventional notion of conflicts. We formulate the transaction scheduling problem to minimize runtime conflicts, and show that the problem is NP-complete. This said, we develop an efficient scheduling algorithm to improve parallelism. Moreover, for transactions that are not packed in batches, we show that runtime conflict analysis also helps reduce conflict penalties, by proposing a proactive deferring method. Using standard and enhanced benchmarks, we show that on average our scheduling and proactive deferring methods improve the throughput of existing partitioners and concurrency control protocols by 131% and 109%, respectively, up to 294% and 152%.

The futures of the air transportation system: automated foresight scenarios generation and analysis

The aviation sector needs to face multiple challenges, whether to mitigate its environmental impact, recover from the sanitary crisis, or satisfy its customers. This paper presents a foresight tool to help make decisions considering possible futures. It is designed to automatically and exhaustively generate all the possible futures of a system of agents, based on a formal model to define the system and its components along with the interactions between them. It is applied to the air transport system and the questions an airline company could ask itself. It aims to limit the impacts of past data and cognitive biases of participants with classic scenario production methods while using qualitative data. As principles of the agents of the system are considered, it adds a new perspective to make decisions and enables us to consider a notion of moral conflict. In fact, the analysis of generated scenarios shows that reaching a goal may require making a compromise between principles or defining priorities. It also shows that an agent, whatever decisions they can make, may face conflict situations because of other agents. The representations of the results allow a better understanding of the situation and analyses of the initial knowledge.

Towards a Temporal Probabilistic Argumentation Framework

In recent years, the notion of time has been studied in different ways in Dung-style Argumentation Frameworks. For example, time intervals of availability have been added to arguments and relations. As a result, the output of Dung semantics varies over time. In this paper, we consider the situation in which arguments hold with a certain probability distribution during a given interval. To model the uncertain character of events, we propose different notions of temporal conflict between arguments according to the type of availabilities intersection (partial, inclusive, or total). Then, we refine these notions of conflict by a defeat relation, using criterion functions that evaluate an attack’s significance according to the probability over time.

Analysis of the traffic conflict situation for speed probability distributions

AbstractThe increasingly widespread application of drones and the emergence of urban air mobility leads to a challenging question in airspace modernisation: how to create a safe and scalable air traffic management system that can handle the expected density of operations. Increasing the number of vehicles in a given airspace volume and enabling routine operations are essential for these services to be economically viable. However, a higher density of operations increases risks, poses a great challenge for coordination and necessitates the development of a novel solution for traffic management. This paper contributes to the research towards such a strategy and the field of airspace management by calculating and analysing the conflict probability in an en-route, free-flight scenario for autonomous vehicles. Analytical methods are used to determine the directional dependence of conflict probabilities for exponential and normal prescribed speed probability distributions. The notions of geometric and speed conflict are introduced and distinguished throughout the calculations of the paper. The effect of truncating the set of available flight speeds is also investigated. The sensitivity of the calculated results to speed and heading perturbations is studied within the analytical framework and verified by numerical simulations. Results enable a fresh approach to conflict detection and resolution through distribution shaping and are intended to be used in an integrated, stochastic coordination framework.

Weber and the European City in the 21st century: Still reality or just a concept?

Max Weber has left a 100-page long text that played a main role in his argumentation on the particular development of Europe in contrast to especially Asia. Main difference, according to Weber, is the development of a ‘local society’ where freedom and the association of free citizens laid the ground for a democratic society. In the reception of this text, a critical view on main assumptions on the ‘European city’ has been dominant. In particular, the notions of conflict and inequality have not been integrated into his argumentation. Nevertheless, some sociologists even today, see Weber and his text as a kind of starting point to understand the social and political construction of urban societies in Europe. Firstly, a critical introduction into the core ideas of Weber on the city will be presented. Subsequently, the article discusses whether the ‘European city’ can still be regarded as a meaningful term to explain the process of urban restructuring taking place today. Although not rejecting the Weberian notion of the city, it will be highlighted that his understanding of ‘urban society’ leaves out recent processes of the post-Fordist restructuring of space.

Impacts of political and strategic thinking on knowledge society: A study of university students in the United Arab Emirates

In the context of the ongoing technological and digital revolution, the diversification of sources for political and strategic thinking holds paramount importance in the contemporary era. This diversification plays a pivotal role in advancing human development by rejecting the notions of conflict and bias rooted in gender, race, religion, or language.Consequently, the presence of diverse sources of political and strategic thinking becomes instrumental in fostering the establishment of knowledge societies that champion democratic principles, uphold the freedom of expression, and facilitate the exchange of ideas. Concurrently, these varied sources contribute to the augmentation of economic and tourism infrastructure within the state, while concurrently fortifying governments and nations against external interventions.The primary aim of this study is to underscore the critical significance of diversifying systematic sources of political and strategic thinking among individuals, particularly within the framework of knowledge society construction. This diversification not only shapes the societal perceptions and choices but also secures the integrity and steadiness of nations, providing a bulwark against potential manipulation in the future.

Negotiating Justice: From Conflict to Agreement

Abstract This special issue of International Negotiation explores how justice is, and may best be, negotiated when parties adhere to conflicting notions of what it means and requires. “Conflicting notions” refer to the endorsement of different principles or to conflicting interpretations of how the same justice principle is to be applied. It may also involve some party’s adhering to a justice principle, while its counterpart endorses criteria other than justice as the proper basis for the case at hand. A diversity of cases and methodological traditions is used to explore a set of analytical questions: Why do parties adhere to conflicting notions of justice in international negotiations? How do conflicting justice notions affect negotiation dynamics and what are different ways in which they can be handled? Are some ways of handling such notions better than others, in the sense of enhancing the chances of a durable agreement?

Displaying Dissent: On Faith, Consumerism, and Censorial Discipline in the Israeli Museum

An unusual violent clash between religious, Christian and Muslim demonstrators and the Haifa Museum of Art took place on Thursday, January 9, 2019. The protesters amassed the entrance of the museum to express their distress against the exhibition Shop It! A handheld firebomb thrown towards the museum was but the first round for the violent reactions of the next several days. These included attacking police forces and attempts to break into the museum featuring works of art considered sacrilegious by the demonstrators. The protest developed into a multi-participant debate in the art scene, involving ordinary citizens, artists and art curators, local church leaders, the city mayor, the minister of culture and other politicians, civil rights organizations and the court, as each part sought to exercise civic, moral, ethical or practical authority to censor the position or the work of the other. The article seeks to analyze the different ways in which mechanisms of regularization, supervision and punishment, which have always been part of the world of art, are used not only by those perceived as apparatuses of the state or as ideological mechanisms of abstract political or institutional entity, but as standard practices in the discourse of creating, trading, curating and presenting art – a discourse which, in the Israeli-Palestinian context, is imbued with the notion of national conflict.

Rethinking Ethical Questions in Life-History Interview Research

Having interviewed Germans who emigrated to Israel and, in most cases, converted to Judaism, I experienced a paralyzing sense of ethical conflict when I began analyzing the first order discourse my participants and I had co-constructed to transform it into the second-order discourse of research publications. So, I set out to rethink the ethics of life-history interview research. My quest into our ethical responsibilities began with rule-based deontological and consequentialist ethics and the guidelines in the social sciences they inform. It led me to reconsider such core notions as informed consent, privacy, and risk-benefit analysis. I came to realize that rule-based ethics are inherently inadequate for addressing the situation-specific and thus unpredictable ethical questions that arise in conducting and analyzing life-history interviews. Next, I turned to the notion of ethical conflict as arising from obligations to trust and truth and rethought it as responsibilities toward participants and audiences. I realized that our responsibilities extend beyond our interview partners, who entrusted us with their life stories, to the audiences, who engage with our analyses. I furthermore reevaluated using research to advocate for disenfranchised participants and argued for transparency and reflexivity regarding how our subject positions impact knowledge construction.

Pariyerum Perumal and a Periyarite Note on Political Engagement

What was in the rhetoric of Periyar that moved an entire people in a direction that has continuing political relevance? How does his style respond to concerns about how we may engage within contemporary political formations, especially given that his work continues to resist being co-opted by his detractors? Analysing the formal elements of a 1931 speech by Periyar, delivered at Nagapattinam, I investigate the movements in his rhetoric which repeatedly mobilises the self as a site of political action. I argue that Periyar’s presentation of the self provides a distinct avenue of political engagement that substantiates the notion of inner conflict as crucial to the development of the titular hero in the 2018 Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal. Methodologically, I draw on the work of the relational psychoanalytic thinker D.W. Winnicott; in particular, his concept of ‘playing’, which refers to the creative moment of passionate immediate engagement with the other that opens up a potent space of understanding and is vital for survival. I show how charting out the various dimensions of this moment of creative play in these two works is crucial to further our understanding of the politics of Periyar and the journey of Pariyerum Perumal.