The Humanities and Conflict Resolution

© 2001 Jessica Senehi, All Rights Reserved

Because social divisions permeate all dimensions of social life (e.g., politics, economics, education, geography, religion, arts), in 1986, Galtung called for the field of peace studies to make connections with all disciplines--including the humanities.[1] Since the inception of the conflict resolution field, there has been a recognition of the role of creativity and cultural analysis in processes of social transformation. Leading thinkers in the field have called for: generating a great moral imagination to promote loyalty to people of all nations and the future,[2] questioning the underlying assumptions that drive social thought and action in order to effect social transformation,[3] imagining a global civil culture in order to attain it,[4] analyzing cultural justifications of systemic violence,[5] drawing on indigenous cultural modes of representation to appropriately intervene in cross-cultural contexts,[6] and recognizing the courage that imagination for peacebuilding requires.[7] Yet there are only a few scholars whose central academic identification is with the conflict resolution field who have focused on this area.[8] Research and discussion are needed to evaluate the relationship between the humanities and conflict processes.

The past century has involved a near doubling of the human lifespan; at the same time, it has been the most violent in human history. Currently, at the century’s end, political mobilization based on national identity is the most salient means through which people are challenging the world order; most of the world’s more than 25 armed conflicts are nationalist in character. There are approximately 275 disadvantaged ethnic groups or “minorities at risk;” and dissidents face torture. Wars waged have involved civilian casualties at an increasing rate. Meanwhile, since the 1970s, terrorism has been an increasing threat throughout the world, culminating in the attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, on September 11, at the beginning of the new century.

Further, in the United States, hate crimes and violence in the streets, workplace, schools, and homes are framed as a “health crisis.” Throughout the world, women’s movements challenge violence and patriarchal systems; and indigenous peoples seek to reassert their identities and views about the nature of things despite a half-millenium of disenfranchisement and near erasure. Africa’s disadvantaged position in the global economy constrains the resources that can be brought to bear on its AIDS health crisis. Meanwhile, nations and individuals face the legacy of past violence and seek reconciliation, redress, and healing. Even within relatively stable nations, such as the United States, critical struggles are waged to define a vision that will shape the future.

In the face of these social issues, the humanities may seem irrelevant. But, language and politics are inextricable:[9]

· The inexpressibility of pain has political consequences; and the torturer “unmakes” the world of the tortured.[10]

· Frederick Douglas’ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas--An American Slave, Written by Himself refuted two main arguments for the preservation of slavery: that slaves were happy and that slaves were unthinking.[11]

· Jean Kilbourne argues that magazines “sell” youth to cigarette advertisers.[12]

· Changing representations of women’s beauty in advertising correspond to changing self-images, eating behaviors, and body types of fourth-grade girls.[13]

· In Rwanda in 1994, Radio RTLM was a major factor in inciting genocidal violence, especially in rural areas where an illiterate population had few alternative information sources.[14]

· For nearly a century, the military has deployed funds to work with Hollywood to promote the armed forces in popular cinema.[15]

· In October 1998, playwright and Nobel Peace Prize (1986) winner Wole Soyinke returned to his native Nigeria to a hero’s welcome, after the military regime of Sani Abacha, who had charged Soyinke with treason the previous year, was replaced by civilian rule.[16]

· In Central America, for a prostrate populace, testimonio literature¾the spoken narrative of life experiences¾both expressed and effected resistance to oppressive regimes. This body of social and political history includes the autobiography of social activist and Nobel Peace Prize (1992) winner Rigoberta Menchu Tum.[17]

· During the 1970s and 1980s in Chile, lower-middle class, middle-aged women sewed appliqué tapestries, arpilleras, which depicted the loss of loved ones due to the political violence that killed tens of thousands under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet. The arpilleras were smuggled out of the country and sold to both generate international awareness and to raise money as part of these women’s “strategies to challenge fear, feed their children, engage in a new form of political activism and of struggle against authoritarianism.”[18]

· For more than 10 years, the AIDS quilt project has been a healing and communal performance of memory[19] and a call to social activism.[20]

· In Nazi Germany, folklore studies became an instrument of racist state ideology;[21] meanwhile other German writers were creating alternative “utopian” fairy tales that “provoke their protagonists and readers, simultaneously, to realize that something has to be done to change their situation.”[22]

· In Burundi, contemporary poetry shared in community settings is a means of developing a shared identity after severe inter-group violence.[23] 

· In Mozambique, the UNICEF-funded “Circle of Peace,” used traditional music, art, and drama to teach peacebuilding to children.[24]

· Mladi Most, which means “Youth Bridge,” is a community center in Mostar, Bosnia, for Bosniak and Croat youth between the ages of 16 and 25; there, Austrian photographer Uli Loskot mentored youths in a collaborative project of photographing images of the war resulting in an international exhibit of their work, “Crucible of War 2000.”

· In the face of invisibility, impotence, and death, for elder Holocaust survivors, telling their stories in a community context was a search for meaning and a re-making of their world: “Such remembered lives are moral documents and their function is salvific, inevitably implying ‘All this has not been for nothing.’”[25]

Culture and social conflicts shape everyday lives lived. We establish our lives and our societies through our daily participation in social institutions and systems, language, and innumerable daily practices.[26] Our worldview and identity is always shaped by discourses, and discourse is always socially constructed. Meanwhile, individuals and groups find ways to analyze, comment upon, and reconstruct shared understandings of their lives and societies; and strive to defy powerful armies and social systems. These struggles to negotiate meaning and power are interconnected and occur at the borders of our nations, our communities, our bodies, and our minds. Sometimes the sites of these struggles are diffuse as persons and groups strive to recognize and challenge violent social systems.

Our actions and choices are embedded in stories that we tell ourselves about what we are doing and why we are doing it, based on cultural knowledge, past experience, future goals, and our reflections on these; and these daily actions become the stuff of future stories.[27] Cultural production is crucial to national identity because it articulates and engenders the nation’s identity, history, and vision.[28] Further, a shared body of knowledge to which persons are intellectually and emotionally committed can be used contextually and strategically as a means of reformulating cultural notions to comment critically and persuasively on social life.

While unequal in power, competing discourses interact in a negotiation of social relations and knowledge. These discursive practices may intensify social cleavages when they privilege some cultures while silencing others, generate or reproduce prejudicial and enemy images of other groups, mask inequalities and injustice, and misrepresent society. Or, discursive practices may be considered to enhance peaceful relations when they involve a dialogue characterized by shared power, engender mutual recognition, promote consciousness-raising, serve to resist domination, or teach conflict resolution strategies.[29] This project will examine these dynamics.