Understanding Conflicts

August 26th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 2:03 pm

Am finally getting a chance to write something after having returned from giving an invited paper at this conference over in Aarhus, Denmark. As you might expect, the “cartoons crisis” trailed its way through various panel sessions, with reflections by Danish academics on the nation’s self-understanding being heavily featured. On its most optimistic reading, this self-image remains “civic nationalism”, although, as was suggested in Jan Oberg’s scathing plenary address concerning the contemporary sources of global conflict, any such self-understanding has to maintain itself in he face of Rasmussen’s government’s role in Iraq, and its consequences for how others understand the meaning of the Danish flag.

This being my first taste of the world of conflict and peace studies, and my first encounter with the work of its major contemporary figures (many of whom were present), I was struck by the relatively anti-political nature of the plenary presentations. Despite the obvious theoretical acumen on which most of the viewpoints drew, and the emotional depth of the speakers’ accounts of conflict mediation (in Burundi, Rwanda, the Congo, the Balkans, Georgia, Moldova, Israel/Palestine, the USA…), a troubling thread of moralization seemed to be discernible.

By “moralization” I mean the urge to present the natural path of conflict towards resolution as one which has to pass from a political field defined by a clash of interests (and perhaps cultures or ideologies through which these interests are refracted), to one in which skilled and brave mediators or other individuals enable, collectively, the re-founding of a moral order which transcends the terms of the conflict, one which enables participants to change their understanding of each other. This was very apparent, in particular, in Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s talk, in which she drew on Derrida’s account of forgiveness to frame the act of forgiving as an act of grace, of love beyond law.

Conflict, on this analysis, becomes a journey from fixed forms of mis-understanding, which often entail demonization of malevolent Others, to empathic identification. Who, when faced with the persistent idiocies of the defining conflicts of the present, would not have sympathy with such a viewpoint? Creative and fearless acts of translation are eternally needed. But I can’t help feeling reservations too, ones which are perhaps reflected in Walter Benjamin’s ruthless judgement on historiography:

The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

This means seeing resisting the urge to see conflict as reducible to a kind of ongoing hermeneutic traffic smash, and forgiveness as a self-sufficient tool of healing. It means rather a commitment to viewing conflict as an accompaniment of the broken relationships between human beings that result from the deformations inherent within a social and economic system – that “evil”, if it means anything beyond superstition, is a quality of systems and of individual subjects considered as embedded within those systems.

From this kind of perspective, forgiveness points towards solidarity, but solidarity is a political relationship, not a moral one, and wants to redeem the world through the transformation and liberation of entire social orders – not of souls, not of cultures, not of nations.