|
Conflict Transformation: from Violence To Politics Culture and personal assumptions
No escape from cultural bias
Although the elements of this jigsaw which I have tried to put together have, for the most part, been so general as to seem incontrovertible, I am aware that what I take for granted may be particular, in fact, to my culture and sub-culture, as well as to my own idiosyncratic viewpoints and assumptions. I have tried to be aware of this and to examine what I have written, checking it for culturally biased assumptions as I went along. Our deepest assumptions are, however, necessarily invisible to us - beyond identification. Although I am a universalist in believing that some aspects of human experience and aspirations may be shared, I am aware that the lenses through which we see the world, and the minds with which we interpret it, are culturally formed and will colour and shape the way we perceive and think about anything. (See, for instance, Salem 1993.) However, having failed so far to name an issue which is at least as big as any other and arguably the biggest there is, I will name it now: the place of more than half the world's population in relation to the less than half of the rest - the place, rights and potential of women.
Culture and gender
Whatever anyone may say about culture, I will state here that there can be no peace while women are treated as chattels, beaten for 'disobedience', traded and abused, excluded against their will from life outside the home, denied legal and economic rights, or generally treated as less than human. The conflict over the relative rights of men and women has never been surfaced in such a concerted way as to be recognised in the way that 'interethnic' or international conflicts have. Perhaps it is too vast and internally varied a conflict for that to be possible. Nor does it seem to me desirable that it should take a similar shape. At the same time, in many societies it represents a latent conflict waiting to happen, while in others it is in the process of slow and uneasy transformation. Not only do women have the right to express their full humanity; societies need the skills, insights and visions of women as well as men. They do not need the hideous images of male violence which characterise the statuary and iconography of so many nations, nor the culture of violence which those images represent.
Conflict prevention not a goal
To return to the title of this paper, getting away from violence means getting into politics, rather than ending conflict. 'Conflict prevention' is not something to aspire to; nor is any situation ever 'post conflict'. Peace is a process which embraces justice and in which conflict is the means of constructive change, rather than the occasion for more cruelty and destruction. If this could be clarified, the 'culture question' so often uneasily referred to in the field of 'conflict resolution' might begin to take care of itself. For those of us included in the benefits and associated with the tyrannies of 'the West', to take that seriously would mean to prepare ourselves for a very bumpy ride for a long time to come.
Questions:
How can we marry 'emancipatory projects' with cultural awareness and humility (or at least sensitivity)? How much conflict is desirable? How can the broad and long term issues of gender and global justice get incorporated (or not) into the way we address specific crises?
next | seminar report
newsletter | ccts |
|