Conflict Culture And History Regional Dimensions

Five specialists examine the historical relationship of culture and conflict in various regional societies. The authors use Adda B. Bozeman's theories on conflict and culture as the basis for their analyses of the causes, nature, and conduct of war and conflict in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Sinic Asia (China, Japan, and Vietnam), Latin America, and Africa. Drs. Blank, Lawrence Grinter, Karl P. Magyar, Lewis B. Ware, and Bynum E. Weathers conclude that non-Western cultures and societies do not reject war but look at violence and conflict as a normal and legitimate aspect of sociopolitical behavior.

Five specialists examine the historical relationship of culture and conflict in various regional societies. The authors use Adda B. Bozeman's theories on conflict and culture as the basis for their analyses of the causes, nature, and conduct of war and conflict in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Sinic Asia (China, Japan, and Vietnam), Latin America, and Africa.

Culture and Negotiation was the outcome of cooperation between UNESCO and IIASA. The cultural factors bearing on international negotiations are a topic of importance, not least in the environmental field. The book's strength is its combination of a lucid and comprehensive discussion of issues and concepts with a series of case studies concerning specific rivers and the people who live and produce on their banks and tributaries. The result throws interesting light on the cultural parameters of human agreement and discord, and offers useful, practical pointers for the art of negotiation.

Recent military interventions in Rwanda, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, amongst others, have placed conflict again at the forefront of international debate. Yet the theoretical analysis of conflicts and of their social and psychological impacts has predictably lagged behind such tumultuous events. Moreover, while scholarship in the areas of strategic studies, international relations and peace studies has addressed the issues in terms of "conflict resolution" and "post-conflict reconstruction", little or no attention has been given to crucial interrelations between conflict and culture. Bringing together international experts from disciplines as diverse as Political Science, History, International Law, Media Studies, Visual Culture, Critical Theory and Semiotics, Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation therefore employs an avowedly interdisciplinary approach in order to address what the editors perceive to be a significant omission. In five themed sections, this ambitious volume tackles many questions often excluded from discourses on conflict. How does a past conflict inform a community's vision for its future? How are conflicts represented in the media, in literature, in journalism, in all forms of cultural expression? How do representations of conflict compound but also confuse, and even reconfigure, cultural identities? What role do histories of conflicts play in the construction of national identities? Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation will be of direct interest to scholars and practitioners working in media and communications, international relations and international law, peace studies, human rights, cultural studies and cultural memory, psychoanalysis and gender studies, and comparative literature and literary theory.

This book is relevant for the study of regional conflicts during and after the end of the Cold War. The focus of the major parts are inter-state wars in the period of 1967-1991. In the revised, updated and expanded new edition the author argues that the Gulf War would probably be the last inter-state war in the Middle East. The resort to the use of force would be mostly pursued by irregulars like Islamic fundamentalists (in Algeria, Egypt, the Occupied Territories) and ethnic nationalists (the Kurds). Thus the study of conflict in the Middle East would shift from the study of inter-state war to the study of the crisis of the nation-state incapable of dealing with the arising violence within its boundaries. The author argues that regional integration among the states and the industrial bolstering of the weak nominal nation-states in the Middle East would be the new needed pattern of security politics in the Middle East no longer restricted to dealing with military issues.