Narratives In Conflict

This book introduces Root Narrative Theory, a new approach for narrative analysis, decoding moral politics, and for building respect and understanding in conditions of radical disagreement. This theory of moral politics bridges emotion and reason, and, rather than relying on what people say, it helps both the analyst and the practitioner to focus on what people mean in a language that parties to the conflict understand. Based on a simple idea—the legacy effects of abuses of power—the book argues that conflicts only endure and escalate where there is a clash of interpretations about the history of institutional power. Providing theoretically complex but easy-to-use tools, this book offers a completely new way to think about storytelling, the effects of abusive power on interpretation, the relationship between power and conceptions of justice, and the origins and substance of ultimate values. By locating the source of radical disagreement in story structures and political history rather than in biological or cognitive systems, Root Narrative Theory bridges the divides between reason and emotion, realism and idealism, without losing sight of the inescapable human element at work in the world’s most devastating conflicts. This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, peace studies and International Relations, as well as to practitioners of conflict resolution.

Practicing Narrative Mediation provides mediation practitioners with practical narrative approaches that can be applied to a wide variety of conflict resolution situations. Written by John Winslade and Gerald Monk—leaders in the narrative therapy movement—the book contains suggestions and illustrative examples for applying the proven narrative technique when working with restorative conferencing and mediation in organizations, schools, health care, divorce cases, employer and employee problems, and civil and international conflicts. Practicing Narrative Mediation also explores the most recent research available on discursive positioning and exposes the influence of the moment-to-moment factors that are playing out in conflict situations. The authors include new concepts derived from narrative family work such as "absent but implicit," "double listening," and "outsider-witness practices."

Translation and Conflict was the first book to demonstrate that translators and interpreters participate in circulating as well as resisting the narratives that create the intellectual and moral environment for violent conflict and social tensions. Drawing on narrative theory and with numerous examples from historical and current contexts of conflict, Mona Baker provides an original and coherent model of analysis that pays equal attention to the circulation of narratives in translation and to questions of dominance and resistance. With a new preface by Sue-Ann Harding, Translation and Conflict is more than ever the essential text for any student or researcher interested in the study of translation and social movements.

Why does Hamas refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the state of Israel? What makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so intractable? Reflecting both Israeli and Palestinian points of view, this volume addresses the two powerful, bitterly contested, competing historical narratives that underpin the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Using key perspectives from Linguistic anthropology the book illuminates how social actors take up the ideals of law, equality, and democratic representation in locally-meaningful ways to make their own national history in ways that may perpetuate violence and inequality. Focusing specifically on post-war conditions in Ireland, the author contextualizes commonplace practices by which citizens are made to learn the gap between official membership in and political belonging to a democratic state. Each chapter takes up a different aspect of state authority and power to constitute citizenship, to enact laws, to mediate conflict, and to create histories in the context of social inequalities and political hostilities. This book is an excellent ethnographic addition to courses in linguistic anthropology, giving readers the opportunity to explore applications and ramifications of key theoretical text within research.

In the context of ongoing or historical violence, people tell stories about what happened, who did what to whom and why. Yet frequently, the speaking of violence reproduces the social fractures and delegitimizes, again, those that struggle against their own marginalization. This speaking of violence deepens conflict and all too often perpetuates cycles of violence. Alternatively, sometimes people do not speak of the violence and it is erased, buried with the bodies that bear it witness. This reduces the capacity of the public to address issues emerging in the aftermath of violence and repression. This book takes the notion of "narrative" as foundational to conflict analysis and resolution. Distinct from conflict theories that rely on accounts of attitudes or perceptions in the heads of individuals, this narrative perspective presumes that meaning, structured and organized as narrative processes, is the location for both analysis of conflict, as well as intervention. But meaning is political, in that not all stories can be told, or the way they are told delegitimizes and erases others. Thus, the critical narrative theory outlined in this book offers a normative approach to narrative assessment and intervention. It provides a way of evaluating narrative and designing "better-formed" stories: "better" in that they are generative of sustainable relations, creating legitimacy for all parties. In so doing, they function aesthetically and ethically to support the emergence of new histories and new futures. Indeed, critical narrative theory offers a new lens for enabling people to speak of violence in ways that undermine the intractability of conflict

Journeys Through Conflict is the story of the Conflict Early Warning Systems (CEWS) project of the International Social Science Research Council. It relates the history of the project, presents its empirically grounded approach to anticipating violent conflict, and shows how the approach may be extended to other social science research arenas. Journeys Through Conflict projects alternate pathways to war and peace by a unique coding, graphing, and computational procedure that takes into account both contested conflict histories and future conflict resolutions.