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English Pages 149 Year 2019
Communicating Conflict
Probing the Boundaries Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board Karl Spracklen Katarzyna Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter S Ram Vemuri
Simon Bacon Stephen Morris John Parry Ana Borlescu Peter Twohig Kenneth Wilson John Hochheimer
A Probing the Boundaries research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/ The Hostility and Violence Hub ‘Communication and Conflict’
2014
Communicating Conflict: A Multidisciplinary Perspective
Edited by
Sarah Craze and Frieder Lempp
Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/
The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.
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ISBN: 978-1-84888-275-1 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2014. First Edition.
Table of Contents Introduction Communicating Conflict: A Multidisciplinary Perspective Sarah Craze and Frieder Lempp Part 1
Issues and Analysis The Ultimate Abyss: Communication Breakdown in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night Oumeima Mouelhi
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Felt versus Expressed Emotions during Interpersonal Conflict Valerie B. Coles and Jennifer A. Samp
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Coverage of Domestic Conflicts in Modern Georgian Media Dali Osepashvili
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Memory and Representations of the Arab Spring in the Brazilian Press: Approaches on Libya Fábio Ferreira Agra and Marcus Antônio Assis Lima
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The Politics of Multilingual Communication: Case Studies and Research Agendas László Marácz
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A Somali in an American Court: The Communication Challenges for Western Countries Prosecuting Somali Pirates Sarah Craze Part 2
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Tools for Resolution Vinoba Bhave: A Compassionate Communicator for Attitudinal Transformation Kalpana Deshmukh and Sangita Meshram
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Before We Talk: Discovering Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart John Backman
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Cultural Perceptions of Physical Space and the Implications for Communication and Conflict Richard Harris
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Non-Government Communications and Conflict Management: The Experience of Iraqi Arab Tribes Ahmed Hassin
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Using Logic to Communicate about Conflicting Interests among Parties Frieder Lempp
127
Introduction Communicating Conflict: A Multidisciplinary Perspective Sarah Craze and Frieder Lempp On what would be the last warm day of summer, a group of people from across the world came together to discuss their individual perspectives on communication and conflict. The nature of the presented papers was equally diverse as the geographic and disciplinary backgrounds of their authors. Discussion was vibrant and expansive and this volume is representative of the range of topics covered over the three day period. This volume comprises a collection of chapters created from papers presented at the 3rd Global Conference on Communication and Conflict that took place in Oxford, UK in September 2013. As intended by the organisers InterDisplinary.Net, the conference was characterised by a distinctively interdisciplinary and collegial atmosphere. This atmosphere combined with intellectual openness to create a space for a multitude of fruitful discussions, meaningful dialogue, understanding of new ideas, and future collaborations. The topics covered in this volume range from studies of specific conflict cases to universal models of conflict resolution and prevention, from religious and spiritual explorations of constructive communication to quantitative, empirical studies of emotional interactions, and from literary analyses of family conflicts to studies of the causes of miscommunication between cultures. To structure the volume, we have split the chapters into two parts. The focus of the chapters in Part 1 is on analysing or describing conflict. The chapters in Part 2 offer potential resolution techniques or starting points for constructive conflict resolution. Part 1 contains discussions of issues surrounding conflict in communications at multiple, progressively broader levels: from those in literature, to personal conflicts, to the way the media reports conflict, to national political conflict and culminating in international conflict. Part 2 concerns tools for the resolution of conflict. This encompasses learning personal skills, such as listening, compassion and harnessing spirituality, to understanding the impact of space, society and the logical structure of conflict resolution. Part 1: Issues and Analysis The first two chapters of Part 1 describe conflict in families and couples in two ways; through an emotional examination and scientific analysis. In the first chapter, the absence of communication within an American family is discussed by Oumeima Mouelhi through the lens of 20th century playwright Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. The Tyrones are in a permanent state of conflict, with long-standing grievances towards each other. Despite constantly fighting, they each possess an uncanny inability to communicate, so the same arguments occur over and over again and are never resolved. Their fighting often hides their most
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__________________________________________________________________ important feelings leading to strange conversations with a lot of sudden changes of topics and intentional pretence about not understanding what is going on. Avoidance and denial are used strategically for dealing with problems, further hampering family communication. As a result, the family’s insistence on not facing the truth and discussing it causes its demise. Shifting from the emotional fallout of an absence of communication to the scientific examination of how emotions are expressed during interpersonal conflict, Valerie B. Coles and Jennifer A. Samp provide an empirical examination of expressed and felt emotions during relational conflict. The pair asked dating partners to complete measures about conflicts where they expressed an emotion they did not feel; and felt an emotion they did not express. Participants were required to reference the degree they felt and/or expressed nine emotions: anger, annoyance, anxiety, fear, frustration, guilt, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The results show that individuals differentiate between felt and expressed emotions and that many emotions are more intensely felt than expressed during conflict. Also, the conceptualisation of emotions as discrete versus dimensional is varied in the conflict context. These are observations that can be clearly applied to the Tyrones in the previous chapter. The theme of personal conflict is continued in Dali Osepashvili’s chapter examining domestic violence in Georgia. Osepashvili’s chapter brings to light how external perception of personal conflicts is communicated through the media. Osepashvili uses Georgian media coverage from 2011-12 to determine that domestic conflicts are mainly perpetrated by husbands and children against women. Georgian women do not leave their families and avoid speaking about their experiences of violence. The topic attracts limited media coverage in Georgia, usually only providing predominantly basic information on the campaign against domestic violence. However, Osepashvili found many cases of sensational coverage where certain facts of violence are illustrated in the Georgian media and, at the same time, the professional ethical standards of journalism were breached. Cases are covered sensationally, with loud headlines, dramatic photos and on the first page of the newspaper, potentially compromising the safety and rights of victims. In Brazil, sensational coverage brought to mind the way the media focuses its narrative on communicating conflict in the broader context of a prominent international event, the Arab Spring of 2011. This kind of significant event is reported across the world, but as Fábio Ferreira Agra and Marcus Antônio Assis Lima discuss, the Brazilian media created a unique memory and representation for their readership by focusing attention on Muammar Gaddafi. Agra and Lima draw on Galtung and Ruge’s work on the chain of communication in the establishment of news from the time that the events happen in the world, through the perception of the media to be transformed into news. The revolutions of the Arab Spring helped form Brazilian opinions about culture and the life of people living in the
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__________________________________________________________________ Middle East and North Africa. Two leading Brazilian weekly magazines: Veja and CartaCapital were selected to form the corpus of their study. The first cover story of both magazines about the Arab Spring in Libya, published on 2 March 2011, was focused on Muammar Gaddafi’s life and the authors found that Brazilian journalists tended to describe the elite nations and elite people to narrate the facts, instead of the people that initiated the uprisings. László Marácz shifts the communication conflict narrative away from media perceptions of societal conflict towards the causes of conflict within the society itself, specifically the politics of language within multilingual societies. Globalisation and different forms of migration and mobility create a proliferation of linguistic diversity and multilingual communication. At the same time, the recognition of the use of one’s first language receives more and more support in international political, legal and institutional frameworks. The promotion of linguistic diversity is the official language policy of the European Union. This policy creates an expectation that languages will be, and will remain, in contact at all levels of governance. This situation will not be restricted to indigenous, regional and minority languages only, but will affect ‘new’ immigrant or heritage languages as well. But there are manifold connections between language and power and intergroup conflict will always have a language element to it. Hence, it is to be expected that large-scale linguistic diversity and multilingual communication will be the subject of power conflicts and hegemonic strives. Due to the fact that most languages are connected to a kin-state, this will immediately have repercussions for international relations and can cause conflicts in this domain. In this chapter, Marácz provides case studies to demonstrate conflicts within complex societies and in international relations caused by linguistic diversity and multilingual communication. A detailed analysis in a transnational theoretical framework creates a coherent set of research agendas to guide research work further and elaborate on resolution strategies. The final chapter of Part 1 moves the conflict narrative beyond nation-state boundaries to a global phenomenon: the ancient, international crime of piracy. As Sarah Craze details in her chapter, for centuries, pirates disrupted maritime commerce, navigation and trade, often with little recourse. An enduring cultural and political persona of pirates as the ‘enemies of all mankind’ and piracy as a crime against all nations has persisted. By the mid-19th century, the use of statesanctioned privateers had been outlawed and, while never being eradicated, piracy was not a priority on the international security agenda for the next 150 years. Then in 2005, Somali nationals began hijacking merchant ships travelling through the Gulf of Aden and holding them for ransom. The pirates were back in the consciousness of international security personnel. The international community responded to the piracy threat, and soon hundreds of Somali men were in court systems across the world. The contemporary prosecution of piracy is fraught with difficulty; including the challenge of effective communication between people
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__________________________________________________________________ from vastly different social, cultural and political environments. Westerners typically hold preconceived notions about pirates, failed states and Somalia fed by the media, governments and international relational concepts of sovereignty and state. The Somali, far from home, has no understanding or experience of a statestructured justice or detention system and may see no rationale for state validation and protection. This chapter will address the communication conflict described above in the context of the international community’s use of prosecution as a method of suppressing piracy. It will discuss the challenges facing the United States prosecuting Somalis for piracy, drawing on the communications between prosecutor and defendant in the courtroom, while questioning whether communication can effectively achieve the desired outcomes of both parties. Part 2: Tools for Resolution The second part of the book comprises five chapters that deal, in one way or another, with the question of how to resolve conflicts in a constructive way. Some chapters focus on specific techniques, such as active listening, compassionate communication, or religious meditation, which prove useful in the context of conflict resolution. Others explore more universal parameters of constructive conflict resolution such as non-government communication and conflict management processes, the perception of physical space, and the propositional logic of conflict resolution. Common to all chapters in Part 2 is that they go beyond a mere analysis of conflicts. Each of the chapters presents a possible way forward for the resolution and/or prevention of conflicts. Thus, the ideas outlined in Part 2 can be regarded as possible tools for the resolution and/or prevention of conflicts. Part 2 begins with Kalpana Deshmukh and Sangita Meshram illustrating the process of compassionate communication with the case study of the Indian high priest of compassion, Acharya Vinoba Bhave (1895-1982). They argue that using a compassionate language with vocabulary of feelings can increase goodwill between people and, thus, help resolve conflicts. According to the authors, compassionate communication provides a tool to strengthen the bond of human relations and is instrumental for attitudinal transformation which, in turn, is a prerequisite for constructive conflict resolution. Deshmukh and Meshram show in their chapter how Vinoba enabled the society of India to witness a high degree of moral and social commitment through the ‘Sarvodaya Movement’ (1950) and ‘Bhoodan Movement’ (1951). In particular, they describe how Vinoba introduced the idea of a voluntary gift of land as a non-violent solution to the problem of landlessness in India and violent tendencies of landlords. Hence, the authors provide a real-world example of how complex conflicts can be addressed, and deep-rooted attitudes can be changed, through compassionate communication. John Backman’s chapter is dedicated to the role spirituality plays in the process of preparing people for a meaningful and constructive dialogue with each other. He argues that, due to their focus on inner transformation, spiritual practices have the
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__________________________________________________________________ ability to reorient people’s deepest attitudes toward others, from hostility and defensiveness to curiosity and compassion. The chapter explores specific spiritual practices, such as silent prayer, meditation, contemplative study of sacred texts, the ‘Daily Office,’ and life in community and examines the transformative power of those practices. Backman shows how practitioners’ experience of a wisdom and presence that goes beyond their inner self can open the door to a reflection of universal values, such as humility, compassion, and risk, that are essential for authentic dialogue. In conclusion, Backman locates spiritual practice within a broader socio-psychological context along with mind-shifts and people’s ability to identify their place in the universe. In chapter ten, Richard Harris analyses cultural differences in the perception of physical space and the impact these differences may have on communication and conflict. He introduces six levels of perception of physical space (called cosmological, geographical, environmental, communal, residential, and personal space) and argues that failure to recognise the complexity of the cultural influences on the perception of space can lead to incomprehension and conflict. While Harris’s six-layer model of the perception of space is not intended as a complete answer to interpersonal or intercultural miscommunication, it provides an initial guide to the different levels, or dimensions, of a physical setting to which a participant may be reacting and, thus, can facilitate an enhanced awareness of a major cause of misunderstanding and conflict. The topic of Ahmed Hassin’s chapter is the extent to which non-government communication and tribal conflict management processes can contribute to the restoration of order and sustainable reconciliation in post-conflict countries. He uses the example of the role of Iraqi tribes in the peaceful reconciliation processes in post-war Iraq. Based on empirical data collected from Iraqi tribal leaders, Hassin argues that tribes have emerged as a powerful disciplinary social structure that is capable of conflict management and national reconciliation. He analyses the tribal discourses and communication methods used in various conflict management processes. He finds that tribes have applied different modes of communication and methods of conflict management at the individual, communal and national level each aimed at bringing stability to the country. The eBook concludes with Frieder Lempp’s chapter on how propositional logic can be used to communicate about conflicting interests among parties. Based on the assumption that conflicts can be understood as inconsistent sets of goals, values, beliefs, emotions, or the like, Lempp argues that conflict resolution is a process of identifying inconsistencies and transforming them. He presents a logical model which can help to identify the relationships between conflicting parties’ interests and determine whether two interests are inconsistent with each other. In addition, he shows how the model can be used to generate possible solutions to a conflict, such as compromise solutions, minimally invasive solutions, or solutions that are compatible with certain predefined norms. Due to its simplicity, Lempp’s
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__________________________________________________________________ model can be used within an integrative negotiation or mediation process to engage parties in a dialogue about their conflicting interests and preferred principles of conflict resolution. Conclusion This eBook provides a small snapshot of the diversity and breadth that is required to examine and resolve the challenges conflict creates for individuals, families, the media and broader societies. Interpretation of the conflict narrative is a recurring theme through the first part of this eBook; not only by the participants within the conflict but by the authors’ perspective as well. Authors have endeavoured to utilise their own expertise to create new communication points about the conflict challenge in question. By bringing fresh eyes to the issues discussed the authors have not only brought the conflict to light but opened the door to resolution. Part 2 is demonstrative of the multifaceted ways communication conflict can be approached. Ways to examine the conflict with a view to facilitating a resolution and suggestions of ways to look within ourselves first are essential conclusions that can be drawn from these chapters. But sometimes, we do not have the answer within so we can rely on more robust tools and thinking processes. Perhaps we are not going to be able to single-handedly resolve the major conflicts of our time with these tools, but surely they give us a place to start. Bringing together such diverse content into this eBook has been a successful and productive collaborative effort between editors, authors and InterDisciplinary.Net. Without the cooperative efforts and prompt responses of all our authors, the eBook would not have worked so seamlessly. We would also like to thank Ann-Marie Cook for her coordination and organisation of the CC3 conference. We hope this volume provides a snapshot of the experiences and expertise of presenters at CC3 and facilitates ongoing dialogue and collaborations for authors and readers, including future attendees of Communication and Conflict conferences.
Part 1 Issues and Analysis
The Ultimate Abyss: Communication Breakdown in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night Oumeima Mouelhi Abstract Eugene O’ Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night creates a world in which communication has broken down. One of the greatest conflicts in the play is the characters’ uncanny inability to communicate despite their constant fighting. In the play, all the Tyrones are in a permanent state of conflict. Edmund, and Jamie often fight among themselves over Mary’s addiction, but no one is willing to confront her directly. Instead, they allow her to lie to herself about her own addiction and about Edmund’s illness. Edmund and Jamie do not communicate well until the last act, when Jamie finally confesses his own jealousy of his brother and desire to see him fail. Tyrone, likewise, can only criticise his sons, but his stubborn nature does not allow him to accept criticism. All the characters have bones to pick, but they have trouble doing so. Breakdown of communication is a very apparent theme in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. We are forced to listen to the same arguments times and again because nothing ever gets resolved. The Tyrones fight, but often hide the most important feelings. There is a deep tendency towards denial in the family. Often, avoidance is the strategy for dealing with problems. Therefore, the conversations in this family are usually strange since there are a lot of sudden changes of topics and intentional pretence about not understanding what is going on. This phenomenon further hampers communication among the Tyrones. This chapter hopes to bring to light the fatality of the Tyrones because of the absence of communication. It shows how a whole family is brought to its own demise because of their insistence on not facing the truth and discussing it. Key Words: Alienation, isolation, miscommunication, conflict, anxiety, tragedy, meaning of life. ***** Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night describes the world of middle-class family life. Its greatness lies in its simple domestication both of tragic emotion and of human insight. The play focuses on a dysfunctional family trying to come to grips with its ambivalent emotions in the face of serious familial problems, including drug addiction, moral degradation, life-threatening illness and above all communication breakdown between the family members. All of the Tyrones are caught in a destiny they cannot escape from. As they tell of themselves, they become larger than their own small lives. This is the Tyrones’ environment
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__________________________________________________________________ obsessed and tortured inside. The whole family is trapped into suffocating and terrifying battle separately and together. This chapter aims to unveil the different mechanisms used by O’Neill to bring to light communication breakdown in the life of the Tyrones; chief among these are permanent conflicts, lies and denials, and ultimately retreat into the past. Long Day’s Journey into Night begins with a note of underlying anxiety and ends with the dissolution of trust, family bonds, and hope for a better future. The play tells the story of the Tyrones; theirs is not a happy tale. The youngest son Edmund is sent to a sanatorium to recover from tuberculosis. His mother Mary, who is at the centre of the family drama, struggles both to keep her morphine addiction at bay and to cope with her family’s mistrust. Mary is wrecked by narcotics and her older son, Jamie, by alcohol and whores. These factors conspire to turn the Tyrones into tormented individuals. All they want is for morning to come, another day to let the fog come in around so that they can forget the world enveloping them. All of the Tyrones lock you into their hellish lives for one long day enclosing Mother, Father and two sons in a long struggle against each other and against Fate. Each of the Tyrones is filled with undisguised self-hatred, pain, and a desperate need for one another. They have arrived at a moment when they can no longer communicate. They can neither talk of fixing the garden nor take an afternoon drive or even talk at all. Any word spoken precipitates an emotional collision for they have reached the end of endurance. Each character slowly confronts his or her rage toward the others. Edmund blames his mother’s indifference on Tyrone’s miserliness. He knows that his father Tyrone will send him to anywhere but a sanatorium and hates him for that. Mary blames her husband Tyrone for the incompetent doctor who gave her the drugs, and her son Edmund for being born. Jamie hates his brother for having the talent he, himself, never had. Edmund and Jamie learned that their negative feelings about life resulted quite simply from a very early critical deprivation of mother love, a deprivation which was followed in their adolescence by rational disillusionment with their addicted mother and by shame. Unable to truly communicate, the Tyrones have become condemned to isolation. The dialogue becomes increasingly aggressive. The inability to communicate is central to the play as these characters are hopeless to defend themselves because they cannot make themselves understood by each other. The play is, primarily, about human isolation and communication breakdown, Barlow writes. 1 The alienation caused by ever-fragmenting personal relationships in an increasingly materialistic and profane society all affects the dynamics of the sibling bond. Jamie and Edmund, often at odds, end up in a tableau of eternal conflict. Due to his love for his mother and his need of her affection, Jamie’s heart is instilled with jealousy of his younger brother Edmund. He even attempts to corrupt his
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__________________________________________________________________ brother introducing him to women and liquor. Jamie confesses that he hates his brother: JAMIE. Never wanted you to succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you, Mama’s baby, papa’s pet. (He stares at Edmund with increasing enmity) And it was your being born that started Mama on dope. 2 The Tyrones have, indeed, lost the power to communicate, even on a daily basis. Nothing is more isolating for the Tyrones than Mary’s persistent ‘stubborn denials’ of the facts regarding her affliction and her son’s illness. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, George Bernard Shaw explained the principle of what Henrik Ibsen sees as the ‘life-lie’ and its relation to reality and idealism. 3 Ibsen and Shaw, both, believed that many of us find reality so unpleasant that we try to cover it up with a mask of idealism, creating an alternative, unreal ‘life’ for ourselves that is essentially a ‘lie.’ They saw this as dangerous, for the further we move away from reality, the more damage we cause to ourselves and others in our efforts to maintain that idealistic mask. While some may carry on living the lie, others are drawn to face reality with varying repercussions. O’Neill suggests that everyone lives with these types of dreams, and to try to live without them is inherently dangerous. The dreams may be attainable but they, at least, offer hope. O’Neill’s cast of characters in Long Day’s Journey does not represent all of society but rather the rejects of society, those people who once had meaningful lives but for various reasons have lost touch with each other, being left with nothing except their ‘pipe dreams’ that allow them to recreate either past or future, even while living in a bitter present, which at least gives them the strength to keep living. In the play, Mary lives a lie pretending that Edmund is not ill. She has been addicted to morphine after her son’s death. Although she has been institutionalised for her addiction, she is unable to overcome it. She often thinks about the past expressing regret that she did not become a nun or a concert pianist. She refuses to believe that her son suffers from tuberculosis. In talking to Jamie, Mary attempts to deceive herself with the comforting belief that Edmund is only suffering from a summer cold: JAMIE. [genuinely concerned] It’s not just a cold he’s got. The kid is damned sick. MARY. [turn on him resentfully] Why do you say that? It’s just a cold! Anyone can tell that! You always imagine things. 4 By the use of denial, Mary believes that Edmund’s illness does not exist. Edmund encourages and supports his mother as she struggles to accept the facts
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__________________________________________________________________ around her, first by innuendo, later by outright assault, as she coldly denies them. The second-act encounter between Edmund and Mary is the most frustrating for both because it is here that she tries hardest to get through to her as she comes closest to accepting herself–that is of reasserting her kinship with him and with the others. ‘I don’t blame you,’ she tells Edmund, I’ve become such a liar. I never lied about anything once upon a time. Now I have to lie, especially to myself. I’ve never understood anything about it except that one day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own. 5 Mary Tyrone is the dark side throughout this play. Her cynicism and panicstricken thought process causes her family much undue estrangement. Her morphine addiction is nothing but a deep feeling of loss and alienation. Addiction is a pathology that envelopes the human subject whilst bringing the person into contact with further pathologies; an addicted subject will more than likely encounter pathologies such as loss, grief, trauma, as well as physical pathologies during their encounter with addiction. In 1930 Freud noted: Life as we find it, is too hard for us, it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures (…) There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of pour misery, substitutive satisfactions which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it (…) The crudest but also most effective among these methods is the chemical one-intoxication. 6 When the four members of the Tyrone family are sober, they generally refuse to acknowledge their own failures and weaknesses. Instead, they deny their faults altogether choosing to blame another family member for them or to argue that they are victims of uncontrollable circumstances. Their self-delusions lead to raging arguments, often punctuated with insulting language. To escape discord and avoid facing their failures, they have refuge in liquor or in the case of Mary, morphine. Under the influence of drugs, the Tyrones tend to probe the past and ruminate over what could have been. The Tyrone family is fragmented and each of its members, to some degree, is alienated from the past. The Tyrones try to explain how and why they have become what they are: ‘The things life had done to us we cannot excuse or explain. The past is the present. It is the future too,’ Mary claims. 7 Most alienated of all is Mary. She tells Edmund: ‘I’ve never felt it was my home. It was wrong from the start.’ 8 Under the influence of morphine, Mary moves into her idealised past, further hampering the communicative process with her family. In
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__________________________________________________________________ fact, she uses different kinds of defence mechanisms in order to avoid facing any of her problems. Mary is living through the most complex defence, as when she flashes back to her past in order to avoid the present unrealities of her present life. In the course of the play, Mary shifts repeatedly between a young girl and an embittered self-contemptuous creature. Edmund describes the blank wall she builds around herself: It’s (…) like a blank of fog in which she hides and loses herself. Deliberately, to get beyond our reach, to be rid of us, to forget we’re alive! It’s as if in spite of loving us, she hated us. 9 The play dramatises the absolute preponderance of the past that is repeated semantically as well as psychologically. The urge for repetition of the past and its obsession imparts a psychotic trait to the characters. What Mary Tyrone says in the play asserts the preponderance of the past in an expression that is invertible for its semiotic brilliance and efficacy, ‘the past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.’ 10 Tyrone’s desperate pleas to Mary in response to her talk of her living in filthy hotels and bearing children there, and young Edmund’s death, he says: ‘For God’s sake, forget the past.’ 11 He adds, ‘Can’t you let our dead baby rest in peace?’ 12 Tyrone is terribly mistaken that any part of their past could be laid in peace, or pushed to forgetfulness. Neither the living conditions that Mary had to experience after her marriage with actor Tyrone, nor the death of the baby Edmund would ever be pushed to oblivion as they have captured their entire psychic beings and entrapped them in their wholeness. If one were to look at Mary, he would see that throughout the play, she is living in the past through her ever-lasting remembrances, which ‘disrupts the linearity’ of her life. 13 ‘Because the id has no concept of time,’ Snowden writes: It contains impulses and impressions that may have arisen decades before, but which still affect the person as if they were happening in the present. These can only be recognised as belonging to the past when they are made conscious by the work of analysis. Only then can they lose their importance and stop affecting the person’s thinking and behaviour. 14 Mary is not the only character to live in a prison at her own making. There have been so many events in the past that had such a traumatic cumulative effect on all the Tyrones that the shadow of the past extends into the present and the future. James and Tyrone as he tells of himself, is haunted by his impoverished childhood and his father’s abandonment and eventual suicide: ‘At ten years old! There was no more school for me,’ Tyrone says. ‘I worked 12 hours a day in a machine shop, learning to make flies (…) you talk of work! And what do you think I got for it?
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__________________________________________________________________ Fifty cents a week! It’s the truth.’ 15 In one self-pitying confession, Tyrone expresses regrets for having given up the chance of becoming a great Shakespearean actor in order to take a profitable but artistically unrewarding part in a popular melodrama, ‘I could have been a great Shakespearean actor,’ he says, ‘if I’d kept once.’ 16 Both Tyrone and Mary escape their pasts, Mary to her convent days when she wanted to be a nun, and Tyrone to a time in his career when he might have resisted trading his talent for wealth as he regrets it, ‘I’d lost the great talent once had through years of easy repetitions, never learning a new part, never really working hard.’ 17 Tyrone, doomed to an endless life of regret for something lost in the past, turns to local barrooms; he buys real estate to purchase security he cannot find; he drinks to dope his mind to the point of forgetfulness. Jamie, like his brother and father, is lost, embittered and cynical. Jamie destroyed his life with the proliferate life of the Broadway rounder. He also has attempted to corrupt his brother in the pretence of ‘putting him wise to women and liquor.’ 18 Jamie deludes himself in his search for personal redemption through alcoholism and whoring. Admittance of ruining himself through perverse drinking is emphasised by Mary when she told Edmund, ‘His drunkenness has virtually ruined him.’ 19 Talking about his mother’s long history of drug addiction, Jamie says: ‘Well you know how it is, I can’t forget the past.’ 20 Indeed, almost every interaction the family has during Long Day’s Journey into Night is affected or shaped in the same way by the past. The past exerts such a powerful grip that characters believe there is little point in trying to change their situation or come to a meaningful communication. ‘Only the past when you were happy is real,’ 21 Mary says. All of the Tyrones come out with their own sense of trauma and ambivalent feelings towards each other that is made manifest in their thoughts, expressions, remembrance and behaviour. The trauma has left them in a position of total psychological impasse. The four Tyrones are misconnected to each other and their action in past have definitely left indelible mark on their psyche. Edmund is no less neurotic in his dark and pessimistic view of life. His response to existing life conditions that include his own deteriorating death, the fear of having something serious in himself like tuberculosis, his mother’s return to addiction, and strained family environment is one of acute stress that pushes him to a paranoid state of anxiety, fear and even firm faith in life’s ultimate insignificance and triviality. Edmund’s recitation of Baudelaire’s poem, speaks of what Tyrone calls, ‘madness,’ ‘filth and despair’ and ‘morbid sense.’ 22 Edmund recites well, with bitter, ironical passion, the Symons’ translation of Baudelaire’s poem: Be always drunken. Nothing else matters. That is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time
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__________________________________________________________________ weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. 23 What Edmund says, here, is an expression of total denial of all that pertains to meaningful life and is the embodiment of a Nietzschean and Schopenhaurean world of absolute lack of spirituality, emptiness, utter wastefulness and decay. In one of the most heartfelt dialogues of the play, Edmund reveals to Tyrone what has mattered most to him in his life. Edmund speaks of taking a walk in the fog: EDMUND. That’s what I wanted, to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea (…) As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. 24 Survival creates the action of the play as we witness how humanity survives the empty existence O’Neill sees as life. The depression that the Tyrones feel make of them lost souls making a final journey to slow death. Long Day’s Journey into Night gives title and direction to the play. It is a different journey through which the characters reveal their own inability to get along with one another. For mother Mary, it is a sad journey into fog of dope and past remembrances. For Tyrone, it is a regressive journey into what could have been a flamboyant artistic triumph. For Jamie, it is a whole journey into the night of cynicism and despair, ‘the truth is there is no cure and we’ve been saps to hope.’ 25 On the other side for Edmund, the younger son, it is a journey beyond night, ‘It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more success as a seagull or a fish.’ 26 Long Day’s Journey into Night is a classic for a reason; it portrays the dark side of a disconnected family in a way that many people will be able to connect to, if not directly to addiction issues, than certainly to communication breakdown and the ways that any family can be haunted by its past. The play transcends autobiographical statement it set out to make. It is more than simply the story of the ‘four haunted Tyrones.’ It is a story of how past fear and disappointment become so crushing as part of the present. It is a story of the massively destructive effects of prolonged self-imposed isolation. The concluding statement of the play is a tableau of family disintegration destroying all possible communication. The ‘night’ that this play focuses on has been a ‘long journey’ into a disbelief in everything. At the end of the play, we are left with, only, the image of four beings linked together round a faintly lit electric light in an illimitable ocean of darkness.
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The Ultimate Abyss
__________________________________________________________________
Notes 1
Judith E. Barlow, ‘Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night: From Early Notes to Finished Play’, Modern Drama 22 (1979): 19-28. 2 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (London: COX & Wyman Ltd., 1991), 103. 3 Cited in Susan C. W. Abbotson, Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007), 413. 4 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 8. 5 Ibid., 93. 6 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 32. 7 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 29. 8 Ibid., 23. 9 Ibid., 53. 10 Ibid., 87. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 12. 13 Chris J. Westgate, ‘Tragic Inheritance & Tragic Expression in Long Day’s Journey into Night’, The Eugene O’Neill Review 30 (2008): 8-16. 14 Ruth Snowden, Freud (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2006), 104. 15 O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 60. 16 Ibid., 61. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 65. 19 Ibid., 50. 20 Ibid., 23. 21 Ibid., 82. 22 Ibid., 132. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 97. 25 Ibid., 27. 26 Ibid., 63.
Bibliography Abbotson, Susan C. W. Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007.
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__________________________________________________________________ Barlow, Judith E. ‘Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night: From Early Notes to Finished Play’. Modern Drama 22 (1979): 19–28. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961. O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night. London: COX & Wyman Ltd., 1991. Snowden, Ruth. Freud. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2006. Westgate, Chris J. ‘Tragic Inheritance and Tragic Expression in Long Day’s Journey into Night’. The Eugene O’Neill Review 30 (2008): 8–16. Oumeima Mouelhi, is Teacher Assistant of English at the High Institute of Human Sciences-Le kef, Tunisia. Fields of interest: literature (American and British drama), social sciences, and cultural studies.
Felt versus Expressed Emotions during Interpersonal Conflict Valerie B. Coles and Jennifer A. Samp Abstract An empirical examination of expressed and felt emotions during relational conflict asked dating partners (N = 222) to complete measures about conflicts where they 1) expressed an emotion they did not feel; and 2) felt an emotion they did not express, while referencing the degree to with they felt and/or expressed nine emotions. Reports indicated individuals differentiate between felt and expressed emotions and that many emotions are more intensely felt than expressed during conflict. Also, the conceptualisation of emotions as discrete versus dimensional is varied in the conflict context. Key Words: Interpersonal conflict, emotion management, romantic relationships. ***** 1. Emotion Management during Relational Conflict Conflict in romantic relationships is inherently emotional. Individuals may engage in emotion management by strategically displaying their emotions by revealing, inhibiting, or exaggerating their emotions to others. 1 For this study, emotion management during relational conflict with a focus on felt versus expressed emotions during conflict was examined. Felt emotions refer to an inner emotional state that is under an individual’s awareness (e.g. I feel happy, I am angry) whereas expressed emotions can be observed by others (e.g. I smile to show I am happy or grimace to show I am angry). According to Ekman and Friesen, 2 five distinctions in the felt-versus-expressed emotion relationship may occur: individuals may (1) intensify emotion by expressing an emotion more than it is felt, (2) deintensify or suppress emotion, by expressing less than what is felt, (3) simulate emotion, by expressing an emotion that is not felt, (4) inhibit or neutralise emotion by acting as if no emotion is felt at all, or (5) mask or substitute emotion by expressing one emotion when another is felt. Individuals may also express emotions to the real and full extent they are felt. Little research has addressed if and how felt versus expressed emotions are strategically managed during relational conflict. With a slight exception, Hample and colleagues compared participant reports versus external observer assessments of anger, happiness, and sadness during an interaction about a controversial issue. 3 Anger was reported by participants and observed by partners and third-party coders, whereas happiness was felt by participants but not always detected by others. While the results of Hample et al.’s study implied that individuals may not always express felt emotions, participants were not directly asked if they withheld, or perhaps even amplified, emotions during a disagreement. Further, the emotion-
14
Felt versus Expressed Emotions during Interpersonal Conflict
__________________________________________________________________ related reports were made in reference to a discussion about an issue unrelated to the dyad. In this study, participant reports of felt emotions versus expressed emotions in reference to a relational conflict with a dating partner were examined. Guided by recent work by Nair 4 we expanded the domain of emotions examined by Hample et al. to consider nine emotions that are relevant to interpersonal conflict: anger, annoyance, anxiety, fear, frustration, guilt, happiness, sadness, and surprise. There were two research questions: (RQ1): Do individuals distinguish between felt emotions and expressed emotions during relational conflict?; and (RQ2): Does the intensity of felt and expressed emotions vary by a particular emotion experienced during relational conflict? 2. Method 144 females and 78 males (age: M = 21.34, SD = 6.15, range: 18-60 years) completed consent procedures and demographic measures and then were asked to remember two conflicts in their romantic relationship whereby they: (1) expressed an emotion they did not feel (the expressed scenario) and (2) felt an emotion they did not express (the felt scenario). Participants were asked to briefly describe each conflict, indicate if the topic had been discussed before, and then complete two different types of emotion management measures for each conflict. To capture the distinction between expressed versus felt emotions, we created items based on Ekman and Friensen’s conceptualisation of emotion management. For each of the nine emotions (anger, annoyance, anxiety, fear, frustration, guilt, happiness, sadness, and surprise), respondents marked which option best applied during the conflict: (1) did not feel or express, (2) felt but not expressed, (3) expressed to a lesser extent than felt, (4) expressed to the extent felt, (5) expressed to a greater extent than felt, and (6) expressed but not felt. To assess the intensity of the particular emotions felt and expressed during conflict, respondents completed two five-point Likert-type scales ((1 = did not feel (or express); 5 = felt (or expressed) to a great extent)) for each emotion. 3. Results All 222 participants completed questions about the expressed scenario and 190 (85.6%) participants responded to the felt scenario. Inductive analyses of the reported conflicts indicated they commonly focused on questions related to the state of the relationship, actions related to alcohol use, or values. These are not uncommon themes for undergraduates describing relational conflicts. 5 A. Felt versus Expressed Emotion Reports As reported in Table 1, there were significant differences in felt and/or expressed emotion reports for both the expressed scenario, χ2 (40) = 522.01, p = < .0001 and the felt scenario, χ2 (40) = 354.20, p = < .0001. For anger, significant effects between reports of felt versus expressed emotions, χ2 (5) = 16.81, p = < .01,
Valerie B. Coles and Jennifer A. Samp
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__________________________________________________________________ were largely driven by the expression of anger. In the expressed scenario, anger was commonly reported to be expressed to the extent felt, expressed to a greater extent than felt, and/or expressed more so than in the felt scenario. Reports of the felt scenario revealed higher frequencies that anger was felt but not expressed, compared to reports for the expressed scenario. A significant scenario difference was observed for annoyance, χ2 (5) = 11.61, p = < .05; respondents expressed annoyance to the extent that it was felt more often in the expressed scenario than in the felt scenario. There were also significant differences in the management of frustration across scenarios, χ2 (5) = 12.34, p = < .001, such that in the expressed scenario, participants reported that they expressed this frustration to the extent felt, compared to the felt scenario. In the felt scenario, participants reported feeling, but not expressing frustration far more often than in the expressed scenario. Reports of anxiety differed between the expressed and felt scenarios, χ2(5) = 11.61, p = < .05; an effect indicating that in the expressed scenario, anxiety was felt but not expressed or expressed to a lesser extent than felt, compared to reports of the felt scenario. For surprise, significant differences in reports of expressed versus felt scenarios were driven by a pattern whereby individuals expressed surprise to the extent felt in the expressed scenario compared to the felt scenario, or expressed surprise to a greater extent than felt in the expressed scenario compared to the felt scenario. Thus, largely for reports of anger, frustration, annoyance, and surprise, when asked to identify emotion management in reference to the expressed emotion scenario, they generally reported expressing felt emotions. No significant differences emerged between scenarios in expressed versus felt emotion reports for fear, χ2(5) = 3.71, ns, guilt, χ2(5) = 11.32, p = .05, sadness, χ2(5) = 8.31, or happiness, χ2(5) = 8.99, ns. However, in total, there was evidence to suggest that individuals differentiate between expressed and felt emotions during interpersonal conflict (RQ1). B. The Intensity of Felt versus Expressed Emotions Exploratory factor analyses with maximum likelihood estimation of the Emotion Display Scale reports for both the expressed emotion scenario and the felt emotion scenario indicated that two sets of emotion judgments should be grouped together given their common loadings greater than 0.60 (see Table 2): (a) frustration, annoyance, and anger and (b) anxiety and fear. These combinations are not surprising given similar groupings revealed in prior research. 6 A primary components factor analysis confirmed composite groupings of frustration, annoyance, and anger (labeled as anger-related) and anxiety and fear (labeled as fear-related). Happiness, guilt, sadness, and surprise remained independent distinct emotions for analyses. As seen in Table 3, the intensity to which emotions were reportedly felt in the expressed emotion scenario, the intensity of happiness, guilt, surprise, fear-related
16
Felt versus Expressed Emotions during Interpersonal Conflict
__________________________________________________________________ were all below average (midpoint = 3), while the intensity of emotions felt reflecting anger-related was significantly higher than average. The intensity of felt sadness was not significantly different from the scale midpoint. Similarly, with regard to the intensity to which emotions were felt in the felt emotion scenario, happiness, guilt, surprise, and fear-related were rated significantly below average, anger-related was significantly higher than average, and sadness was not significantly different from the scale midpoint. Within the emotion scenario, one-way repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that for the felt scenario, repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that emotions were largely felt to a greater intensity than expressed for anger-related (Λ = 2.31, F(1,189) = 3.21, p < .01), fear-related (Λ = 2.22, F (1,188) = 3.01, p < .01), sadness (Λ = 2.29, F (1,187) = 3.33, p < .01), guilt (Λ = 1.78, F (1,188) = 1.76, p < .05), and surprise (Λ = 1.21, F (1,220) = 1.75, p < .05), but not happiness (Λ = 1.0, F (1,189) = .69, ns) emotions. Repeated measure ANOVAs indicated a significant difference between the emotion scenarios for anger-related emotion intensity (Λ = .98, F (1,185) = 4.57, p < .05), such that anger-related emotion was more intensely felt in the expressed scenario compared to the felt scenario. There was no significant difference between emotion scenarios for fear-related (Λ = 1.00, F (1,185) = .00, ns), sadness (Λ = 1.00, F (1,187) = .09, ns), guilt (Λ = .99, F (1,186) = 1.17, ns), surprise (Λ = 1.00, F (1,186) = .02, ns), or happiness (Λ = 1.00, F (1,188) = .54, ns). With regard to the intensity of emotions expressed in the expressed emotion scenario, Table 3 indicates that mean scores of happiness, guilt, sadness, surprise, and fear-related were significantly lower than average, while anger-related was not significantly different from average. For the felt emotion scenario one-sample ttests indicated mean scores of fear-related, sadness, guilt, surprise, and happiness were all significantly below average in expressed intensity. Reports of the expression of anger-related emotion were not significantly different from average in the expressed emotion scenario. For the felt emotion scenario, no emotional expression was reported as above average for any of the nine emotions. Within the emotion scenario, one-way repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that for the expressed scenario, repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that emotions were largely felt to a greater intensity than expressed for anger-related (Λ = 1.18, F (1,221) = 2.27, p < .05), fear-related (Λ = 2.73, F (1,220) = 3.41, p < .01), sadness (Λ = 1.11, F (1,220) = .09, p < .05), guilt (Λ = 2.34, F (1,221) = 2.44, p < .01), but not surprise (Λ = 1.01, F (1,220) = .05, ns), or happiness (Λ = 0.98, F (1,220) = .78, ns). One-way repeated measures ANOVAs indicated significant differences between emotion scenarios for anger-related (Λ = .85, F (1,184) = 31.74, p < .001), sadness (Λ = .90, F (1,187) = 21.82, p < .001), guilt (Λ = .98, F (1,181) = 4.51, p < .05), and surprise (Λ = .97, F (1,186) = 5.35, p < .05) in that all four were more intensely expressed in the expressed scenario compared to the felt scenario. There
Valerie B. Coles and Jennifer A. Samp
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__________________________________________________________________ was no significant difference between emotion scenarios for fear-related (Λ = .99, F (1,187) = 2.04, ns) or happiness (Λ = 1.00, F (1,187) = .18, ns). These results suggest that the intensity with which individuals express emotions differ between expressed and felt emotion scenarios. 4. Discussion Our data suggest that oftentimes emotions are felt but not expressed during conflict, far more than the contrary. Further, the results of this study provide insight as to how emotions should be conceptualised in relational contexts. We considered nine emotions that previous research has found to be relevant to interpersonal conflict: anger, annoyance, anxiety, fear, frustration, guilt, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Categorical assessments of these emotions indicated that all were experienced by the majority of participants, but anger, annoyance, frustration, anxiety and surprise were commonly reported to be expressed in both scenarios. Another key focus concerned if the intensity of felt and expressed emotions vary by a particular emotion experienced during relational conflict. Here, the anger-related emotions were the most intensely experienced emotions. The term experienced here refers to both feeling and expressing emotion. Sadness was the second most intensely experienced emotion and fear-related emotions were the third most intensely experienced emotion. Given our focus on conflict, it was unsurprising that anger-related, fear-related emotions were reported to be felt and expressed – and with far more intensity than more positive emotions such as happiness and surprise. Interestingly, with the exception of anger, most emotions were not felt or expressed very intensely, with most mean scores for felt and expressed intensity falling below the scale midpoint. However, regardless of overall low intensity experiences, most emotions were more strongly felt than they were expressed. This observation was consistent throughout the study. In particular, when comparing the intensity of whether an emotion was felt to the intensity it was expressed within emotion scenarios (felt versus expressed), anger-related, fear-related, sadness, and guilt were all reported to be felt to greater degrees than they were expressed in the expressed scenario. These results repeated in analysis of the felt scenario, with the addition of a contrast between felt surprise, which was also more intensely felt than expressed. These results further support the observation that individuals commonly feel emotions to greater extremes than they express them. The emotion that did not indicate contrast between felt and expressed experiences was happiness, which was also rated lowest in intensity across scenarios. Since happiness was the only positive emotion examined in this study, we cannot make claims about positive emotion management in the context of relational conflict. However, it is possible that because a large proportion of the conflict accounts provided by participants focused on conflicts that had occurred before (i.e. serial), participants were not open to the management of positive emotions given prior outcomes of the conflict.
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Felt versus Expressed Emotions during Interpersonal Conflict
__________________________________________________________________ 5. Conclusion This study is marked by limitations, including the fact that it was subject to self-report biases, suggesting that future research may benefit from assessing the production of emotional behavior as conflicts unfold in real time. Also, the sample lacked demographic and cultural diversity. Prior research has observed that cultures have different emotional display rules, 7 thus future research may benefit from a broader sample. In addition, this study considered nine emotions; later work should explore other emotions to provide a useful contrast to these results. Yet to the extent that a foundation about the basic associations between emotion and conflict has been set, it is hoped that future research will continue to examine the difference between felt and expressed emotions on how people many effectively manage their relationships.
Notes 1
Sally Planalp, Communicating Emotion: Social, Moral, and Cultural Processes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3-10. 2 Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Cues (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977), 25-67. 3 Dale Hample, Marceline Thompson-Hayes, Paul K. Wallenfelsz and Christina Knapp, ‘Face-to-Face Arguing Is an Emotional Experience: Triangulating Methods and Early Findings’, Argumentation & Advocacy 42, No. 2 (2005): 74-93. 4 Nisha Nair, ‘Towards Understanding the Role of Emotions in Conflict: A Review and Future Directions’, International Journal of Conflict Management 19, No. 4 (2008): 359-381. 5 Christin E. Bates and Jennifer A. Samp, ‘Examining the Effects of Planning and Empathic Accuracy on Communication in Relational and Non-Relational Conflict Interactions’, Communication Studies 62 (2011): 207-223. 6 Peter Kuppens and Ivan Van Mechelen, ‘Interactional Appraisal Models for the Anger Appraisals of Threatened Self-Esteem, Other-Blame, and Frustration’, Cognition and Emotion 21, No. 1 (2007): 56-77. 7 James J. Gross, Jan M. Richards and Oliver P. John, ‘Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life’, Emotion Regulation in Families: Pathways to Dysfunction and Health, eds. Douglas K. Snyder, Jeffry Simpson and Jan N. Hughes (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006), 13-35.
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__________________________________________________________________
Bibliography Bates, Christin E., and Jennifer A. Samp. ‘Examining the Effects of Planning and Empathic Accuracy on Communication in Relational and Non-Relational Conflict Interactions’. Communication Studies 62 (2011): 207–223. Burgoon, Judee K., and Amy E. Bacue ‘Nonverbal Communication Skills’. In Handbook of Communication and Social Interaction Skills, edited by John O. Greene, and Brant R. Burleson, 179–220. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. Canary, Daniel J. ‘Managing Interpersonal Conflict: A Model of Events Related to Strategic Choices’. In Handbook of Communication and Social Interaction Skills, edited by John O. Greene, and Brant R. Burleson, 515–555. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen. Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Cues. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977. Gottman, John M., and Janice L. Driver. ‘Dysfunctional Marital Conflict and Everyday Marital Interaction’. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage 43, No. 3 (2005): 63–78. Gross, James J., Jan M. Richards, and Oliver P. John. ‘Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life’. In Emotion Regulation in Families: Pathways to Dysfunction and Health, edited by Douglas K. Snyder, Jeffry Simpson, and Jan N. Hughes, 13–35. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006. Guerrero, Laura, and Angela G. La Valley. Conflict, Emotion, and Communication: Handbook of Communication and Conflict. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. Hample, Dale, Thompson-Hayes, Marceline, Wallenfelsz, Paul K., and Knapp, Christina. ‘Face-to-Face Arguing Is an Emotional Experience: Triangulating Methods and Early Findings’. Argumentation & Advocacy 42, No. 2 (2005): 74– 93. Hochschild, Arlie R. ‘Emotional Work, Feelings Rules, and Social Structure’. The American Journal of Sociology 85, No. 3 (1979): 551–575.
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Felt versus Expressed Emotions during Interpersonal Conflict
__________________________________________________________________ Jones, Tricia S. ‘Emotional Communication in Conflict: Essence and Impact’. In The language of conflict and resolution, edited by William F. Eadie, and Paul E. Nelson, 81–104. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. Lazarus, Richard S. Emotion and Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Nair, Nisha. ‘Towards Understanding the Role of Emotions in Conflict: A Review and Future Directions’. International Journal of Conflict Management 19, No. 4 (2008): 359–381. Planalp, Sally. Communicating Emotion: Social, Moral, and Cultural Processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Valerie B. Coles (B.A., M.A., University of Georgia) is a PhD student. She focuses her research on conflict in interpersonal relationships. Jennifer A. Samp (B.A., Hamilton College, M.A., PhD University of WisconsinMadison) is Associate Head and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. She focuses her work on conflict in interpersonal relationships.
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__________________________________________________________________
Appendix Table 1: Counts of Felt/Expressed Emotions for the Expressed and Felt Emotion Scenarios Not Felt and Not Expressed
Felt But Not Expressed
Expressed to a Lesser Extent Than Felt
Expressed to the Extent Felt
Expressed to a Greater Extend Than Felt
Expressed But Not Felt
Expressed Felt
31 41
45 52
45 40
58 32
30 19
10 1
Expressed Felt
16 32
46 46
37 44
83 48
29 15
8 2
Expressed Felt
7 20
36 48
38 42
99 57
38 13
3 2
Expressed Felt
50 67
65 46
58 34
39 33
6 5
2 0
Expressed Felt
105 92
54 41
32 31
22 16
4 5
3 0
Expressed Felt
104 118
45 30
30 17
26 14
10 6
4 1
Expressed Felt
66 54
48 60
37 36
45 25
15 10
8 1
Expressed Felt
115 105
27 27
22 26
34 20
12 3
6 3
Expressed Felt
128 129
12 11
15 14
28 13
23 12
15 7
Emotion Scenario Anger
Annoyance
Frustration
Anxiety
Fear
Guilt
Sadness
Surprise
Happiness
Note: n = 222 for expressed emotion scenario; n = 190 for felt emotion scenario. Cell entries reflect n of individuals reporting a given emotion within a particular felt/expressed scenario.
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Felt versus Expressed Emotions during Interpersonal Conflict
__________________________________________________________________ Table 2: Summary of Exploratory Factor Analysis Results for Reports of Felt and Expressed Emotions Using Maximum Likelihood Estimation Expressed Emotion Scenario Felt Emotions
Factor 1
Factor 2
Anger
.78a
.33
Annoyance
.85a
.02
Frustration
.83a
.13
Anxiety
.09
.74a
Fear
-.01
.82a
Guilt
-.14
.50
Sadness
.35
.56
Surprise
.10
.57
Happiness
-.43
.20
Anger
.82
a
.29
Annoyance
.80a
.17
Frustration
.86a
.17
Anxiety
.16
.74a
Expressed Emotions
Fear
.11
.80a
Guilt
.08
.38
Sadness
.34
.58
Surprise
-.19
.59
Happiness
-.54
.29
Felt Emotion Scenario Felt Emotions Anger
.83a
.16
Annoyance
.88a
-.10
Frustration
.85a
.01
Anxiety
.05
.84a
Fear
.01
.85a
Guilt
.00
.55
Sadness
.27
.55
Surprise
-.06
.27
Happiness
-.55
.14
Factor 1
Factor 2
Expressed Emotions Anger
.79 a
.28
Annoyance
.90 a
.13
Frustration
.86 a
.12
Anxiety
.21
.82a
Fear
.15
.84a
Guilt
.08
.55
Sadness
.27
.52
Surprise
.05
.54
Happiness
.44
.10
Note: a Factor loadings > .60 on a given factor.
Valerie B. Coles and Jennifer A. Samp
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__________________________________________________________________ Table 3: Felt and Expressed Intensities of Emotions: Emotion Scenario Comparison Expressed Scenario Felt Scenario Felt Expressed Felt Expressed 3.65a,c,e 3.20d,e 3.41a,c,f 2.53b,d,f (1.04) (1.24) (1.17) (1.28) Fear-Related 2.46b,c 1.87b,d 2.43b,c 1.75b,d (1.15) (0.99) (1.32) (1.02) Sadness 2.81c 2.50b,d,e 2.84c 2.02b,d,f (1.48) (1.39) (1.46) (1.31) Guilt 2.06b,c 1.80b,d,e 1.88b,c 1.55b,d,f (1.24) (1.14) (1.22) (1.01) Surprise 2.07b 1.93b,e 2.09b,c 1.69b,d,f (1.32) (1.25) (1.39) (1.12) Happiness 1.50b 1.67b 1.45b 1.69b (0.87) (1.27) (0.93) (1.18) Note: n = 222 for expressed emotion scenario; n = 190 for felt emotion scenario. a Mean significantly above the scale midpoint (=3), p < .05. b Mean significantly below scale midpoint (=3), p < .05. c Mean significantly higher for the reported intensity of a given emotion within a scenario (expressed or felt) than the intensity of the same emotion, p < .05. d Mean significantly lower for the reported intensity of a given emotion within a scenario (expressed or felt) than the intensity of the same emotion, p < .05. e Mean significantly higher for the reported intensity of a given emotion in the expressed scenario, compared to the reported intensity of the same emotion in the felt scenario. f Mean significantly lower for the reported intensity of a given emotion in the felt scenario, compared to the reported intensity of the same emotion in the expressed scenario. Emotion Anger-Related
Coverage of Domestic Conflicts in Modern Georgian Media Dali Osepashvili Abstract The goal of this chapter is to present research results on how the topic of domestic conflicts is highlighted in Georgian media. For this purpose the author studied the Georgian media of 2011-12. To carry out the research the method of contentanalysis is used. According to the results of the research, domestic conflicts are mainly caused by family violence. The research confirmed that women are the main victims of family violence, that they are the subject of violence from their husbands and children, that women do not leave their families and avoid speaking about their experiences of violence. According to the research, it also turned out that the frequency of covering this topic is low. Georgian media covers basic information on the campaign of struggle against domestic violence, but there are also many cases of sensational coverage where certain facts of violence are illustrated in Georgian media and, at the same time, the professional ethical standards of journalism are breached. At the end of the chapter the author suggests certain recommendations for journalists on how to cover such sensitive and ethical topics in order not to damage the victims of domestic conflicts, (women in this case) and not to further humiliate their rights. Key Words: Domestic conflict, violence against women, Georgian media. ***** 1. Introduction Domestic conflict is one of the issues that is highlighted in Georgian media mostly with sensation and quite often the way it is covered violates the ethical standards of journalistic coverage in recent years. Victims of domestic conflicts are mostly women who suffer violence from their husbands or children. However, they do not leave their families and avoid sharing this topic. This topic can be mainly found in the media agenda when information related to the fight against domestic violence should be provided to the public. However, we find that media through covering the concrete facts of domestic conflicts, sensationally and dramatically violates the norms of journalistic and professional ethics on the one hand and, on the other hand, human rights are violated as well. This can be said especially in cases of reporting violence against children, when victims can be identified. Also, the presumption of innocence is violated when Georgian journalists name those persons who are suspected in the crime. It is also a flagrant violation of children’s rights. The goal of this chapter is to study how Georgian print media highlights the topic of domestic conflicts. The objects of the research are the following
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Coverage of Domestic Conflicts in Modern Georgian Media
__________________________________________________________________ newspapers: Akhali Taoba, Alia, Kviris Palitra, Kviris Qronika, Prime Time, Resonance, 24 Hours, and Versia. This research is important and urgent, because a study, which would focus on the specific facts of the media coverage of domestic conflicts, has not been conducted in Georgia yet. 2. Literature Review Studying the media coverage of violence against women started in America in the 1970s and 1980s. Tierney studied the New York Times in 1970-1978, thus laying the foundation for research in this direction. 1 Bullock and Cubert conducted quantitative content analyses and frame-analyses of newspaper articles. 2 Rayan, Anastario and DaCunha studied the coverage of violence cases which ended in murders. 3 Gillespie, Richards, Givens and Smith conducted coverage frameanalysis of female victims who dies as a result of domestic violence. 4 In recent years quite a number of media-guides for journalists about the coverage of domestic violence issues have been prepared in the USA. 5 The following violence-related research studies have been conducted in Georgia: National Research Related to Violence Against Women in Georgia, 6 Media Representation of Combating Domestic Violence in Georgia, 7 Violence Against Children and the Journalistic Ethics, 8 Topic on Children and the Problems of Journalistic Ethics in Georgian Mass Media, 9 Georgian Media Coverage of Children and Crime. 10 There is also a Georgian research study conducted from a legal point of view, Domestic Violence and the Ways of Solving it. 11 Our research is directly focused on the coverage of domestic violence in the Georgian print media. The research is current and urgent, because such a study, which would focus on the specific facts of the media coverage of domestic conflicts, has not been conducted in Georgia yet. 3. Research Hypothesis While covering the topic of domestic conflicts in Georgian media, human rights are often violated: specific facts of violence are covered sensationally, in violation of the norms of journalistic ethics. The identification of victims and suspects is possible and the presumption of innocence is not protected. 4. Research Questions How often is this topic highlighted in Georgian media? How is it highlighted? What essential mistakes do Georgian journalists make while highlighting this topic?
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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Research Methodology Content-analysis was used as the method for studying newspaper publications. 2011-13 was taken as the study period. I found 194 newspaper articles during this period (2011-13). The sample included 65 cases. I analysed every third article. The statistical software SPSS was used to determine descriptive statistics (n=65). I used the following variables for the research: Form of Violence; Form of Publication; Tone of Newspaper Publication; Balance; Source; Focus; Victim of Violence; Violator; Completeness of Information; Photo; Sensational Coverage; Identification of Victims; Victim Blame Language; Mistakes of Ethical Breach. 6. Research Findings As it was revealed by the research, domestic conflicts are mainly caused by domestic violence. As for the terminology, media used the term ‘domestic violence’ in 52 cases (80%) of the analysed newspaper materials (N=65). It was also interesting to study the form of domestic violence which prevailed in our analysed publications. The study was based on the definition given by the United Nations and International Federation of Journalists, which stated that there are four types of domestic violence: physical, sexual, psychological and economical. The analysis of the newspaper materials showed a prevalence of physical violence in 45 articles (68%); psychological violence occurred in 10 articles (16%), sexual violence in 8 articles (13%), and economical violence in 2 publications (3%).
Figure 1: Form of Violence.
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__________________________________________________________________ As for the form of articles, we found interviews in 38 cases (58%); feature stories in 11 cases (17%); news in 3 cases (5%) and 13 cases in the category ‘other’ (20%).
Figure 2: Form of Publications. As for the main focus of articles, the research showed that domestic violence coverage occurred in 72% (47 articles) of the examined publications; publications about the fight against domestic violence are only 28% (18 articles). Coverage of domestic violence cases with fatal outcome (murder) occurred in 29 percent (19 articles) of the analysed articles. Articles in a neutral tone occurred only in 34 cases (52%). In all other cases, there are personal assessments made by journalists. Usage of victim blame language by journalists occurred in 12.3 percents (8 cases) of analysed articles. It is mainly expressed in typical questions, such as: ‘It is your fault. Why did not you leave the family?’ However, there were also cases where journalists not only blamed the victim, but also gave the names of alleged murderers and criminals before they were proven to be guilty. Balance is maintained in only 20% (13 cases) of the articles. It is not maintained in 80% (52 cases). It would be better to represent both sides during the domestic violence coverage in the publications prepared by the journalists. As for the sources of information, victims of violence are presented in 45 articles; family members in 6 articles; psychologists in 8 cases; human rights defender representatives of non-governmental organisations in 19 cases; neighbors in 11 cases; human rights defenders in 2 cases; and other sources in 18 cases. It is desirable to base each publication on at least 3 sources for inducing trust among the audience.
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Figure 3: Sources of Information. Research revealed that the victims of domestic violence are mainly women who experience violence from their husbands or sons. This was the case in 86% (54 cases) of the articles; domestic violence against children occurred in 11% (7 cases); in 3% (2 cases) of the articles violence against men occurred with a women being the perpetrator.
Figure 4: Victim of Violence.
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__________________________________________________________________ Who are violators? As it was shown by the research, mainly men are violators, who abuse their wives. This was the case in 77% (50 cases) of the analysed articles; women abused their husbands in 6% (4 cases); children, who abuse their mothers occurred in 12% (7 cases), and other family members were the violators in 5% (3 articles).
Figure 5: Violator. According to the research, 38% (25 cases) of female victims of violence stay at home and continue living with the violating husband or child. 62% (40 articles) of female victims left home and lived in a temporary shelter, with relatives, or in a rented apartment. It should be emphasised, that it is a mistake when journalists indicate the location of a female victim of violence, because violators may find her again and attempt to continue with the violation. Photos were attached to 86% of the articles. 14 percent (9 cases) are published without a photos or drawing. In most cases, photos are dramatic, with bloody knives or pools of blood. We also came across photos of participants of domestic conflicts. While in some cases the participants tried to cover their eyes, it is still possible to identify the persons. Beside the photos, the identification of the victims of violence is possible in 26% (17 cases) of the analysed articles, it is impossible in 74% (48 cases). So, overall, journalists tend to try to protect the anonymity of a victim and do not mention the name and surname. The facts of violence are given sensationally and dramatically in 75 percent (49 cases) of the articles.
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__________________________________________________________________ All in all, several kinds of breaches of journalistic ethics occurred in 42% (27 cases), and ethical norms were protected in 58% (38 cases) of the articles. 7. Limits of Study and Future Research We limited ourselves by researching only newspaper media regarding the topic of domestic violence. For future research, in order to show a fuller picture, it will be interesting to study television and online media and compare it with newspaper media. It is also possible to conduct a survey among journalists covering this issue. 8. Conclusion As shown by the research, when covering the topic of domestic violence in Georgian media, journalists make many mistakes from an ethical point of view. Cases are covered sensationally, with loud headlines, dramatic photos and on the first page of the newspaper. The issue of domestic violence is not covered as a social problem, but as a criminal case. Journalists make it possible to identify the victims of the violence; indicate their location and do not think about the possibility that these people may become the victims of violence again; they do not realise that with such kind of dramatic coverage the victim of the violence may suffer psychologically and they may become victims of stigma, especially, children victims of violence; Georgian journalists also breach the presumption of innocence and during the coverage of cases with tragic outcome, they define the murderers and criminals before they are proven to be guilty; in some cases, there are facts of breaching the rights of the children, and general human rights. However, it should be emphasised, that the purpose of the chapter was not to criticise some particular newspaper. Rather, we wanted to show a tendency, which is characteristic of modern Georgian media when covering this sensitive issue. We think the solution is the protection of the journalistic professional ethical norms.
Notes 1
Kathleen J. Tierney, ‘The Battered Women Movement and the Creation of the Wife Beating Problem’, Social Problems 29, No. 3 (1982): 207-220. 2 Cathy F. Bullock and Jason Cubert, ‘Coverage of Domestic Violence Fatalities by Newspapers in Washington State’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 17 (2002): 475-499. 3 Charlotte Rayan, Mike Anastario and Alfredo DaCunha, ‘Changing Coverage of Domestic Violence Murders’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21, No. 2 (2006): 209-228, accessed 14 February 2013, http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/ryan1.pdf.
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__________________________________________________________________ 4
Lane K. Gillespie et al., ‘Framing Deadly Domestic Violence: Why the Media’s Spin Matters in Newspaper Coverage of Femicide’, Violence against Women 19, No. 2 (2013): 222-245. 5 Iowa Domestic Abuse Death Review Team, Domestic Violence: A Guide for Media Coverage, 2009, accessed 11 February 2013, http://www.idph.state.ia.us/bh/ common/pdf/domestic_violence/guide_media_coverage.pdf; Connecticut Coalition against Domestic Violence, Reporting on Domestic Violence in Connecticut: A Guide for Media, 2011, accessed 14 February 2013, http://www.ctcadv.org/files/40 13/8247/9596/2011_CT_Media_Guide_.pdf; Washington State Coalition against Domestic Violence, Covering Domestic Violence: A Guide for Journalists and Other Media Professionals, 2008, accessed 14 February 2013, http://www.wscadv.org/docs/Media_Guide_2008.pdf; Jane Ellen Stevens, Reporting on Violence: New Ideas for Television, Print and Web (Berkeley: Berkeley Media Studies Group, 2001); Rhode Island Coalition against Domestic Violence, Telling the Full Story: An Online Guide for Journalists Covering Domestic Violence, 2012, accessed 14 February 2013, http://dvonlineguide.org/en/. 6 Marine Chitashvili, National Research on Domestic Violence against Women in Georgia, 2011, accessed 1 February 2013, http://www.nplg.gov.ge/dlibrary/collect/0001/000757/kalta.pdf. 7 Nino Javakhishvili, Media Representation of Combating Domestic Violence in Georgia (Tbilisi: TSU, 2011), accessed 12 February 2013, http://ucss.ge/nino%20javaxiSvili.doc. 8 Zviad Koridze, Ethical Reporting on Children in Georgia: Situation Analysis (Tbilisi: Unicef, 2008). 9 Dali Osepashvili, ‘Children’s Rights and Challenges of Journalistic Ethics in Georgia Media’, Journal of International Scientific Publications: Media and Mass Communication 2 (2013): 69-75, accessed 11 September 2013, http://www.scientific-publications.net/download/media-and-mass-communication2013.pdf; Dali Osepashvili, ‘Topic on Children and the Problems of Journalistic Ethics in Georgian Mass Media’, Caucasian Messenger 17 (2008): 171-178. 10 Dali Osepashvili, ‘Georgian Media Coverage of Children and Crime’, Inteleqtuali 8 (2009): 83-91. 11 Ella Kusiani, Domestic Violence and the Ways of Solving It, 2012, accessed 1 February 2013, http://blawg.ge/?p=748.
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Bibliography Bullock, Cathy Ferrand, and Jason Cubert. ‘Coverage of Domestic Violence Fatalities by Newspapers in Washington State’. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 17 (2002): 475–499. Chitashvili, Marine. National Research on Domestic Violence against Women in Georgia. Accessed 1 February 2013. http://www.nplg.gov.ge/dlibrary/collect/0001/000757/kalta.pdf. Connecticut Coalition against Domestic Violence. Reporting on Domestic Violence in Connecticut: A Guide for Media, 2011. Accessed 14 February 2013. http://www.ctcadv.org/files/4013/8247/9596/2011_CT_Media_Guide_.pdf. Gillespie, Lane K., Tara Richards, Eugena Givens, and Dwayne Smith. ‘Framing Deadly Domestic Violence: Why the Media’s Spin Matters in Newspaper Coverage of Femicide’. Violence against Women 19, No. 2 (2013): 222–245. Iowa Domestic Abuse Death Review Team. Domestic Violence: A Guide for Media Coverage, 2013. Accessed 11 February 2013. http://www.idph.state.ia.us/bh/common/pdf/domestic_violence/guide_media_cover age.pdf. Javakhishvili, Nino. Media Representation of Combating Domestic Violence in Georgia. Tbilisi: TSU, 2011. Accessed 12 February 2013. http://ucss.ge/nino%20javaxiSvili.doc. Koridze, Zviad. Ethical Reporting on Children in Georgia: Situation Analysis. Tbilisi: Unicef, 2008. Kusiani, Ella. Domestic Violence and the Ways of Solving It, 2012. Accessed 1 February 2013. http://blawg.ge/?p=748. Osepashvili, Dali. ‘Topic on Children and the Problems of Journalistic Ethics in Georgian Mass Media’. Caucasian Messenger 17 (2008): 171–178.
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__________________________________________________________________ —––. ‘Children’s Rights and Challenges of Journalistic Ethics in Georgia Media’. Journal of International Scientific Publications: Media and Mass Communication 2 (2013): 69–75. Accessed 11 September 2013. http://www.scientific-publications.net/download/media-and-mass-communication2013.pdf. —––. ‘Georgian Media Coverage of Children and Crime’. Inteleqtuali 8 (2009): 83–91. Rayan, Charlotte, Mike Anastario, and Alfredo DaCunha. ‘Changing Coverage of Domestic Violence Murders’. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21, No. 2 (2006): 209–228. Accessed 14 February 2013. http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/ryan1.pdf. Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Telling the Full Story: An Online Guide for Journalists Covering Domestic Violence, 2012. Accessed 14 February 2013. http://dvonlineguide.org/en/. Stevens, Jane E. Reporting on Violence: New Ideas for Television, Print and Web. Berkeley: Berkeley Media Studies Group, 2001. Tierney, Kathleen J. ‘The Battered Women Movement and the Creation of the Wife Beating Problem’. Social Problems 29, No. 3 (1982): 207–220. Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Covering Domestic Violence: A Guide for Journalists and other Media Professionals. January 2008. Accessed 14 February 2013. http://www.wscadv.org/docs/Media_Guide_2008.pdf. Dali Osepashvili is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at TSU, I. Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Georgia. She is head of MA programme, ‘Media and New Technology’. PhD. Dr. 2004. Courses: News Reporting and Writing; Magazine Writing; Media and Human Rights. She is a member of ECREA – European Communication and Research Association (2011); ATINER – Athens Institute for Education and Research (2011); IAMCR – International Association for Media and Communication Research (2013).
Memory and Representations of the Arab Spring in the Brazilian Press: Approaches on Libya Fábio Ferreira Agra and Marcus Antônio Assis Lima Abstract This chapter aims to analyse the journalistic narratives of the Brazilian press about the Arab Spring in view of studies on collective memory and representation. It draws on Galtung and Ruge’s work on the chain of communication in the establishment of news from the time that the events happen in the world, through the perception of the media to be transformed into news. The authors list factors such as reference to the elite nation or elite people, to determine publication. From a selection of news media, a collective memory about the events is created and memories within these representations made by the media can shape the perspective of readers. Human memory, according to Halbwachs, can be constituted of a collective way. So, the relationships between people and the media are important factors for certain events may be raised later. So the news about what happened during the Arab Spring helped form Brazilian opinions about culture and the life of people living in the Middle East and North Africa. Two leading Brazilian weekly magazines: Veja and CartaCapital were selected to form the corpus of this chapter, with a focus on the first cover story of both magazines about the Arab Spring in Libya with Muammar Gaddafi’s life as a main focus, both published on 2 March 2011. First, it was a quantitative survey of articles published on the Arab uprisings in the first four months of the Arab Spring. Then the reports on Libya were analysed from the perspective of representations and collective memory, focusing on how journalists tend to describe the elite nations and elite people instead of the people that initiated the uprisings to narrate the facts. Key Words: Arab Spring, Brazilian press, journalism, Libya, press magazines. ***** 1. Introduction The objective of this chapter is to analyse, from the perspective of memory and representations, some of the Brazilian media’s journalistic narratives concerning the 2011 conflict in Libya. It was one of the countries hit by the wave of revolts, referred by the Western press as the Arab Spring. The corpus chosen for this chapter consists of reports from the weekly Brazilian magazines, CartaCapital and Veja. 1 These stories were published in sections that deal with international affairs: Nosso Mundo in the case of CartaCapital, and Especial, in the case of Veja. The magazines, which circulate throughout the Brazilian territory, have antagonistic editorial lines concerning both the analysis of national and international political affairs.
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__________________________________________________________________ The analysis in this chapter is taken from the first magazine cover stories about the uprising in Libya published on 2 March 2011. 2. Narratives and Representations In order to produce a report, a journalist cuts out fragments of an event. The discourses and images relating to people and events are subjected to the point of view of the journalist, the media provider and, ultimately, to the destination of the communication, the public itself. Through words, journalists structure and materialise an aspect of reality. However, as is stressed in Motta, ‘men not only represent the world, but form it, as he names and classifies it.’ 2 On the other hand, as highlighted in Bakhtin, ‘the word is precisely that which best reveals the basic forms, the general ideological forms of semiotic communication.’ 3 The word is an ideological sign. It is by following this premise that we propose to address the role of the media in contemporary times. Specifically, the utilisation of the written word to designate people to reflect their roles in society, to sort and order the groups and how it cannot be separated from the interest of the media who purport to report on certain events. Cotta stated that journalistic actions, practices and techniques, as well as the resulting images and discourses conveyed in the media, should be examined within a backdrop of the historical, political, economic and social contexts in which the facts are narrated. 4 According to Cotta, the environment in which the journalist is situated ‘directly influences journalistic actions, interfering with the production and the very culture of information and communication.’ 5 In journalistic narrative, classifications are enhanced and, especially through written language, create symbols, stereotypes and representations of groups and individuals. According to Berger and Luckmann, ‘Language now constructs immense edifices of symbolic representations that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life like gigantic presences from another world.’ 6 The construction of symbols becomes tangible through the narrative and becomes the primary substance for such an undertaking. Narrative journalism contributes to the construction of reality because it operates in the field of cultural production and aims to provide readers with knowledge about the world. In this way, as Junior highlighted, paraphrasing Verón, ‘The informational media is the place where industrial societies produce our reality.’ 7 However, these representations give the reader different realities and these representations incorporate the collective memory. The human memory, according to Halbwachs, is constituted in a collective way. 8 The relationships between people and the media are essential for events to be stored in the mind and modified according to the various contingencies that interfere in the process of the reading of facts. But it is in the process of
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__________________________________________________________________ relationships with others and in daily contact with the narratives that people participate in a collective memory, which overrides individual memories. The reports on the Libyan conflict published by Veja and CartaCapital magazine on 2 March 2011 introduced readers to historical facts that are moulding the present, to paraphrase Medina. 9 The magazines use as a narrative feature the retrieval, in the collective memory, of information about the life of Muammar Gaddafi. 10 By association, this information is used for the readers to form judgment of the character and thinking on the conflict that unfolds in the present. The two magazines present Gaddafi as a dictator, but analysis of his government and his role as the head of the country differs radically. CartaCapital discusses Gaddafi’s personal actions as tyranny but also highlights his revolutionary role and his importance in the affirmation of the country’s independence in the years that followed his rise to power: The Revolution Council headed by him was said to be Muslim, Nasserist and socialist. He tried to oust the military bases of the United States and the United Kingdom and take control of oil production and most of the profits therein. It was decisive for the consolidation of OPEC: his government was second, after Algeria, in promoting a unilateral adjustment of oil prices (from US$2.23 to US$2.53 in September 1970) that led to the US oil embargo after the October 1973Yom Kippur War, the first “oil shock.” 11 Veja’s representations of Gaddafi emphasised that he perpetuated power by force and peremptorily linked him to various attacks and coups around the world: Brother Leader, Guide of the Revolution, King of Culture, Imam of all Imams, Prophet of the Prophets, Father of Africa and Rector of Arab Rulers were some of the titles Muamar Kadafi 12 called himself. Historically, he will simply be known as an international criminal of the worst kind. Among the many misdeeds of the Libyan dictator was the financing of attacks abroad and assisting coups d’état in other African countries. Kadafi was involved in some of the most cowardly acts in the last few decades, such as the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the explosion of a nightclub in Berlin frequented by American soldiers in 1986, and the attack on the Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. 285 people were killed in these three attacks. 13
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__________________________________________________________________ 3. Libya: In the Eye of the Hurricane Among so many responsibilities delegated to the journalist, monitoring the powers that govern society and giving voice to the claims of citizens are some of the premises that validate the profession. In the book, Elements of Journalism: What People Should Know and the Public Should Expect, 14 Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstel list, after a debate with 25 journalists of the United States on the problems surrounding the profession, nine essential elements for contemporary journalism. According to Kovach and Rosenstel, the first obligation of journalism is to the truth; its first loyalty to the citizens; its essence is the discipline of checking; its practitioners must maintain independence from those being covered; journalism should serve as an independent monitor of power; it should provide a forum for public criticism; it must strive to make the significant facts interesting and relevant; it must keep the news comprehensive and balanced and, lastly, its practitioners should be free to exercise their personal conscience. 15 With regard to the first obligation to the truth, it is worth asking what is the truth and to whom does it belong? The truth in journalism cannot be separated from the subjectivity of the journalist, who collects the information, nor the subjectivity of their sources who, when asked to offer the information, give personal points of view about the events. The event to be narrated is not a precise clipping of time and space. Rather it is an abstract picture, open to reading equally on the part of the journalist and the observer. According to Cotta, ‘the journalist never has the “truth” in his hands about each fact because he always works with what seems to be true or believable (for him and for his sources).’ 16 Another important element in Kovach and Rosenstel’s approach is the image of journalism as an independent monitor of power. On this point, one should inquire about which power, especially when talking about newspaper coverage on phenomena occurring outside the territory of the world’s greatest economic powers. According to the researchers Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, there is a pre-set tacit structure that will determine the criteria of newsworthiness. The researchers described 12 factors that influence the treatment of topics in the news: frequency; threshold; unambiguity; meaningfulness; consonance; unexpectedness; continuity; composition; reference to persons; reference to elite people; reference to elite nations; and reference to something negative. 17 Two of these factors are considered most relevant to the reporting on the events associated with the Arab Spring: reference to elite nations, and reference to elite people. The more an event affects the interests of the major powers or elite people, the more likely it will be reported and the more likely that the event will be turned into news. In the case of the revolts in Arab countries, and Libya in particular, the references to the elite nations and elite people are factors that determine the continued presence of these events in the press. Together CartaCapital and Veja
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__________________________________________________________________ produced 30 reports on the subject, published in 34 editions dated from January to April 2011. Libya, followed by Egypt, dominated the headlines (see Figures 1 and 2). In this way, of the 30 reports produced by the two magazines, 24 were about Libya and Egypt as covered countries, Libya being the main subject in 13 of these reports in magazines together.
Figure 1: News Reports about the Arab Spring in Veja Magazine between January-April 2011.
Figure 2: News Reports about the Arab Spring in CartaCapital Magazine between January-April 2011. On 2 March 2011, the two magazines splashed the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi on the cover. The headlines were designed to clearly show the expectations of both magazines when reporting the events: ‘In the ruins of the tyrant: without dictators, Kadafi’s Libya and other Islamic countries are going to get a lot worse before getting better,’ 18 reported Veja; ‘The demise of the dictator: counting down the hours to rid Libya of bloodthirsty megalomaniac Kaddafi,’ 19 announced CartaCapital.
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__________________________________________________________________ Veja’s seven page report is titled ‘Murky past, bleak future’ 20 and is perfectly in tune with The Structure of Foreign News, as proposed by Galtung and Ruge. Focusing on Muammar Gaddafi, (reference to elite people) the narrative says little of the motivations for the uprising in the country. In contrast, they highlight the improving relations between Libya and Western countries. It is emphasised that the United States, England and Italy, driven by economic and political interests, supported Gaddafi in previous years. The geopolitical importance of the dictator in the region was not based on his activities inside the country but, mainly through his relations with those countries, who promoted his transmutation from enemy to ally: It was not just Kadafi’s disposition in taking a less threatening posture and interest in Libya’s oil and gas reserves that eased the Western approach to the dictator. It was also the fact that, after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the American foreign policy priorities turned towards the fight against Islamic terror. Thus, alliances with those regimes interested in crushing fundamentalists intensified. Libya took a relevant part in this strategy because the country (especially its eastern regions, where the current revolution originated) is an assembly line of radical Islamists. 21 CartaCapital’s six page report is entitled ‘Flood in the Desert.’ 22 The story is more comprehensive on Libya’s relations with Western countries, pointing to alliances that go beyond those established with the United States, England and Italy. Also, the narrative of these relationships is closely tied into general considerations about the life and work of Gaddafi: Whoever had an interest in desirable geopolitical or economic outcomes would view Kaddafi with goodwill. Kaddafi could be considered both an anti-imperialist leader whilst also being a partner of European transnationalism and a bastion of the West against fundamentalism. Given his complicated history and eccentric ideas, everything could be found. 23 The lead of this news report deals with the insurgencies in the Middle East and North Africa. Nevertheless, the six pages together are all devoted to Gaddafi’s biography and Libya’s relationship with European Nations, the United States and Latin America’s left wing countries. In the two reports, little attention is given to the reasons for the revolts. There are no statements from civilians, and only quotations from former world leaders: Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi (CartaCapital) and former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair (Veja). Citizens who were at the head of the protests were
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__________________________________________________________________ relegated to a position of insignificance in the unfolding conflict. This approach draws on the considerations of Galtung and Ruge: That the news is elite-centred, in terms of nations or in terms of people, is hardly strange. The actions of the elite are, at least in general and from a short-term perspective, more consequential than the activities of others: this applies to the elite nations as well as to elite people. 24 At the time, it was relevant to the Brazilian media that the Arab Spring in Libya was reported, mainly because it was not an isolated incident in the context of the Middle East and North Africa. But, it is necessary to point out that what became more relevant to the two magazines examined here was the interests of elite nations and the actions of elite people. On the margins of the stories are the wishes and interests of the insurgents whose actions effectively triggered the revolts.
Notes 1
The language that both magazines Veja and CartaCapital are originally written is Portuguese. All translations are quoted in English with translations by the author of this chapter. 2 Luiz Gonzaga Motta, ‘Por Que Estudar Narrativas?’, trans. Fábio Agra, in Narrativas Midiáticas, ed. Célia Mota, Luiz Gonzaga Motta and Maria Jandyra Cunha (Florianópolis: Insular, 2012), 30. 3 Mikhail Bakhtin, Marxismo e Filosofia da Linguagem, trans. Fábio Agra (São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 2010), 36-37. 4 Pery Cotta, Jornalismo, Teoria e Prática, trans. Fábio Agra (Rio de Janeiro. Livraria e Editora Rúbio, 2005), xi. 5 Ibid. 6 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise of Sociology of Knowledge (England: Penguin Books, 1991), 59. 7 See Alfredo Eurico Vizeu Pereira Junior, Jornalismo e Representações Sociais: Algumas Considerações, trans. Fábio Agra (E-compós, 2004), accessed 27 May 2011, http://www.compos.org.br/seer/index.php/e-compos/article/viewFile/ 18/19; Eliseo Verón, Construir el Acontecimento (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1995), 201. 8 Maurice Halbwachs, A Memória Coletiva (São Paulo: Edição Vértice, 1990). 9 Cremilda Medina, A Arte de Tecer o Presente: Narrativa e Cotidiano (São Paulo: Summus, 2003).
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__________________________________________________________________ 10
The name of Muammar Gaddafi was written in this way because is more common in the international press. But, there are at least 32 ways to write his name. 11 Antonio Luiz M. C. Costa, ‘Dilúvio No Deserto’, trans. Fábio Agra, Carta Capital, 2 March 2011, 38. 12 The Portuguese representation of Gaddafi’s name is used by Veja Magazine in this quotation. 13 Diogo Shelp, ‘Passado Turvo, Futuro Sombrio’, trans. Fábio Agra, Veja, 2 March 2011, 74. 14 This is the original title of the book. In Portuguese the title is Os Elementos do Jornalismo: O Que os Jornalistas Devem Saber e o Público Exigir. 15 Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstel, Os Elementos do Jornalismo: O Que os Jornalistas Devem Saber e o Público Exigir (São Paulo: Editora Geração, 2001). 16 Cotta, Jornalismo, Teoria e Prática, 53. 17 Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Sage Publication, 1965), 64-91. 18 ‘Sob as Ruínas do Tirano: Sem os Ditadores, a Líbia de Kadafi e Outros Países Islâmicos vão Piorar Muito antes de Melhorar’, trans. Fábio Agra, Veja, 2 March 2011, Front Page. 19 ‘O Ocaso do Ditador: Contam-se as Horas para a Líbia se Livrar do Megalomaníaco e Sanguinário Kaddafi’, trans. Fábio Agra, CartaCapital, 2 March 2011, Front Page. 20 Shelp, ‘Passado Turvo, Futuro Sombrio’, trans. Fábio Agra, 74-75. 21 Ibid., 77. 22 Costa, ‘Dilúvio No Deserto’, trans. Fábio Agra, 38. 23 Ibid., 38. 24 Galtung and Ruge, The Structure of Foreign News, 68.
Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Marxismo e Filosofia da Linguagem. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 2010. Barrucho, Luís Guilherme, and Érico Oyama. ‘O Fogo Chega ao Barril’. Veja. 2 March 2011. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise of Sociology of Knowledge. England: Penguin Books, 1991.
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__________________________________________________________________ Costa, Antonio Luiz M. C. ‘Dilúvio No Deserto’. Carta Capital. 2 March 2011. Cotta, Pery. Jornalismo, Teoria e Prática. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria e Editora Rúbio, 2005. Galtung, Johan, and Mari Holmboe Ruge. The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Vol. 2, No. 1. Sage Publication, 64–91. Gryzinski, Vilma. ‘Quem ri por Último? No Momento o Irã’. Veja. 2 March 2011. Halbwachs, Maurice. A Memória Coletiva. São Paulo: Edição Vértice, 1990. Junior, Alfredo Eurico Vizeu Pereira. Jornalismo e Representações Sociais: Algumas Considerações. E-compós, 2004. Accessed 27 May 2011. http://www.compos.org.br/seer/index.php/e-compos/article/viewFile/18/19. Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstel. Os Elementos do Jornalismo: O Que os Jornalistas Devem Saber e o Público Exigir. São Paulo: EditoraGeração, 2001. Medina, Cremilda. A Arte de Tecer o Presente: Narrativa e Cotidiano. São Paulo: Summus, 2003. Motta, Luiz Gonzaga. ‘Por Que Estudar Narrativas?’. In Narrativas Midiáticas, edited by Célia Ladeira Mora, Luiz Gonzaga Motta, and Maria Jandyra Cunha, 23– 32. Florianópolis: Insular, 2012. Shelp, Diogo. ‘Passado Turvo, Futuro Sombrio’. Veja. 2 March 2011. Fábio Ferreira Agra is a Master Student in Literature: Culture, Education and Languages at the State University of Southwest Bahia (Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia – UESB) and graduated in Social Communication/Journalism at the State University of Southwest Bahia. Marcus Antônio Assis Lima is a Visiting Researcher at Goldsmiths College/University of London. He has a Master in Communication and PhD in Linguistics. He is an Associate Professor in the Post-Graduate Program in Literature: Culture, Education and Languages at the State University of Southwest Bahia (Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia – UESB).
The Politics of Multilingual Communication: Case Studies and Research Agendas László Marácz Abstract Due to globalisation, and different forms of migration and mobility there is a proliferation of linguistic diversity and multilingual communication. At the same time the recognition of the use of one’s first language receives more and more support in international political, legal and institutional frameworks. The promotion of linguistic diversity is the official language policy of the European Union. 1 Because of such policy, it is to be expected that languages will be, and will remain, in contact at all levels of governance. This situation will not be restricted to indigenous, regional and minority languages only, but will affect ‘new’ immigrant or heritage languages as well. As we know from the work of political scientists, like Pierre Bourdieu, and contact linguists, like Peter Nelde, there are manifold connections between language and power, inter-group conflict will always have a language element to it. Hence, it is to be expected that large-scale linguistic diversity and multilingual communication will be the subject of power conflicts and hegemonic strives. Due to the fact that most languages are connected to a kinstate, this will immediately have repercussions for international relations and can cause conflicts in this domain. In this chapter, I will analyse some case studies to demonstrate conflicts within complex societies and in international relations caused by linguistic diversity and multilingual communication. A detailed analysis in a transnational theoretical framework allows me to put forward a coherent set of research agendas in order to guide research work further and elaborate on resolution strategies. Key Words: Linguistic diversity, multilingual communication, language contact, power, conflict, quadratic nexus, nationalising state, linguistic minority, kin-state, transnational framework, supranational forums, chain reaction, research agendas. ***** 1. Theory Linguistic diversity in Europe has a long history. 2 The phenomena associated with linguistic diversity, like language contact and multilingual communication have been studied extensively in the domain of sociolinguistics. 3 Language as a feature of national identity has played a crucial role in the formation of European national states and keeping together all sorts of ethnic groups. 4 Bourdieu argues that the idea of one language for one nation has been pursued for pure power political reasons during the French Revolution. 5 For the revolutionary forces to control the state, the promotion of the standard variant of French, the dialect of
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__________________________________________________________________ Paris and its surroundings, was a tool to dominate the communication lines between the centre and the rest of the country and to include fellow-supporters into the power structures of the state and to exclude non-supporters from the very same power structures. Hence, Bourdieu concludes language and linguistic communication is a tool for safeguarding power and control. In essence, this tactics to ensure power and control has been applied at a larger scale in the age of nationalism that followed the French Revolution. Everywhere in Europe where nation states arose, a language, mostly the language of the group in power, became the dominating paradigm for communication with and within the state guaranteeing that specific groups dominating the language of the nation state formation could take control of the state’s governance structures. 6 In Europe, one of the last stages in this process took place during the nineties when on the ashes of multinational, multilingual states, like the Soviet-Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia a range of new states arose. These states were designed as national states selecting the language of the majority group for official communication. Note, however, that the ‘ideal’ state of affairs, i.e. one nation using a pure language for official communication has never achieved. Dialects or other languages treated as ‘foreign’ – even though they were indigenous – remained spoken and used even after a selection for an official language was made. The other, non-state languages have been captured under the misleading term ‘minority languages,’ because the patterns, modes and traditions of language use were much more complicated than a simple opposition in terms of numeral majority and minority speakers is able to capture. However, it was sufficient to exclude minority language speakers from the power structure of the so-called national state. 7 On the ground, a situation of language contact remained and according to linguists that have been studying patterns of language contact, the power element is always present in the contact between two languages, especially in the relation between majority and minority languages. Notice that this linguistic observation of Nelde and others correlates with the analysis of a political scientist, like Pierre Bourdieu on ‘the language policy of exclusion.’ 8 Cases of linguistic hegemony and multilingual communication that result in far more complicated linguistic and communicational patterns trigger conflicts. These conflicts are basically political conflicts having an asymmetric structure. The language groups not controlling the state language are excluded from power and the groups being excluded from power are struggling for recognition in order to get access to the power structure of the state in their first language. The end of the twentieth century left us with numerous such struggles over the inclusion and exclusion of indigenous linguistic minority groups. In Europe only a few cases have been solved successfully within the existing state patterns in consent with both or more of the parties involved in such language conflicts. In most places however, an embittered struggle, even though some modest international regulations in the framework of supranational forums have been
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__________________________________________________________________ elaborated, between linguistic groups is taking place and is the ‘exclusioninclusion dilemma’ of speakers of the other, non-standard languages on the agenda. This gives rise to a variety of political conflicts. The situation has become even more complex due to all sorts of mobility forms, including migration, on a global scale. Intensified mobility is one of the cornerstones of the European integration. This leads however to a proliferation of ‘linguistic diversity’ what commentators have been labelling as ‘super-diversity,’ ‘deep diversity’ or ‘complex diversity.’ In order to generalise over these cases it is better to speak of ‘other-lingualism’ linking the category of indigenous languages and migrant languages directly. 9 This term allows us to classify these languages in the same category. The challenge of ‘mixed’ cultures and languages within the framework of nation states and the conflict free management at different tiers of governance is one of the most urgent tasks the global community is facing today. 10 Linguistic human rights might offer a guiding principle for the fair management of these cases. However, it must be noted that we are only in the beginning of this process without much practical policy measures or legal tools to operate with. 11 As long as the cases of multilingualism and complex diversity were ‘local,’ often within a region or the borders of a nation state, linguistic conflicts had a limited scope. These conflicts did not have to cause the outbreak of large-scale violence, but the constant tension between linguistic groups has a paralysing effect on the functioning of the state and may traumatise the speakers involved. Due to globalisation with its interconnectedness all-over, local communicative conflicts are not restricted anymore to local spaces but might cause a ‘spill-over’ in the international arena. 12 International relations in the world of globalisations form a complex web in which the classical state actors are joined by transnational institutional and non-institutional actors. The non-institutional actors can influence the politics of international relations by using the Internet and penetrating the media. 13 Following Smith and Brubaker, it will be claimed that these local conflicts embedded in the international relations web form a complicated transnational configuration. 14 In fact, in these multilingual, communicative conflicts four actors are involved, i.e. the nationalising state, other-lingual groups, the external linguistic homeland or kin-state of these groups and the supranational forums. Following Smith, I will refer to these transnational communicational patterns as the ‘quadratic nexus.’ 15 Due to the lack of international norms and standards and the complicated set of factors involved it is the interplay of the four poles in the quadratic nexus that is deciding on the outcome of these communicational conflicts. 16 This quadratic nexus will be used as the analytic framework in the case studies to be discussed below. 2. Case Studies In this section, I will discuss four instances of multilingual communication that illustrate the quadratic nexus within international relations. These case studies
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__________________________________________________________________ include Hungarians in Central European states; Russians in Baltic States; Poles in Lithuania; and Turks in Germany. Due to the limitations of space, I will concentrate on the essential properties of these cases. Hungarians in Central European states. Hungarians are living in eight Central European states due to historic restructuring after the First and Second World War and the collapse of communism in 1989. There is an extensive literature from different disciplines that describes and analyses their position in the neighbouring states of Hungary. These states include Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. Especially the ethno-linguistic Hungarian communities in Romania and Slovakia are substantial in size, i.e. 1.5 million and 500.000 respectively. 17 The four actors involved in the quadratic nexus of this case have the following objectives. From a linguistic point of view, the nationalising states have been trying to assimilate their Hungarian communities with different and changing intensity. Their language policy has been designed to exclude the Hungarian language from the official domains or allow it only marginally. The Hungarian linguistic minorities have been struggling for the recognition of their language rights. After the collapse of communism in the Central European states they have been using political tools to reach their goals offered by a democratic society in development. The external homeland Hungary has employed several strategies to support the struggle of their co-nationals in Hungary’s neighbouring countries. Only in the late period of communism gave Hungary some support to its co-nationals and in the beginning of the nineties after the collapse of communism the support was intensified. The supranational community has been drafting modest linguistic minority rights mainly for stability and security reasons in Central Europe. 18 This has empowered the Hungarian linguistic groups all-over Central Europe. 19 As a consequence, there are some minimum conditions for Hungarian language use but there is no single norm or standard for Hungarian minority speakers practicing their Hungarian language in Central Europe. Russians in the Baltic states Estonia and Latvia. The Russians – or maybe it is better to speak about Russophones in this context – in the Baltic states Estonia and Latvia have settled in these countries during the period of communist occupation. They have stayed in these countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restored independence of Estonia and Latvia in 1991. In these states, the Russophones constitute a substantial minority, i.e. in Estonia 25 percent of the 1,300,000 inhabitants; and in Latvia almost 30 percent of the 2,000,000 inhabitants are speakers of Russian. 20 The nationalising states have tried to assimilate their Russophones or exclude them from the state by refuting them citizenship referring to the historic rights of the autochthonous Baltic population. The Russians have only recently tried to organise themselves as a national minority and have become active in gaining Estonian or Latvian citizenship. The external homeland, i.e. Russia has tried to intervene several times in favor of its ‘imagined’ ethnolinguistic community. The position of the Russophones in the Baltic states has
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__________________________________________________________________ improved due to an active policy of the Council of Europe, OSCE and the EU, especially before the EU-accession of the Baltic countries in 2004. Poles in Lithuania. More than six percent of the inhabitants of Lithuania, i.e. more than 200,000 people of the more than three million inhabitants of Lithuania are ethnic Poles. They live in the area of the capital Vilnius close to the LithuanianPolish border. The nationalising state Lithuania is not eager to assign linguistic rights to its Polish minority. Speakers of Polish have been refused use of the Polish spelling for their own names. The Polish spelling differs at some points clearly from the Lithuanian one. Lithuania also has restricted the teaching of Polish in the educational domain. 21 The external homeland, Poland has been actively supporting its linguistic minority in Lithuania. In particular after a decision of the European Court of Justice supporting the position of the Lithuanian state to use the Lithuanian spelling but not the Polish one in official documents, the relation between both governments became tensed. 22 Turks in Germany. The status of Turkish immigrants and their descendants in Germany was raised during an official visit of the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to Germany in February 2008. 23 Erdogan suggested the German Turks to integrate into the German society but to reject assimilation. The estimated number of Turks in Germany is 2.5 million, i.e. around three percent of the 80 million inhabitants of Germany. The Turkish PM was actually arguing for ‘his’ Turks to receive a similar status to established minorities in Germany, like the Danish or the Sorbian ones. Note that it is highly questionable that there is something like ‘the’ Turkish minority in Germany, although there are certainly legitimate claims for the use and reproduction of the Turkish language in Germany. This case emphasises that at the meta-level there is no difference in status between minority and immigrant languages. Erdogan’s statement raised tensions on the political level. German politicians accused Erdogan of interfering in internal German affairs and claiming rights for the perceived Turkish group in Germany. 3. Synthesis In all the four case studies clear instances of language contact in a space of linguistic diversity are found. In all these cases, there is a conflict in terms of multilingual communication. Although not all these cases have a history of violence there are clear asymmetries and inconsistencies in terms of rights and societal participation. This causes ongoing struggles, strives for hegemony and recognition. These struggles have the effect of paralysing the functioning of the state, affecting the well-being of its population and have the potential of turning into a violent conflict, or even worse into mass atrocities and war. Note that this state of affairs supports Nelde’s hypothesis that languages in contact means conflict. In our age of globalisation, the patterns are embedded in the so-called quadratic nexus.
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__________________________________________________________________ Because the four actors, including the nationalising state, the linguistic minority, the external kin-state and the supranational forums are interconnected any of the actors can put pressure on this nexus and initiate a ‘chain reaction.’ The supranational forums have been developing linguistic minority rights regimes in terms of human rights and have succeeded to implement this by making use of the conditionality mechanism, like in the case of EU-accession. Due to changing dynamics of the international political situation after the application of conditionality norms and standards might loose their relevance and the nationalising state can put pressure on its linguistic minority. This means that rights granted before conditionality are weakened after conditionality is no longer a political issue. 24 The Hungarians in Slovakia and the Poles in Lithuania were recently confronted with discriminative language laws; the Hungarians in Romania are threatened by a restructuring of the territory where they live. As a consequence, this would affect the threshold of twenty percent for using the Hungarian language. This would lead to the lowering of the number of speakers in a certain domain of governance under the twenty percent. In that case, the Hungarian language cannot be used in official communication anymore. The linguistic minority can also lift its claims. The Russians that were an ad-hoc group of Russophones under communism in the Baltic states are claiming the status of ‘national minority’ in Estonia and Latvia now. This will cause a reaction of the nationalising state, then trigger a reaction of the kin-state and finally of the supranational community to damp the conflict which might be or might not be successful. The discrimination of the Poles in Lithuania has initiated the mobilisation of the minority itself by bringing their case to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. The negative outcome of the Court’s verdict for the Lithuanian Poles has activated the kin-state Poland to side with ‘its’ external minority. Consequently, this has caused a conflict between two NATO-allies, Poland and Lithuania. The case of the Turks in Germany shows that a kin-state can initiate a chain reaction within the quadratic nexus by claiming rights for its ‘perceived’ minority, although it is legitimate to put language rights for immigrants on the international agenda. In this case, the tension was not only raised by the claim itself but by the protector’s inconsequence, i.e. the kin-state is asking for rights not being granted to its own minorities, the Kurds in Turkey. 4. Research Agendas There are at least three research agendas associated with the analyses elaborated above. Firstly, the question is in what sense is the generalisation ‘languages in contact necessarily leads to conflict’ true; or to formulate the statement otherwise: are there any instances in which languages are in contact without conflict. If the latter is true it will be interesting to compare these cases with the conflict cases to understand the nature of languages in contact and the hegemonic strives related to it better.
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__________________________________________________________________ Secondly, the relation between the nationalising state and ethno-linguistic minorities has been analysed in terms of the ‘security dilemma.’ 25 This analysis has concentrated on the highest state of conflict, i.e. how ethno-linguistic conflicts can lead to war and how the outbreak of war can be prevented. But even if there is no acute danger for physical violence or even worse war what state is a society in where there are constant psychological and societal struggles in terms of exclusion and inclusion, discrimination, the threat of discrimination, psychological pressure on the speakers of other languages, and so on. 26 Can such states be democratic well-fare states at all, be able to participate in bigger democratic entities and fulfill obligations in supranational forums? Thirdly, the quadratic nexus has four interconnected but independent poles. Much more case studies are needed to study the nexus from the perspective of the four poles. In recent decades, much effort has been put into the objectives of supranational forums but there is less emphasis–at least in accessible languages – on the other poles of the nexus. Furthermore, the interplay between the four poles of the nexus is important to study for finding out under what conditions one of the poles may act as the catalyst of the chain reaction. Again, as in the case of multilingual communication this need not have to cause physical violence or war per se but it might lead to a permanent state of tension which is hampering the functioning of the international community. As an outcome of these interdisciplinary research agendas, it is possible to elaborate on resolution strategies for conflict in the case of linguistic diversity and multilingual communication. However, for now, in the absence of universal international norms and standards for the functioning of a multilingual society, this will be heavily determined by politics.
Notes 1
See László Marácz and Mireille Rosello, eds., Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012). 2 Ibid. 3 See Guus Extra and Durk Gorter, eds., ‘Multilingual Europe: Facts and Policies’, Contributions to the Sociology of Language 96 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008). 4 See Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin Books, 1991). 5 See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 46-48. 6 Compare Sue Wright, Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Jennifer Jackson-Preece, ‘Origins of “Nations”. Contested Beginnings, Contested Futures’, in Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict, eds. Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff (London: Routledge, 2011), 15-25.
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__________________________________________________________________ 7
See John Edwards, Minority Languages and Group Identity: Cases and Categories (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010). 8 See Peter Nelde, ‘Language Contact and Language Shift in Brussels’, Folia Linguistica Historica IV, No. 1 (1983): 101-117; and Peter Nelde, ‘Language Contact Means Language Conflict’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 8, Nos. 1-2 (1987): 33-42. 9 Compare Ryszard Cholewinski, ‘Migrants as Minorities: Integration and Inclusion in the Enlarged European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies 43, No. 4 (2005): 695-716; and Gwendolyn Sasse, ‘EU Conditionality and Minority Rights: Translating the Copenhagen Criterion into Policy’, EUI Working Paper RSCAS No. 16 (2005a). 10 Consider Thomas Ricento, ed., An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Bernard, Spolsky, Language Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 11 See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten, eds., Language Rights and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Stephen May, Language and Minority Rights. Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language. Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Yvo Volman, ‘The Lisbon Treaty and Linguistic Diversity: Policy and Practice in the European Institutions’, in Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans. European Studies 29, eds. László Marácz and Mireille Rosello (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), 37-56. 12 Compare Robert J. Holton, Globalization and the Nation State, 2nd Edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 13 See Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 2010). 14 See David J. Smith, ‘Framing the National Question in Central and Eastern Europe: A Quadratic Nexus?’, Global Review of Ethnopolitics 2, No. 1 (2002): 316; and Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 15 Compare Smith, ‘Framing the National Question in Central and Eastern Europe’; László Marácz, ‘Towards a European System Guaranteeing Linguistic Minority Rights Protection: Including the Hungarian Cases’, in Concepts and Consequences of Multilingualism in Europe 2, ed. Mustafa Ibrahimi (Tetovo: South East University Press, 2011a), 24-49; László Marácz, ‘Language Policies in Central and East European States with Hungarian Minorities: Implications for Linguistic Rights Protection of National Minorities in the EU’, in Minority Politics within the Europe of Regions, eds. István Horváth and Márton Tonk (Cluj-Napoca:
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__________________________________________________________________ Scientia Publishing House, 2011b), 155-185; and Galina Korshunova and László Marácz, ‘Multilingualism and Transnational Communication Strategies in Europe: From Hapsburg to the European Union’, in Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans. European Studies 29, eds. László Marácz and Mireille Rosello (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), 57-79. 16 See Gwendolyn Sasse, ‘EU Conditionality and Minority Rights’. 17 See George Schöpflin, Hungary and its Neighbours. Chaillot Papers 7 (Paris: Institute for Security Studies, 1993); Brigid Fowler, ‘Fuzzing Citizenship, Nationalising Political Space: A Framework for Interpreting the Hungarian “Status Law” as a New Form of Kin-State Policy in Central and Eastern Europe’, Working Paper 40/2 (Sussex: European Institute University of Sussex, 2002); Zoltán Kántor, Balázs Majtényi, Osamu Ieda, Balázs Vizi and Iván Halász, eds., The Hungarian Status Law: Nation Building and/or Minority Protection (Slavic Eurasian Studies. Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2004); Judit Tóth, ‘Kin Minority, Kin-State and Neighbourhood Policy in the Enlarged Europe’, Central European Political Science Review 17 (2004): 14-25; Anna Fenyvesi, ed., Hungarian Language Contact Outside Hungary: Studies on Hungarian as a Minority Language (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005); Sasse, ‘EU Conditionality and Minority Rights’; Zsuzsa Csergo, Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Susan Gal, ‘Hungarian as a Minority Language’, in Multilingual Europe: Facts and Policies. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 96, eds. Guus Extra and Durk Gorter (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 207-232; Mária M. Kovács and Judit Tóth, ‘Kin-State Responsibility and Ethnic Citizenship: The Hungarian Case’, in Acquisition and Loss of Nationality, Expanded and Revised Edition vol. 1, eds. Rainer Baubock, Bernard Perchnig and Wiebke Sievers (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 151-76; Agnes Batory, ‘KinState Identity in the European Context: Citizenship, Nationalism and Constitutionalism in Hungary’, Nations and Nationalism 16, No. 1 (2010): 31-48; and Stephen Deets, ‘Networks and Composite States: Rethinking Minority Representation and Governance’, paper prepared for the International Studies Association Convention, New Orleans, 16 February 2010. 18 See Gwendolyn Sasse, ‘Securization of Securing Rights? Exploring the Conceptual Foundations of Policies towards Minorities and Migrants in Europe’, Journal of Common Market Studies 43, No. 4 (2005b): 673-693. 19 See for Transcarpathia Anikó Beregszászi and István Csernicskó, ‘A Magyar Nyelv Használatának Lehetőségei Kárpátalján de Jure és de Facto’, in Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-Közép-Európában, eds. Orsolya Nádor and László Szarka (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003), 110-123; see for Transylvania Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, John Fox and Liana Grancea,
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__________________________________________________________________ Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); see for Slovenia Anna Kolláth, ‘A Szlovéniai Kisebbségek Nyelvi Jogai: Különös Tekintettel a Magyar Kisebbségre’, in Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-Közép-Európában, eds. Orsolya Nádor and László Szarka (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003), 190-204; see for Croatia Károly Lábadi, ‘Nyelvtörvények, Nyelvi Jogok Horvátországban’, in Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-Közép-Európában, eds. Orsolya Nádor and László Szarka (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003), 176-190; see for Vojvodina Csaba Máté Sarnyai and Tibor Pap, ‘Personal Autonomy and/or National Councils in Vojvodina’, in Minority Politics within the Europe of Regions, eds. István Horváth and Márton Tonk (Cluj-Napoca: Scientia Publishing House, 2011), 251276; see for Slovakia Gizella Szabómihály, ‘A Szlovákiai Kisebbségek Nyelvi Jogai és a Kisebbségi Nyelvhasználat Színterei, Különös Tekintettel a Magyar Közösségre’, in Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-Közép-Európában, eds. Orsolya Nádor and László Szarka (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003), 95110; and see for Austria Szilvia Szoták, ‘Az Ausztriai Kisebbségek Nyelvi Jogai: Különös Tekintettel a Magyar Kisebbségekre’, in Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-Közép-Európában, eds. Orsolya Nádor and László Szarka (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003), 204-219. 20 Compare Uldis Ozolins, ‘The Impact of European Accession upon Language Policy in the Baltic States’, Language Policy 2 (2003): 217-238; James Hughes, ‘Exit in Deeply Divided Societies: Regimes of Discrimination in Estonia and Latvia and the Potential for Russophone Migration’, Journal of Common Market Studies 43, No. 4 (2005): 739-762; Gabrielle Hogan-Brun, Uldis Ozolins, Meilutė Ramonienė and Mart Rannut, ‘Language Politics and Practices in the Baltic States’, Current Issues in Language Planning 8, No. 4 (2008): 469-631; and Gwendolyn Sasse, ‘The Politics of EU Conditionality: The Norm of Minority Protection during and beyond EU Accession’, Journal of European Public Policy 15, No. 6 (2008): 842-60. 21 See Lukasz Wardyn, ‘Minority Language Rights Protection in Lithuania: A Case Study’, paper presented at the Conference on Minority Representation and Minority Language Rights: Origins, Experiences, and Lessons to be Learned (Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár, Klausenburg), Sapientia University, 11-14 October 2012). 22 See the text of the verdict of 12 May 2012 by the ‘European Court of Justice’, accessed 15 October 2013. http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?language=en&num=C-39/09. 23 Compare Peter Kraus, ‘The Politics of Complex Diversity’, Ethnicities 12, No. 1 (February, 2012): 3-26.
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__________________________________________________________________ 24
See Sasse, ‘EU Conditionality and Minority Rights’; and Sasse, ‘Securization of Securing Rights?’. 25 Compare Barry Posen, ‘The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict’, Survival 35, No. 1 (1993), 27-47; and Paul Roe, Ethnic Violence and the Societal Security Dilemma (New York: Routledge, 2005). 26 See Rogers Brubaker and David D. Laitin, ‘Ethnic and Nationalist Violence’, Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 423-452.
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__________________________________________________________________ Csergo, Zsuzsa. Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Deets, Stephen. ‘Networks and Composite States: Rethinking Minority Representation and Governance’. Paper prepared for the International Studies Association Convention. New Orleans, February 16, 2010. Edwards, John. Minority Languages and Group Identity. Cases and Categories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010. Extra, Guus, and Durk Gorter. ‘The Constellation of Languages in Europe: an Inclusive Approach’. In Multilingual Europe: Facts and Policies, Contributions to the Sociology of Language 96, edited by Guus Extra, and Durk Gorter, 3–63. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. —––, eds. Multilingual Europe: Facts and Policies: Contributions to the Sociology of Language 96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. Fenyvesi, Anna, ed. Hungarian Language Contact Outside Hungary: Studies on Hungarian as a Minority Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Fowler, Brigid. ‘Fuzzing Citizenship, Nationalising Political Space: A Framework for Interpreting the Hungarian “Status Law” as a New Form of Kin-State Policy in Central and Eastern Europe’. Working Paper 40/2. First published in 2002 by the ESCR ‘One Europe or Several?’ Programme. Sussex: European Institute University of Sussex, 2002. Gal, Susan. ‘Hungarian as a Minority Language’. In Multilingual Europe: Facts and Policies. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 96, edited by Guus Extra, and Durk Gorter, 207–232. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. Holton, Robert J. Globalization and the Nation State. Second Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hogan-Brun, Gabrielle, Uldis Ozolins, Meilutė Ramonienė, and Mart Rannut. ‘Language Politics and Practices in the Baltic States’. Current Issues in Language Planning 8, No. 4 (2008): 469–631.
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__________________________________________________________________ Hughes, James. ‘Exit in Deeply Divided Societies: Regimes of Discrimination in Estonia and Latvia and the Potential for Russophone Migration’. Journal of Common Market Studies 43, No. 4 (2005): 739–762. Jackson-Preece, Jennifer. ‘“Origins of ‘Nations”: Contested Beginnings, Contested Futures’. In Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict, edited by Karl Cordell, and Stefan Wolff, 15–25. London: Routledge, 2011. Kántor, Zoltán, Balázs Majtényi, Osamu Ieda, Balázs Vizi, and Iván Halász, eds. The Hungarian Status Law: Nation Building and/or Minority Protection. 21st Century COE Program. Slavic Eurasian Studies. Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2004. Kolláth, Anna. ‘A Szlovéniai Kisebbségek Nyelvi Jogai: Különös Tekintettel a Magyar Kisebbségre’. In Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-KözépEurópában, edited by Orsolya Nádor, and László Szarka, 190–204. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003. Korshunova, Galina, and László Marácz. ‘Multilingualism and Transnational Communication Strategies in Europe: From Hapsburg to the European Union’. In Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans. European Studies 29, edited by László Marácz, and Mireille Rosello, 57–79. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. Kovács, Mária M., and Judit Tóth. ‘Kin-State Responsibility and Ethnic Citizenship: The Hungarian Case’. In Acquisition and Loss of Nationality, Expanded and Revised Edition Vol. 1, edited by Rainer Baubock, Bernard Perchnig, and Wiebke Sievers, 151–176. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Kraus, Peter. ‘The Politics of Complex Diversity’. Ethnicities 12, No. 1 (February, 2012): 3–26. Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendonn Press, 1996. —––. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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__________________________________________________________________ Kymlicka, Will, and Alan Patten, eds. Language Rights and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Lábadi, Károly. ‘Nyelvtörvények, Nyelvi Jogok Horvátországban’. In Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-Közép-Európában, edited by Orsolya Nádor, and László Szarka, 176–190. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003. Marácz, László. ‘European Tools of Conflict Management in Central European States with Hungarian Minorities’. Kommunikáció, Média, Gazdaság VIII.1 (2010): 77–116. —––. ‘Towards a European System Guaranteeing Linguistic Minority Rights Protection: including the Hungarian Cases’. In Concepts and Consequences of Multilingualism in Europe 2, edited by Mustafa Ibrahimi, 24–49. Tetovo: South East University Press, 2011a. —––. ‘Language Policies in Central and East European States with Hungarian Minorities: Implications for Linguistic Rights Protection of National Minorities in the EU’. In Minority Politics within the Europe of Regions, edited by István Horváth, and Márton Tonk, 155–185. Cluj-Napoca: Scientia Publishing House, 2011b. Marácz, László, and Mireille Rosello, eds. Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans. European Studies 29. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. May, Stephen. ‘Language and Minority Rights. Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language’. Nationalism and the Politics of Language. 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge, 2012. Nádor, Orsolya, and László Szarka, eds. Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-Közép-Európában. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003. Nelde, Peter. ‘Language Contact and Language Shift in Brussels’. Folia Linguistica Historica IV, No. 1 (1983): 101–117. —––. ‘Language Contact means Language Conflict’. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 8, Nos. 1–2 (1987): 33–42. —––. ‘Language Contact’. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 15 (1995): 81– 90.
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__________________________________________________________________ Ozolins, Uldis. ‘The Impact of European Accession upon Language Policy in the Baltic States’. Language Policy 2 (2003): 217–238. Péntek, János, and Attila Benő. ‘Nyelvi Jogok Romániában’. In Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-Közép-Európában, edited by Orsolya Nádor, and László Szarka, 123–148. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003. Posen, Barry. ‘The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict’. Survival 35, No. 1 (1993): 27–47. Ricento, Thomas, ed. An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Roe, Paul. Ethnic Violence and the Societal Security Dilemma. New York: Routledge, 2005. Sarnyai, Csaba Máté, and Tibor Pap. ‘Personal Autonomy and/or National Councils in Vojvodina’. In Minority Politics within the Europe of Regions, edited by István Horváth, and Márton Tonk, 251–276. Cluj and Napoca: Scientia Publishing House, 2011. Sasse, Gwendolyn. ‘EU Conditionality and Minority Rights: Translating the Copenhagen Criterion into Policy’. EUI Working Paper RSCAS No. 16 (2005a). —––. ‘Securization of Securing Rights? Exploring the Conceptual Foundations of Policies towards Minorities and Migrants in Europe’. Journal of Common Market Studies 43, No. 4 (2005b): 673–693. —––. ‘The Politics of EU Conditionality: The Norm of Minority Protection during and beyond EU Accession’. Journal of European Public Policy 15, No. 6 (2008): 842–860. Sasse, Gwendolyn, and Eiko Thielemann. ‘A Research Agenda for the Study of Migrants and Minorities in Europe’. Journal of Common Market Studies 43, No. 4 (2005): 655–671. Schimmelfennig, Frank, and Ulrich Sedelmeier, eds. The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
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__________________________________________________________________ Schöpflin, George. Hungary and its Neighbours. Chaillot Papers 7. Paris: Institute for Security Studies, 1993. Skovgaard, Jakob. ‘Towards a European Norm? The Framing of the Hungarian Minorities in Romania and Slovakia by the Council of Europe, the EU and the OCSE’. EUI Working Papers SPS No. 07 (2007). Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Smith, David J. ‘Framing the National Question in Central and Eastern Europe: A Quadratic Nexus?’. Global Review of Ethnopolitics 2, No. 1 (2002): 3–16. —––. ‘Minority Rights, Multiculturalism, and EU Enlargement: The Case of Estonia’. Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 1 (2003): 1–39. Spolsky, Bernard. Language Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Szabómihály, Gizella. ‘A Szlovákiai Kisebbségek Nyelvi Jogai és a Kisebbségi Nyelvhasználat Színterei, Különös Tekintettel a Magyar Közösségre’. In Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-Közép-Európában, edited by Orsolya Nádor, and László Szarka, 95–110. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003. Szoták, Szilvia. ‘Az Ausztriai Kisebbségek Nyelvi Jogai: Különös Tekintettel a Magyar Kisebbségekre’. In Nyelvi Jogok, Kisebbségek, Nyelvpolitika Kelet-KözépEurópában, edited by Orsolya Nádor, and László Szarka, 204–219. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003. Toggenburg, Gabriel N. ‘Who Is Managing Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in the European Condominium? The Moments of Entry, Integration and Preservation’. Journal of Common Market Studies 43, No. 4 (2005): 717–738. Tóth, Ágnes, ed. National and Ethnic Minorities in Hungary, 1920-2001. East European Monographs, No. DCXCVIII. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Tóth, Judit. ‘Kin Minority, Kin-State and Neighbourhood Policy in the Enlarged Europe’. Central European Political Science Review 17 (2004): 14–25.
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__________________________________________________________________ Trifunovska, Snežana, ed. Minority Right in Europe: European Minorities and Languages. The Hague: TMC Asser Press, 2001. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. New York: Routledge, 2010. Vizi, Balázs. ‘Minority Languages and Multilingualism in Europe and in the European Union’. In Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans, European Studies 29, edited by László Marácz, and Mireille Rosello, 135–157. Amsterdam amd New York: Rodopi, 2012. Volman, Yvo. ‘The Lisbon Treaty and Linguistic Diversity: Policy and Practice in the European Institutions’. In Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans. European Studies 29, edited by László Marácz, and Mireille Rosello, 37–56. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. Wardyn, Lukasz. ‘Minority Language Rights Protection in Lithuania: A Case Study’. Paper Presented at the ‘Conference on Minority Representation and Minority Language Rights: Origins, Experiences, and Lessons to be Learned’, Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár, Klausenburg), Sapientia University, 11-14 October 2012. Wiener, Antje, and Thomas Diez. European Integration Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Wright, Sue. Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. László Marácz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He studied general linguistics and Hungarian Studies at the University of Groningen. He publishes on the history of Eastern Europe, European multilingualism, the enlargement of the European Union in Central and Eastern Europe and on minority rights’ protection. He coordinates a number of international projects, including a ‘Toolkit for Transnational Communication in Europe’ sponsored by the Dutch Scientific Research Organization (NWO). He is visiting professor at the L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University and the Academy for Public Administration in Astana (Kazakhstan).
A Somali in an American Court: The Communication Challenges for Western Countries Prosecuting Somali Pirates Sarah Craze Abstract Until 2005, only a handful of people in living memory had encountered a pirate. For centuries, pirates disrupted maritime commerce, navigation and trade, often with little recourse. These actions created an enduring cultural and political persona of pirates as the ‘enemies of all mankind’ and piracy as a crime against all nations. By the mid-19th century, the use of state-sanctioned privateers had been outlawed and, while never being eradicated, piracy was not a priority on the international security agenda for the next 150 years. Then in 2005, Somali nationals began hijacking merchant ships travelling through the Gulf of Aden and holding them for ransom. The pirates were back in the consciousness of international security personnel. The international community responded to the piracy threat, and soon hundreds of Somali men were in court systems across the world. The contemporary prosecution of piracy is fraught with difficulty; including the challenge of effective communication between people from vastly different social, cultural and political environments. Westerners typically hold preconceived notions about pirates, failed states and Somalia fed by the media, governments and international relational concepts of sovereignty and state. The Somali, far from home, has no understanding or experience of a state-structured justice or detention system and may see no rationale for state validation and protection. Building on the work of Senior, Lane and Galvin, this chapter will address the communication conflict described above in the context of the international community’s use of prosecution as a method of suppressing piracy. It will discuss the challenges facing the United States prosecuting Somalis for piracy, drawing on the communications between prosecutor and defendant in the courtroom, while questioning whether communication can effectively achieve the desired outcomes of both parties. Key Words: Piracy, pirate, suppression, state failure, Somalia, prosecution, law. ***** 1. Introduction The hijack of the US-flagged Maersk Alabama in April 2009 by Somali pirates had all the hallmarks of a Hollywood action movie: a vulnerable ship sailing alone in remote, pirate-infested waters off the wild coast of eastern Africa, a purposeful enemy, an all-American crew that bravely clung to control of the ship, a heroic captain who traded himself for the lives of his crew and spent days in a lifeboat with three captors until the finale, when the President authorised lethal force and salvation arrived as US Navy SEALS killed all but one of the pirates, rescued the
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__________________________________________________________________ captain and crew to sail another day. 1 Somali piracy had been a minor news item about threats to global trade, but overnight, it became a threat to American lives. The international community and its media publicly acknowledge the Somali state’s failure as the leading cause of piracy and the key inhibitor for its suppression. Historically, the state’s capacity to maintain control of territory and inhabitants has always been integral to containing piracy and other transnational crimes. Today, state control, combined with political will is still required to suppress piracy. The absence of state control from Somali territory resembles the situation in piracy’s heyday, the seventeenth century, when an economically beneficial dearth of state responsibility manifested into non-state actors taking responsibility for state functions. Then, it was reflected in the actions of privateers, now it manifests as Somali claims of acting as coast guards against foreign threats to fishing and illegal dumping in unprotected waters. Today, there is now an established and internationally acceptable top-down structure a state is expected to take to maintain control, regardless of a society’s existing cultural and societal construct. To the international community, the suppression of Somali piracy has an economic, political and legal basis and the Maersk Alabama provided a tangible success story. But Somalis were bewildered by the response to the Maersk Alabama incident. Aisha Gurey, an Arabic teacher in Harardhere, said ‘It was wrong to kill those pirates. The international community is wrong, and the pirates are wrong. But in this case, the strong one has killed the weak one.’ 2 This quote epitomises the conflict between the two groups; the strength of the international community in its legal systems and military capacity to protect itself from an armed, individualistic economic threat and the weakness of uneducated but enterprising Somali men, often at the bottom of the pirate food chain, lured by the promise of unforeseen riches and motivated by a lack of legal, viable employment, prepared to risk their lives at sea while being unlikely to face any adverse consequences on land. Occasionally, these men are taken across the world to stand trial in foreign courts because Somalia is seen as too lawless and chaotic to provide suitable justice for this ancient crime. It is in these courtrooms that piracy and the state converge and the communication conflict can be exploited. This chapter will examine the historical and modern dichotomous conflict between piracy and state control by placing a historical context around the contribution of non-state actors to state-building, how modern state structures conflict with Somali society and how the strength of the international community’s position lies in the Westernised basis of international piracy law. It will draw on testimony from the USS Nicholas case to gain individual insight into the defining actions of a group of Somali men accused of piracy.
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__________________________________________________________________ 2. Discussion One moonlit night in April 2010, the USS Nicholas, a US Naval frigate tasked with anti-piracy patrols in the Indian Ocean was on its way to the Seychelles. Three radar blips were seen on the ship’s radar, and two suddenly made a beeline for the ship. Gunfire from one of the skiffs was heard and the USS Nicholas returned fire. A boarding crew chased down the skiff, capturing the three men aboard. A search was undertaken for the other two vessels. A larger fishing vessel was detained after its two occupants failed to get the engine to start, while the other skiff had taken the opportunity to escape. The five men were taken aboard the USS Nicholas and detained. According to the men on board the skiff, they had been fishing for lionfish (shark) off the coast of Somalia when armed men had boarded their skiff, thrown away their fish and forced them at gunpoint onto the fishing vessel. After several days, they were pushed back onto their skiff, given an automatic weapon and told to speed towards the lights of the ship in the distance. Under threat of their lives, they did as the men asked. One man accidentally discharged his gun and when the ship fired back, they threw their weapons over the side. Meanwhile, on hearing the shots, some of the men on the fishing vessel had jumped into the other skiff and sped away. The two men left were trying to start the engine when the Navy boarding team found them. All five were charged with piracy and transferred to the United States for prosecution. Early reports of piracy off Somali waters in the 1990s centred much further north in the Gulf of Aden and were attributed by the media to disgruntled fishermen extracting fees from boats fishing illegally in Somalia’s unprotected economic exclusion zone. 3 These Somalis did not call themselves ‘pirates,’ preferring badaadinta badah (‘saviours of the sea’), or ‘coast guard’ to the English-speaking media. 4 The coast guard claim was dismissed as an untruthful justification for a clearly illegal act. 5 When Somali warlords colluded with entrepreneurial businessmen to exploit the value of ships and crew in the mid2000s, organised piracy became big business. But, as members of a state economically unable and politically unwilling to protect its territory from foreign economic threats and with no recognised ruler claiming sovereignty over it, a fundamental question of authority persists over who should be held accountable for these ‘coast guards’ actions. History can help examine this question. Since at least the thirteenth century in Europe, non-state actors, like privateers, mercenaries and mercantile companies, had been given authorisation to undertake violence on the state’s behalf. 6 This authorisation allowed rulers to claim a share of successful acquisitions while also denying responsibility for negative consequences. 7 Privateers waged war on the seas, supplemented naval power, disrupted enemy supply lines and commercial circuits, and accumulated wealth at the expense of rivals. English naval supremacy
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__________________________________________________________________ against Spain in the seventeenth century was gained by the vicious actions of the Elizabethan Sea Dogs, privateers who were glorified for ransacking and ransoming entire cities, while sharing their loot with the English crown. 8 Privateering ‘coast guards’ in nineteenth-century Spain undermined the legitimacy of state representation by sharing profits from smuggled goods. 9 However, sovereign authority could be questionable. The 1688 Glorious Revolution and the war between the deposed King James and his successor King William saw scores of privateers arrested for piracy because they carried authorisation from James. 10 One advocate argued that King James exercised a legal authority from his court in France and the men were prisoners of war, not ‘enemies of mankind’, but to no avail. Up to the first decade of the nineteenth century, privateering was not only a substitute and foundation of state power but also symbolic of political and economic state weakness. Organised piracy often resulted from the state’s inability or incapacity to control privateering. Ambiguous sovereign authority was cleared to some extent by the outlawing of privateering in 1856, solidifying the illegality of piracy. At the same time, European states had progressed towards a centralised monopolisation of force and established state institutions to execute the social contract made with people in return for taxes, eventually forming the state structure recognised today. State failure occurs when these structures collapse. 11 However, Somalia, like most of pre-colonial Africa, is traditionally a stateless society. The idea the badaadinta badahs were acting without sovereign authority stems from the European-based notion of state development that has become the international norm, creating a conflict with the traditional and contemporary societal constructs in play in Somalia. A centralised state, and the accompanying judicial and security systems that come with it, is still considered the solution to piracy as well as necessary for bringing Somalia into the ‘family of democratic nations.’ 12 However, MacCallum argues that the imposition of democracy on a traditionally clan-based society like Somalia divides clans into a ruling group and a group to be ruled, creating divisions and power structures; as evidenced during the Barrè dictatorship and the subsequent civil war. 13 Nevertheless, since the Somali state collapsed in 1991, fourteen top-down state-building attempts, led by the US and European Union, have been made, culminating only in disastrously unsuccessful deals with various warlords du jour. 14 By 2006, local Islamic leaders decided to bring about peace and security by uniting Islamic courts. This worked for a time until, deep in the War on Terror and fearful an Islamic state would shelter terrorists, their efforts were stamped out by the intervention of international forces. 15 This intervention directly contributed to the rise of the militant movement of Al-Shabaab, who took control of much of the southern Somali territory (excluding the northern regions of Puntland and Somaliland) and espoused a fundamental Islamic doctrine
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__________________________________________________________________ unprecedented in Somalia. 16 So, Somali state-building efforts based on traditional religious, cultural and societal constructs were not recognised by the strong states of the international community, indicating that while state-building is required to suppress piracy, it is expected to take a specific and suitable form. Moreover, while the international community may assume that the lack of a state in Somalia translates into a vacuum of anarchy and chaos, the Somalis do follow a customary body of law, the Xeer. The Xeer provides an authentic rule of law to support trade and economic development and protect persons and property. 17 It is a compensatory rather than punitive system, so is incompatible with Westernised legal systems. There is no criminal law in Somalia. 18 An offender is answerable to his family or kinship group, not to a police or judicial monopoly, and only a victim or his family can initiate court action. Jurisdiction is determined by the head of the perpetrator’s extended family group who is responsible for resolving the issue at hand and allocating appropriate compensation. 19 The solution to piracy has always been considered land-based, not at sea. Perhaps it exists within the Xeer, rather than the imposition of foreign state constructs. It seems unreasonable to expect the Somalis to fundamentally change the entire structure of their society by taking a great leap to modern statehood that took the Western world hundreds of years to develop. Neither state failure nor the Xeer has sheltered Somalis from the global desires of financial freedom and security. In fact, when the aspirations of the badaadinta badah to protect Somali interests from foreigners gave way to organised piracy, Somalis joined a long line of people using piracy to find a way out of a life of poverty and oppression. Senior discusses the comparatively pleasant life of English pirates in Tunis in the early seventeenth century; a century later, Rediker discusses how some pirates created an egalitarian society at odds with the social hierarchy of the time; while Galvin speaks of the reprieve piracy gave men from a harsh life in the Caribbean later that century. 20 However, pirates eventually encounter the combined tactics of prosecution and suppression, both drawn from European legal principles and political motivations. In the seventeenth century, pirates’ propensity for personal profit and lack of allegiance to any state threatened English economic interests and caused jurisdiction to be extended over ‘foreign’ pirates for their acts against other foreigners. 21 The extension of jurisdiction combined with the Roman concept of hostes humani generis (‘enemies of all mankind’) to form the basis of the universal jurisdiction that allows all states to prosecute pirates detained on the high seas today. 22 By the time privateering was delegitimised, ‘enemies of mankind’ had filtered through European legal systems and was exported through colonialism. Suppressing piracy was a frequent excuse to expand political and economic ambitions during the nineteenth-century colonial period. 23 Colonialism brought Western standards of meaning and overtones to piracy that did not directly
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__________________________________________________________________ translate to comparable phenomena in non-European waters. 24 Early European accounts of predatory maritime activities in Southeast Asia are steeped in their own religious, economic and political agendas, where language and translation may inhibit interpretation of events. 25 Alleged pirates brought to trial by the colonists may have acted with the authorisation of their leader (similar to European privateers), but the application of international law and its imperialist roots rarely worked in the favour of the natives. In other words, there was an inherent bias in what was rather euphemistically termed international law since it adheres to European norms and practices. Today, international law and statelessness converge through the United Nations-sanctioned efforts by the European Union, United States and other countries to suppress piracy off the Somali coast. The Somalis, those who had managed to survive famine and the devastation of war, have no memory of centralised state control and authority, so the relative risks of piracy can be comparable to day to day life. 26 While the Xeer may dictate relations amongst each other, the hijack and ransom style of piracy practiced by Somalis causes a clash of cultures that would play out in courtrooms across the world. 3. Somalis and Americans in Court: The USS Nicholas Court Case Court testimony of the USS Nicholas case provides some insight into how the institutions of a powerful state deals with crimes at sea perpetrated by persons without a state’s protection. It also provides a rare, first-hand glimpse into a person’s life in such circumstances. The US Navy represents the state authority and control, while prosecution witnesses have laws and civil rights at their disposal. The court shows compassion in its questioning of the defendants, maybe more than it would to their own citizens in the same situation, but it does not appear to fully grasp the magnitude of the cultural and language differences between its court and the Somali men on trial. The men claimed they were coerced into attempting to hijack the ship, but at no time are they questioned about the legality of their actions, implying the illegality is assumed. Acknowledgement of the unusual circumstances of the USS Nicholas incident is made, such as its occurrence at night and its geographic location significantly further south than other incidents occurring at the time, but this provides little support the defendants’ story. This section will discuss three observations from the court testimony; concerning the US Naval ship, understanding of civil rights and rule of law, and the Somalis’ claims of coercion. The Somali men in the USS Nicholas trial were never asked what they thought a pirate was during their prosecution. 27 According to the testimony of US Federal Agent Knox and his translator, Mr Aziz, despite initial denials, the five detained men admitted to being pirates. Agent Knox testified Mr Gurewardher told him of the plans to ‘pirate a merchant vessel’ but this does not sound like the language of
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__________________________________________________________________ a man who cannot read or write. Nor did the defendants understand measurements of distance or time. In fact, the defendants’ lack of education is pervasive throughout their testimony and this raises questions of their understanding of the court process and the criminality of their actions. The prosecution’s focus on distance in relation to the capital, Mogadishu, meant little to the men and they would interpret questions literally; for example when asked whether he could see the coast from where his fishing boat was anchored, Mr Dire replied, ‘of course I can see the coast, I have eyes.’ Two of the men, Gurewardher and Umar, explained they had left Mesgawane in three vessels, with eight AK-47s and the intention of finding a ship to hijack. The remaining three detained men, Dire, Hasan and Ali, initially told Agent Knox they were fishermen who had been kidnapped by the real pirates (Mr Gurewardher and Mr Umar as well as others who had escaped in the confusion) and forced to participate. 28 Unusually, the attack had occurred at night so it would have been difficult to distinguish the ship from a distance, so Agent Knox considered that the men had mistaken the USS Nicholas for a merchant ship. Agent Knox’s observation assumes that the men would recognise what a naval ship represents and be suitably deterred. 29 This is reasonable to a US citizen since a US warship is a component of the armed forces and a clear representation of state power and authority. However, Somalia has never had a benevolent, statecontrolled military institution. For these men, power, authority and their lives have always been in the hands of any man with a gun. So while the USS Nicholas was another potential target for hijack, when it fired back it was a threat to their lives. This is evidenced by the testimony of Mr Ali. The prosecutor suggested that he must have been relieved to see a naval warship since that would mean that he was rescued. Mr Ali responded that all he saw was more men pointing guns at him. The men were advised they had the right to remain silent and did not have to cooperate but both Agent Knox and Mr Aziz testified that the men seemed unusually open and friendly during their questioning. Their attitude may have stemmed from a naivety that since only a few shots were fired on the USS Nicholas and no-one was hurt and there was no damage, perhaps it was all just a big misunderstanding. When taking into account the men’s lack of exposure to a Western legal system, it is unlikely they had any understanding of the civil rights available to Americans facing criminal charges. However, after six months of incarceration, the men would claim that Mr Aziz told them if they did not admit to being pirates, they would be returned to their skiff and set adrift without food or water. 30 So perhaps it can be suggested the men are using their stateless identity in their favour. Historically, state judicial systems have rarely accepted coercion into piracy as a defence. Few merchant seamen were paid sufficiently to warrant sacrificing their lives for their employers so often joined the pirates as a matter of survival. The law
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__________________________________________________________________ does not distinguish between coercion and voluntary participation in piracy, despite the acknowledgement by anti-piracy experts that coercion into piracy is known to occur in Somalia. Somali piracy works by leveraging on the value of Western lives over Somali lives. Without evidence of the coercion, it is essentially one uneducated person’s word against an established court system. The options beyond participation or death available to a person allegedly held at gunpoint on a small boat in the middle of the ocean were not examined. 31 4. Conclusion As this chapter has detailed, the interaction between the development of a state and the actions of non-state actors, whether they are privateers, coast guards or pirates is historically complex and evolutionary. State-building may be the solution to piracy, but if internal efforts by Somalis, based on their cultural and societal constructs, are deemed unsuitable and are overridden by external actors, the people will take matters into their own hands. Anarchy and chaos is not a given in Somalia, as the Xeer suggests, but piracy law and prosecution has developed along established, Western notions of the crime that places an individual without the protection of a conventional modern state at a distinct disadvantage. As the USS Nicholas case demonstrates, the people on trial may be pirates in the eyes of international law, but the five men in that US courtroom are not equipped with the intrinsic understanding of protection that being a member of a strong state provides. This creates an imbalance of power in the courtroom and a cultural conflict of communication. The five men in the USS Nicholas case were each sentenced to 30 years imprisonment. 32
Notes 1
The story has in fact been filmed as Captain Phillips starring Tom Hanks, to be released in October 2013. 2 Scott Wilson, Ann Scott Tyson and Stephanie McCrummen, ‘3 Rounds, 3 Dead Bodies; Precision Volley by Navy Seals Ended a Five-Day Ordeal for Seaman, But Piracy off Somalia Continues’, The Washington Post, 14 April 2009, accessed 30 May 2013, through LexisNexis Database. 3 Illegal dumping of toxic waste in Somali waters has also been a problem. A July 2005 UK DFID report indicated that $100 million’s worth of illegal tuna and shrimp were taken from Somalia’s EEZ in 2003-04. Cited in Lauren Ploch et al., Piracy off the Horn of Africa (Congressional Research Service, 2011), accessed 3 June 2013, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40528.pdf. See also Jay Bahadur, ‘Somali Pirate: We’re Not Murderers... We Just Attack Ships’, The Guardian, accessed 13 October 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/24/a-pio
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__________________________________________________________________ neer-of-somali-piracy; Jeffrey Gettleman, ‘Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money’, New York Times, 1 October 2008, accessed 14 June 2013, available in LexisNexis Database; Abdirahman Jama Kulmiye, ‘Militia vs Trawlers: Who Is the Villain?’. The East African Magazine, 9 July 2001, accessed 1 September 2013, http://www.ecop.info/e-news/e-news-01-07-9.htm; Najad Abdullahi, ‘Toxic Waste Behind Somali Piracy’, aljazeera.com, 11 October 2008, accessed 21 June 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2008/10/2008109174223218644.html. 4 Bahadur, ‘Somali Pirate’. The closest translation to pirate is burcad badeed, which means ‘ocean robber.’ While Somalia does not have an official coastguard, the implication of state authorities in contemporary piracy is not uncommon. See also Unknown, ‘Iran Denies Gulf Piracy Claims’, Reuters News, 23 May 1995, accessed 20 June 2013, retrieved from Factiva Database. Chinese and Indonesian authorities have also been implicated in piracy events in the 1990s. Unknown, ‘Hye Mieko Attack Triggers Fear of Upsurge in Piracy’, South China Morning Post, 28 June 1995, accessed 20 June 2013, retrieved from Factiva Database. 5 Proceedings in Relation to the Trials of John Golding, Thomas Jones, John Ryan, Darby Collins, Richard Shivers, Patrick Quidley, John Slaughter, and Constantine De Hartley (1693). 6 Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extra Territorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 See for example the Revenue Cutter Service established in the United States in 1790 and the Preventative Water Guard established in England in 1809. 10 See for example John Golding et al. 11 For analysis of state failure, see for example Robert I. Rotberg, ed., ‘Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators’, State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (World Peace Foundation and Harvard University’s Program on Intrastate Conflict, 2003). 12 Spencer Heath MacCallum, ed., The Law of the Somalis (New Jersey: The Red Sea Press, 2005), 130. As an example, one conference proposing the introduction of democracy in Somalia was prefaced by the argument that ‘Somalia [had] been isolated long enough and should now join the other nations in having a “real” government.’ See also: European External Action Service, ‘The EU Fight against Piracy in the Horn of Africa’, 2012, accessed 14 February 2013, http://eeas.europa.eu/agenda/2012/200212_factsheet_piracy.pdf; Ploch et al., ‘Piracy off the Horn of Africa’; Ted Dagne, ‘Somalia: Current Conditions and Prospects for a Lasting Peace’, 2007, accessed 1 September 2013,
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__________________________________________________________________ http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33911.pdf; Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, ‘Piracy Off the Somali Coast’, 2008, accessed 3 June 2013, http://www.asil.org/files/somaliapiracyintlexpertsreportconsolidated1.pdf. 13 Spencer Heath MacCallum, ‘The Rule of Law without the State’, last modified 12 September 2007, accessed 26 July 2013, http://mises.org/daily/2701. 14 The most recent attempt is known as the Transitional Federal Government and was established in 2004. It is slowly gaining legitimacy, although the comparatively successful breakaway regions of Puntland and Somaliland show no indication of uniting with southern Somalia. 15 For details of the situation in Somalia under the UIC in 2006, see Saeed Shabazz, ‘Annan: US Wrong to Support Warlords in Somalia’, 29 June 2006, accessed 19 June 2013, http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/World_News _3/article_2716.shtml; Joseph Winter, ‘Somalia’s Peacekeeping Conundrum’, 7 December 2006, accessed 19 June 2013, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/ 6218674.stm. According to the IMB, reports of piracy attacks in 2006 dropped to 11 from 35 the preceding year. See for example, Rob Crilly, ‘Sharia Law Imposes New Order’, The Irish Times, accessed 1 September 2013, retrieved from LexisNexis Database; Richard Dowden, ‘Somalia Can Succeed If We’d Leave It Alone’, The Independent (London), 21 June 2006, accessed 1 September 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/richard-dowden-somalia-cansucceed-if-wed-leave-it-alone-404830.html; Hannah Allam, ‘An Uncertain Calm in Somalia. A Tenuous Calm in Mogadishu. An Islamist Force Brings Peace to a Violent City, but Doubts Remain’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 June 2006, accessed 3 September 2013, http://articles.philly.com/2006-06-17/news/25403747_ 1_mogadishu-islamic-courts-union-islamists. The Bush Administration denied any direct involvement in funding Mogadishu warlords against the UIC and subsequently the Ethiopian intervention to remove the organisation. However, encouragement was found in a June 2006 memo by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer when he stated ‘any Ethiopian action in Somalia would have Washington’s blessing.’ Memo available from wikileaks.org. 16 Al-Shabaab’s links with Al-Qaeda and its purported sheltering of terrorists gave rise to the idea that piracy funds terrorism in Somalia. This has been examined by Christopher L. Daniels, Somali Piracy and Terrorism in the Horn of Africa, ed. Martin Gordon (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012) and Richard Lough, ‘Piracy Ransom Cash Ends up with Somali Militants’, Reuters, 6 July 2011, accessed 10 January 2013, retrieved from Factiva database. It appears while Al-Shabaab has taken a cut of ransom payments, pirates do not operate under Al-Shabaab’s command. 17 MacCallum, ‘The Rule of Law without the State’. 18 MacCallum, ed. The Law of the Somalis, 56.
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MacCallum, ‘The Rule of Law without the State’. C. M. Senior, A Nation of Pirates: English Piracy in Its Heyday (David & Charles Publishers Ltd., 1976). Peter R. Galvin, Patterns of Pillage: A Geography of Caribbean-Based Piracy in Spanish America, 1536-1718 (Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 1999). Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Massachusetts: Boston Press, 2004). 21 Alfred P. Rubin, The Law of Piracy, Second Edition (Transnational Publishers, Inc., 1998), 68. Rubin provides case examples in Chapter 1: The Origins. 22 For details on the development of the legal concept of universal jurisdiction, its controversiality and its use in the prosecution of contemporary crimes against international law, such as genocide and crimes against humanity, see (among others): Kenneth Roth, ‘The Case for Universal Jurisdiction’, Foreign Affairs 80, No. 5 (2001); Henry A. Kissinger, ‘The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction’, Foreign Affairs 80, No. 4 (2001); Luc Reydams, Universal Jurisdiction: International and Municipal Legal Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 23 Adam J. Young, Contemporary Maritime Piracy in Southeast Asia: History, Causes and Remedies (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2007), 46. 24 Nicholas Tarling, ‘The Establishment of the Colonial Regimes’, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 57. Tarling suggests that in Southeast Asia the term piracy was used to describe anything from ‘attempts of the sultanate of Aceh to establish entrepôt trade, to the attacks of Iban upon the core rivers of Sarawak, to the marauding and slave-trading of the Ilanun and Balanin of the Sulu islands and northern Borneo.’ The British engaged other states and rulers to work against piracy, including the Sultan of Brunei in an 1847 treaty. 25 Young, Contemporary Maritime Piracy in Southeast Asia: History, Causes and Remedies, 26. Young refers to the evidence of legitimate raiding in the region, similar to European privateering. 26 Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN Special Representative to Somalia cited ‘poverty, lack of employment, environmental hardship, pitifully low incomes, reduction of pastoralist and maritime resources due to drought and illegal fishing and a volatile security and political situation’ as contributing factors to the rise and continuance of piracy in Somalia’. Ould-Abdallah, ‘Piracy off the Somali Coast’, 15. 27 United States of America v Mohammed Modin Hasan, Gabul Abdullahi Ali, Abdi Wali Dire, Abdi Mohammed Gurewardher, Abdi Mohammed Umar (2012). 28 The men who testified were Abdi Wali Dire, Abdi Mohammed Gurewardher, and Abdi Mohammed Umar. Mohammed Modin Hasan and Gabul Abdullahi Ali exercised their right not to testify. 20
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Frecon noted that the visual presence of naval patrols was an effective deterrent to piracy in the Riau Islands in Indonesia in the mid-2000s, but the relationship between the military and Indonesian citizens is quite different there. Eric Frecon, Piracy and Armed Robbery at Sea in Southeast Asia (Webinar) (Defence IQ, 2009). 30 There is no way to verify what was said as Agent Knox admitted that his interviews with the men were not recorded and Mr Aziz was the only other Somalispeaking individual present. There is an allegation that the Russian navy had done exactly this and the men were never seen again. 31 As an example, in 2011, a Yemeni man was sentenced to life in prison on piracy charges relating to the SV Quest hijack and the murder of its four crew. In spite of the acknowledgement of the court that the man had been a victim of piracy himself and that his captured ship was used in the attack, the court found that the man had chosen to go with the pirates to hijack the Quest in exchange for a share of the ransom. Whether the man would have received payment if the hijack had been successful will never be known. 32 By comparison, Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia, was given a 50 year sentence for his role in crimes against humanity committed during the Sierra Leone Civil War in the early 21st century.
Bibliography Abdullahi, Najad. ‘“Toxic Waste” behind Somali Piracy’. aljazeera.com, 11 October 2008. Accessed 21 June 2013. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2008/10/2008109174223218644.html. Allam, Hannah. ‘An Uncertain Calm in Somalia. A Tenuous Calm in Mogadishu. An Islamist Force Brings Peace to a Violent City, But Doubts Remain’. The Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 June 2006. Accessed 3 September 2013. http://articles.philly.com/2006-06-17/news/25403747_1_mogadishu-islamic-courts -union-islamists. Bahadur, Jay. ‘Somali Pirate: We’re Not Murderers... We Just Attack Ships’. The Guardian, 24 May 2011. Accessed 13 October 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/24/a-pioneer-of-somali-piracy. Crilly, Rob. ‘Sharia Law Imposes New Order’. The Irish Times, Undated. Accessed 1 September 2013. Retrieved from LexisNexis Database.
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__________________________________________________________________ Dagne, Ted. ‘Somalia: Current Conditions and Prospects for a Lasting Peace’. Congressional Research Service, 2007. Accessed 1 September 2013. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33911.pdf. Daniels, Christopher L. Somali Piracy and Terrorism in the Horn of Africa. Edited by Martin Gordon. Global Flashpoints: A Scarecrow Press Series. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. Dowden, Richard. ‘Somalia Can Succeed If We’d Leave It Alone’. The Independent (London), 21 June 2006. Accessed 1 September 2013. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/richard-dowden-somalia-cansucceed-if-wed-leave-it-alone-404830.html. European External Action Service. ‘The EU Fight against Piracy in the Horn of Africa’. 2012. Accessed 14 February 2013. http://eeas.europa.eu/agenda/2012/200212_factsheet_piracy.pdf. Frecon, Eric. Piracy and Armed Robbery at Sea in Southeast Asia (Webinar). Defence IQ, 2009. Galvin, Peter R. Patterns of Pillage: A Geography of Caribbean-Based Piracy in Spanish America, 1536-1718. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 1999. Gettleman, Jeffrey. ‘Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money’. New York Times, 1 October 2008. Accessed 14 June 2013. Available in LexisNexis Database. Kissinger, Henry A. ‘The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction’. Foreign Affairs 80, No. 4 (2001): 86–96. Kulmiye, Abdirahman Jama. ‘Militia vs Trawlers: Who Is the Villain?’. The East African Magazine, 9 July 2001. Accessed 1 September 2013. http://www.ecop.info/e-news/e-news-01-07-9.htm. Lough, Richard. ‘Piracy Ransom Cash Ends up with Somali Militants’. Reuters, 6 July 2011. Accessed 10 January 2013. Retrieved from Factiva database. MacCallum, Spencer Heath, ed. The Law of the Somalis. New Jersey: The Red Sea Press, Inc., 2005.
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__________________________________________________________________ —––. ‘The Rule of Law without the State’. 12 September 2007. Accessed 26 July 2013. http://mises.org/daily/2701. Ould-Abdallah, Ahmedou. ‘Piracy off the Somali Coast’. United Nations, 2008. Accessed 3 June 2013. http://www.asil.org/files/somaliapiracyintlexpertsreportconsolidated1.pdf. Ploch, Lauren, Christopher M. Blanchard, Ronald O’Rourke, R. Chuck Mason, and Rawle O. King. ‘Piracy off the Horn of Africa’. Congressional Research Service, 2009. Accessed 3 June 2013. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40528.pdf. Proceedings in relation to the Trials of John Golding, Thomas Jones, John Ryan, Darby Collins, Richard Shivers, Patrick Quidley, John Slaughter, and Constantine de Hartley, Lords of the Council and the Admiralty, 1693. Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Massachusetts: Boston Press, 2004. Reydams, Luc. Universal Jurisdiction: International and Municipal Legal Perspectives. Oxford Monographs in International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Rotberg, Robert I., ed. ‘Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators’. In State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror. World Peace Foundation and Harvard University’s Program on Intrastate Conflict, 2003. Roth, Kenneth. ‘The Case for Universal Jurisdiction’. Foreign Affairs 80, No. 5 (2001): 150–154. Rubin, Alfred P. The Law of Piracy. Second Edition. Transnational Publishers, Inc., 1998. Senior, C. M. A Nation of Pirates: English Piracy in Its Heyday. London: David & Charles Publishers Ltd., 1976. Shabazz, Saeed. ‘Annan: US Wrong to Support Warlords in Somalia’. 29 June 2006. Accessed 19 June 2013. http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/World_News_3/article_2716.shtml.
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__________________________________________________________________ Tarling, Nicholas. ‘The Establishment of the Colonial Regimes’. In The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Thomson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extra Territorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. United States of America v Mohammed Modin Hasan, Gabul Abdullahi Ali, Abdi Wali Dire, Abdi Mohammed Gurewardher, Abdi Mohammed Umar. United States District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, Norfolk Division, 2012. Unknown. ‘Hye Mieko Attack Triggers Fear of Upsurge in Piracy’. South China Morning Post, 28 June 1995. Accessed 20 June 2013. Retrieved from Factiva Database. Unknown. ‘Iran denies Gulf Piracy Claims’. Reuters News, 23 May 1995. Accessed 20 June 2013. Retrieved from Factiva Database. Wilson, Scott, Ann Scott Tyson, and Stephanie McCrummen. ‘“3 Rounds, 3 Dead Bodies”, Precision Volley by Navy SEALs Ended a Five-Day Ordeal for Seaman, But Piracy off Somalia Continues’. The Washington Post, 14 April 2009. Accessed 30 May 2013. LexisNexis Database. Winter, Joseph. ‘Somalia’s Peacekeeping Conundrum’. 7 December 2006. Accessed 19 June 2013. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6218674.stm. Young, Adam J. Contemporary Maritime Piracy in Southeast Asia: History, Causes and Remedies. Maritime Issues and Piracy in Asia. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2007. Sarah Craze is a second year part-time PhD student at the University of Melbourne with a background in business, marketing, international studies and now history. With thanks to Richard Pennell for his supervisory and review assistance with this chapter.
Part 2 Tools for Resolution
Vinoba Bhave: A Compassionate Communicator for Attitudinal Transformation Kalpana Deshmukh and Sangita Meshram Abstract A language with vocabulary of feelings increases goodwill to connect better with one another and can help resolve conflicts. The non-violent communication is undoubtedly a tool to generate positive vibrations in the human heart. Its instrumentality in strengthening the bond of human relations for a noble cause is a unanimously accepted fact. This chapter attempts to elaborate on the regenerative power of compassionate communication through a case study of the Indian high priest of compassion, Acharya Vinoba Bhave (11 September 1895 – 15 November 1982). Vinoba, a man of constructive concepts, enabled the society to witness a high degree of moral and social commitments through the ‘Sarvodaya Movement’ (1950) and ‘Bhoodan Movement’ (1951). His language of hearts succeeded in unlocking the conscience of countless people to generate faith in human values. His asceticism and verbal power metamorphosed the hearts of the notorious dacoits of Chambal. His thoughts depict the influence of ‘Upanishada.’ To solve the problem of landlessness in India and to eradicate the violent and inhuman tendencies of the landlords, Vinoba propounded the novel idea of a ‘voluntary gift of land’ as a non-violent, radical solution. He convinced the people that ‘...land is a gift of God and it should be utilised by all living beings. Possession of excessive land is as much a sin as theft. That is why land should be owned by a village. But accumulation of wealth is a greater sin…’ and ‘...the earth is our mother, we are her sons. It is improper to call ourselves “owner of land”. God is the real owner. Turn your village into one family and be an owner of big brotherhood…’ This sheer generosity of thoughts has the potential to create an invisible string of love, peace, sacrifice, devotion, faith and equity and tie the hearts of people across the globe to establish peace. Key Words: Acharya, Bhoodan, Sarvodaya, Upanishada, asceticism, constructive concepts, radical solution, moral and social commitments. ***** 1. Nurturing of Vinoba Vinoba Bhave was born as Vinayak Narahari Bhave in Gagode of the Kolaba district in western India on 11 September 1895. 1 His father, Narahari Bhave, was a devout Hindu, but had a scientific and technological turn of mind. He valued time punctuality and was an ideal figure of tolerance. While playing a game of chess he used to keep a clock to restrict his play-time. But he was disciplined enough to continue the remaining game the next day. 2 The manifestation of his control over
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__________________________________________________________________ the evil desire for greed was evident in ‘his denial in accepting more salary.’ 3 This positive trait of satisfaction has a universal appealing power to elevate morale. Vinoba developed a logical thinking ability, discipline and rationality from his mathematician father. Vinoba’s mother, Rukmini Devi, was an ideal devotee. From her, he gained a precious sharing of heart – devotion, cooperativeness, and love towards singing and music. Her invocation to God imbibed the belief that without God’s grace human efforts are in vain. Vinoba’s every action had an essence of his parents’ valuable teachings. 4 In childhood, Vinoba was careless about his clothes and was so unconscious about his health that he did not brush his teeth properly. 5 But he had a habit of walking long distances. Once he walked about seven kilometres through the forest to search for his mother in the village Pen. 6 Mother and son discussed spiritualism and metaphysics. 7 At the age of eight, he read ‘Dyaneshwari’ 8 and was praised for reading ‘Bhaktivijay.’ 9 He had excellent memorising skills and he memorised forty thousand stanzas from religious books. 10 At the age of ten, Vinayaka’s 11 thread ceremony was performed and he took ‘the vow of celibacy.’ 12 Vinayaka’s grandparents and mother told him the stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. 13 His education started in Baroda 14 and he passed the matriculation examination in 1913. 15 His faith in spiritualism and patriotism made him determined to leave home and his attachment to his mother did not hold him back. 16 One day he consigned his school certificate to flames to show that he was against possessiveness. 17 In his view, attachment to, or storage of, anything can divert from duty or cause a person to make selfish decisions. On 25 March 1916, intending to sit the Inter Arts examination, Vinayak left Baroda for Mumbai. On the way, he felt the profound stillness of the Himalayas was inviting him. 18 Between the two paths, revolutionary and spiritual, he selected the revolutionary path. This sacrifice of his extreme passion of spiritualism was for the sake of service to mankind. He was the idol of selfless decisions. 19 At Kashi, Mahatma Gandhi’s impassioned speech of 4 February 1916 fired Vinoba’s mind. 20 He wrote to Gandhi and in his reply Gandhi simply responded, ‘the points you have raised are fundamental and cannot be discussed in a letter. Could you please come here so that we can talk about them?’ 21 On 7 June 1916, Vinoba stepped into Gandhi’s Kochrab ashram in Ahemadabad and his ‘Ashramlife’ began. 22 On 23 March 1917, Vinoba obtained one year’s leave to study Philosophy in Wai and returned exactly a year later. 23 Gandhi wrote to Vinoba’s father to advise him ‘your Vinoba is staying in our ashram’ and on hearing of the illness of Vinoba’s mother, Gandhi sent him home. 24 On 24 October 1918 she died. 25 After her death, his self-reliant father did all household work. His humbleness did not permit him to keep a servant. He thought, ‘It’s better to do one’s own work rather to run the risk of hurting someone’s feelings.’ 26 Such kindness of heart has a power to kindle the universe. .
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__________________________________________________________________ Thereon ‘Gandhi’s words and Vinoba’s action became routine.’ 27 Vinoba joined the non-cooperation movement. On 13 April 1923, he led the ‘flag satyagraha’ at Nagpur and suffered imprisonment. 28 Spindle, charkha and handloom were his tools for the war of independence in 1942 during the ‘Quit India Movement.’ Swami Vivekanand’s ‘mantra’ was adopted by Gandhi, which became his life hymn: ‘service to God is the service to poor.’ Vinoba was disposed towards rigorous devotional life. 29 He dedicated his life to Gandhi’s constructive programme. For eradication of untouchability, he did scavenging and leather work, experimented with spinning and weaving, established a Gramseva Mandal, started nursing for lepers and lived in a hut in Harijan locality at Nalwadi near Wardha. This was the period of his strict ‘Karmayog.’ 30 2. ‘Hriday Parivartan’ and Vinoba During his youth, Vinoba’s inner voice was calling him. He was dissatisfied with the faithlessness of society. Listening to the soul’s urge, he initiated a social change. To create a righteous society, he chiselled his linguistics, imbibed the teachings of holy scripts, and formulated a sequence for the transformation of heart to change human life and finally, a constructive change for the society. 31 Revolution can be possible by transcending minds, spirit of goodwill, self realisation and constructivism. 32 Vinoba believed in a peaceful revolution based on fundamental change in values, the realm of thoughts and virtues. Any change cannot be a revolution. 33 He used to say, ‘One who has the wealth of love and thoughts; never indulges in any kind of dispute or despair.’ 34 This implies that ultimate power lies in the thoughts. Human beings are blessed with thinking ability. Change in the thoughts is a sign of evolution. There cannot be stagnancy in life; on the contrary, it is an ever changing phenomenon. Vinoba confidently said that ‘People liked his thoughts as they had a strong foundation of love. That’s why he called himself a “supreme cementing factor”, who persevered for revolutionary transformation. A change of heart was bound to be a cementing factor.’ 35 Its unique characteristic is boundlessness. It does not possess any space bar. It is a universal urge for connecting hearts. Love and hatred are two sides of the revolutionary coin which can be smitten by wisdom of thoughts. Hatred is a dehumanising factor. It weakens human relations. Anger too is cancerous to social growth but love is the panacea to root out these termites. Love can reverberate to the revolutionary process. It can bridge the gap of envy. Faith is the prime power which can set open the doors of hearts to gush out the stream of love. 36 Vinoba had a strong opinion that every man’s heart is a treasure of immense values. Still some appear miserly, or lie, or are evil. This appearance is due to the impact of one’s surroundings and upbringing. An adverse environment makes the human body a sweet juicy fruit with a damaged scalp. For the excursion of heavenly values from the human heart, a heavenly tool ‘faith’ is needed. Every
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__________________________________________________________________ heart is filled with kindness to pour out for the needy poor. The human heart has an affinity for love. It immediately responds if compassionately tackled. If a person is respectfully humble, God dwells in the human heart during any adversity to the purity of mind and cooperativeness in attitude. 37 Vinoba was successful in his first experiment of heart transformation at Kashi. He had purchased a lock and the shopkeeper demanded an excessive price. Though Vinoba was aware of its cost, he paid the demanded amount and told the shopkeeper, ‘I know the price of the lock is just 2 anas but because you have demanded 8 anas, I have to give it to you.’ 38 From this day, Vinoba started passing by the road towards the shop but without looking at the shopkeeper. On the fourth day, the shopkeeper requested forgiveness for his misbehaviour and returned the additional amount. In a democratic country, Satyagrah cannot be coercion; on the contrary democracy is the replica of heart transformation and compassion. 39 Without a weapon, Vinoba triumphantly metamorphosed the dreaded dacoits to surrender. The ideology of goodwill was a victory upon the negativity of evils when the government of India’s attempts were in vain, in spite of its advanced armaments. Vinoba uplifted the dacoits to include them in the mainstream population. This constructive act convinced people that nobody is dacoit by birth but are the byproduct of barbarism, immorality and a destructive social environment. At the request of Tahdildar Singh, the son of a notorious dacoit, Mansingh, Vinoba decided to visit the dacoits in the dangerous region of Bhind Muraina. 40 Once again the ideology of compassion proved to be on par with the weapons, power, rules and regulations. Doubts were raised on his visit to the area of dacoits. But Vinoba politely advised that he was visiting the province of saints and God will decide who the dacoit is. The purpose of his visit was to give devoted service to them: 41 Entering the Chambal valley, Vinoba issued a challenge to all: “Tulsidas says, Sumati Kumati sab ke ura basai (everyone has good and bad propensities), Bigadi janam anek ki sudharata pala na laage aadh (the sin of many incarnations is burnt out in a moment by the fire of repentance). Even if, there is darkness in a cave for ten thousand years, a small candle dispels it in a moment. Who was Valmiki? Wasn’t he a dacoit, a street thug? The greatest sinner is capable of becoming the most righteous man. It doesn’t take time for a dacoit to be a saint. God quickly embraces him who is sincere repentant. The real hero is he who is neither a cruel nor a coward.” 42 With Vinoba’s message of love and under Yadunath Singh’s leadership, teams of workers fanned out into the ravines and canyons of the Chambal valley. Their
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__________________________________________________________________ job was to arrange the dacoits’ meetings with Vinoba. 43 In a couple of days, the dacoit Ramavtar Singh surrendered. After seven days, three other dacoits surrendered: 44 Vinoba said to dacoits, “You are rebels and I am a rebel. But my revolt is different. I have revolted against the present social order in order to remove poverty, inequality and injustice. If you do the same, you will benefit yourself and the world.” 45 In his daily discourse he said, ‘...When accumulation increases, theft increases. Start donating large-heartedly, give up fear, have compassion. The number of dacoits will decrease automatically...’ 46 Vinoba’s ideology praises the act of repentance. The individuals, who had the image of God in their heart, were inspired to surrender. They must be accepted wholeheartedly for the strength of repentance for their misdeeds. 47 Vinoba recalled the episode of the dreaded dacoit Angulimal who, 2000 years ago, had surrendered to Lord Gautam Buddha. 48 Repentance is an act of an incarnation of non-violence. God himself had given the idea to dacoits to leave their evil deeds and live the life of honesty. The purification of heart had shown them the path of righteousness. The non-violence had shown the positive impact of the surroundings. 49 Vinoba was against a war strategy that tortured warriors to accept defeat. He condemned the act of envy and he wished to enter into the heart of the enemy peacefully, without harm. 50 3. The ‘Bhoodan’ Movement On 18 April 1951, Vinoba camped at the village Pochampalli in Nalgonda district. Some Harijans told him about the tragedy of their lives and said they need a little piece of land to work and maintain them happily. 51 Vinoba promised them farm land. Shri Ramchandra Reddy donated 100 acres of land to Harijans. It was a new experience that a land too, can be donated peacefully. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a letter of appreciation to him. Vinoba replied ‘...all problems can be solved by non violence which can be possible through purification of heart...’ 52 For Vinoba, mathematics was next to God. His mathematical brain quickly calculated that at the rate of one acre per individual, for about fifty million people of India, at least fifty million acres land is required. 53 If the land problem could not be solved peacefully then non violence had to accept defeat and the field would be left open for violence. He proposed unyielding faith in the power of ahimsa to solve every problem in the world. 54 Leaving everything to God, Vinoba asked for land donations. He received 12,000 acres during his pilgrimage of Telanghana within two months. 55 He said:
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__________________________________________________________________ “Like air, water, and sunlight, land too is God’s gift. It is, therefore, meant for all. Man cannot be the owner of land. Its real owner is God. Land is our mother and we are all her children ...” 56 In his opinion,‘...a concept can be fought only with another concept.’ 57 One who has excessive land would be attacked by those who are landless. Nobody is benefited by violence. Human rights can be won by ahimsa. 58 Similar to the impact of the message of peace from the holy scripts, Vinoba experienced the miracle of the thought of Gautam Buddha that love alone puts an end to enmity in diffusing violence. Communist activists asked people, ‘Is it possible that landlords will ever have a change of heart? They have got to be beaten up.’ Vinoba asked them, ‘Did Karl Marx come and beat you up to make you a communist? How did you become a communist? Marx’s books brought about a change of heart in you. So, you are a symbol of change of heart yourself.’ 59 People were surprised by the transformation of the possessive and greedy Prince of Palkot into a donor Prince who agreed to comply with the Land Gift Movement and donated 45½ thousand acres of land. 60 The Prince was overwhelmed by the Movement’s objective to spread the religious message of humanity: the real devotion to God lies in offering food to a hungry man and water to a thirsty. 61 He announced his gratitude to Vinoba for showing the valuable path of humanity. 62 The divinity in Vinoba had completely diluted the princely attitude and ‘yesterday’s exploiter became a servant today...’ 63 The Prince left his mansion and his studded apparel to clad himself in Khadi and inscribed his footprints on the path of spirituality. 64 In Patna on 23 October 1952, Vinoba announced ‘Wealth Donation Yajnya.’ The non-accumulation of wealth was its fundamental principle. The idea behind it was to rob the robbers for the noble cause of distributing gains equally. 65 It helped eradicate the spread of a negative message about robbery. The constructive thought of non-possession reigned thereafter. 4. The ‘Sarvodaya’ Movement Gandhi decided that, after independence, the dissolution of congress would usher in a new social order, ‘Lok Sevak Sangh.’ But Gandhi was assassinated in early 1948. His vision was continued by his entourage: Dr Rajendra Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Jayprakash Narayan and Vinoba Bhave and the ‘Sarvodaya Samaj’ was launched. 66 Sarvodaya means ‘the welfare of mankind by removing the disharmony of cast distinction and promoting self governance, nonexploitation, cooperativeness, non-violent and peaceful striving for the good will of all.’ 67 As a saviour of humanity, Vinoba embraced the pedestrians’ path and walked barefoot, all over the country, to know and understand the common people
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__________________________________________________________________ and to propagate the implementation of Sarvodaya’s objective. 68 Later, he experimented with ‘Kanchan-mukti,’ for monitory transaction. 69 The human tendency of possessiveness is like a contagious disease. Vinoba strived hard to make humanity disease free by habituating it with self-work, self-sacrifice and non-possession. 4. Conclusion On 4 November 1982, Vinoba had a temperature and his health deteriorated. He had a heart attack but refused to go to hospital. By 8 November, he stopped taking medication and eating and died at 9:30 am, on 15 November 1982. 70 The grandeur of his spiritual achievements is as spell-binding as it is beyond imagination. The secret of Vinoba’s celestial power lies in his upbringing. He is indebted to his parents for the influence of their chastity, asceticism, sense of detachment and religious attitude. He lived in the company of many great personalities. He had chewed and chimed the great literatures but all this would be inferior when compared with his mother’s contribution to his life. 71 Once he wrote, ‘Gita, mother and takli are the holy trio of my life.’ 72 ‘Mother’ symbolises the spiritual saga of life, ‘Gita’ stands for the epic of knowledge and ‘takli’ encompasses the saintly aroma of Gandhi’s thoughts. 73 His mother taught him to ‘view God’s image in everything,’ and to fill his heart with compassion, care and respect. 74 And ‘we must first give and eat later’ as ‘giving is God-like, hoarding is heinous.’ 75 In her teachings, Vinoba found the deepest truth of philosophy and the answer to his question of what God is. The seeds of the ‘Land Gift Movement’ were sown at this stage. Vinoba was fortunate enough to receive the nutrients of human conduct and unselfishness from his mother. He made a collection of his mother’s inspirational sayings in ‘VicharPothi,’ such as ‘small is sweet, much is mischief;’ ‘A stomach full of food and clothes to cover body, that is all we need;’ ‘Service to country means devotion to Lord.’ 76 Vinoba’s ideology of spiritual attainment was shaped in this religious and divine environment. He was a staunch follower of asceticism and the embodiment of a detached attitude. He wrote to Gandhi, ‘asceticism; wooden plate, bowl, dhoti, blanket, and books were preserved but coat, cap, etc were discarded.’ 77 His nourishment of virtues is the blessing of family and surroundings. But he himself sacrificed for imbibing the qualities of universality. The sublimity of his thoughts lies in creating a suitable atmosphere for the spiritual anvil of society. He adopted the non-violent encoding to eradicate the impediments hampering the tranquillity of revolution. His sense of tolerance was derived from his celibacy and the gift of his parents’ candid oath of chastity. With deep compassion, this philosopher activist communicated with masses to bring about a basic attitudinal transformation. The world witnessed the strength of constructive thoughts in mobilisation of masses, without any technological aid of
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Notes 1
Nirmala Deshpande, Vinoba, trans. Virkar S.A. (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2001), 3. 2 Kalindi, ed., Prempanth Ahimsecha, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (Pawanar Wardha: Paramdham, 2003), 45-46. 3 Shivaji Bhave, Vinoba Jivan Darshan, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (Mumbai: Maharashtra Rajya Sahitya Sanskrutii, 1984), 29. 4 Kalindi, Prempanth, 33-42. 5 Balkoba Bhave, Mera Bachapan Vinoba ki Sahavas Mein, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (Varanashi: Sarv Seva Sangh, 1971), 7. 6 Shivaji Bhave, Vinoba, 60. 7 Deshpande, Vinoba, 5. 8 ‘Dyaneshwari’ is an interpretation of Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita in Marathi language by the Marathi saint Dyaneshwar during 13th century. Sanskrit was the language of the elite class in India. Vinoba wanted to bring the thought of Gita to the common people. 9 Sane Guruji, Goshtirup Vinoba Bhag-1, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (Nagpur: Kaustubh, 1994), 7. Bhakti Vijay is a biographical account on the life of the great saint Tukaram of Maharashtra, who was born in the year 1577. It is written by Mahipati. 10 Deshpande, Vinoba, 5. 11 Vinayaka is his birth name and the name Vinoba was given to him by Mahatma Gandhi. His mother used to call him ‘Vinu,’ ‘Vinya.’ 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 4. 14 Tarunbhai, Vinoba Jivan Darshan, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (Varanashi: Sarvodya Sahitya Publication, 1958), 19. 15 Deshpande, Vinoba, 8. 16 Kalindi, Prempanth, 58. 17 Deshpande, Vinoba, 10. 18 Ibid., 10-11. 19 Ibid., 11. 20 Ibid., 13. 21 Ibid.,14-15. 22 Ibid.,15.
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Ibid., 18. Ibid., 15. 25 Ibid.,19. 26 Kalindi, Prempanth, 45. 27 Deshpande, Vinoba, 19. 28 Ibid., 22. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 22-23. Karmyog means a selfless service, without a desire for any return while doing one’s duty. 31 Gautam, ed., Vinoba Sahitya Khand-15 Aarohan, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (Pawnar Wardha: Paramdham, 1996), 61. 32 Ibid., 319. 33 Kalindi, Prempanth, 79. 34 Gautam, Vinoba, 319. 35 Ibid., 321. 36 Ibid., 502-503. 37 Ibid., 87-88. 38 Kalindi, Prempanth, 65. 39 The term ‘Satyagrah’ is advocated by Mahatma Gandhi against British rule in India. Its meaning is ‘insistence on truth by forbidding physical force’ or ‘nonviolent resistance for truth.’ 40 Ibid., 161. 41 Gautam, Vinoba, 235. 42 Deshpande, Vinoba, 102. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 102-103. 46 Ibid., 103. 47 Gautam, Vinoba, 235. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 236. 50 Gautam, ed., Vinoba Sahitya Khand-16: Tisari Shakti, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (Pawnar Wardha: Paramdham, 1996), 267-268. 51 Deshpande, Vinoba, 36. 52 Kalindi, Prempanth, 127. 53 Deshpande, Vinoba, 37. 54 Ibid. Ahimsa means non-violence. It is Mahatma Gandhi’s principle for solving any kind of dispute peacefully. 55 Ibid., 38. 56 Ibid. 24
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Ibid. Ibid., 38-39. 59 Ibid., 50. 60 Ibid., 51. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 52. 64 Khadi is a term for hand spun and hand woven cloth made out of hemp. In India, Khadi is a symbol of nationalism, equality, and self-reliance. 65 Ibid. 66 Vishwanath Tandon, Acharya Vinoba Bhave (New Delhi Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1992), 45. 67 D. N. Shikhare, Vinoba Jivan Mantra, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (Pune: Chitrashala Publication, 1988), 33. 68 Weekly Journal, Harijan Sevak, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (31 March 1951), 39. 69 Kalindi, Prempanth, 114. Kanchan-mukti means ‘freedom from money economy.’ 70 Ibid., 270. 71 Ibid., 33. 72 Ibid., 30. 73 Kalindi, ed., Sneh Sannidhi, trans. Kalpana Deshmukh (Pawnar Wardha: Paramdham, 2007), 137. 74 Kalindi, Prempanth, 38. 75 Ibid., 37. 76 Ibid., 41. 77 Kalindi, Sneh, 11. 58
Bibliography Bhave, Balkoba. Mera Bachapan Vinoba ki Sahavas Mein. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh. Varanashi: Sarv Seva Sangh, 1971. Bhave, Shivaji. Vinoba Jivan Darshan. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh. Mumbai: Maharashtra Rajya Sahitya Mandal, 1984. Deshpande, Nirmala. Vinoba. Translated by Virkar, S.A. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2001. Gautam, ed. Vinoba Sahitya Khand-15 Aarohan. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh. Pawnar Wardha: Paramdham, 1996.
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__________________________________________________________________ Gautam, ed. Vinoba Sahitya Khand-16 Tisari Shakti. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh. Pawnar Wardha: Paramdham, 1996. Kalindi, ed. Prempanth Ahimsecha. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh. Pawnar Wardha: Paramdham, 2003. Kalindi. Sneh Sannidhi. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh. Pawnar Wardha: Paramdham, 2007. Sane, Guruji. Goshtirup Vinoba. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh. Nagpur: Kausatubh, 1994. Shikhare, D. N. Vinoba Jivan Mantra. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh. Pune: Chitrashala, 1958. Tandon, Vishwanath. Acharya Vinoba Bhave. New Delhi Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1992. Tarunbhai. Vinoba Jivandarshan. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh. Varanashi: Sarvodya Sahitya Publication, 1958. Weekly Journal. Harijan Sevak. Translated by Kalpana Deshmukh, 31 March 1951. Kalpana Deshmukh is a Science and Arts postgraduate, specialising in Animal Physiology and Indo Anglian Literature respectively. She is the recipient of AICTE, Delhi’s MODROBS grant for her project on ‘Strengthening of Language Laboratory at Institute.’ Currently, in the Department of Communication Skills, of RBTE, Nagpur, she is dealing with research project on ‘Understanding the Problems of English Language Proficiency in the students of Engineering and Technology Faculty.’ Sangita Meshram was conferred the Gold Medal for her PhD research work and has good number of papers at state, national and international conferences. Currently, in the Department of History, at RTM Nagpur University, Nagpur, she is working on a major research project sanctioned by UGC, titled ‘Dalit Leadership in Vidarbha (1900-1950).’
Before We Talk: Discovering Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart John Backman Abstract The field of dialogue and deliberation has long approached its subject matter in terms of process – what happens ‘at the dialogue table.’ Almost no attention, however, has been paid to the preparation of individuals for dialogue before the process. Here spirituality has a unique role to play: its focus on inner transformation has, over the centuries, demonstrated its ability to reorient people’s deepest attitudes toward others, from hostility and defensiveness to curiosity and compassion. This chapter describes how some of the world’s most venerable spiritual practices can effect this reorientation. Starting with a Christian perspective that embraces all major faith traditions, the chapter examines the transformative power of such disciplines as silent prayer, meditation, the contemplative study of sacred texts, the ‘Daily Office,’ and life in community. The effect of these disciplines for dialogue is that they bring the innermost self into union with the divine wisdom and presence beyond that self; as a result of this unitive process, practitioners begin to reflect the divine values (such as humility, compassion, and risk) that are essential for authentic dialogue. Because of the holistic nature of human persons – spirit, soul, mind, and body – this chapter also touches briefly on two complements to the spiritual practices described above: new mind-sets and an expanded social context. Fundamental mind-shifts empower adopters to see even their most cherished opinions as one set among billions, and thus to hold them more lightly. Moreover, a broader engagement with the world – specifically in the spheres of media consumption, human networks, and travel – provides first-hand evidence of one’s place in the universe and the legitimacy of other systems of thought. Key Words: Dialogue, spirituality, Christianity, transformation, spiritual practice, mind-shifts. ***** 1. From Process to Transformation For most of its history, the field of dialogue and deliberation has concerned itself with what might be called doing – with process development, group dynamics, the formation of networks and organisations devoted to dialogue, and on-the-ground dialogues on issues of the day. Conversely, little attention has been paid to the internal preparation of individuals before the dialogue takes place. 1 Yet this preparation has the potential to drive dialogue to a deeper level and optimise outcomes (whether those outcomes include tangible results or mutual understanding).
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__________________________________________________________________ On one level, the preparation for dialogue can be cognitive in nature: participants who study the issue under consideration generally bring considerably more depth of thought and nuance to their participation ‘at the dialogue table.’ Deeper still, the prior cultivation of certain character traits – empathy, a clear sense of self and one’s own limitations, compassion, willingness to risk – can enable individuals to approach any dialogue with a clear mind and open heart. Without such character traits, dialogue participants find it too easy to revert to their natural instinct toward defensiveness and self-protection, and the dialogue stalls. One approach to this cultivation is distinctly spiritual in character, centring on some of the world’s most venerable practices of prayer, meditation, and study. The power of these practices to effect inner transformation (as demonstrated by centuries of use by mystics and monastics) can also reorient people’s deepest attitudes toward others from hostility and defensiveness to curiosity and compassion. In this chapter, the work of these practices is considered from a Christian perspective while seeking to embrace all major faith traditions. 2. Into the Depths: Silent Prayer and Meditation Many people of faith think of prayer exclusively as talking to God. While this is an essential element of prayer – ‘pour out your heart before him,’ the psalmist writes 2 – the monastic tradition has long known the value of another practice: silent prayer and meditation. By sitting in silence, focusing attention on the present moment and the Spirit within it, practitioners of this contemplative style of prayer provide space for God to speak to their deepest selves. They also allow themselves to be transformed. By opening their hearts to God in silence on a consistent basis, they draw closer to what mystics have long conceived of as ‘union with God’ – the melding of God’s heart with one’s own, as it were – and the deepest self begins to reflect the values widely associated with the divine, including compassion, connection, peace, and self-giving. This dynamic calls to mind the old axiom about long-married couples: that after a certain point, they begin to look like each other. In the same way, an individual begins to look like God: just as the divine values are exhibited in the divine life, so they are exhibited in the life of the contemplative as well. As it turns out, these values are the same required for fruitful dialogue. Many practices can facilitate this process. Centring prayer – sitting silently and focusing on a single word – has proved fruitful for many people. 3 Focused attention on an icon similarly provides a window on this encounter with the divine. Yet the practice of silent prayer does not have to be formal. During his daily visit to a Catholic church, a gentleman in France would sit in one of the pews, gaze at the crucifix on the altar, and then leave. When asked what he was doing, he replied, ‘I look at him, he looks at me, and we’re happy together.’ 4 Meditation similarly has the power to connect its practitioners with reality both large and small. By focusing on the breath, for instance, meditators connect
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__________________________________________________________________ directly with one of the most fundamental processes of existence: ‘all that lives, breathes.’ 5 Father William Johnston writes: Breath rises from the very root of the being, so that consciousness of the breath can lead to a realization of the deepest self by opening up new doors in the psychic life. In the Bible it is clear that breath is identified with the deepest thing in man; it is precisely when breath enters into matter that man becomes man. 6 Breath meditation has also been described as breathing in the Holy Spirit, i.e., drawing the essence of God into one’s self. Other meditation practices relate more directly to preparation for dialogue. Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal describes a practice in which one adds the words I don’t know to every thought that passes through the mind during meditation. Such a practice quickly opens the eyes of meditators to the limits of their knowledge – and cultivates the humility that makes dialogue productive. ‘Repeating the words “I don’t know” allows us to question tightly held ideas,’ Fronsdal writes. 7 ‘Done thoroughly, “I don’t know” can pull the rug out from under our most cherished beliefs.’ 8 In the process, it allows practitioners to relax their obsessive attachment to those beliefs, which opens the door to dialogue with those who believe otherwise. If silent prayer and meditation were practiced in isolation, however, the practitioner’s experience of God would be limited to her or his own awareness – and, as many faith traditions would concede, God is simply too vast and elusive for one person alone to grasp. This points to the value of additional practices that nudge people into an encounter beyond themselves. 3. Wisdom Outside the Self: Encountering Sacred Texts Few resources are as beyond the immediate experience of postmodern people as the scriptures of the various faith traditions. When Christians open their Bibles, they encounter a sacred text written in a dramatically different era, by authors with dramatically different mores and social contexts. The messages often run counter to society’s norms. The literary forms, hyperbole, and symbolism can be difficult to grasp. The ancient assumptions about life can appear nonsensical to modern readers. As a result, the passages in these pages regularly baffle, offend, and horrify. More than that, they awaken the limits of understanding. This encounter with scriptures can take several forms. One can, for instance, pray the scriptures. The Christian Church’s great source for this type of prayer has always been the psalms, partly because the psalms convey a vast range of human emotion as expressed to God. The typical monastic practice is to gather in community several times a day to chant the psalms, together with scripture
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__________________________________________________________________ readings and other prayers, a practice commonly known as the Daily Office or Divine Office. Outside the monastery, churches and individuals (particularly in the Catholic and Anglican traditions) have adapted this practice for their own use. A key to the praying of scripture is consistency in two dimensions. First is a logistical dimension: praying the Office regularly, on a fixed schedule, particularly when the practitioner is distracted or would rather do anything else. Second is scriptural: praying the psalms according to a regular cycle, such as the lectionary used in many churches. These constraints help avoid the temptation to pray one’s favourite texts repeatedly while avoiding others less to their liking. Instead, people who say the Office often find themselves praying texts that do not express how they feel on a particular day. It is a jarring experience to arise to a warm morning soaked in sunshine and end up praying Psalm 88, which ends ‘and darkness is my only companion.’ 9 This is precisely the point. The clash between the self and another frame of mind brings a wide range of insights to light: new ways to think about God, disturbing possibilities that God does not exactly conform to one’s understanding, reminders that the understanding is limited and that the individual self is not the centre of the universe. By allowing the deepest part of themselves to encounter wisdom outside themselves, day after day, practitioners of the Office not only become larger of spirit, but also gain the perspective on the self and the cosmos that authentic dialogue requires. Like the ‘I don’t know’ meditation, the Daily Office fosters humility: not humiliation or self-deprecation, but a crystal-clear view of one’s place in the grand scheme of things. The discovery of one’s limits – the fact that each individual is one person, no more, no less, with a great deal still unknown – practically drives people into dialogue to discover what others know. The same dynamic takes place in the study of sacred texts. Any purposeful encounter with the Bible, in any format, will confront readers with something very different from themselves. Lectio divina – the slow, contemplative reading of scripture to hear God’s voice – may bring this disparity home with the greatest impact, as it engages mind, heart, and spirit in an encounter with the holy. However, other Christian traditions and institutions have their own effective practices, from critical exegesis of the original languages in seminary to the quiet time popular in many evangelical circles. As with praying the psalms, adherence to a lectionary forces the need to grapple with a broader range of the texts. 10 4. The Voice of the Other: Living in Community While the encounter with scriptures is a powerful way to encounter outside wisdom, texts can be read from beginning to end and still be explored within a specific mental framework. This is what makes the practice of community so vital. In conversations with one another, community members can be confronted with worldviews and frames of reference that they never could have imagined themselves. They find entirely new ways of viewing old truths. They open up still
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__________________________________________________________________ further to the possibilities of truth and the value of ‘I could be wrong.’ In this regard, the fruits of community are the fruits of dialogue itself. By the time I joined my Episcopal parish, I had already spent two decades studying and exploring the Christian faith. In the years since, however, the people of the parish have introduced me to approaches that never would have crossed my mind. I knew, for instance, that I took the Bible seriously but not literally, yet only through my membership did I learn in depth about the role of historical and literary criticism. I talked with people who deny a literal resurrection of Jesus and those who would have been quite comfortable in the Church of the Middle Ages. Some of these encounters were emotionally difficult. Even the most challenging, however, led me to a richer, more complex understanding of my faith – and a respect for even a broader range of opinions. It is true that any group could have a similar effect. What sets community apart in this regard is the depth of commitment: the dedication to a specific group of people ‘for better or for worse.’ While not a guarantee of stability and permanence, this commitment provides a relatively safe place for exploration and the ‘work of the soul’ central to inner transformation. It is far easier to try out an insight that emerges from lectio divina, or imagine an unusual idea about God out loud, when listeners are committed no matter what. This type of community also enhances the values that append to the work of inner transformation – values that facilitate openness to dialogue. By nurturing a sense of safety, as we have just seen, community facilitates the willingness to risk, without which no dialogue can reach its full potential. By persisting with people they may not even like, so as to cultivate personal growth, community members foster their capacity for love and compassion. By conflicting with others, then working out differences, each member comes to see her- or himself as one person in a group, thus fostering humility. Community offers, of course, an even more fundamental benefit to the progress of dialogue: the live practice of dialogue itself. Every time members of the community advance an idea for reflection, or raise an issue for consideration, or propose a new policy for the community, they issue an invitation to dialogue – and the ensuing dialogue provides the opportunity to hone practical communication skills. 5. The Work Outside the Soul: Mind-Sets and Behaviours Humans are not just spirit. In light of that, it is useful to complement the work of inner transformation in at least two ways: with fundamental mind-shifts and an expanded social context. Individuals can incorporate such mind-shifts into their inner lives through a range of strategies, from meditation (as in the ‘I don’t know’ meditation mentioned above) to simple practice. Besides I don’t know, I have found two mind-shifts, summarised in two simple phrases, to be productive in the reorientation of the
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__________________________________________________________________ inner life toward dialogue. These mind-shifts, properly used, empower users to see even their most cherished beliefs as one set among billions, and thus to hold those beliefs more lightly. And yet. In the process of forming opinions, it is all too easy to commit to conclusions without fully weighing all facts and issues. The value of and yet is that it short-circuits this process, enabling individuals to hold their positions lightly. Thus, as an example, social conservatives proclaim that same-sex marriage will hurt the development of children raised therein – and yet a longitudinal study reveals that the children of lesbian parents are doing better than their counterparts in other family structures. 11 Similarly, many progressives view members of the American Tea Party movement as uneducated and shallow of thought, and yet the Tea Party’s percentage of college graduates is half again the average of Americans overall. 12 As a mind-set, and yet opens the door for a new perspective, new evidence, or new thinking. When practiced consistently, and yet becomes an a priori habit: its practitioners begin to encounter each new claim or loudly stated position with an eye for the other side of the and yet. Both/and. Either/or thinking has come to dominate the US public square, and this creates a significant obstacle to dialogue. Either/or severely narrows the range of possible solutions while making it easy to demonise those on the ‘wrong’ side. When there are only two positions in a debate, and the issue is drawn in black and white, the people on the opposing side appear clearly to be wrong, if not duplicitous or even sinister. Catholic theology, in particular, has long promoted both/and as the antidote for either/or. 13 Both/and enables Catholics to hold the ‘opposite’ sides of many doctrinal issues in a harmonious tension: Jesus as both human and divine, God as both one and three, the Bible as both the Word of God and the product of human writers. Contrary to either/or, both/and provides room to embrace divergent views from a broad range of people. Rightly used, both/and can move its users toward genuine syntheses and grand ideas that are more than the sum of their parts. Like and yet, both/and is best used not as a goal, but as a starting point, with the question ‘How can both/and work here?’ This leads into a search for new or undiscovered ways in which two ‘opposing’ ideas can combine to create a better one. As more ideas are included, so are the people who hold them dear. The circle of welcome, and of dialogue, grows. That ‘circle of welcome’ is a cornerstone of another broad category of approaches to dialogue as a habit of the heart: expanding the social context. Travel, particularly travel across cultural borders, is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this. Through immersion in another culture, the traveller quickly discovers a remarkable difference in viewpoints, evidence that her or his own individual worldview is simply one among many. While the impact varies directly with duration and dissimilarity of cultures – the more time spent in a more dissimilar culture, the more deeply one grasps the limitations of one’s own views –
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__________________________________________________________________ even travel to neighbouring states, learning another language, or volunteering with a population unlike oneself can be effective in this regard. The same circle broadening can occur ‘at home’ too, simply by surrounding oneself with people who think, believe, and behave differently. In doing so, the attentive listener can hear the reasoning behind their fervently held opinions. She or he can begin to pick up their language, the meaning of their code words, and their nuances of thought – and even think within their mind-set. Over time, the ‘not unreasonableness’ of their opinions becomes clearer: it becomes possible to imagine how a mature, good-thinking person might believe what they believe. More important, by living around such people in their daily lives, one gains a 360degree picture of them – not just their beliefs and opinions, but their selves – which reveals the most fundamental common ground of all: our common humanity. In a similar vein, people committed to dialogue can take steps to absorb media outside of their own mental sets. By partaking of a ‘balanced media diet’ that diversifies input across multiple parameters – conservative to liberal, local to global, capitalist to socialist, with a diversity of race, ethnicity, and gender – news consumers inevitably encounter the same story from many different perspectives. Like encounters with people who disagree, this often reveals the potential legitimacy of each point of view; the complexity of the situation and the lack of easy answers become clear. Almost automatically, readers and viewers of diverse media approach each issue with more humility and more openness to others whose viewpoints are different from their own. At the same time, they grow sceptical of simplistic solutions for any issue, because so few of them are effective. Over time, these media consumers grow in wisdom, empathy, an ability to live with ambivalence and ambiguity: values that foster more fruitful dialogue. These mind-shifts and encounters with the ‘other,’ however, can be far more effective when paired with an openness and attention that springs from the deepest self. This is the value of a spiritual approach to dialogue: it transforms the pursuit of peacemaking and reconciliation from a useful but external practice to a life orientation – a habit of the heart.
Notes 1
A number of approaches have focused on the individual’s cognitive and behavioural frameworks, particularly as they connect to dialogue or group dynamics. To cite two examples: the physicist and dialogist David Bohm focused on awareness of one’s underlying thoughts and assumptions in the midst of dialogue; see his classic On Dialogue (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996). T-groups, created under the aegis of the National Training Laboratories, enable participants to become aware of and modify their own behaviours to enhance their interpersonal abilities.
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Psalm 62:8 (New Revised Standard Version). Contemplative Outreach, ‘Centering Prayer’, accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.centeringprayer.com. Fathers William Meninger, Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating have been central to the modern description and practice of centring prayer. 4 Jackie Smallbones, ‘Quiet Time Lessons’, Church Herald, March 1999. 5 Light of the Spirit Monastery, ‘Why Breath Meditation?’ Breath Meditation, accessed 18 June 2013, http://breathmeditation.org. 6 William Johnston, Christian Zen: A Way of Meditation (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), quoted in George Burke, ‘The Christian Tradition of Breath Meditation’, Light of the Spirit Monastery, accessed 18 June 2013, http://breathmeditation.org/the-christian-tradition-of-breath-meditation. 7 Gil Fronsdal, ‘Not-Knowing’, Insight Meditation Center, accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/articles/not-knowing. 8 Ibid. 9 Psalm 88:16, from The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 713. 10 This sort of encounter, in which a text draws readers beyond themselves, does not happen only with texts traditionally deemed sacred. A humanist colleague told me that he often experiences a similar dynamic when reading Wordsworth. The writings of saints and gurus – which faith traditions often consider instructive but not necessarily inspired on the level of a sacred text – have transported millions of believers beyond the confines of their own self-interest. This resonates with the idea in many faiths that God can be found anywhere. 11 Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos, ‘U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents’, Pediatrics (June 7, 2010), accessed 18 June 2013, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2010/06/07/peds.2009-3153.abst ract#aff-1. 12 Brian Montopoli, ‘Tea Party Supporters: Who They Are and What They Believe’, CBS News, 14 April 2010, accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002529-503544.html. 13 See, for instance, Felix Just, S. J., ‘The Essential Key to Christian Theology: Both/And, Not Either/Or’, Catholic Resources, accessed 18 June 2013, http://catholic-resources.org/Both-And.htm. 3
Bibliography Backman, John. Why Can’t We Talk? Christian Wisdom on Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart. Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2012.
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__________________________________________________________________ Bohm, David. On Dialogue. Abingdon: Routledge, 1996. Breath Meditation. ‘Why Breath Meditation?’ Light of the Spirit Monastery. Accessed 18 June 2013. http://breathmeditation.org. Burke, George. ‘The Christian Tradition of Breath Meditation’. Light of the Spirit Monastery. http://breathmeditation.org/the-christian-tradition-of-breath-meditation. Contemplative Outreach. ‘Centering Prayer’. http://www.centeringprayer.com. Fronsdal, Gil. ‘Not-Knowing’. Insight Meditation Center. Accessed 18 June 2013. http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/articles/not-knowing. Gartrell, Nanette, and Henny Bos. ‘U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents’. Pediatrics, June 7, 2010. Accessed 18 June 2013. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2010/06/07/peds.2009-3153.abst ract#aff-1. Gregory of Nyssa. ‘On Perfection’. The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 29 (1984): 349–379. John of the Cross. Ascent of Mount Carmel. Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008. Johnston, William. Christian Zen: A Way of Meditation. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Meeks, Wayne A., Jouette M. Bassler, Werner E. Lemke, Susan Niditch, and Eileen M. Schuller, eds. The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993. Smallbones, Jackie. ‘Quiet Time Lessons’. Church Herald, March 1999. The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. John Backman is an associate in the Order of the Holy Cross (Episcopal), a regular contributor to Huffington Post Religion, and the author of Why Can’t We Talk? Christian Wisdom on Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart (SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2012). His articles on contemplative spirituality – particularly its
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Cultural Perceptions of Physical Space and the Implications for Communication and Conflict Richard Harris Abstract When people from different cultures interact, they tend to focus on the content of the communication rather than its physical context, unconsciously assuming that this is perceived identically by the participants – literally as common ground. Perception, however, is very much a cultural phenomenon, the meanings and interpretations assigned to what is perceived residing less in external features than in people’s heads. Failure to recognise the complexity of cultural influences on perception can thus lead to incomprehension and conflict. In this chapter I offer a sequential consideration of space in terms of cosmological, geographical, environmental, communal, residential and personal aspects, trusting that this will prove to be a useful approach for anyone dealing with communication and conflict issues across cultural boundaries. Cosmological refers to metaphysical and symbolic meanings of physical space, whereas our ideas about the physical world and its peoples are analysed under the geographical frame. Environmental deals with the effects of physical landscape on perception and interaction while settlements, boundaries, and concepts of public and private are considered in the communal frame. By residential I refer to the effects on communication of different shapes of houses and workplaces and under personal, I discuss such topics as appropriate conversational distance, posture, gesture, and other nonverbal features of communication. This model is not intended as a complete answer to interpersonal or intercultural miscommunication, of course; human interaction is far too complex for such completeness. However, as an initial guide to the different levels, or dimensions, of a physical setting to which a participant may be reacting, I believe that it can lead to an enhanced awareness of a major cause of misunderstanding and conflict. Key Words: Physical space, culture, perception, cosmological, geographical, environmental, communal, residential, personal. ***** 1. Introduction It is often assumed that perception of the environment is a biological universal, since humans receive information about the external world from their five senses. In fact, perception is far more complex, involving non-hardwired processes of selection, organisation, and interpretation of the sensory data that constantly flood our awareness. By means of these perception processes we shape this wealth of stimuli into a coherent whole that, for us, is veridical reality. Such meaningful
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__________________________________________________________________ coherence, however, is culturally contingent; our backgrounds predispose us to focus on certain aspects of the environment to the exclusion of others, to assign selections to certain socially sanctioned mental categories, and to react to them emotionally and cognitively according to cultural norms and values. Thus, when individuals or societies respond differently to ostensibly identical phenomena and conflict ensues, it is necessary to analyse and address the cultural influences on their reactions. This chapter explores the cultural differences that inform perceptions of physical space using a six-part model that, while not definitively capturing every aspect of this involute theme (and being itself inevitably subject to cultural bias), nevertheless furnishes a framework for its exploration and discussion. Each of these frames might be thought of as lenses through which to investigate the complex interactions of cultural individuals with physical space. 2. Cosmological Space By this term I am referring to metaphysical, spiritual, and symbolic aspects of environmental perception. A basic differentiating factor of all human cultures is the extent to which humans feel in control of, or subject to, forces external to themselves. There is a continuum of thought featuring, at one extreme, the materialist, post-Enlightenment confidence that reason and science will eventually enable humans to understand and manipulate every aspect of the world. At the opposite end of this scale is the belief that the universe is inherently unpredictable and dangerous, either indifferent to humanity, or malevolent, inhabited by powerful spirits needing to be propitiated with rituals and observances. Between these two extremes the value differences are subtler, often exhibiting both scientific and supernatural features; many of the major religions occupy this middle ground, albeit differing in crucial aspects from each other. Many of our culturally conditioned beliefs about the world, its inhabitants, and the nature of the transcendent are so deeply ingrained that they are unreflectively seen as ‘the way things are,’ not subject to examination or question. Indeed, in some contexts inquiry can equate to sacrilege. A salient example of cosmological perception can be seen in relation to sacred space. The Copernican paradigm shift of the late Middle Ages impelled Western values decisively toward the rational end of the spectrum. 1 Consequent to the general acceptance that the Earth was not the centre of the universe came a number of developments with enduring social implications, including the decay of ecclesiastical authority and the liberation of independent thought, an emphasis on rigorous observation and measurement as the source of truth, and the loss of a spiritual connection to the Earth. Catholic churches, including the great mediaeval cathedrals, had often been erected on pagan sacred sites, preserving the idea that there was something special about that patch of ground. In a more rationalist worldview, including that of Protestantism, the Earth is devoid of inherent
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__________________________________________________________________ spirituality, seen more as temporarily useful than eternally numinous, to be exploited rather than exalted. 2 The potential for misunderstanding and conflict between this perspective and that of a culture more respectful of sacred space, whether exemplified by feng shui, by Thai spirit houses, or by holy sites in India or the Middle East, is enormous. 3. Geographical Space Studying physical space through the geographical lens involves questions of representation and conceptualisation. A common assumption in this sense concerns maps, which are often taken to be accurate delineations of reality, rather than the contingent conveniences that they are. People educated in schools with the Mercator map of the world on the wall will likely have internalised an idea of the relative sizes of countries that differs greatly from their actual land areas. The Peters equal-area projection, in rectifying this discrepancy, inevitably introduces another distortion, this time in terms of the shapes of countries, since no representation of the world onto a flat plane can resolve all these difficulties. Furthermore, people in the United Kingdom are used to maps that reinforce our already robust conviction that we are in the centre of the world; it is a literally disorienting experience to travel to the ‘far East’ and encounter maps centred on the vast Pacific, with the British Isles about to topple off the Western edge of the map. Yet more challenging is the map sometimes found in Australia or New Zealand, which defies modern cartographic convention in having South at the top. Other maps can inflame nationalist passions through their drawing of boundaries and their naming of places. 3 Few French visitors to the United Kingdom enjoy hearing that they are crossing the English Channel, an irritation augmented by their arrival at Waterloo station. Basically, whichever map we use is certain to have dramatic repercussions for our image of the world and our interactions with those from other parts of it. 4 Also considered under the geographical heading are the images we have of different countries, their peoples, and their cultures. Virtually all knowledge of other realities is necessarily incomplete and flawed, often relying on generalisations and stereotypes strongly influenced by media concentration on transient drama rather than veracity. For many people in developed economies neighbouring countries may be associated primarily with crime and undesired immigration. Even in its less pernicious manifestations this reductionist tendency can be disrespectful; there is more to Thailand than great beaches and cheap shopping. Human beings in general seem to have a natural tendency toward ethnocentrism, but one-dimensional conceptions can only breed incomprehension and distrust.
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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Environmental Space The idea behind the environmental frame is that people from dissimilar areas may focus on diverse aspects of their surroundings using differently developed perceptual skills, having been conditioned by their backgrounds to pay attention to specific features and interpret them in certain culturally determined ways. 5 One of the most dramatic illustrations of differing environmental perception is the story told by anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who had lived with the Mbuti pygmies in the dense Congo rain forest. Turnbull relates how he took his friend Kenge on his first trip outside the forest to the open grasslands where, on perceiving a herd of buffalo in the distance, Kenge asked what insects they were and, on approaching the buffalo, expressed surprise at how quickly they had grown. This man, whose vision was superbly adapted to the confines of the forest, had never developed the understanding that size apparently diminishes with distance. 6 Then there is the contentious theory of environmental (or climatic) determinism. Drawing selectively on statistics that seem to show that the economic development of a country generally corresponds to its distance from the equator, the pernicious argument has been made that people from temperate latitudes are naturally more hardworking, productive and intelligent than their counterparts in the tropics. 7 Such is the intuitive appeal of this idea that prejudicial stereotypes can even be found within the same country, the industrious, ingenious Yankee being compared favourably to the indolent Southerner, workers in the north of Italy and Germany holding derogatory opinions of their compatriots in the south. In the southern hemisphere the same attitudes are found in the reverse direction, enterprising Australians from Melbourne tending to hold a dim view of the work ethic of Queenslanders, for instance. (The apparent counter example of successful yet tropical Singapore is explained by its population being 80% Chinese, originally from more temperate latitudes.) Now largely discredited, this ‘equatorial effect’ is almost certainly a historical accident, in many cases a result of the distorting influence on development of European colonialism. A further explanation for this apparent phenomenon has been suggested by Jared Diamond, who argues that latitudinal development was facilitated by the easily navigable physical geography of the Eurasian landmass, along with that area’s disproportionate number of domesticable animals and crop species. 8 Unfortunately though, proximity to the equator has too often been interpreted as a climatic determinant of character, producing people who are happy to lie in the shade plucking fruit from trees without the effort of cultivating them. It is therefore natural and right, according to this prejudicial view, that the peoples of the northern latitudes have come to dominate the world economically and politically. 5. Communal Space All over the world in a multiplicity of environments humans live together in settlements of widely varying size and form, sharing the space and its resources
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__________________________________________________________________ according to the rules and traditions of the community. 9 So effectively and unconsciously are these customs internalised that over time they harden into attitudes appearing to the members of the community as universal common sense, rather than the often-arbitrary cultural constructions that they are. Within the culture such assumptions are widely understood and rarely challenged; it is when members come into contact with ‘outsiders’ holding different values that conflict is the almost inevitable result. One basic distinction in settlement patterns and their influence on attitudes to space is that made by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. Tönnies identified two general types of human association which he termed Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Often translated as ‘community,’ Gemeinschaft refers to an organic, essentially unplanned organisation such as a traditional village, toward which members are oriented, whereas Gesellschaft denotes a structured, purposive form of association that is maintained by individuals acting in self-interest; the term can mean ‘company’ in German, but is also used to describe the structure of civil society, in which explicit rules and control are seen to be necessary. Gemeinschaft agricultural villagers may feel an allegiance to extended family and locality far stronger than to civil society at large, but a new city or a planned community, on the other hand, may be much more of a Gesellschaft, in which people are linked not by shared values as much as self-interest: the need to make a living or feel secure. It has been suggested that the most common reason for communication in a Gesellschaft community is a perceived problem such as barking dogs or disputed parking. Garrett Hardin’s famous essay on the ‘tragedy of the commons’ can be read as an illustration of how Gesellschaft attitudes can destroy a Gemeinschaft entity. 10 Hardin argues that the ancient idea of public common land, to which each stockowner has equal grazing rights, will inevitably be compromised, since there will always be some who will graze more of their own animals on the land until the resource is depleted for all. Examples abound, from overfishing to the greed of bankers contributing to the ongoing financial crisis. In the absence of external regulation, rational self- (or national) interest prevails over considerations of responsibility to the larger whole. Cultural differences regarding communal space manifest themselves in disputes over boundaries between public and private, between individual rights and group responsibilities, between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Increasingly, the accepted solution seems to be the separation of communities by building security fences, physical or administrative. 6. Residential Space The house is, as Amos Rapoport notes, ‘an institution, not just a structure, created for a complex set of purposes.’ So normalised are our ideas of the house, however, that these purposes may be unconsciously taken to be fairly constant
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__________________________________________________________________ around the world, driven mainly by what are assumed to be basic human needs for shelter, security, and comfort. As Rapoport concludes, though, ‘what finally decides the form of a dwelling, and moulds the spaces and their relationships, is the vision that people have of the ideal life.’ 11 That is, notwithstanding the importance of climatic conditions, availability of materials, level of technology and other physical determinants, the most salient factor in forming the concept of the house is that of cultural values. The four related themes of security, privacy, status, and aesthetics illustrate cultural differences. Security is conceived of as protection from the elements and from intrusion, but the levels to which such protection is taken varies considerably. For many visitors to the U.S., the extent to which domestic environments are climatically controlled can be shockingly uncomfortable, and the desire to throw open a window overwhelming. E. T. Hall has memorably recounted how, in his discussions with Arab immigrants coming from Middle Eastern homes filled with air and light, their most common descriptor for U.S. houses was that they were ‘tomb-like.’ 12 Moreover, armed response warnings and gated communities, often protected by private security forces, can be disturbing to those from more hospitably open cultures. The idea of private space is expressed in many Western houses by each member of the family often having his or her own room, with obscure (to an outsider) rules about who is allowed where. This arrangement is almost perfectly reversed in Japan, where external privacy is high, houses often screened by walls or trees, but internal privacy is minimal, with spaces being used for multiple purposes by all members of the household. The house as a status symbol is prevalent in many developed countries, the ‘American Dream’ vision of a detached, suburban, owner-occupied house continuing to increase in floor area in inverse correlation to family size in the U.S. Aesthetics, in the sense of the look of houses, is not a significant factor in many parts of the world, where vernacular architecture produces dwellings that vary only slightly from a traditional, communally-accepted model changing only slowly over time. Notions of status, privacy, and territoriality, as well as, crucially, communication behaviours, are learned in the home, but are carried over into other spheres of life, and only by bringing such topics into open discussion can a shared perspective be attained and conflict avoided. 7. Personal Space All interactants in multicultural settings inevitably have to deal with a complex range of reactions with regard to personal space and its perceived infringement, a problem exacerbated by the frequent inability on the part of the persons affected to express exactly why they are feeling uncomfortable or tense. How far away should another person stand during a conversation? How close can a third person approach without intruding? How does one interact with another who is on the telephone? Do lowered voices in a conversation signify respect for others or furtiveness? Does
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__________________________________________________________________ poking one’s head around another’s office door to ask a question imply politeness or trespass? Under what circumstances is it appropriate to touch another person, or to maintain eye contact? How are all these situations affected by age, status, or gender of the participants? Our answers to such questions are so deeply ingrained that they often lie beneath the level of conscious thought, appearing to us as universal common sense, or human nature. Proxemics, according to Hall, who coined the term, refers to ‘the interrelated observations and theories of man’s use of space as a specialised elaboration of culture.’ 13 In this sense it is commonly listed as one of the most important culturally specific nonverbal communication codes or behaviours, along with others such as gesture, facial expression, dress, haptics, olfactics, and chronemics. Indeed, some of these other nonverbal signals are themselves dependent on proxemics; to be close enough to touch or smell another person, or to detect subtle changes of expression or posture, implies an interpersonal propinquity that is highly culturally regulated. Many northern Europeans experience excruciating discomfort, if not threat, in interactions with people from South American cultures, where tactile communication is a normal part of conversation. Hall described four zones of communication – the intimate, the personal, the social, and the public, although the sizes of these zones vary considerably with culture. 14 Many writers have used the image of a bubble to describe the limits of the space around an individual that is considered inviolably personal, noting that this bubble can extend to material features of the environment, where it is known as territoriality – my desk, my house, my parking space. Few aspects of people’s lives do not exhibit a proxemic dimension, and the emotional and behavioural consequences of perceived transgressions, from mild discomfort through violent conflict, may be no less severe for being largely below the level of awareness. 8. Conclusion I stated earlier that the above six frames are only arbitrarily divided, and nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in the cosmological and personal, which inextricably interpenetrate each other and also permeate the other four areas, imbuing the overall schema with a pleasing circularity. Concepts of a personal microcosm connected to a universal macrocosm are found in many cultures, from Chinese feng shui to Christian liturgy, and relationships to all aspects of the environment are ultimately embodied in an individual consciousness, whose perceptions and limitations are to a large extent influenced by cosmological factors. Debates over such varied issues as abortion, capital punishment, gay marriage, environmental protection, human rights, and justified torture all reflect differing core values about control and responsibility, not only with regard to our own bodies but also those of others. Any resolution of the problems engendered by cultural differences in perceptions of space requires a delicate balancing act between remaining true to
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__________________________________________________________________ one’s own fundamental values, and those of the culture to which one belongs, and demonstrating at least a willingness to engage constructively with the very different beliefs of others. Three concepts are essential to maintaining this balance. In the first place, curiosity about other ways of thinking and perceiving is required. Our reaction to what we think of as a violation of common sense, or ‘the right way’ of perceiving a situation, is all too likely to be visceral rather than intellectual; anger and distrust tend to trump inquiry and interest. Secondly, the interest we have in other cultures must be satisfied by accurate information rather than loose generalisations and stereotypes garnered, often, from popular media and not from considered judgment. Finally, the understanding obtained through curiosity and research can then inspire an informed respect for the myriad ways that human societies have developed to cope with the challenges of worldly existence, even when those ways seem initially unfathomable. Cultural differences in space perception can be subtle or obvious, yet all can lead to serious conflict situations ranging from the interpersonal to international. Given a sufficient measure of awareness and goodwill however, an exploration of these differences by means of open, multi-voiced dialogue can bring about an enjoyably augmented understanding of ourselves as well as an enhanced appreciation of the rich and varied cultural worlds around us.
Notes 1
A discussion of this paradigm shift can be found in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 2 The process of desacralisation is described by Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (London: Century, 1990). 3 Mark Monmonier, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4 For a discussion of the political aspects of cartography, see Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Also, Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 5 The ‘carpentered world’ hypothesis posits that the nature of the built environment influences an inhabitant’s susceptibility to certain optical illusions. A concise summary can be found in Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2008). 6 Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961).
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Most closely associated in modern times with Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1915). 8 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1997). 9 Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1974). 10 Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162 (1968): 1243-1248. 11 Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969). 12 Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1966). 13 Ibid. 14 Most perceived violations probably occur at the boundary of the intimate and the personal zones. See Stella Ting-Toomey, Communicating across Cultures (New York, NY: Guilford, 1999).
Bibliography Black, Jeremy. Maps and Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1997. Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne H. Ehrlich. The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2008. Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1966. Hardin, Garrett. ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248. Harley, J. B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Huntington, Ellsworth. Civilization and Climate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1915. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
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__________________________________________________________________ Monmonier, Mark. From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Rapoport, Amos. House Form and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969. Sheldrake, Rupert. The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God. London: Century, 1990. Ting-Toomey, Stella. Communicating across Cultures. New York, NY: Guilford, 1999. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1974. Turnbull, Colin M. The Forest People. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961. Richard Harris is Professor of Intercultural Management at Chukyo University, Japan, where he has lived for the past 33 years. His current research interests include concepts of the ideal across cultures, and the ways in which cultural values are expressed in myths and folk tales.
Non-Government Communications and Conflict Management: The Experience of Iraqi Arab Tribes Ahmed Hassin Abstract Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, this country has witnessed an unprecedented sectarian atmosphere. The newly installed political system by the US has institutionalised the ethno-sectarian nature of the political ‘democratic’ scene and the influx of al-Qaida and other militia was exacerbating the violent context. The post-invasion formed State apparatus has been crippled and not been capable of taking control, enforcing law, restoring order and establishing sustainable reconciliation. Within this context, tribes have emerged as a powerful disciplinary social structure that is capable of conflict management and national reconciliation. Based on empirical data collected from Iraq, this chapter discusses the roles of Iraqi tribes in peaceful reconciliation processes. It further engages with the tribal discourses and communication methods used in this process to contribute to bringing stability to the country. Tribes have applied different modes of communications and methods of conflict management at the individual, communal and national level. Key Words: Iraq, violence, tribes, communications, reconciliation, conflict management, disciplinary power. ***** 1. Introduction Studies about tribes in post-2003-war Iraq have either focused on tribes’ paramilitary roles of the so-called ‘Awakening Councils’ in supporting counterterrorism efforts; tribe interventions as ‘state-like entities’ in international politics; or, the role of tribal laws in individual and communal reconciliation. However, the extent to which these social institutions have contributed to conflict management and curbing the civil war Iraq was about to slip in is still a relatively unexplored topic in the literature. The roles of tribes in Iraq are historically known to be more in mitigation and conciliation in cases of blood feuds and similar social problems like offenses, quarrels and disputes over land, water and other economic issues. Nonetheless, the tribal practices in conflict management are not extended in knowledge to understand the power tribes exercise in reconciliation. This chapter engages with tribal involvement in conflict management practices since 2003 and seeks to explain the role of this social structure in conflict management. In the outset, it sheds light on the Iraqi context since 2003 and moves to discussing the theoretical framework. By embarking on the Foucauldian concepts of disciplinary power and discourse/power relation, the chapter explores the tribal communication
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__________________________________________________________________ patterns and practices applied in reconciliation as well as disciplining tribal members. It then explores how tribes’ reconciliations on communal levels have contributed to national reconciliation. The findings are drawn from primary data collected by the author in late 2012 from various Iraqi urban and rural areas. 2. A Snapshot on Post-War Iraq Many policies implemented by the occupying forces since 2003 in Iraq were ethno-sectarian based which contributed to damaging Iraq’s social fabric and posed serious threats to Iraqi national unity. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that ruled post-war Iraq disbanded many state institutions including the army and security forces. 1 The first Iraqi constitution since 1924 was introduced to the Iraqi people and promoted by the US-led Coalition to be the first permanent constitution that has institutionalised ethno-sectarian divisions. Moreover, the first Iraqi Governing Council and the first interim government appointed by the US were built upon ethnic and sectarian backgrounds. Simultaneously, home-grown and Iran-supported exile militia were emerging and fuelling unprecedented sectarian tensions. al-Qaida in Mesopotamia have emerged not only in a resurgence to the Coalition invasion of Iraq but also to declare ‘all-out war on Iraqi Shi’ites.’ 2 The bombing of the revered golden shrine in Samarra in February 2006, which was linked to al-Qaida, became the climax of tensions when reprisal killings and destruction of Sunni mosques broke out in Baghdad’s streets. 3 The outcome was hundreds of thousands killed and injured, more than five million internally displaced, refugees, widows, orphans and brain drainage. 4 Within this context, many citizens found that a ‘tribe’s role is essentially instrumental and pragmatic’ to provide Solutions. 5 3. Theoretical Background Conflict management encompasses the processes of prevention, reconciliation and resolution by applying context-specific methods. They are often seen as comprehensive procedures which are employed to bridge any social gaps and divides; to reconstruct the social tolerance and trust; to exercise dialogical and peaceful settlements of disputes; and transformation from conflict settings to peace-building via communicative channels of mitigation and negotiations at the state, communal or group level. 6 There are various ecological factors that trigger or moderate violence at various communal and societal levels. 7 State institutions, media, economic organisations, political parties and democratic institutions, religious and ethnic community leaders and family are all found to be key players in conflict instigation or management in different communication approaches. It is argued that exclusive governmental management of conflicts cannot be achieved without the engagement and active involvement of non-governmental communicative structures in the process of reaching sustainable peace building. 8 Therefore, a significant degree of
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__________________________________________________________________ communication within the society in an internal conflict setting is vital for achieving social integration and transforming the society to nation building. 9 Thus ‘informal cultural codes of communication may facilitate cross-communal social interaction’ to ‘silencing difference and division.’ 10 Meanwhile, modes of communications are determining factors in conflict resolution and social networking is best described as being transformative and interactive. Foucault’s notion of the relations between discourse, power and discipline is a pivotal theoretical platform to discuss violence and conflict management. Foucault referred to the term ‘communication’ in its broad sense of being ‘the common activities of individuals.’ 11 According to him, disciplinary power exercised through the media of social relations and communications exist in social structures while ‘previously, disciplinary power was defined in opposition to all non-material forms of power, such as communication, language, symbolism.’ 12 He conceptualised power as a process of ‘a certain type of relations between individuals.’ 13 Foucault discussed the punitive systems outside the state apparatus and argued for the expansion of disciplinary power to other social institutions in a different regime of power exercise. For him, ‘discipline is a set of strategies, procedures and ways of behaving which are associated with certain institutional contexts and which then permeate ways of thinking and behaving.’ 14 McNay notes that particular space, internal regulations and hierarchical relations are determinant factors in how communications can make an impact on members of that institution or community. 15 In instances of internal violence, conflict resolution sometimes requires a third party interaction as a mediator among the disputant parties in order to reach a certain agreement that both parties would accept and adhere to. Conflict management by third party can take various forms of bringing the two disputant parties together: mediating; fact-finding; conciliation; and arbitration. 16 Within this process, bargaining can reach resolutions through monetary payments or other inkind benefits that may be paid by each party to the other or by the intermediary. 17 However, in order to reach a peaceful resolution, a common ground of trust, will and reciprocal exchange of concessions from both parties should be associated with a certain level of power for the negotiators and the intermediaries. 18 Any inter-group conflict has an emotional dimension. If emotional dimensions are ignored, conflict management cannot be claimed to be successful and the existing resentment may trigger the conflict again. 19 Therefore, upon involvement in any conflict management and negotiation process, Shapiro and Fisher stress the importance of paying attention to appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status and role. Although tribe is used by Shapiro in his Relational Identity Theory in a broad sense as a symbol of ‘groups whose members are connected through kind, kin, and emotional investment’ 20 the actual qualities of tribes of loyalty and collective identity qualify this informal institution to play effective roles in conflict
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__________________________________________________________________ management. Traditionally, Iraqi tribes intervene to resolve disputes among people on the basis of unwritten tribal laws drawn from their socio-cultural mores. Tribal laws provide ‘a system for maintaining the community social contract in contrast to the administration of individual punishment through third-party adjudication, as in the Western legal tradition.’ 21 Loyalty to the tribe in most Arab countries is a very traditional practice, ‘in many areas of Iraq, the tribe and the extended family are the foundation of society, and they represent a sort of alternative to the government.’ 22 4. Iraqi Tribes and Conflict Management The findings of this chapter are based on primary data collected in Iraq from tribal members and leaders using surveys and interviews. 29 participants completed survey questionnaires and were interviewed in rural and urban areas in three Iraqi governorates. The interviewees provided their insights of the exacerbation of problems since the war in 2003. Civil unrest and ethnic and sectarian disorder are among commonly noted categories. Absence of nationalist state institutions, weak legal apparatus and the existence of unjust state institutions have all contributed to deepening these social issues. Consequently, the problems were building up to a disastrous situation which turned the people back to their tribes. When asked about the specialisation of tribes, 86 per cent of the participants in the survey perceive their prime specialisation to be ‘Reconciliation and Conflict Management.’ There is a very close relation between how participants perceive tribe specialisation as institutions and the actual roles played by tribes. 100 per cent of the cohort agreed that Conflict Management is the main actual activity undertaken by the tribes since 2003 to contribute to solving issues. Inter-tribal and intra-tribal offenses and disputes have increased massively and tribal responses to those issues have massively increased too. The weak legal system has pushed people to seek alternative legitimate and binding socio-legal apparatuses that can provide solutions. Foucault’s notion of the legitimate ‘biopower’ is crucial for discussing tribes as a disciplinary and regulatory power. 23 On the one hand, tribes continued their traditional activities in mitigation and reconciliation through the culturally accepted tribal laws. On the other hand, however, they have extended their social power beyond by exercising a greater role in disciplining their communities. The Foucauldian disciplinary power paradigms are situated ‘within a society through the use of a range of different mechanisms and techniques.’ 24 Data show that tribal leaders took two directions for disciplining tribal members. One is educating their members on reconciliation, tolerance and neglecting any calls for sectarianism. The preferable mode of communication between the institution and its members and stakeholders is personal contact. Telephone and face-to-face are the most frequent methods of communication; with face-to-face as the primary
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__________________________________________________________________ method for reconciliation. In addition to the primacy of personal contact communications demonstrated by survey data, about 20 per cent of the responses stated that geographic liaising tribal leaders; and 10 per cent of responses added Social Events such as weddings, mourning gatherings and reconciliation sessions as other means of communications. The venue and environment within which such conciliation sessions normally take place, is also a symbolic and procedural communicative factor for tribal members in reconciliation. Mudheef is the reception hall of the head of the tribe and is usually where reconciliation takes place. Its Arabic root is dhiayafa, which means hospitality; and, mudheef literally means the place where hospitality is extended. It is of a high symbolic significance when two of the interviewed sheikhs speak about resolving problems in their mudheef: In our mudheef, we have conducted many meetings and gatherings with other tribal leaders to solve problems of people. We have also solved many disputes with other tribal members at our mudheef with the presence of tribal leaders from other parties of disputes. 25 The other tribal disciplining direction is strict measures brought against any tribal member involved in terrorist acts or intentional killings of individual citizens. An example of those measures is what a head of tribe in Baghdad has explained: We do not get involved in cases of terrorism as the tribe does not contribute to solving such problems. Terrorism has become just like adultery and theft in the tribal traditions. The terrorist has no intercession among the tribes. He himself is liable for the blood. 26 Furthermore, the tribal law has been adapted by tribes in Salah al-Din Governorate to establish what is called thaiya. It is a tribal criminal law consensually agreed upon by all the 42 tribal leaders in the governorate who form the Salah al-Din Council of Tribe Sheikhs. This law is driven by traditional tribal mores and seeks contributing to enforcement of existing state laws. According to this criminal penal law, every aggression and incident has a certain penalty, which should be paid by the offender to the victim. All these laws are written in a document that is disseminated across the Salah al-Din governorate tribal sheikhs who can use it for dispute resolutions. The tribal verdicts are binding for all parties involved as it is reached with the agreement of both parties involved in the dispute or conflict. There are harsh penalties for the violator of the agreement and his sheikh is bound to sustain the resolution. They are enforced by the tribal mores due to strong tribal commitment
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__________________________________________________________________ and severe punishments. Tribal punishments can vary from payment of money in ransoms called diyah to the banishment of the aggressor about 80 kilometres outside his or her hometown, which is called tadieer. The aggressor is even declared an undesirable person among his tribe. The disciplinary power tribes exercise is not exclusively attributed to the weakness of the state legal system as other socio-cultural factors are significant too. Discipline is viewed by Foucault as the individual’s concern with self-control of emotional and postural behaviour that is subjected to external procedures that put disciplinary pressures which effect the discipline of individuals. 27 Tribal members believe that tribes ensure rights. A tribal member affirms: The tribe exists to make justice and stand by the poor and support him over the unjust and return the right to the poor. It holds its faulty members for account; it returns the rights of its members from other outsiders; and, gives the right back where it belongs to. 28 Moreover, the emotional side that Shapiro referred to is never ignored by tribes in reconciliation. The tribal reconciliation process is amicable and peaceful and can bring a sustainable resolution acceptable to both parties. One sheikh notes, ‘we try all means to resolve the disputes peacefully. After the two parties were foes, they become friends and brothers thanks to our reconciliation.’ 29 They mitigate between both parties to reach an agreeable win-win resolution. Conflicts are usually managed by peer sheikhs of the tribes of both disputants with the presence of heads of other tribes as mediators. The level of participant sheikhs is very carefully paid attention to so as to ensure successful resolution through this emotional dimension by appreciation of affiliation, status and role of those sheikhs. The social nature of these institutions assists them in expanding their activities beyond their vicinity to inter-governorate reconciliation. Data show that tribes played a role in bringing peace, stability and reconciliation at a national level in the post-war context. 70 per cent of the participant sheikhs mentioned their tribal roles in national reconciliation. The social relations that tie the tribes and the sense of solidarity are a prominent drive to intervene as described by an interviewee: Tribes have existed before the heavenly message and are a natural continuation of the social fabric in the Iraqi society. From south to north, all the Iraqi society is a tribal society composed of tribes which have the elements of intra-tribal communications, fraternity and marriage. The heads of all tribes have relationships with their counterparts. The main concern of all tribal leaders was containing the sectarian crisis and restoring Iraq and returning it to the first square of fraternity and solidarity. 30
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__________________________________________________________________ The other impetus behind this is their philosophy of non-sectarianism, as the vast majority of the Iraqi tribes have no pure sect that can be referred to. This philosophy is exhibited through tribal leader discourses and their consequent actions. Foucault’s nexus of discourse/power is invoked as the exercise of power is based upon the legitimacy and capability of institutions to manage conflicts. 31 A tribe’s capability of reconciliation on individual and communal levels is demonstrated earlier; and their legitimacy is derived from the individual, social and the state recognition of their roles in reconciliation. Their activities at the national level have varied from direct intervention in reconciliation, to strengthening their social relations by applying certain social communication patterns. In terms of direct intervention, heads of tribes have expanded their long experience of reconciliation to pacify sectarian tensions by fasel among tribes that have their members killed for sectarian reasons. The fasel process has emerged since 2003 as a successful conflict management strategy that can bring sustainable and peaceful resolution to major, as well as, minor conflicts or disputes. Another measure is maintaining communications through the tribal networks all over Iraq. Tribal leaders have utilised their social events including weddings, mourning, and even fasel to meet each other and strengthen their relations. The non-sectarian discourse of tribal leaders has empowered them to engender powerful social networks for reconciliation that are recognised by the state. Tribes have also followed the trend of holding and hosting big gatherings for their peer tribal leaders from across Iraq to show solidarity regardless of the sect or ethnicity. Two examples were given by two heads of tribes; one from Kerbela and one from Salah Ed Din. They were both proud of holding a national reconciliation symposium in his mudheef that was attended by thousands of tribal leaders, officials and national figures from all over Iraq from all the Iraqi strata from the north to the south. All these factors and processes of communication exercised by tribes have provided them with the ability to manage conflicts through practicing the disciplinary power and discourse in mitigation. 5. Conclusion Since 2003, tribes have played crucial roles in conflict management in post-war Iraq. Their social networks and disciplinary power have provided them with effective tools to exercise successful reconciliation and conflict resolution of individual, intra-tribal and inter-tribal disputes and conflicts through tribal laws. Practicing punitive power, their personal modes of amicable and considerate social communications and their non-sectarian discourse have empowered them to contribute to the national reconciliation and prevention of a massive civil war.
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Notes 1
Adeed Dawisha, ‘Iraq: Setbacks, Advances, Prospects’, Journal of Democracy 15, No. 1 (2004): 5-20; Zalmay Khalilzad, Scott Worden and Adeed Dawisha, ‘Afghanistan & Iraq: Taking Stock’, Journal of Democracy 21, No. 3 (2010): 4149; Walid Zoubaydi, ‘Iraq: The Trouble and Solution’, Almustaqbal Alarabi (The Arab Future) 386 April (2011). 2 Safa R. al-Sheikh and Emma Sky, ‘Iraq Since 2003: Perspectives on a Divided Society’, Survival 53, No. 4 (2011): 123. 3 Ibid. 4 Anthony H. Cordesman, Iraq’s Fracture Lines: Recidivism or Reassertion (Washington, DC: CSIS 2009); Victoria Mason, ‘The Im/Mobilities of Iraqi Refugees in Jordan: Pan-Arabism, “Hospitality” and the Figure of the “Refugee”’, Mobilities 6, No. 3 (2011): 353-373; Melinda J. Morton and Gilbert M. Burnham, ‘Iraq’s Internally Displaced Persons’, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 300, No. 6 (2008): 727-729. 5 Hayder Al-Mohammad, ‘Relying on One’s Tribe: A Snippet of Life in Basra Since the 2003 Invasion’, Anthropology Today 26, No. 6 (2010): 23. 6 Eileen Babbitt and Fen Osler Hampson, ‘Conflict Resolution as a Field of Inquiry: Practice Informing Theory’, International Studies Review 13, No. 1 (2011): 46-57; Anders H. Stefansson, ‘Coffee After Cleansing? Co-Existence, CoOperation, and Communication in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Focaal Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 57 (2010): 62-76. 7 Monique LeBlanc, et al., ‘Buffering the Effects of Violence: Communication and Problem-Solving Skills as Protective Factors for Adolescents Exposed to Violence’, Journal of Community Psychology 39, No. 33 (2011): 353-367. 8 Daniel Wehrenfennig, ‘From an Analog Past to a Digital Future: Information and Communication Technology in Conflict Management’, in Conference Papers: International Studies Association (2009): 1-47. 9 Jochen Hippler, ‘Concepts and Theoretical Aspects of Nation-Building’, NationBuilding a Key Aspect for Peaceful Conflict Transformation, Development and Peace Foundation, ed. Jochen Hippler (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 3-14. 10 Anders H. Stefansson, ‘Coffee after Cleansing? Co-Existence, Co-Operation, and Communication in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Focaal Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 57 (2010): 72. 11 Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984 (New York: Routledge, 1979): 58-95. 12 Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994): 124. 13 Kritzman, Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984. 14 Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (London: Routledge, 2004), 44. 15 McNay, Foucault.
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Sara M. Mitchell, Kelly M. Kadera and Mark Crescenzi, ‘Practicing Democratic Community Norms: Third Party Conflict Management and Successful Settlements’, Paper presented at the American Political Science Association 2003 Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, 27 August 2003. 17 Babbitt and Hampson, ‘Conflict Resolution as a Field of Inquiry’. 18 Ibid. 19 Daniel L. Shapiro, ‘Relational Identity Theory: A Systematic Approach for Transforming the Emotional Dimension of Conflict’, American Psychologist 65, No. 7 (2010): 634-645. 20 Shapiro, ‘Relational Identity Theory’, 643. 21 Jason E. Strakes, ‘Arab and Non-Arab Tribes as State-Like Entities: Informal Alliances and Conflict Patterns in the Historic and Contemporary Middle East’, Journal of the Middle East & Africa 2, No. 2 (2011): 247. 22 Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., ‘How to Win in Iraq’, Foreign Affairs (2005): 87104. 23 Joseph Rouse, ‘Power/Knowledge’, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 92-114. 24 Mills, Michel Foucault. 25 Thair Al-Karkushi, interview by the author, Kerbela, Iraq, 12 October 2012. 26 Arkan Al-Garha, interview by the author, Baghdad, Iraq, 2 October 2012. 27 Mills, Michel Foucault. 28 Saif Abbas Al-Nuaimi, interview by the author, Baghdad, Iraq, 3 October 2012. 29 Arkan Al-Garha, interview by the author, Baghdad, Iraq, 2 October 2012. 30 Interview with a tribal leader from Al-Shwelat Tribe, Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq, 10 October 2012. 31 Rouse, ‘Power/Knowledge’.
Bibliography Al-Garha, Arkan. Interview by the author. Baghdad, Iraq, 2 October 2012. Al-Karkushi, Thair. Interview by the author. Kerbela, Iraq, 12 October 2012. Al-Mohammad, Hayder. ‘Relying on One’s Tribe: A Snippet of Life in Basra Since the 2003 Invasion’. Anthropology Today 26, No. 6 (2010): 23–26. Al-Nuaimi, Saif Abbas. Interview by the author. Baghdad, Iraq, 3 October 2012. Al-Salman/Dulaim Tribe, Head of. Interview by the author. Salah al-Din, Iraq, 20 November 2012.
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__________________________________________________________________ Al-Sheikh, Safa R., and Emma Sky. ‘Iraq Since 2003: Perspectives on a Divided Society’. Survival 53, No. 4 (2011): 119–142. Interview with a tribal leader from Al-Shwelat Tribe. Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq, 10 October 2012. Babbitt, Eileen, and Fen Osler Hampson. ‘Conflict Resolution as a Field of Inquiry: Practice Informing Theory’. International Studies Review 13, No. 1 (2011): 46–57. Carroll, Katherine B. ‘Tribal Law and Reconciliation in the New Iraq’. Middle East Journal 65, No. 1 (2011): 11–29. Cordesman, Anthony H. ‘Iraq’s Fracture Lines: Recidivism or Reassertion’. Center for Strategic and International Studies. Washington, DC, 3 August 2009. Accessed 15 January 2012. http://www.csis.org/burke/reports. Dawisha, Adeed. ‘Iraq: Setbacks, Advances, Prospects’. Journal of Democracy 15, No. 1 (2004): 5–20. Diamond, Larry. ‘Lessons from Iraq’. Journal of Democracy 16, No. 1 (2005): 9– 23. Dobbins, James, Seth G. Jones, Keith Crane, Andrew Rathmell, Brett Steele, Richard Teltschik, and Anga R. Timilsina. The UN’s Role in Nation-Building: From the Congo to Iraq. California: Rand Corporation, 2005. Eisenstadt, Michael. ‘Tribal Engagement Lessons Learnt’. Military Review (2008): 161–176. Foucault, Michel. ‘On Power’. In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1979. —––. ‘Politics and Reason’. In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1979.
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__________________________________________________________________ Hippler, Jochen. ‘Concepts and Theoretical Aspects of Nation-Building’. In Nation-Building: A Key Aspect for Peaceful Conflict Transformation, Development and Peace Foundation, edited by Jochen Hippler, 3–14. London: Pluto Press, 2005. Khalilzad, Zalmay, Scott Worden, and Adeed Dawisha, ‘Afghanistan & Iraq: Taking Stock’. Journal of Democracy 21, No. 3 (2010): 41–49. Krepinevich Jr, Andrew F. ‘How to Win in Iraq’. Foreign Affairs (2005): 87–104. LeBlanc, Monique, Shannon Self-Brown, Desti Shepard, and Mary Lou Kelley. ‘Buffering the Effects of Violence: Communication and Problem-Solving Skills as Protective Factors for Adolescents Exposed to Violence’. Journal of Community Psychology 39, No. 33 (2011): 353–367. McNay, Lois. Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Mason, Victoria. ‘The Im/mobilities of Iraqi Refugees in Jordan: Pan-Arabism, “Hospitality” and the Figure of the “Refugee”’. Mobilities 6, No. 3 (2011): 353– 373. Melton, James. ‘The Recurrence of Ethnic Conflict: Are Democratic Institutions to Blame?’ Paper presented to Midwestern Political Science Association. Annual Meeting, Chicago, 2006. Mills, Sara. Michel Foucault. London: Routledge, 2004. Mitchell, Sara M., Kelly M. Kadera, and Mark Crescenzi. ‘Practicing Democratic Community Norms: Third Party Conflict Management and Successful Settlements’. In American Political Science Association 2003 Annual Meeting, Philadelphia (2003): 1–35. Morton, Melinda J., and Gilbert M. Burnham. ‘Iraq’s Internally Displaced Persons’. The Journal of the American Medical Association 300, No. 6 (2008): 727–729. Presbey, Gail M. ‘Challenges of Founding a New Government in Iraq’. Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory 12, No. 4 (2005): 521–541.
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__________________________________________________________________ Rouse, Joseph. ‘Power/Knowledge’. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting, 92–114. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Shapiro, Daniel L. ‘Relational Identity Theory: A Systematic Approach for Transforming the Emotional Dimension of Conflict’. American Psychologist 65, No. 7 (2010): 634–645. Smart, Barry. Michel Foucault. London: Routledge, 2002. Stanski, Victoria. ‘Linchpin for Democracy: The Critical Role of Civil Society in Iraq’. Journal of Third World Studies 22, No. 2 (2005): 197–225. Stefansson, Anders H. ‘Coffee After Cleansing? Co-Existence, Co-Operation, and Communication in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina’. Focaal Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 57 (2010): 62–76. Strakes, Jason E. ‘Arab and Non-Arab Tribes as State-Like Entities: Informal Alliances and Conflict Patterns in the Historic and Contemporary Middle East’. Journal of the Middle East & Africa 2, No. 2 (2011): 235–253. Taylor, Maureen, and Theo Dolan. Mitigating Media Incitement to Violence in Iraq. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2013. Unknown. ‘Dealing with the Emotional Aspect of Conflict’. Harvard Mental Health Letter 25, No. 5 (2008): 4–5. Wehrenfennig, Daniel. ‘From an Analog Past to a Digital Future: Information and Communication Technology in Conflict Management’. Paper presented to International Studies Association, Annual Meeting (2009). Wilson III, Isiah. ‘Tribes, The State, and (Postmodern) War: Bringing Containment Back In’. Conference Papers, American Political Science Association (2006): 1– 30. Young, Douglas W. ‘Nonviolent Alternatives Among the ENGA of the Papua New Guinea Highlands’. Social Alternatives 16, No. 2 (1997): 42–45. Zoubaydi, Walid. ‘Iraq: The Trouble and Solution’. Almustaqbal Alarabi (The Arab Future) 386 (April 2011): 58–76.
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__________________________________________________________________ Ahmed Hassin is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia. His PhD thesis explores the roles played by Iraqi civil society in post-conflict nation building since 2003. The thesis discusses both formal and informal forms of civil society organisation in socio-economic service provision and active citizenship.
Using Logic to Communicate about Conflicting Interests among Parties Frieder Lempp Abstract Conflicts can be understood as inconsistent sets of goals, values, beliefs, emotions, or the like. Conflict resolution, then, becomes a process of identifying the inconsistencies that constitute a conflict and transforming them. It is the task of conflict resolution practitioners to facilitate a process which encourages parties to transform their goals, beliefs, values, and emotions into a consistent set that is more or less acceptable to all parties. In the first part of this chapter, I present a model, based on propositional logic, which can help to identify the relationships between conflicting parties’ interests. In particular, it can be used to determine whether two interests are inconsistent with each other. Underlying this model is the assumption that interests can be reconstructed as propositional attitudes, i.e. relational mental states that connect an individual to a proposition. In the second part, I show how the model can be used to generate possible solutions to a conflict. Different solution algorithms can generate different types of solutions, such as compromise solutions, minimally invasive solutions, or solutions that are compatible with certain predefined norms. The generated solutions can serve as a source of inspiration for resolving a conflict and can be proposed to the parties for discussion. The propositional model is simpler than game-theoretic models of conflict and requires a lower level of quantification as it is not based on numerical utility functions. Due to its simplicity, the model can be used within an integrative negotiation or mediation process to engage parties in a dialogue about their conflicting interests and preferred principles of conflict resolution. Key Words: Conflict analysis, conflict resolution, modelling, propositional logic, propositional attitudes, interest-based negotiation. ***** 1. Logic and Conflict At first glance, conflicts and logic do not seem to have much in common. On the contrary, conflicts are frequently characterised by strong emotions and a lack of logic. In this chapter it is argued that, despite the commonly perceived opposition between conflict and logic, logic can be used effectively to facilitate a conversation among conflicting parties, which enables them to develop an understanding for their mutual goals, beliefs, values and emotions. A logic-based approach to conflict resolution has previously been proposed by British computer scientist R. Kowalski. 1 My approach differs from Kowalski’s model in that it is not based on production-systems and BDI logics, but rather on propositional logic and C.
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__________________________________________________________________ Alchourrón, P. Gärdenfors and D. Makinson’s theory of belief revision. 2 My approach also uses ideas from W. Lauterbach and C. Newman’s model of computerised intrapersonal conflict assessment. 3 From a logical point of view, conflicts can be regarded as inconsistent sets of interests. This view is nicely summarised by M. Nicholson: A conflict exists when two people wish to carry out acts which are mutually inconsistent. […] A conflict is resolved when some mutually compatible set of actions is worked out. 4 While logicians are, amongst other things, concerned with the consistency of propositional statements, conflict scholars analyse the compatibility of parties’ interests, such as their goals, beliefs, values and emotion. Logicians call propositions inconsistent if they cannot be true simultaneously. Conflict scholars describe interests as incompatible if they cannot be satisfied at the same time. Hence, if interests are expressed as propositions, logic can be used to analyse their compatibility relationships. The value of using logic to determine whether two interests are compatible has been noted by O. J. Bartos and P. Wehr: It is often difficult to determine reliably whether goals are in fact incompatible. Two approaches are quite helpful. The first approach is something that probably occurs to you first: you ask whether it is logically impossible for both parties’ goals to be achieved simultaneously. 5 Logic can also help generate possible solutions to a conflict in that it allows a systematic description of all (logically) possible situations regarding the satisfaction of parties’ interests. Each such situation constitutes a possible solution to a conflict and can be evaluated regarding the extent to which it satisfies the parties’ interests. Specific types of solutions, such as compromise solutions or minimally invasive solutions, can be generated by simple search algorithms and can be proposed to the parties as a possible solution to their conflict. Of course, a logical analysis of conflict has its limits. My intention is not to argue that such an analysis should replace other forms of conflict analysis. Rather, it provides scholars and practitioners with an additional, analytical framework to clarify the relationships between parties’ interests and to generate solutions that can serve as a source of inspiration for resolving a conflict. In the chapter, I outline a logic-based model of conflict analysis and resolution by means of four ‘conversations’ which, successively, introduce the key concepts of the model and illustrate how it operates in practice. The sequence of the four conversations is loosely based on R. Fisher and W. Ury’s principled approach to
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__________________________________________________________________ negotiation. 6 A comprehensive description of the model including all technical details can be found in my doctoral thesis. 7 2. A Conversation about Issues The first conversation concerns the issues the conflict is about. The guiding question for this conversation is: What are the parties arguing about? For example, when looking at the conflict between the al-Assad government and the Syrian opposition, one could identify al-Assad’s status as the President of Syria, the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising, and the dismantling of the Syrian security services as key issues. 8 To make issues accessible to a logical analysis, they need to be expressed as basic propositions. These are statements for which it makes sense to ask whether they are true or false and which cannot be broken down into more basic propositions. 9 Typically, basic propositions are expressed by simple declarative sentences. For example, the issue of whether al-Assad is the President of Syria can be expressed by the basic proposition ‘al-Assad is the President of Syria.’ This proposition is either true (i.e. al-Assad is the President of Syria) or it is false (i.e. he is not). It is basic, as it cannot be broken down into more basic propositions. The proposition ‘Syria is a recognised, independent state’ is not basic. It can be broken down into the two propositions ‘Syria is recognised’ and ‘Syria is independent.’ For a given conflict, one can identify all issues and express them as basic propositions. Thus, each issue can be treated as a bivalent variable ij taking the value ‘true’ if the proposition expressing the issue is true and ‘false’ if the proposition is false. The set of all issues can be stated as I = {i1, i2, …in}, where each ij ∈ I represents a basic proposition expressing one issue. Which issues are considered relevant to a conflict depends on the context in which the analysis is carried out. Issues can either be identified by the parties themselves (e.g. during a negotiation) or by an independent person, such as a researcher. 3. A Conversation about Interests The second conversation relates to the parties’ interests regarding the issues, such as their goals, beliefs, values and emotions. Key questions to guide this conversation include: What do the parties want to achieve? What is their view of the conflict? What do they think should happen? How do they feel about the issues? Having described the issues as basic propositions, we can express the parties’ interests as propositional attitudes. 10 These are attitudes a person or social entity holds towards a proposition. For example, a party may want that a certain proposition is true (goal), believe that a proposition is true (belief), hold that a proposition should be true (value), or experience an emotional reaction towards a proposition (emotion). Attitudes are a central concept in social psychology. 11 Theories describing the relationship between, and dynamics of, attitudes include F. Heiders balance theory 12 and L. Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. 13
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__________________________________________________________________ In the conflict in Syria, we can express al-Assad’s goal to remain the President of Syria as a propositional attitude held by al-Assad towards the proposition ‘alAssad is the President of Syria’ (i.e. al-Assad wants this proposition to be true). While the Syrian opposition does not want al-Assad to be the President of Syria, they are likely to hold the belief that al-Assad is the President of Syria (i.e. they believe that the proposition ‘al-Assad is the President of Syria’ is true). Values are attitudes where a party believes that an issue should be true on the basis of moral, legal, religious, political, or other reasons. For instance, the Syrian opposition may believe that the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising should be prosecuted (i.e. they believe that the proposition ‘the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising are prosecuted’ should be true). Values differ from goals in the way they are justified. While goals are justified on the basis of parties’ real or perceived needs, values bear on more universal justification patterns such as legal norms, moral principles, religions, etc. Finally, parties can experience emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear, happiness, hope, towards an issue. For example, the al-Assad government may be afraid of the prospect of the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising being prosecuted (i.e. the alAssad government experiences an emotion towards the proposition ‘the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising are prosecuted’). Emotions are often directional (positive/negative), more immediate and less controlled than goals, beliefs and values. The view of emotions as certain types of propositional attitudes is linked to the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion. 14 Parties hold attitudes not only towards basic propositions, but also towards complex propositions that are composed of basic propositions. For example, a party may want that either one of two basic propositions is true, in which case the party holds an attitude (goal) towards the disjunction of two basic propositions. The words used to connect basic propositions to form complex propositions are called connectives. The main connectives are negations (‘not’), conjunctions (‘and’), disjunctions (‘or) and conditionals (‘if …, then …’) which are typically abbreviated by the symbols ∧, ∨, →, ¬, respectively. For example, if al-Assad indicated his willingness to step down as the President of Syria under the condition that the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising are given amnesty and the Syrian security services are not dismantled, this goal can be expressed as an attitude held by al-Assad towards the complex proposition ¬i1 → (¬i2 ∧ ¬i3), where i1 stands for ‘al-Assad is the President of Syria,’ i2 for ‘the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising are prosecuted,’ and i3 for ‘the Syrian security services are dismantled.’ 4. A Conversation about Possible Situations Having expressed the parties’ interests as propositional attitudes, the next step is to identify situations in which these interests are satisfied. Generally, a propositional attitude is satisfied if the proposition, towards which the attitude is held, is true. For example, al-Assad’s goal of remaining the President of Syria can be considered satisfied, if the proposition ‘al-Assad is the President of Syria’ is
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__________________________________________________________________ true. Basic propositions are directly true or false themselves. To determine the truth/falsity of a complex proposition, one needs to look at the truth/falsity of the basic propositions and the connectives it is composed of. Each connective has a corresponding rule to determine the truth or falsity of any complex proposition built by that connective. For instance, according to the conjunction rule, a conjunction (‘and’) is only true if both of its constituting propositions are true. The range of all (logically) possible situations relevant to a specific conflict is determined by the set of issues I = {i1, i2, …in}. As discussed earlier, each issue can either be true or false. Hence, one can think of a possible situation as a state of the world which specifies for each issue whether it is true or false. To illustrate this idea, we can look at a simple conflict which is only about one issue i1 representing the basic proposition ‘al-Assad is the President of Syria.’ Logically, there are only two possible situations regarding this issue: s1, in which al-Assad is the President of Syria, and s2, in which he is not. Clearly, in s1, al-Assad’s goal of remaining the President of Syria is satisfied, whereas in s2 it is not. In a conflict with two issues, i1 and i2, there are four possible situations: s1 (both i1 and i2 are true), s2 (i1 is true and i2 is false), s3 (i1 is false and i2 is true), and s4 (both i1 and i2 are false). Generally, if there are n issues in a conflict, there are 2n possible situations with regard to the truth/falsity of these issues. The set of all possible situations can be stated as S = {s1, s2, …sn}, where each si ∈ S represents a specific combination of truth values (‘true’ or ‘false’) assigned to the set of issues I = {i1, i2, …in}. For each situation and each interest, we can determine whether the interest is satisfied in that situation (✓) or not (✗). This evaluation can be conveniently expressed as a table similar to a truth-table as introduced by L. Wittgenstein. 15 The parties’ interests are listed in the left hand column, and the possible situations are listed in the top row. The table below illustrates an evaluation of three goals of the al-Assad government (al-Assad1, al-Assad2, and al-Assad3) and three goals of the Syrian opposition (Opp1, Opp2, and Opp3) regarding three issues (i1, i2, and i3). Table 1: Interests and Situations.
Interests
al-Assad1 al-Assad2 al-Assad3 Opp1 Opp2 Opp3
s1 i1 true i2 true i3 true ✗ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✓
s2 i1 true i2 true i3 false
s3 i1 true i2 false i3 true
✗ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗
✗ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗
Situations s4 s5 i1 true i1 false i2 false i2 true i3 false i3 true ✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗
✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✓ ✓
s6 i1 false i2 true i3 false
s7 i1 false i2 false i3 true
s8 i1 false i2 false i3 false
✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✓
✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✓
✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✓
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__________________________________________________________________ The table shows that:
the al-Assad government and the Syrian opposition are in conflict with each other, since there is no possible situation in which all interests are jointly satisfied; the goal al-Assad1 is incompatible with Opp1, Opp2, and Opp3, since there is no possible situation which satisfies both al-Assad1 and Opp1, al-Assad1 and Opp2, or al-Assad1 and Opp3; the goal Opp1 is incompatible with al-Assad1, al-Assad2, and al-Assad3, since there is no possible situation which satisfies both Opp1 and al-Assad1, Opp1 and al-Assad2, or Opp1 and al-Assad3; and all other goals are mutually compatible, since there is a possible situation (s1) which jointly satisfies them all.
The information in Table 1 can also be displayed graphically as shown in the figure below. It displays each goal as a dot connected by a continuous line if the goals are compatible and a dotted line if they are incompatible. al-Assad1
Opp1
al-Assad2
Opp2
al-Assad3
Opp3
Figure 1: Relationships between Interests. 5. A Conversation about Solutions So far, I have shown how logic can be used to describe a conflict. The next step is to show how logic can be used to generate, evaluate, and select possible solutions to a conflict. The key to this step is to understand that each possible situation (as defined in the previous section) represents a possible solution. Each situation describes a state of the world, which the parties can possibly achieve, and for which it can be determined to what extent each parties’ interests are satisfied.
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__________________________________________________________________ What it means to agree to a certain situation as the solution to a conflict is that the parties agree to see to it that all those propositions, which are true in that situation, are in fact true, and those propositions, which are false in that situation, are false. Again, we can look at the conflict in Syria. Let’s assume the al-Assad government and the Syrian opposition agreed to situation s3 as the solution to their conflict. As both basic propositions i1 and i3 are true and i2 is false in s3, it represents a solution where the parties agree that al-Assad will remain President of Syria, the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising will not be prosecuted, and the Syrian security services will be dismantled. Given that each possible situation describes a possible solution, we can systematically search for specific solutions that are consistent with certain principles of conflict resolution. For instance, we can look for compromise solutions, solutions that are minimally invasive, or solutions that are compatible with certain predefined legal norms. In the following, I show how each of these three types of solutions can be generated. Compromise solutions are characterised by the fact that each party has approximately the same number of interests satisfied and, hence, no party is disproportionately disadvantaged. To generate a compromise solution, we have to determine for each possible situation si ∈ S and each party the number of satisfied interests by that party. Then we simply have to select that situation for which these numbers are most equal. For instance, in the conflict in Table 1, only s1 and s8 qualify as compromise solutions. In all other situations the numbers of satisfied claims differ between the two parties. A minimally invasive solution maximises the total number of satisfied interests and, thus, requires the parties to change their interests to the least extent. While this guarantees that the parties as a whole achieve the highest number of interests being satisfied, it does not take into account how the number of satisfied interests is distributed between the parties. In the example, the minimally invasive solution coincides with the compromise solution, as s1 is the situation where most interests are satisfied. However, in other conflicts the situation maximising the total number of satisfied interests may be different from a compromise solution. Finally, solutions can be generated that are compatible with certain predefined norms, such as legal or moral norms. This is realised by restricting the search to only those situations in which the propositions expressing the norms in question are true. For instance, if it was a norm of international humanitarian law to prosecute the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising, one may want to look at only those situations in which the proposition ‘the perpetrators of the Syrian uprising are prosecuted’ is true. In the example, these are s1, s2, s5, and s6. Once those situations are identified, one can apply any other search algorithms to them (e.g. compromise or minimally invasive solution). Each of the three searches described above can be executed by a simple algorithm. Other principles of conflict resolution can be formulated and
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__________________________________________________________________ implemented as respective search algorithms. For instance, other types of compromise solutions could be defined as solutions where the number of each party’s unsatisfied (rather than satisfied) interests is equal. 6. Conclusion In conclusion, the main value in using a logic-based approach lies in that it provides a framework for a structured conversation about a conflict. The framework can guide scholars or practitioners through all essential components of a conflict. Starting with the parties and issues, it leads the conversation to the parties’ goals, beliefs, values, and emotions and the relationships between those. The framework can help parties, practitioners, and scholars to think about possible solutions to a conflict and evaluate them regarding the extent to which they satisfy the parties’ interests. While the generated solutions may not completely solve a conflict, they can be used as a starting point for finding a solution. In comparison to game-theoretic models, the logic-based approach is significantly less formal, requires no quantification of the parties’ utility functions, and captures more directly the relevant aspects of a conflict. Still, it provides the formal rigor required to make the representation of a conflict accessible to computational manipulations. 16 The model can be implemented as a computer program which outputs possible solutions on the basis of data about parties, issues, interests, and solution types. Such a programme could be used for research purposes as well as by practitioners. Users can systematically represent a conflict, generate possible solutions, and evaluate those solutions. They can ‘play around’ with the programme generating different types of solutions, observing how different representations of a conflict produce different solutions, and weighing different aspects of a conflict by altering the input.
Notes 1
Robert Kowalski, A Logic-Based Model for Conflict Resolution (London: Imperial College London, Department of Computing, 2003), accessed 6 December 2012, http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/conflictresolution.pdf. 2 Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors and David Makinson, ‘On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction and Revision Functions’, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 50, No. 2 (1985): 510-530. 3 Wolf Lauterbach and Cory F. Newman, ‘Computerized Intrapersonal Conflict Assessment in Cognitive Therapy’, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 6 (1999): 357-374. 4 Michael Nicholson, Rationality and the Analysis of International Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 11.
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Otomar J. Bartos and Paul Wehr, Using Conflict Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14. 6 Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement without Giving In (London: Penguin Group, 1981). 7 Frieder Lempp, ‘Logic-based Conflict Analysis and Resolution’ (PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 2009). 8 Local Coordination Committees in Syria, ‘The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces’, 19 November 2012, accessed 2 May 2013, http://www.webcitation.org/6CIpu8And. 9 Bertrand Russell, ‘On Propositions: What They Are, and How they Mean’, in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert C. Marsh (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 285320. 10 Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames, eds., Propositions and Attitudes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 11 Gordon Allport, ‘Attitudes’, in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Carl Murchison (Worcester: Clark University Press, 1935), 789-844. 12 Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: Wiley, 1958) 13 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). 14 Richard S. Lazarus and Bernice Lazarus, Passion and Reason: Making Sense of Our Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 15 Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Pears and Brian McGuiness, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (London: Routledge, 2001). 16 R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey (New York: Wiley, 1957).
Bibliography Alchourrón, Carlos, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson. ‘On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction and Revision Functions’. The Journal of Symbolic Logic 50, No. 2 (1985): 510–530. Allport, Gordon. ‘Attitudes’. In Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Carl Murchison, 789–844. Worcester: Clark University Press, 1935. Bartos, Otomar J., and Paul Wehr. Using Conflict Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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__________________________________________________________________ Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962. Fisher, Roger, and William Ury. Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement without Giving In. London: Penguin Group, 1981. Heider, Fritz. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley, 1958. Kowalski, Robert. A logic-based model for conflict resolution. London: Imperial College London, Department of Computing, 2003. Accessed 6 December 2012. http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/conflictresolution.pdf. Lauterbach, Wolf, and Cory F. Newman. ‘Computerized Intrapersonal Conflict Assessment in Cognitive Therapy’. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 6 (1999): 357–374. Lazarus, Richard S., and Bernice Lazarus. Passion and Reason: Making Sense of Our Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Lempp, Frieder. ‘Logic-based Conflict Analysis and Resolution’. PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 2009. Local Coordination Committees of Syria. ‘The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces’. Last modified 19 November 2012. Accessed 2 May 2013, http://www.webcitation.org/6CIpu8And. Luce, R. Duncan, and Howard Raiffa. Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey. New York: Wiley, 1957. Nicholson, Michael. Rationality and the Analysis of International Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Russell, Bertrand. ‘On Propositions: What They Are, and How they Mean’. In Logic and Knowledge, edited by Robert C. Marsh, 285–320. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. Salmon, Nathan, and Scott Soames, eds. Propositions and Attitudes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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__________________________________________________________________ Wittgenstein, Ludwig, David Pears, and Brian McGuiness. Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. London: Routledge, 2001. Frieder Lempp is a Lecturer in the Dispute Resolution Centre at Massey University, New Zealand. His research interests include conflict modelling, conflict theory, and the psychological foundations of negotiation and mediation.