Conflict Resolution and Development through Social Empowerment Programmes in Northern Afghanistan
Brenna Dorrance
This article explores the implementation of three conflict resolution projects in Northern Afghanistan that seek to promote community peace building through development projects. The article first addresses the justification behind the type of programme selected. Then the unique situations in Khowja Alwan, Nahri Shahi and Shoulgara Districts will be explored and four major lessons learned will be highlighted. Lessons learned include: the importance of stakeholder involvement, the importance of expectation management, the importance of incentive and community contributions to fostering ownership and finally the importance of ongoing monitoring. Challenges encountered and reasons for a positive outlook for these conflict resolution mechanisms are also addressed.
The article is written by the former Project Manager of the three case studies with current updates about project implementation and a forecast for the projects' future. Ultimately, the article claims, it is possible to pursue reconciliation through development and conflict resolution projects.
Inside 'Rotten English': Interpreting the Language of Ambiguity in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy
Jeffrey Gunn
My article is concerned with the manner in which Ken-Saro-Wiwa's novel Sozaboy portrays the struggles of an ethnic minority community caught in middle of the Nigerian Civil War. Set in the nineteen-sixties, he uses the fictional Dukana people to retrace and discuss the circumstances that lead to the oppressive situation faced by his own Ogoni people in the nineteen-nineties.
I begin by analysing the nature of nation-state formation and the inherent problems associated with citizenship or belonging in African nations. Saro-Wiwa creates a unique language termed 'Rotten English' which he uses to propose a new order in Nigeria where ethnic minorities become the recipients of more equally distributed national wealth.
I examine the nature of the words that construct 'Rotten English' and reveal that this language is best understood as the language of ambiguity. A range of ambiguous terms construct this language and enable Saro-Wiwa's to portray the oppressive situation faced by ethnic minorities in Nigeria. These ambiguous terms convey the position of the Dukana people, who remain victims in a triadic power relation model.
By creating awareness about the dire situation faced by ethnic minorities in Nigeria Saro-Wiwa empowers ethnic minority groups such as the Ogoni. Their story is heard around the world and cannot be divorced from Saro-Wiwa's political activism.
A Politics of Disease: the fantastic trope and the dismemberment of reality
Richard Iveson
The following article attempts to delineate a politics of the fantastic by demonstrating how the dis-orientating 'improper' metonymy of the fantastic trope has the potential to violently disrupt the structuring metonymies of power by reinscribing the regulatory effacings upon which power founds itself, and thus undermine its claim to 'natural' authority. Further, in suggesting that it is its inescapability from the foreclosure of the economy of the same that provides the fantastic trope the potential both to disorient and to conserve existing power structures, we thus argue that whether it polices or politicizes is rather determined by the cultural context within which each particular manifestation is repositioned, and that only as a singular event of dis-ease does the fantastic trope retain the potential to contaminate the myths of power. Finally, we demonstrate how, in seeking to legitimize and conserve its power by 'naturalizing' its arbitrary social order, the revolutionary government of the Soviet Union attempts to preclude any such risk of dis-ease through the systematic exclusion of improper metonymy.
Countering Media Hegemony, Negative Representations, the 'Bad Citizen': Asylum seekers' battle for the hearts and minds of Scotland
Amadu Wurie Khan
Asylum seekers and refugees, as well as policy actors in government and civil society, regard the UK media coverage of the asylum issue as negative and biased. The negative coverage has pathologised asylum seekers as 'folk devils' and 'bad citizens', who are blamed for the breakdown of the national citizenship community. The biased coverage is also blamed for the public hostility towards asylum seekers, community tensions and for making asylum seekers the most marginalised and disempowered community in the UK. Government and civil institutions have, therefore, called for journalists to be balanced and responsible in their reporting with a view to facilitating a better public understanding of the asylum issue. In this paper, I consider how the ubiquitous negative press coverage has galvanised asylum seekers to canvass public support and understanding of their plight in Scotland's two major cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh. By drawing on fieldwork data, I consider how they deploy two interventions; 'artistic and socio-cultural' events and 'communal talk and dialogue' in challenging the media's hegemonic (mis)representation of the asylum seeker. By these interventions members of the asylum-seeking community show they are capable of 'responsible' citizenship. They also contribute to a political and critical pedagogy by providing alternative knowledge and learning about the refugee condition among British citizens. The way that the interventions function as a paradigm of social change, engagement and empowerment is also considered, an area that is currently under-explored.
Antilanguage and a Gentleman's Goloss: Style, Social Meaning and Entitlement to Irony in A Clockwork Orange
Liberty Kohn
This paper provides two new insights into A Clockwork Orange. First, by examining two basic registers in A Clockwork Orange, nadsat and formal English, I suggest that power is gained or denied through a character's ability to speak an appropriate register's formal requirements properly. This analysis leads to a second insight. Characters who stylistically perform the current situation's register best are the only people entitled to the use of irony, sarcasm, and mockery. The connection between performance of a register's formal features and entitlement to irony is illustrated through several scenes where Alex shifts or mixes register: First, Alex's correct performance of nadsat with his droogs, which leads to gang leadership, burglary and violence; second, his inability to shift entirely from nadsat to the formal, adult register with his correction officer, which leads to a reprimand of Alex; and third, his poor lexico-grammatical performance of nadsat while in jail with older gang members who also speak variants of the antilanguage nadsat, which leads to Alex's blame for a group murder of a cellmate. In each situation, those who speak with the appropriate syntax and lexicon of the contextual register are entitled to effective use of irony, sarcasm, or mockery, linguistic qualities that consistently parallel the contextual social and physical power of the immediate social hierarchy.
Actions and the energeiai: the 'ethics of borderlands' in the educational praxis of architecture
Leonidas Koutsoumpos
By accepting a difference in the meaning between the terms morality and ethics, this paper supports the Wittgensteinian view that sees Ethics as a paradoxically ineffable discourse which is implicit, cannot be expressed, or put in words, but nonetheless, I argue, can be taught through a tacit mode of undeclared lessons. The paper is divided into two parts: The first part utilises the Aristotelian Ethics that distinguish three areas of the human action or conduct: thinking, making and doing (theoretical, poetic and practical). Through the analysis of the terms I show that, so far, 'thinking' and 'making' have been the conventional ways of seeing architectural Ethics as morality. On the other hand, 'doing' which is associated with ethics has been largely underestimated in the role that it plays in the wider Ethical discourse. For this, the paper builds an argument that supports ethics through 'doing' and praxis. The second part of the paper presents this argument in a concrete situation of a dialogical interaction between students and tutors from the design studio, the core of architectural education, where they discuss 'ethics of borderlands'. In this concrete situation I focus on ethics and present its manifestation in praxis.
The Child in Criminology: Site of Intervention, Site of Control, Site of Blame
Ruth Alexandra Liston
Through an exploration of the relationship between criminological theory and criminal justice policy, this paper offers an alternative viewpoint about the power of theory to influence social change. Probation for juvenile offenders began as an independent social movement which influenced, and was influenced by, theories on crime causation. Research by the author shows the means by which a theory can have a positive effect on a burgeoning social movement, but that the politicisation of probation and youth crime has pushed theoretical understandings of crime to the periphery. The central argument is that, while theory has influenced penal policy, this has only occurred when politically convenient. Engagement on a purely theoretical level has little influence on juvenile justice today and 'law and order' rhetoric dominates instead, this means that the child has been reconfigured as a site of blame and subject to the armoury of punishments that come with that status
Oil Politics in the Amazon: From Ethnocide to Survival
Maria Teresa Martinez Dominguez
Indigenous peoples have resisted the colonization of their territory and their souls for hundreds of years. The contemporary experience is of transnational corporations operating in their territory, competing for the precious natural resources they have traditionally preserved. The paper starts by discussing how theory can contribute to self-determination and emancipation of indigenous people by celebrating their resistance as one of their survival mechanisms in opposition to other approaches that focus on the assimilation and oppression of indigenous groups. The central argument is that the development of the oil industry in the Amazon basin has been and still is one of the vectors of ethnocide of indigenous peoples and is at the same time triggering short and long-term resistance as a response to the 'oil conflict' and 'corporate globalization', their ultimate goal being their self-determination and survival as peoples. I conclude by stating that indigenous life projects and alternative understandings of development can shape the way towards a 'post-neoliberal civilization' based on diversity and egalitarianism versus cultural homogenization and unfair distribution of resources.
Contesting identities in exile: an exploration of collective self-understanding and solidarity in Refugee Community Organisations in Glasgow
Teresa Piacentini
Social empowerment and social engagement are notions not normally associated with the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees. Stateless, rootless, powerless, excluded, stripped of identity, the general consensus, rather, is that asylum seekers have come to represent all that is socially disengaged and disempowered in late capitalist modernity. Nonetheless, there is another experience of living under asylum that is emerging. As individuals navigate the ascribed 'asylum seeker identity' with its imputed behaviours, they also mobilise into collectives which, through an appropriation of the asylum seeker label and collective solidary action, transform their social reality into one that enables, engages, and empowers. Using data from preliminary empirical research, I suggest the experience of living under asylum can be best described as a contemporary experience of non-settlement, from which an asylum consciousness emerges. From this collective self-understanding, a sense of solidarity develops and this is explored through the lens of Refugee Community Organisations, identified in this paper as transformative social and cultural spaces for asylum seekers to fulfil the need to develop social connections in the absence of traditional social and kinship structures. This reframes the experience of living under asylum as a process of collective social transformation. Data is drawn from early stage research with representatives from five Refugee Community Organisations in Glasgow from different African countries, including Congo DRC, Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Uganda.
Grupo Chaski's Microcines: Engaging the Spectator
Miriam Ross
Latin American cinema has commonly been looked at within a radical framework. From the middle of the twentieth century, filmmakers, journalists and scholars have celebrated a type of filmmaking that contains revolutionary ideals, anti-neocolonial stances and attempts at social reform (Chanan, 1997; Fusco, 1987; Pick, 1993). The peak of this radical filmmaking came about with the emergence of the New Latin American Cinema movement and the concurrent, but more globally orientated, Third Cinema movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Towards the end of the twentieth century these movements began to disperse and there is no longer the sense of a continent-wide radical cinema project. Nevertheless, there are still Latin American filmmaking groups and practitioners, such as CineMujer in Colombia and TV dos Trabalhadores in Brazil, that work towards the same fundamental aims, mainly to empower local communities and work against exploitation and discrimination (Aufderheide, 2002). The focus of this paper is on one such group, the Peruvian based Grupo Chaski; in particular it will focus on the way that Grupo Chaski is currently working to develop a solid infrastructure for cinema exhibition as a means to implement their aims of social reform. This study is the result of personal research undertaken in South America during 2004, 2005 and 2007 and much of the knowledge of Grupo Chaski presented within this paper draws on personal interviews and observations of this group. This paper will also draw on the critical tendencies that emerged through the New Latin American Cinema movement and Third Cinema to frame the way in which Grupo Chaski continues a type of radical cinema practice.
Money No Object: Revolution and Revaluation in the Economics of Place and the Place of Economics in Art
Colin Vernall
Hungarian artist Miklós Erdély made two works which use hard currency as his principal material. This paper will compare these street actions, the different environments and circumstances in which they evolved, and Erdély's divergent approaches towards activism and irony within these ostensibly similar works.
The significance of Erdély's work as a Hungarian artist working during the Cold War, both in Budapest and Paris, will be discussed in terms of the polarized theory of the period. The two actions looked at here point to the existence of critiques of modernism which evolved through a reengagement with Duchampian strategies, such as in the work of Klein and Manzoni, and which later emerged elsewhere in Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Unlike those other examples, Erdély's work was the product of an environment straddling the East-West divide, placing it yet further from the dominant ideologies of modern and postmodern art history.
Furthermore, while the examples of Erdély's work discussed are both political art, they also depart considerably from the highly politicised prescriptions of the period. Though often described as a conceptual artist, Erdély's early work can be read in more sympathetic terms according to post Cold War art theory, particularly through the increasingly important concept of the everyday. With its focus on the interstices between institutionalized spaces, both physical and, in the case of Erdély's work, theoretical, the everyday allows readings which can be informed by but are not limited to dominant theory and art history.