Conflict

We are facing six conflicts, four current, one past and one future are shaping our present reality. Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties; not an attribute of one party. It spells danger of violence and opportunity to create new realities. Thus, to understand the shoa the narratives of unspeakable German atrocity and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable. But so are the narratives of German-Jewish relations, Germans to others, Jews to others. Failure to do so blocks rationality: if conflict is in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation. This is not blaming the victim. What matters most is changing the relation. Are we able?

US politics has for a long time, since the 1970s, been the politics of inequality. Not only have the indicators of inequality, like the ratio in average income between the top and the bottom 20%, or the salary ratio between a CEO and the average employee in a corporation, increased (from 50 to 1100). But the top 10 or 1 or 0.1 percent, has acquired wealth so far unheard of. And the bottom 90, or 99 or 99.1 percent see the average family income in real terms decreasing; for the lowest down below the poverty line, way down into misery like worrying about where the next meal comes from (from the soup kitchen for very many).

Can anyone doubt that if there were more than 1300 hunger strikers in any country in the world other than Palestine, the media in the West would be obsessed with the story? It would be featured day after day, and reported on from all angles, including the severe medical risks associated with such a lengthy refusal to take food. At this time two Palestinians who were the first to start this current wave of resistance, Thaer Halaheh and Bilal Diab, entering their 64th day without food, are reported by the prisoner protection association, Addameer, and the NGO, Physician for Human Rights-Israel, to be in critical condition with their lives hanging in the balance. Despite this dramatic state of affairs there is scant attention in Europe, and literally none in North America.

IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE, APRIL 2012 © IPS and the author Editor’s note: The overall picture has turned much worse over the last few months. In particular, the Western demands to Iran made public prior to the Istanbul consultations on April 14, bodes ill for the next round of talks in Baghdad. Everyone has stated views, used rhetoric and taken concrete steps that bring us all closer to the a and the tightening of sanctions that already suffocate Iranian society. It is believed – ­falsely­ – that sanctions are somehow “soft weapons”. In Iraq, with one-third of the population of Iran, Western sanctions caused roughly one million Iraqi deaths. What is indicative of a will to promote future peace among the parties? Well, the following are not: pre-negotiation demands, threats to destroy, an oil embargo, sanctions directed at citizens, condescending rhetoric to and about a nation with one of the oldest...

Washington, DC One wonders what the US political leaders want. The incumbent lives in this world, playing an ultra-realist game: extra-judicial executions in maybe 70 countries, drone attacks; minimizing US losses, maximizing direct hits at what he sees as the problem, concrete identified individuals, not concrete unidentified conflicts. He has neither the moral nor the intellectual courage to do that. The challengers, with one exception, are focusing on one issue: down with the welfare state. Ron Paul, the libertarian, adds: down with the warfare state. He has registered Vietnam-Afghanistan-Iraq and the next in line, Iran-Syria, as unwinnable and unaffordable for a bankrupt economy. Young Republicans and others flock to him, but his discourse is too unusual. Warfare, not welfare makes sense. This has to do with the relation to conflict, a three-headed problem: attitude, behavior, contradiction. The USA wants an attitude of love for the USA, military response to evil...

Gareth Evans, a former attorney-general and foreign minister in Australia, threatened me because I raised the issue of his support for the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. I have rarely ever come face to face – only inches in fact – with such anger. Certainly not at an academic conference. And certainly not from such a prominent figure: chancellor of Australian National University, former attorney-general and foreign minister, former head of the International Crisis Group, and one of the world’s most prominent global thinkers. Yet here I was with Gareth Evans, cursing at me, ripping my badge off, and threatening to punch me in the face.

A few days ago I was a participant in a well-attended academic panel on ‘the decline of violence and warfare’ at the International Studies Association’s Annual Meeting held this year in San Diego, California. The two-part panel featured appraisal of the common argument of two prominent recent publications: Steven Pinker’s best-selling The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined and Joshua Goldstein’s well-researched, informative, and provocative Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Both books are disposed to rely upon quantitative data to back up their optimistic assessments of international and domestic political behavior, which if persuasive, offer humanity important reasons to be hopeful about the future. Much of their argument depends on an acceptance of their interpretation of battlefield deaths worldwide, which according to their assessments have declined dramatically in recent decades. But do battlefield deaths tell the whole story, or even the...

We all feel desperate watching the horrible killing, feeling the suffering of the bereaved, the whole people. But, what to do? Could it be that the UN, and governments in general, have a tendency to make the same mistake, again and again, of putting the cart before the horse? The formula they use is generally: [11 Get rid of No. 1 as key responsible, using sanctions; then [2] Cease-fire, appealing to the parties, or intervening, imposing; [3] Negotiation among all legitimate parties; and from that [4] A political solution as a compromise between the positions. It looks so logical. There is a key responsible, President Assad, ordering the killing; get rid of him by all means. Then the cease-fire, the fire ceasing; then negotiation, and then the solution emerges. Logical, yes; but maybe not very wise.

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> If it bleeds it leads! The mantra of many a newsroom. In their new book, “Pax Ethnica” two great journalists, Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, argue that day in and day out ethnic conflict and tension along religious and cultural lines makes for reliable, if dispiriting, headlines. Journalists regularly play plenty of attention to failed states, sectarian violence and societies at the breaking point. But what about those unsung exceptions, the communities of the world where diverse groups live together in harmony?

A new report /02/idazidore.jpg”> We all have a feeling of what peace is. Yet, defining it more precisely is not so easy. It belongs to the category that philosophers have called ‘essentially contested concepts’ – also used about freedom, justice and, say, democracy. Being somehow elusive, perhaps the best we can hope to achieve is intelligent discussions about how to approach peace, rather than defining it precisely. There are those who jump the philosophy, conceptuality and definitions and go directly to quantifying peace. By means of some “indicators” readily available in data bases they put together a composite measure that enables them to rank-order countries. Developing such hit lists – for happiness, development, corruption, etc.- has become a kind of industry in recent years.

/10/janoberg.jpg”> On Monday the 23rd of January 2012, the EU’s 27 members unanimously decided to stop their oil import from Iran on July 1 this year. That sort of policy is considered benign in comparison with warfare. It won’t be when seen in the long run. Sanctions usually have the opposite consequences of those “intended”. Secondly, as we know from the Iraq case, they are part and parcel of a build-up to war and will have, in the longer run, devastating, cruel consequences for innocent civilians whose lives are already hard. How come EU leaders seem not to see the counterproductivity of their decisions? Do they not know that they contribute to a build up to a war that will be much more catastrophic than that on Iraq both for the region, for themselves and for the economy they otherwise try to keep from even deeper crisis? Virtually everyone speaking...

Alfàs Del Pi, Spain The clouds are dark. And we sense one on the horizon, black; a point so far. The description of the cloud: using a major war, even with Russia-China, to revive an economy in depression; destroying capital, rebuilding.