Kiss of Love Campaign: Contesting Public Morality to Counter Collective Violence

The paper studies the immense opposition to a nonviolent campaign against the practice of moral policing in Kerala to understand the dominant spaces, collective identities, and discourses that give shape to the outrage of public morality in India. The campaign through its politics specifically targeted rightwing and political groups as well as socially embedded familial and institutional structures that exercise control over individuals through patriarchal regimes. The adverse reaction to the campaign revealed that collective aggression or violence can be used to impose majoritarian values and exert social control through the authority of public morality and everyday acts of moral policing in masculinized, politico-religious spaces that characterize the traditional public sphere in India. The contested ‘morals’ were gendered and communal notions particular to the middle classes and central to the maintenance of dominant structures of family, marriage, religious community, and the nation. The same informs notions of popular morality that give moral policing its ‘rational’ authority. The research employs online opinion pieces, reports and discussions, and two structured interviews to examine why the campaign became prominent in the public sphere. It gives coherence to the campaign’s agenda to counter the underlying violence of moral policing and suggests measures for peaceful resolution of public contestations.

Interracial Dialogues in Dixie: Expressing Emotions to Promote Racial Reconciliation

Given the legacy of racial injustice and mistrust that continues to plague race relations in the United States, it is important that citizens of different racial backgrounds come together to share their feelings and thoughts about race issues in order to advance racial reconciliation in their own communities. Saunders (1999) asserts that such dialogues can transform interracial relationships that could inspire the larger community to change itself. This study presents the results of nine interracial focus groups from two dialogues on race relations events held in Dothan, Alabama in 2015 and 2016. Our findings illustrate that many Black respondents displayed both anger and sadness as they provided stories of the institutionalized racism (e.g., racial profiling, educational inequality, residential segregation, etc.) as well as the more personalized racism that they had experienced. White respondents too demonstrated anger and sadness when relating their own experiences of strained race relations. This mixed-methods study also employed API analysis to further strengthen our original qualitative exploration of emotions. We argue that interracial dialogues can hold the potential for racial reconciliation as participants’ stories elucidate our most intransient race problems while also highlighting the emotions that connect discussants through the dialogic process.

Teaching peace by using nonviolent communication for difficult conversations in the college classroom

Having empathy and respect for oneself and others when engaging in difficult dialogue is an essential part of peace education. Gandhi emphasized that involving emotions was more transformative than purely intellectual approaches to education. Nonviolent communication (NVC), as developed by Marshall Rosenberg, is a tool for fostering empathy and building connection across difference. Using NVC for difficult conversations in any college classroom is a way of mainstreaming peace education across the curriculum. Though there is literature on difficult conversations in the college classroom, and on the effectiveness of NVC in general and in K-12 classrooms, there is very little on NVC in college spaces, and none on NVC for difficult conversations. In this primarily qualitative study college students were asked to use NVC to discuss controversial nonviolent actions. We found that even when both professor and students were NVC beginners, students were able to use it to discuss polarizing protests in a class with a diversity of views and needs for respect were overwhelmingly met. NVC was also useful for deepening analysis of the effectiveness of nonviolent actions, and could serve as a tool of emotional regulation for nonviolent action, or a modern day sort of purification for satyagraha.

Avoiding the ‘Anthropocene’?: An Assessment of the Extent and Nature of Engagement with Environmental Issues in Peace Research

This article critically examines the extent and nature of engagement with environmental issues within the field of peace research, and specifically with the unfolding ecological crisis (‘the Anthropocene’). A representative sample of journals and book series associated with peace research were analysed in order to a. quantify the extent of engagement with climate change and other environmental issues in peace research, and b. assess the range of discursive positions vis-a-vis the environment represented in the sample. The article finds that, in comparison to other ‘thematic niches’, environmental issues have received limited attention. It also finds that the dominant orientation of publications that do have an environmental focus can be considered ‘reformist’ - largely concerned with or assuming the possibility of significant continuity from the present. More ‘radical’ perspectives are present but in a much lower proportion. Whilst acknowledging the validity of and need for a plurality of perspectives and approaches, it is argued that the scientific evidence of an accelerating and increasingly dangerous ecological crisis does raise challenging questions for peace research. The article concludes with a call for renewed debate on the purpose(s) and assumptions of peace research, informed by a wider range of perspectives on environmental issues. It is a contribution to a tradition of critical reflection within the field but is the first to provide a systematic and grounded analysis of engagement with and perspectives on, the environment within peace research.

Reintegration of Al-Shabaab’s Defectors in Somalia: An Examination of Conditions for Successful Reintegration

This article attempts to examine an issue regarding the reintegration of disengaged Al-Shabaab combatants in Somalia. Nowadays, some countries have undergone current generation disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR), known as third-generation DDR; in the Somali context, although DDR is designed to disengage and rehabilitate defectors of Al-Shabaab for their reintegration into society, in practice, its implementation is not preceded by conventional approaches to conventional DDR, and it has suffered from various problems and contradictions. Previous research and information on the subject are extremely limited, due to a severe security situation. Accordingly, the author conducted interviews in Somalia in 2016 and 2019 with disengaged combatants and community members, to examine conditions necessary for good reintegration. The findings of the interviews revealed a gap in understanding between ex-combatants and members of the community, which significantly undermines the prospect of successful reintegration. A detailed analysis of the findings firstly shows that two problems exist regarding rehabilitation: a lack of knowledge, and an absence of accountability and transparency; secondly, further associated problems, such as severe unemployment, unstable security, financial difficulty, and distrust of the current government, which has devastating consequences for reintegration.

Measuring Intergroup Forgiveness: The Enright Group Forgiveness Inventory

Until recently, researchers operationalized and measured the psychological construct of forgiveness at the individual, rather than the group, level. Social psychologists started applying forgiveness to groups and examining the role intergroup forgiveness may have in conflict resolution and peace efforts. Initial attempts to define and measure forgiveness at the group level either assumed individual and group capacities were the same, or insufficiently described what intergroup forgiveness meant. We developed a new measure of intergroup forgiveness, and a novel group administration process, that operationalized the construct in a philosophically coherent way. Our conceptualization of intergroup forgiveness was rooted in what groups, as opposed to the individuals who compose them, have the capacity to do. We collected data on the psychometric properties of the measure with 595 participants in three different geographic and cultural settings. We assessed the factor structure, internal consistency, and validity of the measure. We also assessed a novel group-based method of administering the measure to better understand the relationship between group based reports and self-reports of intergroup forgiveness. The factor structure of the measure was supported, and the measure had strong internal consistency, as well as convergent and discriminant validity. The group administration process revealed important group dynamics and was not statistically different than a standard self-report administration; this finding has important implications for research and practice.

National Resilience to Protracted Violence in Ukraine

This paper concentrates on the production of power of the Ukrainian nation, that not only deals with continuous violence within the nation, but also develops national strength to address this violence. This paper aims to explore how the Ukrainian nation develops resilience to protracted violence as a form of transformative power and what factors contribute or impede this process. The paper defines resilience as a form of power that enhances the capacity of a national community to heal from trauma, effectively resists perpetrators of violence, and positively transform intergroup relations to remove communities from contexts of chronic violence and war. Based on semi-structured interviews with twenty-six respondents and a phenomenological analysis of data, this paper shows that effective practices of resilience developed by the national community of Ukraine, including volunteerism, a critical approach to history, and dialogue, not only aid Ukrainians in the adaptation to the chronic violence but also in the transformation of the nature and the impact of the violence on the national community. At the same time, these practices not only utilize external and internal resources but shape the societal capacities and the international interventions. Finally, these practices also alter visions of the society and dynamics of relations between power agents.

Struggle and Martyrdom: Abusive Power and Root Narrative in the Aftermath of the Eritrean Revolution

In this paper I have applied root narrative theory to the case of conflict in Eritrea, a small African country along the Red Sea that has been embroiled in conflict with its neighbors and the international community on and off since at least 1961. Examining a small sample of representative texts from the government of Eritrea and from international critics of the regime, I demonstrate that these parties—different moral languages that make it almost impossible for each side to see the point of view of the other. Using the semiotic structure of the story system implied by root narrative theory I point out possible moves that both international actors and interested scholars and journalist could make to improve relationships with Eritrea, which has been erroneously maligned with the title, “the North Korea of Africa.” I’ve titled this paper struggle and martyrdom to signal the most efficient way to come to terms with the current leadership of Eritrea. Any policy proposal or technical solution that is not in some way compatible with the Liberation narrative implied by this imagery will be bitterly opposed, not only in the short term but also into the foreseeable future.

Rethinking Peace: Discourse, Memory, Translation, and Dialogue, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, Giorgio Shani and Jeremiah Alberg. Reviewed by Mohammed Moussa.

Peace is a protean concept that equally eludes academics and practitioners on the one hand and perpetrators and victims on the other hand. However, this conundrum has not discouraged the preoccupation of peace and conflict studies with fixing the definition of peace once and for all for immediate export to war zones. In this essay, I review the timely book of Rethinking Peace: Discourse, Memory, Translation, and Dialogue which explicitly aims at not only rethinking peace but also providing self-reflexive viable alternatives. My review proceeds according to two steps: first, I identify the key themes of each part and of each chapter; second, I situate the edited volume in a context characterized by two increasingly significant conversations, the interpretivist turn and the decolonizing of knowledge, that at times overlap.

al-Shabaab and Boko Haram: Recruitment Strategies

This paper is an examination of the membership recruitment strategies of two violent extremist organizations (VEOs), namely al-Shabaab and Boko Haram. The majority of the literature on VEOs concentrates on the conceptualization of terrorism, motivations for terrorism and counter-terrorism strategies, as well as a focus on the frequency of VEO attacks, number of fatalities and funding sources. The literature tends to portray poverty as the main driver of recruitment. The focus on recruitment strategies has been relatively recent. There is therefore still a lack of in-depth analyses on the processes of recruitment of specific extremist groups, and this impacts on the development of effective counter-insurgency policies and practices. We conclude that there is a need for more nuanced studies of recruitment practices, including radicalization strategies, of specific VEOs in Africa. This understanding of recruitment practices, particularly by VEOs such as Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, will enable more context specific counter-insurgency programmes that target the ability of these organizations to recruit and expand. There can be no one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with the challenge of violent extremism in Africa.