MYANMAR’S ‘ROHINGYA’ CONFLICT: MISCONCEPTIONS AND COMPLEXITY

Myanmar’s Rohingya conflict is arguably the most sensitive and complex issue facing the country, both in terms of the extent of physical and social destruction, and the impact on Myanmar’s domestic reform and international standing. The scale of human suffering is mind-numbing, the reactions of Aung San Suu Kyi and the Myanmar authorities baffling. However, too much international commentary is reductionist, flattening multiparty and multifaceted sociopolitical dynamics into a simple narrative, which is detrimental to understanding and responding to the conflict. This paper attempts to make sense of some of this complexity, firstly by addressing several common misperceptions of the conflict, then analysing it from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The first misconception is that this conflict is not new, but significant antecedents date back at to at least World War II, if not before. The second is that this conflict is not merely about state oppression of a despised and vulnerable ethno-religious minority, but rather a multipolar conflict with conflict and violence, driven by mutual existential fears and deeply historical grievances on all sides, by at least three key actors. This multipolarity needs to be better understood but outsiders seeking resolution of the conflict. And finally, the third is that this conflict is not primarily about the denial of citizenship and statelessness of the Muslims, as significant as this is, but about definition of the political community in Myanmar and the politics of inclusion/exclusion in governance. Framing this as an ‘intractable conflict’, this paper then examines the drivers of conflict from the perspective of an ethnic security dilemma, a double minority complex, and the political economy, arriving at conclusions about the nature of the conflict and sounding a final warning about a potential moral hazard arising from the way international support is framed and offered.     

The representation of the female body in the multimedia works of Regina José Galindo

The female body is central to the performance art, poetry and blog site interventions of Guatemalan Regina José Galindo. While Galindo is best known for her performance work, this article compares the hereto overlooked, distinctive and often shocking representations of the female body across her multimedia outputs. We first consider the ways in which, in all three media, Galindo presents an ‘excessive’, carnivalised, grotesque and abject female body. Second, we analyse representations of the female body that has been subjected to violence at a private and public level. In so doing, we show how Galindo not only contests hegemonic visions of gender and (national) identity but also challenges the viewer/reader to engage with, rather than look away from, the violence to which women are subjected in patriarchal society.     

Constitutional reform and new patterns of electoral violence: evidence from Kenya’s 2013 elections

In places prone to electoral violence, what effects can constitutional changes have on elites’ incentives to organise conflict? This article develops two hypotheses to address the above question. It proposes that in places where national reforms find sub-national resonance, national and local politicians’ incentives regarding the electoral utility of conflict will align. However, in places where national-level changes fail to be locally relevant, these incentives will deviate from one another. The research illustrates these logics through a controlled comparison of two Kenyan counties: one that experienced electoral violence and the other that maintained peace around the 2013 elections.     

Inequality,Ethnicity, Political Mobilisation and Political Violence in Latin America: The Cases of Bolivia,Guatemala and Peru*

The paper explores the relationship between political violence and ‘horizontal’ inequality in ethnically‐divided countries in Latin America. The cases studied are Bolivia, Guatemala and Peru. Preliminary results are reported on the measurement of horizontal inequality, or that between groups, defined in cultural, ethnic and/or religious terms. The Latin American cases are shown to be often more unequal than the cases from Africa and Asia included in the wider study of which the work forms a part. The complex relationship between such inequality, ethnicity and political violence is explored historically. Ethnicity is today rarely a mobilising factor in violence in the Latin American cases, but the degree of inequality based on ethnicity is shown to be highly relevant to the degree of violence which results once conflict is instigated. History explains why.     

India's Fractured Northeastern Frontier: An Overview

The paper tries to analyze the different layers of the conflict in the remote Indian northeast. It looks at the different facets of this conflict, and argues that the conflict in the Indian northeast exists at many different levels. In relation to the different facets of the conflict, the paper has a special focus on human rights abuses, poverty, corruption, poor governance, administrative failure, the role played by external actors, and draconian laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Most of the conflicts have been associated with strong separatist tendencies and the issue of migration. The levels of violence have differed from place to place within the region. While violence has been successfully dealt with by the Indian government in states like Mizoram, the situation in states like Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland seems to be a work in progress. Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland have witnessed very high levels of violence since 1947, when India became independent from British colonial rule, until the present day. Methodologically, the paper follows a bottom up approach, and, to get first-hand information about the conflict, a series of interviews was conducted recently with some of the local residents of the region. The paper suggests demilitarization and infrastructure development in the region as the way forward.     

A Confluence of Competitions: Regime-Building and Violence in Timor-Leste

In April 2006, riots broke out on the streets of Dili. As violence escalated over the weeks that followed, a beacon of liberal peace-building dissolved into near-anarchy. While there have been several accounts of Timor-Leste’s “crisis” of 2006, it remains unclear why violence spiraled at that time, rather than at an earlier point in the country’s post-conflict transition. This article addresses that temporal puzzle by combining an analysis of the structural origins of the crisis with discussion of proximate, agency-driven triggers to violence. The resulting narrative first details the development of competition between governing elites, and also between state security actors, over the years following independence. The fusion of those two dynamics of competition in 2006, I then argue, created conditions sufficient for violent conflict.     

This stillness,this lack of incident: making conflict visible in West Papua

This article examines how the ongoing conflict in West Papua between state security forces and Papuan independence activists is made visible in activist social media postings in their attempts to draw attention to the violence, abuses, and problems in Indonesia’s easternmost province. The use of social media may provide new avenues for raising awareness about the conflict and its consequences. However, a social media strategy that contrasts the innocence and justness of the Papuan people with the violence and barbarity of other Indonesian peoples and the state risks entrenching established tropes which may serve to discourage broader support for West Papuan pleas for justice and independence.     

The green and the cool: Hybridity,relationality and ethnographic-biographical responses to intervention

Policy debates on conflict research, which are mostly directly used to develop practices of soft intervention (including conflict resolution, peacebuilding and statebuilding), emanate from common epistemic and ontological frameworks. Most have been produced and perpetuated by key institutions in the global North through their encounter with historical direct and structural violence, both North and South. Power has followed Enlightenment knowledge, along with its various biases and exclusions. Its progressive normative, political, economic and social assumptions about a ‘good society’ and an ‘international community’ have been fed through social science into the building of international institutions, IFIs and the donor system. Using a method called ethnographic biography (in which biography is broadly defined to include the bibliography produced by the subject, as well as interviews and discussions), this article illustrates how peace thinking is mutually constructed as both positive and hybrid, confirming earlier critical work. However, the research methods deployed to engage with the contextual production of knowledge by local scholar-practitioners are sorely underdeveloped. This is illustrated through an analysis of the work of ‘local’ conflict scholars on their own peacebuilding and statebuilding processes in Cyprus, Kosovo and Timor Leste.     

Historical Everyday Geopolitics on the Chile-Peru Border

Geopolitics is increasingly seen by scholars as occurring in everyday spaces and performed by ordinary people. This paper extends this idea to historical work to examine how citizens themselves (re)produce geopolitics at the time of historical events. It does so through a case study of geopolitical tension on the Chile-Peru border in the 1970s. Through oral histories and newspaper analysis, a historical everyday geopolitics approach reveals how those living in the Chilean border city of Arica played a part in promoting national and border security. This centres the embodied and emotional experiences of those affected by violence and conflict.     

Changing Lenses: Conflict Analysis and Mexico's “Drug War”

U.S. policy toward Mexico has been influenced by a “drug war” frame that has left little rhetorical and operational room for creative multisectoral strategies to stem the violence and address its causes. This article proposes conflict analysis, a lens for viewing conflict that brings into focus a multilevel, integrative diagnosis of the violence in Mexico and supports recent evolutions in Plan Mérida toward a more holistic peacebuilding approach.     

Opposition visions for preserving Syria’s ethnic-sectarian mosaic

The excessive violence that has spread across virtually all of Syria since the 2011 uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Asad has so far prevented a serious debate about feasible solutions. Together with internal power struggles and the intervention of external actors, ideational factors and identity construction are playing a key role in shaping the dynamics of the Syrian conflict. Fear of exclusion in a future order dominated by radical Islamist forces is keeping the minority groups and some secularists close to the regime. However, there are also grounds for cautious optimism: as this paper shows, most actors from the moderate opposition acknowledge the need to take the minorities’ fears seriously and to provide them with guarantees of participation in a future political order, while stopping short of the option of a power-sharing arrangement between community representatives.     

Dying to win: Elections,political violence,and institutional decay in Kenya

This paper examines the lessons learned from Kenya's 2007 post election violence and what has happened since then. It notes that the root causes of the violence still persist, have not been addressed, and easily could be reignited. Faced with a situation where institutions and the rule of law have been weakened deliberately and where diffused violence is widespread, both Kenya's transition to democracy and the fate of the nation remain vulnerable. The argument here is that the problems faced in holding and managing elections in conflict situations often are not simply technical. Instead, in Kenya and elsewhere, many difficulties are symptomatic of larger political and institutional questions related to democratic change that are more difficult to analyze in causal terms or to address.     

Using ‘Participatory’ Methods with Young People in Contexts of Violence: Reflections from Guatemala

This article is based on research carried out with young people in Guatemala City, in communities with a high incidence of youth gang violence. The demands of working with a traditionally ‘disempowered’ social group, youth, and in situations of violence, provide a timely opportunity for methodological reflection. The central objective is to discuss the means through which perceptions and experiences of gang violence were reported during the research. It deals in particular with the relative benefits of Participatory Appraisal methods in research with young people in situations of violence. Empirical material from Guatemala is used to reflect on the particular ways in which violence is variously revealed and explained. It also comments on the ways in which violence, in turn, impacted upon the conduct of the research itself.     

Ethnic Rights Under Threat: The Black Peasant Movement Against Armed Groups' Pressure in the Chocó, Colombia

During the past decade Colombia has been experiencing the paradox of, on the one hand, enjoying one of the most advanced constitutional frameworks for the empowerment of citizenship rights in general and ethnic rights in particular, and on the other, suffering from the drawn-out effects of endemic violence and armed conflict. In this paper, the manifestation of this paradox in a specific context, that of the black peasants' land rights movement in the Chocó region, is explored. Under the aegis of the 1991 Constitution, organisations of black peasants have been making headway in filing for and receiving substantial collective land titles on the basis of a discourse of black ethnic rights. At the same time, and not coincidentally, various armed actors such as the FARC guerrillas and paramilitary forces have made violent inroads into this region. The violence has led to internal displacement, social uprooting, and the disruption of the organisational efforts of the black peasantry. This has put the process of ethnic construction and mobilisation under severe strain. However, black peasants' organisation have been trying to use the land entitlements as a tool to mount a counterstrategy against the violence inflicted by the armed groups.     

Theoretische Überlegungen zur Entstehung von Gewalt in Protesten: Eine situative mechanismische Erklärung

This paper connects recent findings in sociology, criminology, social psychology and neurosciences to develop a mechanism-based explanation of the emergence of protest violence. The theoretical considerations connect Charles Tilly’s and Sidney Tarrow’s relational sociology with Randall Collins’ emotions-based micro-sociology of violent confrontations and Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism. The goal is to contribute to the development of a mid-range theory that can explain the emergence of violence in generally peaceful protests conclusively and that is empirically verifiable. The paper assumes that instead of protesters’ or police officers’ motivations and strategies, three situational factors are crucial for the emergence of violence in protests: interaction, emotion and interpretation during the protest event. Due to actors’ situational interpretation specific combinations of interactions form relational processes that trigger emotional mechanism of “tension and fear”, as conceptualized by Collins. Together with “emotional dominance” during the protest, tension and fear forms the emotional process of “attacking the weak” and thereby prompts violence even in protests of generally peaceful protest groups.     

The Reconstructing of Industrial Relations in Taiwan’s High Technology Industries

Scholars have shown interest in labour capacity when discussing labour movements in Taiwan’s industrial relations since the nation’s democratic transition from 1987. Interestingly, the upturn in workers’ struggles skipped the Hsinchu Science Industrial Park, which concentrated its business on the non-unionised, high-technology sector. Existing studies have not sufficiently explained how the Hsinchu Science Industrial Park escaped the series of labour conflicts after 1987. Rather than focusing on labour capacity, this article employs an alternative perspective – the role of employers and management strategies – to examine how employers brought together segments of capital and labour through a diversity of human resource management strategies. These management strategies have two aspects. First, high-tech industrial managers took advantage of “Taiwan-style” employee profit sharing and stock ownership to strengthen firms’ top tier of strategic decision-making with the support of national institutions. Second, while human resource management strategies will often differ from country to country, Taiwan’s management strategies draw from the experiences of Silicon Valley. Rather than fragmenting workers into teams and ethnic networks as in Silicon Valley, Taiwan’s managers established individual labour and management relations to avoid collective labour conflict.     

Romanians’ current perception of threat from immigrants in a context of co-ethnic migration: assessing the role of intergroup conflict and active/passive contact

This paper investigates the predictors of natives’ perception of the immigrant threat in Romania, an interesting site given immigrants’ marginal presence in the total population and the sizeable proportion of co-ethnic immigrants. Yet the interplay between nationalism and religion shapes an ideological frame that favours unwelcoming attitudes towards immigrants that challenge the Romanian identity forged along ethnic and religious ties. The authors used regression to analyse immigrant threat according to several dimensions: cosmopolitanism, group conflict and intergroup contact. In order to reflect specificities of this particular context, the latter dimension is conceptualized so as to include active and passive contact with immigrants. This distinction is relevant because of immigrants’ low presence in Romania. Findings suggest that variables from conflict theory explain more of the variation in the perceived threat, while indirect contact through mass-media exposure to immigrant content has the potential to reduce the perception of immigrant threat.     

Communal violence and ethnic polarization before and after the 2015 elections in Turkey: attacks against the HDP and the Kurdish population

Given its duration and intensity, the decades-old civil war in Turkey between the Turkish state and the PKK has resulted in relatively low levels of lethal inter-communal conflict between Kurdish and Turkish populations. However, around the June 2015 elections an unprecedented wave of systematic anti-Kurdish violence swept across western Turkey. The paper will assess these events in relation to literature on communal riots and electoral violence. It will consider the impact of state led anti-Kurdish discourse and the growth of the HDP, as potential factors that aggravated the dormant tensions and laid the groundwork for widespread inter-communal violence.     

The fate of the Assyrian minority in early independent Iraq: a test case of political violence based on rational primordialism

Analyzing ethno-national conflicts is usually not easy in that not all quantitative scientific tools are useful to the student of a conflict based on primordial elements. The burden of studying the outcome of a conflict is all the more complex given that the two conflicting groups might be at two different stages of their political development at any given time during the course of the conflict. In the case of the fate of the [Eastern Christian] Assyrian community in early independent Iraq, the political rationale for decisions taken by each party was drawn from different sociological, historical and political realms. Decisions in times of conflict and their political and historical ramifications are not always rational, since they draw upon primordial/communal considerations rather than the accurate reading of the overall true strategic scene.

The violence was an outcome of a combination of primordial differences and rational choice. The Iraqis sought to establish a new sovereign state with minimal disturbances from its Christian minority that they perceived as not belonging to the new nation. As for the Assyrians, they chose violence believing that at least some superpowers would support them. Historically, this rational decision based upon a primordial dispute turned out to be a mistake primarily because of lack of external support, weak internal cohesion of the group, and feeble leadership.     

韩国国会政治中诱发肢体冲突现象的因素初探

肢体冲突是议会内处于劣势的少数党为表达抗议、进行自我防御的一种议事途径和手段。其最终目的是要通过议事妨害、拖延,达到阻止争议法案顺利通过的目的。研究表明,多数党的＂规则强权＂与少数党的＂自我保护、自我救济＂之间的对抗是引发肢体冲突的根本原因;而少数党以肢体冲突作为首选斗争方式,则根源于韩国国会制度中威权主义权力的运行惯例,以及议事规则中缺乏对少数党权利保障而形成的多数党与少数党严重的政治不平衡局面;从深层结构看,肢体冲突还与国会内部、政党内部的社会资本状况不足有着内在的联系。