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Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies |
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Copyright © 2004 Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. All rights reserved.
Heribert
Adam While the bitter South African conflict resulted in a negotiated settlement and a common state, mere partition is widely hailed as the solution to the strife between Israelis and Palestinians. Regardless of whether Palestinians ultimately achieve viable sovereign statehood or equal citizenship in a binational state or whether, as seems more likely, apartheid-style, conflict-ridden coexistence continues to prevail, the future agenda will involve legalized reckoning with past crimes on both sides. Non-violent and stable intergroup relations require institutionalized accounting for past injustices. Apart from amnesia, democracies have employed trials, lustration, reparations, re-education, memorialization and official apologies to deal with their unsavoury legacies and collective responsibilities. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been celebrated as an international model for other divided societies. It affirmed victims, afforded amnesty to perpetrators after disclosure and contributed to political education, if not racial reconciliation. However, by mainly focusing upon the minority—the perpetrators and victims of gross human rights violations—the TRC neglected the vast majority lying between these two extremes. Individuals on both sides collaborated, instigated, supported, passively stood by, or actively dissented; above all, they benefited or suffered from an unjust order. How transitional justice deals with these differentially implicated segments of the population and what impact it has on identity and political consciousness is indicative of the success or failure of the politics of reconciliation. Nobody can reasonably expect major collective attitude changes after violence ceases. The affiliations of the conflict era run deep and the public airing of past atrocities may, in fact, reinforce bitterness and sentiments of revenge. Theologically-inspired Christian notions of confession, repentance, absolution, healing and forgiveness resonate more with normative sermons than with social reality, particularly in a Judaeo-Muslim political culture. With a focus upon how the institutional provisions of post-conflict reconstruction can be improved in the future, this paper critically and comparatively assesses the South African experiment. Although the contexts different, it ventures some speculations on how the lessons learned from South Africa may be applied to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
J. A. Allan The first purpose of this paper is to show how constructed knowledge always overcomes knowledge based upon observed science. The second is to show how societies in neo-liberal industrial economies have, in late modernity, become very risk-aware. This high risk-awareness is a result of the campaigning of environmental and other activists and the unprecedented ability to share bad news rapidly through globalized information technology and the media. The resulting hyper-risk-aware societies are troubled as much by constructed risks as by real ones and there is confusion because risk can be more easily foregrounded and backgrounded by political imperatives than science-based arguments. These societies have also learned to be aware of the risks ‘manufactured’ by the processes associated with advancing modernity without being able to deal rationally with their causes. The study uses cases from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) water sector to illustrate the consequences of these phenomena for water policy-making in the region.
Sultan Barakat
Although warfare has been a traditional and often dominant theme of historical discourse, the reconstruction that usually follows war has long been a minority interest occupying only a peripheral space in the consciousness of the international community. However, this situation has altered dramatically in the last decade with increasing recognition that the postwar reconstruction of nations is a key element to achieving global stability and security, and in eradicating poverty in the twenty-first century. The challenge of rebuilding war-torn societies is infinitely more difficult and complex than is generally recognized. The problems of ‘normal’ development processes in countries emerging from conflict are amplified by the conflict’s own legacy (including physical destruction, lack of financial, material and human resources, institutional fragility, political volatility and psychosocial trauma) and are often compounded by the necessity of providing humanitarian relief in the absence of security. Ultimately, reconstruction is a local challenge that must take account of political, social, cultural and economic circumstances within the national and regional context in question. This paper has three sections. It begins with an explanation of what is meant by postwar reconstruction and why it assumed greater prominence during the 1990s and beyond. The second part identifies key stages in the conceptualization of postwar reconstruction—key stages that also represented benchmarks in the adoption of ‘best practice.’ The third and final part of the paper presents a number of the lessons that have been learned regarding reconstruction and aims to guide practitioners, policy-makers and academics on the key principles underpinning reconstruction activity.
William O. Beeman Recent events in world politics have heightened public attention to the concept of risk in social life. In a world where danger and violence have become media commodities, it seems that risks to health and well-being have never been greater. However, because attitudes toward risk are learned cultural behaviour, ‘perception of risk’ has become more essential as a predictor of political and social behaviour than actual tangible risk. In this paper, I discuss contrasts between notions of personal and public risk from the standpoint of the societies of the United States, the Islamic Middle East and the Buddhist Far East. Though broad generalizations may be dangerous, the cultural styles in each of the three regions allow individuals and larger social groupings, such as corporations and governments, to engage in decision-making which seems rational in terms of the broad attitudinal frameworks dominant in these regions, but which may contrast sharply with the rational actions of individuals and groups in other regions. As the world becomes more integrated globally, knowledge of the differences in these perceptions and their concomitant implications for the actions taken by decision-makers will become increasingly essential to international understanding. As a case-study for this discussion, I focus upon the war in Iraq, highlighting reactions and attitudes in the United States, where risk is in proportion to fear; among Iraq’s Islamic Middle Eastern neighbours, where risk is really ‘no risk’; and among the nations of East Asia, particularly Japan, where risk is normative and drives the course of history.
Nathan J. Brown Despite the best efforts of many scholars, contemporary Middle Eastern politics is often understood as a battle between individuality, rationality and modernity, on the one hand, and group identities, religion and tradition, on the other. Such images are current not only among external observers, but also among many of the participants in regional political activities. The perception of such a clash has real costs since it directs attention away from emerging syncretic approaches. In this paper, I examine two areas in which these two oft-claimed incompatible approaches have operated—constitutionalism and civic education. I seek to show not only that syncretic approaches are possible, but that they have emerged and promise new possibilities for regional politics.
Thomas Cushman In sociological theory, the idea of risk has become increasingly important as a way of explaining personal existence and social outcomes in modernity. According to major theorists of ‘risk society,’ the increasing complexity of modern societies creates new environments of risk and new kinds of quandaries, both for individuals and for politics. Much of the current debate on the nature of cultural conflict between modern Western societies and Islamic societies (especially those in which Islamic fundamentalism is prevalent) sees this conflict in terms of a response to the threat of detraditionalization posed by Western modernity. According to this view, violent actions against the West are the products of resentment and animosity toward an ever-encroaching juggernaut of modernity. Western theories of risk society are, however, culturally specific and do not account for the cultural variability of the idea of risk. That is to say, the experience of risk in modern Western societies cannot be transposed directly to other cultures, especially those in which the basic parameters of modernity that create the risk environment are not present or are actively resisted. In this paper, I argue that a good deal of the cultural conflict between Western modernity and traditional Islamic cultures results, in part, from the clash between different experiences of risk. To a certain degree, the present war on terror is a function of the enhanced risk environment posed by the threat of violence from Islamist fundamentalism. The latter, however, is itself a product of a culturally-specific notion of risk that sees Western modernity as a threat to traditional existence and to the very idea of salvation within Islamic culture. The aim of the paper is to interpret contemporary cultural conflicts as a function of competing ideas of risk.
Ghassan Hage This paper examines the relationship between risk and hope. Hope here is treated as a social phenomenon that is produced by the nation-state and distributed among citizens. The key argument of the paper is that the experience of risk is intimately related to the distribution of hope within the nation-state. This is especially so since risk, like hope, is essentially a relationship to the uncertainties of the future. On the one hand, the experience of risk is linked to one’s sense of agency, which includes agency over the future. On the other, it involves degrees of anxiety generated by the future’s uncertainties. I argue that the heightened experience of risk in Western societies has less to do with an increase in the objective ‘dangers’ that people have to face and more to do with a higher degree of anxiety and paranoia created primarily by a crisis in the function of the nation-state as a distributor of social hope.
Brandon Hamber
As tension mounts during the build-up to the Orange marching season, which occurs each summer in Northern Ireland, the streets of many cities and towns are festooned with flags. The proliferation of Union Jacks, Irish Tricolours, Ulster flags and paramilitary banners adorning the streets symbolize loyalty and serve as sectarian markers of territory. In July 2002, however, something unusual happened: republicans started hoisting the Palestinian flag alongside their Irish Tricolours while, in neighbouring loyalist areas, the Israeli flag fluttered alongside the Union Jack and paramilitary banners. This paper suggests some reasons for this by focusing upon the concept of ‘fear’ in the context of the peace processes in Northern Ireland and South Africa. It begins by offering some thoughts on the phenomenon of Israeli flags flying in Belfast before moving on to consider briefly how the psychological and sociological literature generally treat the concept of fear (and risk). This leads to the argument that fear and the use of fear are unrecognized variables in popular discourses surrounding political negotiations and processes such as truth commissions. The paper analyzes the role of fear in the political transition process, a subject seldom dealt with in the academic literature, and examines the way that the concept of fear—like the suffering of victims of political violence—is politicized and depoliticized. The paper then concludes by trying to apply some of the ideas that it presents to the South Africa and Northern Ireland contexts and, particularly, to approaches to political risk-taking.
Hassan Hanafi This paper contains three sections. The first posits that there is no risk without promise and no promise without risk—but risk and promise for whom? Assessments of risk and promise are not one-sided; they involve both the self and the ‘other’. From the perspective of the Muslim world, it is the self and the West is the ‘other’; from the perspective of the West, the opposite is true. The second part of this paper looks at the risks and promises that Islam holds out to the Muslim world as self. Islam is here taken to represent a risk to oppressive socio-political regimes that are dependent upon the United States, exploiting their respective masses and in the pockets of the local private sector, transnational corporations, the world capital market and the phenomenon of globalization. As such, Islam represents promise to poor and frustrated citizens and marginalized and alienated nations. In its third part, the paper considers how ghettoized Muslim migrants secluded from their Western environments may perceive Islam if they view the West as a location of power without justice and double standards in judgements and policies. However, the risks inherent in this perception are matched by the promise that Islam may meet the Western need for new ideals concerning morality, multipolar systems and genuinely equal partnerships.
Riaz Hassan The concept of umma is an important element of historical, as well as contemporary, discourse on Islam. This paper provides an overview of the development and evolution of the concept of umma and its usage in Islamic discourse to explain the current social, political and economic conditions of the Muslim world. It reports findings about umma consciousness among Muslims in Southeast Asia, South and Central Asia and the Middle East, examining the impact of globalization on the Islamic umma and how it is shaping the emerging struggle between ‘hybridity’ and ‘authenticity’ among Muslims and Islamic movements. The paper concludes with some observations on the risks and challenges of this struggle and its sociological implications for the future of the Islamic umma and the world. [This article was published in BRIIFS vol. 5, no.2 (Autumn/Winter 2003.)]
Michael Humphrey The ‘war on terrorism’ in the name of national security and anxiety extends a discourse on risk that is already prevalent as an organizing principle in our globalizing world. In sociology, ‘risk society’ refers to the social precariousness of contemporary institutionalized patterns of existence, in which future possibilities, rather than past lessons, increasingly determine decision-making. The ‘war on terrorism’ has used the idea of risk not merely as a strategy to defend values and institutions, but to bring about social and political transformation. Pre-emptive wars have been launched against failed states or collaborators with terrorists abroad and anti-terrorist legislation has been introduced to acquire emergency powers at home. Michael Ignatieff calls the project of fixing failed states through military intervention “Empire lite,” commenting that “to the extent that human rights justify the humanitarian use of military force, the new empire can claim that it serves the cause of moral universalism” (Ignatieff 2003, 110). In reality, human rights and democracy are being offered under a form of imperial dependency in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq through ‘nationalist nation-building projects’ that are unlikely to succeed. Democracy entails self-rule and not just getting the right to vote. This paper argues that both the war on terrorism and humanitarian military intervention are shaped by risk, rather than justice, and are, therefore, more about containment than about realizing the aspirations of a moral universalism based upon rights and political participation.
Bruce
Kapferer
Susan Kippax This paper addresses notions of risk in the context of HIV and AIDS. It looks at how ‘risk’ is understood from the position of researchers, including sociologists and epidemiologists, and from the position of persons at risk and it describes how these understandings are related to the ways in which rights and responsibilities are also understood. In its examination of these perspectives, the paper distinguishes between ‘traditional,’ ‘modern’ and ‘social’ public healths and the ideological or moral perspectives that underpin them. It also touches upon the ways in which globalization plays into this complex field and raises questions about patents and access to treatments. My argument is that, within the ‘modern’ public health, risk is understood as relating to the individual and that this construction or ‘selected form’ is one of the reasons for the failure of public health to control HIV.
Hans Levander This paper compares some characteristics of an isolated national security (the ‘old’ security) to a common and comprehensive international security (the ‘new’ security) at four interdependent levels: concrete behaviour; the structures and institutions of society; ethics/‘cosmologies’; and the human factor. National security has long been the concern of experts working in specific governmental institutions such as foreign offices/departments of state, ministries/departments of defense (better known, not so long ago, as war departments) and ‘intelligence services.’ Yet, in today’s wider global context, the present and future national security of every state on earth demands that each citizen take responsibility for achieving international peace and in caring for the environment. An understanding of this necessity is reflected in concepts such as ‘citizen diplomacy,’ ‘global citizenship’ and ‘Earth stewards.’ Through international networking, non- governmental organizations (NGOs) play a prominent role in the re-evaluation of security concepts and in building bridges across national, cultural and religious frontiers. Some of them are ‘whistle-blowers’ (Greenpeace, Amnesty International, IPPNW, Lawyers against Nuclear Weapons, etc.), some work at confidence-building (Rotary International, Zonta and many others in the fields of science, culture, sport and education), while still others develop international aid programs (Red Cross/Crescent, Médecins sans frontières, Oxfam, etc.). NGOs in dialogue with governmental and intergovernmental organizations can make an important contribution to promoting the necessary and, at the same time, psychologically-difficult process of changing the paradigm of international security.
Howard Margolis Difficult-to-resolve conflicts involving expert vs. lay risk intuitions have been notoriously common in the sphere of environmental regulation. The paper reviews this history before commenting upon some perception-of-risk issues in international contexts. The difficulties here turn out to be different from those encountered in domestic environmentalism, but no less troublesome.
Sari Nasir Risk and uncertainty are an integral part of the lives of the people of the Middle East in general and the Arab world in particular. Their future has become uncertain due to the process of transition from traditional societies to modern states, a process further complicated by such factors as continual crises, hostilities, disasters and globalization. This paper examines perceptions of risk and uncertainty in the Arab world in historical and contemporary contexts.
Carolyn Nordstrom
Behind the risks normally associated with war and political violence—the wounds to bodies and the body politic—are a much less visible series of actions with risks that are seldom assessed, actions capable of shaping global economic and political grids. Wars and, indeed, most politics and economics, rest upon a foundation made up of both legal and extra-legal activities. Hundreds of billions of dollars are made on unrecorded (extra-legal) weapons sales and hundreds of billions more are earned through the sale of resources to gain the hard currency needed to buy those weapons and to purchase all of the other supplies that a country at war requires, from medicines and food to industrial equipment and communications technology. If we were simply addressing illegal arms sales, assessing risk would be relatively straightforward. But the fact that countries at war depend upon the extra-legal as well as the legal to acquire the basic developmental infrastructure essential to their populations’ survival means that exploring the qualities and dangers of risk is much more complex and multi-faceted: for example, how do we calculate the stakes of wide-scale profiteering from selling extra-legal pharmaceuticals to war-afflicted populations that do not have access to legal medicines? The sheer magnitude of the power and profits that accrue to the extra-legal (and the fact that analytical attention generally focuses upon illegal arms and drugs sales, while common commodities make up the bulk of the extra-legal—and represent unrecorded profits for legal enterprises) suggests that the systematic investigative invisibility surrounding these topics is purposeful—a form of political and economic prestidigitation or sleight of hand. This article investigates the dynamics of the extra-legal as it shapes political and economic processes in the world today.
John Torpey
This paper revisits some of Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights about ‘democracy’ in an effort to make sense of contemporary events. It argues that the work of this aristocratic Frenchman is crucial to understanding the ideologically-egalitarian, rights-driven, ‘Tocquevillean’ world that we now inhabit and that the United States dominates. The arrival of this phase in world affairs represents the culmination of a tripartite historical process. Since 1945, there have been three phases of global politics: between 1945 and 1989, the world was Marxist— dominated by the discourse of economics; from 1989 until 2001, it was Weberian—dominated by the discourse of cultural conflict; and, since 2001, it has been Tocquevillean—dominated by the discourse of American exceptionalism, which here refers, in particular, to the United States’ peculiar combination of religious openness and constitutionally-guaranteed individual rights. As the state retreats from its former role, the relationship between these two elements has come to represent the central historical issue of our time and will remain so for the foreseeable future. September 11, 2001 marked the definitive switch to a Tocquevillean world, the principal characteristic of which is rifts within the societies of ‘the West.’ Beyond more immediate points of contention, the current tension has a great deal to do with religion and its role in a secular democratic order, a subject about which Tocqueville had some very illuminating things to say. Tocqueville’s insight was that continental Europeans and British colonials in America had fundamentally different relationships to religion in the “age of democratic revolution.” For the American colonists, religion and liberty went hand-in-glove; the drive for political freedom was intimately bound up with the drive for religious freedom. This close association of religious with political liberty undergirds the ongoing American defence of freedom of worship. On the continent, however, the situation was just the opposite. By 1789, the Church had come to be an essential prop to a monarchical order grown tyrannical. The result has been an enduring legacy of anti-clericalism in much of Europe, which contrasts sharply with an abiding tolerance for religiosity—often of the most exotic varieties—in the United States. Against this background, this paper explores the ways in which religious belief resonates or conflicts with political freedom in movements around the world and the role of the United States in a world bubbling with religious ferment.
Jim Whitman This paper takes as its starting point the identification of the element of risk as a structural condition of advanced industrialization. The concern here is less with the ‘systematically produced hazards’ of ‘risk society’ (those matters which are, at least to some degree, open to political, scientific and ethical deliberation), than with something more fundamental—what is termed the complex interaction of human and natural systems. The argument is that the human condition—and, by extension, the range of possible social futures—is coming to be conditioned by global dynamics that fall outside of the calculation of risk and, indeed, sometimes outside of timely human comprehension. Even as the range and power of actors with global reach or potential impact has increased, there has also been a proliferation of new centres of power, competence, authority and allegiance, reflected in the burgeoning literature on global governance. Whether the new modes of regulation and control suggested in much of the global governance literature are likely to be equal to the task of sustaining the globalized and globalizing world we have made for ourselves comprises the second half of the paper.
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