Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict among Palestinians in Israel

2 Explaining Conflict and Violence: A Theoretical Framework

48 2 Explaining Conflict and Violence A Theoretical Framework The aims of this chapter are twofold. First, we will discuss dominant theories of ethnic and communal conflict and violence in order to see if they can explain what actually happened in Kafr Yassif in 1981 and the broader phenomenon of communal violence among Arabs in Israel. Second, the chapter aims to make an intervention in the larger literature on communal and ethnic violence and the field of conflict management. Theory and Method: Ibn Khaldoun’s Approach This chapter offers a unique approach to studying social problems by drawing on the method of the famous Arab philosopher of the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldoun (AD 1332–1406). There are always epistemological questions at stake in any research project, and underlying my use of Ibn Khaldoun in this study is a deeper question of the decolonization of Eurocentric scholarship that dominates the Western and US academy. One of the implications of this paradigm is that rational and scholarly engagement has taken place only following the advancement in sciences in the West after the Renaissance and Enlightenment in the age of modernity, during which Europe supposedly woke up after centuries of ignorance termed the Dark Ages, which in fact were not as “dark” as they are often assumed, neither in Europe nor in other parts of the world. Furthermore, history according to this Eurocentric approach claims Greek knowledge as its origin, which is something to be questioned when Greece was linked more to the Mediterranean and Africa than to Europe. Explaining Conflict and Violence • 49 To exclude the contribution of the “non-Western” world to knowledge production not only disfigures the genealogy of learning and anthropology of knowledge but also makes the contributions of non-Europeans less known to the Western academy and makes the field of knowledge production linear and less enriching. To claim modernity and rationality as the property of Europe and “the West” was part of what Wallerstein (2004) calls a necessary step in the global capitalist system that was structured to put Europe and the West at the center, which the rest of the world ought to emulate or follow. Not only should the Western-centric claims of rationality in scientific research be questioned, but the central argument in the narrative of Western modernity also ought to be disputed given that the so-called rational thought in the pursuit of scientific research was part of the non-European heritage for centuries before the advent of European modernity. In my view, there is hardly any subject or field in the modern social sciences that does not owe a great debt to Ibn Khaldoun and other non-European scholars who contributed to the accumulation of knowledge and even discussed methodologies of research that are similar to and sometimes even more sophisticated than what is often taught in social science disciplines in the Western academy. These epistemological issues and questions of intellectual history are beyond the scope of this book, but they underlie the book’s analysis of colonialism, power, and knowledge at many levels. Using Ibn Khaldoun’s insights to frame the methodology of research in this study is a small step in a larger project of decolonizing scholarship. Ibn Khaldoun actually addressed questions of research methodology in Al-Muqaddimah, posing questions such as the following: What are the primary methods to be used in a rigorous inquiry? What are the pitfalls of weak scholarship and of using already available explanations and theories ? Ibn Khaldoun warned against research by scholars who do not wish to trouble themselves in finding new frameworks that might challenge established explanations and against dishonest scholarship that hesitates to challenge hegemonic discourses. Ibn Khaldoun critiqued the hegemony of “court scholars,” who take dominant discourses at their face value. He also observed that scholars often lean toward already available explanations because they fit into how they see the world themselves. 50 • Not Just a Soccer Game As mentioned in the introduction, according to Ibn Khaldoun, a sound scholarly inquiry rests on three elements: first, logical deduction based on analytic reasoning of statements, arguments, and theories already available , in which one must look for holes or contradiction in the available arguments; second, fieldwork in the location of inquiry and empirical research if the question is concerned with an event with a group of people or states; and third, an engagement with other scholarly works and sources that deal...