Violence: Analysis, Intervention, and Prevention

Chapter 9: Peace and Conflict Studies: Nonviolence, Social Justice, Human Rights, and Social Change

194 9 Peace and Conflict Studies Nonviolence, Social Justice, Human Rights, and Social Change On February 7, 1986, Florida’s Haitian radio, Radio 2020, reported that Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Haiti’s ousted president, had fled to the French Riviera. Radio 2020, an important source of information for Florida’s growing Haitian community , called on all of Florida’s Haitian community to come to the radio station in Davie, Florida, near Ft. Lauderdale to celebrate the fall of Baby Doc. The Klu Klux Klan on hearing that a large group of black people were gathered at the radio station decided to go to Radio 2020. They surrounded the celebrating Haitians gathered at Radio 2020 with the intent of forcing the black people out of the radio station and out of Davie. The Haitians gathered in front of the station spoke little English and knew nothing of the Klu Klux Klan and its sordid history. When the Klu Klux Klan arrived the Haitians applauded, thinking that they were supporting them. The Haitians went up to the Klan members present and tried to embrace them, saying “my friend thank you for coming and helping us to celebrate the fall of Baby Doc Duvalier.” The local media was covering the event, and the Klu Klux Klan did not react to the efforts of the overjoyous Haitians to hug them. However, the Klu Klux Klan asked the Peace and Conflict Studies |  Haitians to leave the premises, and they did so peacefully (Margaret Armand, personal communication, June 2000). Over the past several decades, influential thinkers from a variety of disciplines have more or less explicitly challenged the relationship between knowledge and power. In 1942 Carl Rogers developed the idea of client-centered therapy, which placed power not in the mind of the therapist but rather in the client. Rogers (1942, 28) argued that the aim of the intervention was to assist the individual to grow rather than to solve a problem so that the person can cope with present and later problems in an integrated fashion. The role of the therapist is to facilitate, through dialogue, the client’s efforts to make sense of her or his own experience and determine her or his future direction. This process must occur in the context of a therapeutic relationship characterized by unconditional positive regard that allows the client to feel safe and valued and to trust her or his own knowledge. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1999) argued that the education system served as an instrument of oppression by creating a culture of silence. He reframed the teacherstudent relationship as interdependent and intersubjective. Students bring important knowledge to the educational process. Education should provide opportunities for teachers and students to work together through a dialogic process to critically examine and better their social situations and their lives. In this kind of an educational process, persons do not have the world explained to them but instead become more able to interpret the world themselves. Freire believed that for the human being to exist, she or he must be empowered to not only name the world but also to change it. Michel Foucault (1979, 1993) also challenged the authority of experts when he persuasively argued that knowledge is not discovered but rather is produced by powerful technologies. Some discourses are seen as more legitimate or politically powerful: mass media versus  | Chapter 9 what has a lesser audience or no audience, discourses from within academia versus from without, and what the literary canon includes rather than omits. These privileged discourses, however, may not represent or may even misrepresent the experience of many social groups, including communities of women, groups from the global South, or the global North’s poor (e.g., Gugelberger and Kearney 1991; Randall 1991). In sociology, symbolic interactionists strive to understand how individuals and groups make sense of their lives and world (Blumer 1969). Feminist methodologists emphasize the needs of disempowered groups when they ask who research is for (Harding 1987). In the field of sustainable development, appropriate technology is the idea that those being helped are partners in designing and implementing solutions to their problems (Escobar 1995). It is arguable that the discipline that is the least touched by these ideas is the one most explicitly concerned with power: political science . Increasingly, however, the traditional concepts of high politics— state power, state interests, and interstate diplomacy—are gradually accommodating...