Lecture Week 1

Question 1

What was the first generation of conflictstudies about?

Answer 1

After the two WW: there were massive amounts of killings and destruction which led to a peace and -anti-wat sentiment to intitiate peaceful international relations.

So then international relations as a discipline started out of an anti-war sentiment

Aim: promote peace through research, develop new perspectives on peace and conflict, and explore the causes and consequences.

Question 2

What is conflict?

Answer 2

any situation in hwich occur two or more parties perceive that they passes mutaully incompatible goals.

Three components:
- goal incompatability: belief that aspirations are blocked by the other party’s attempt to reach its own respective goal
- attitudes: psychological states that accompany and arise from the involvement in a situation of conflcit
- Behaviour: actions undertaken by one party aimed at the opposing party with the intention of making the opponent abandon or modify its goals

Question 3

What is violence

Answer 3

Structural violence: violence is whatever causes the actual level of realization to be lower than the potential level of realization. Factors like racism, sxism, economic inequality or poverty produce this structural violence and hence this discrepancy

Symbolic violence: contemporary social hierarchies and social inequality, as well as the suffering that they cause, are produced and maintained less by physical force than by forms of symbolic domination – the results of such domination are symbolic violence. Thus: the imposition on subordinated groups by the dominant class of an ideology which legitimates and naturalizes the status quo:see alsodominant ideology;compareinterpellation.

Question 4

What is a civil war?

Answer 4

a politically organized, large-scale, sustained, physically violent conflict that occurs within a country principally among large/numerically important groups of its inhabitants or citizens over the monopoly of physical force within the country. Civil wars usually have incumbent governments that control the state and have a monopoly of force before the civil war and challengers—people who have not effectively challenged the monopoly of others before the outbreak of the civil war but whose challenge initiates the outbreak of the civil war.

Question 5

What is peace?

Answer 5

Negative peace: the absence of violence, absence of war
Positive peace: as the absence of indirect and strcutural violence and the integration of human society