A Justice Site
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: September 10, 2004
Latest Update: September 10, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Lecture Notes: Terms and Concepts, Thursday, September 9, 2004On September 10, 2004, Sawson Mansour sent the following reminder from law class: Need info on:
- Bales, Interaction Process Analysis (IPA)
- Pepinski, Hal. Peacemaking Primer On the importance of dispeling anger before negotiation can effectively begin. Backup Excellent source. Long. You may want to scan for later reading. Note especially:
"Tis a Blessing for Anger to be Open"Once as a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, as I spoke of the kind of self-discipline peacemaking requires, one graduate student tried to side with me, and another sitting beside me with his wife, passed prolonged suffering at the fellow student's arrogance and threatened to break his jaw. As I told both of them after the event, when the first student backed off verbal retaliation and taunting following the second student's threat, I knew the second student was now at virtually no risk to swing as his oppressor because he had said how he felt openly, in front of us others, instead. Violence breaks out when we can't safely express and be validated for the anger and fear first. Cycles of violence take hold of us precisely as the underlying fears of ourselves and others which drive us remain nonshareable beforehand. So when I'm self-possessed enough to hold out hope and continue trying for peace, I welcome honest, open, public utterances of anger and frustration, I welcome heating up debate to its angriest, most fearsome sources, because the sooner and more directly the anger and fear comes out, the safer we all become. It is to my peacemaking mind absurd to ask young angry singers to tone down their rhetoric. Better to welcome the rhetoric and take the time to talk it over with the angry singers and their fans, rather than forcing people to endure the fears they resonate to in the music to bear them in isolation, in hiding, until they explode into blinds acts of pain and devastation."
From Hal Pepinsky's PeaceMaking PrimerNow, in addition to this sense of defusing built up anger and frustration, there is another important question raised by Darci in Women and Poverty. When you are the object of ridicule, arrogance, subordination, domination, any of those, or others, and if you ignore it to go on to more peaceful illocutionary understanding, how is the person that expressed such antagonistic and disrespectful views ever going to learn that such behavior is not socially acceptable, and can and does harm those in a position of lesser social status or power? That is a very good question, Darci. My response was that we must first speak to priorities and agendas, and that ending violent or potentially violent crises needs to come first, at which point we then turn our attention to further social transformation. But meanwhile, we may have reinforced the bully's propensity to bully. What would Hal say? Read through the Primer. Is his answer there?
