Archive for the ‘Conflict’ Category
On Conflict, Gender and Rethinking the Battlefield
Conflict. While I do not think that letting select issues just “fly under the radar” will solve any problems I get a feeling that fighting across well-worn battlefields will only obscure the ultimate goals of reducing the need for conflict at all. I am responding creatively here to a previous post about the predominance and apparently endless ascendency of Man and masculinity at the cost of Woman. I agree that there is a certain undeniable centrality and power that has been assumed by the male in relation to the female in culture, history, media, politics and so on. However – I feel that the battle is being fought over ground so wretched with despair and the intellectual corpses of so many great thinkers that it has come to resemble a kind of Somme battlefield of muddy and endless carnage and destruction. I frame this as a separate discussion than that of the analysis and uncovering of the many ways in which men do exploit, dominate and abuse women – the argument as demonstrated here is about what may be underlying issues to this gender imbalance.
6 Degrees of Separation: Congo, Sexual Violence and You
Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at the hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair. (Photo: Hazel Thompson, Source: The New York Times)
One of the things we can appreciate when we start to see the world as one single interconnected whole is the sometimes uncanny way in which we are all fundamentally connected. A previous post on this blog (“Violence Against Women In Different Lights Around The World“) discusses the omnipresence of sexual violence and abuse endured by women from all areas of this planet. In some recent online research I discovered a particularly tortuous and torturous path of connection between the ubiquitous mobile phone and what may well be some of the most extreme sexual violence being perpetrated against women at this time.
Although we may perceive that any specific instance of such an injustice or crime is a single entity it is always an instantiation of the wider matrix of human psychological and sexual power-plays. This blog is an effort to focus on the wider connectivity of the problems but a general understanding is only truly facilitated by the study of specific instances and their unique signature of behaviour or activity. I hope to return at a later point to more the general psychological, cultural and sexual symmetries at play here but this article is on something of which I feel we should all be very, painfully, aware.
Desensitization Towards Human Suffering
Hostage crises have failed to attract mainstream attention like it used to earlier. A reason perhaps is the fact that people are now desensitized to killing and shootings as a person or a group being held hostage is practically of no consequence to either governments or the masses. In fact, desensitization to crime and violence is so much that recently when two Austrians were held hostage by the North African branch of Al-Qaeda in Mali, it failed to garner any attention at all.
After 8 months when the two hostages, Andrea Kloiber and Wolfgang Ebner were released from their sandy captivity, it again failed to create any sense of excitement either in Austria or elsewhere. Unfortunate as it is, people look for statistics and not the human suffering behind the numbers.
A single person’s suffering deserves the same importance as a group of 100 people’s suffering does.
On the (Cutting) Edge
At issuesbeyondborders, let us not see the world in terms of countries, regions, and hemispheres. These are borders that divide, and make people revel in their territorial and self-centric nature. The real divisions that put men asunder are not found on terra firma. What separate men are also the same things that drive rifts among them, though not without the possibility of closing in the gaps.
The real demarcations are in the attitude and behavior of men.
So, here at issuesbeyondborders, let’s talk about what happens when human behavior and attitude affect the tides of change, even if the change isn’t at all good. For instance, let’s not talk about the proliferation of Ecstasy in Europe or hashish in Thailand or meth in Hong Kong or cocaine of the Medelin Cartel in South America or, even, heroin in Afghanistan. Instead, let’s talk about the global drug trade and see similarities in how this has spread to practically all corners of the world. What make drug pushing easy and drug use accessible are some of the contexts that we will explore here at issuesbeyondborders.
Let’s drive the shovel deep into the apparent crust of things, and call a spade a spade (pun intended). Though human attitude is the toughest to crack and fathom, issuesbeyondborders hopes to shovel in enough material to actually close in the gaps among humans.
Let’s go out on a limb. Go far to the edge. Let’s flatten the world.
