Towards a Systematic Theory of Power Attribution (original) (raw)
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Introduction to the Special Issue: Power and Conflict
2020
This Special Issue of Peace and Conflict Studies focuses on the power dynamics that drive participants of protracted violent conflicts. Such dynamics undergird every act of brute force by militants of such conflicts, every state policy that diminishes the lives and life prospects of marginalized people, and every public speech by a political leader that degrades a segment of the population as inferior, dangerous or impure. Despite the ubiquity of power to violent conflicts generally, this subject matter lacks primacy as a central topic of prevailing conflict theories. Power is cast tacitly as secondary to the cardinal categories of violence, conflict and peacebuilding. This subordinate positioning is mistaken. A robust understanding of protracted violent conflicts requires attending to power’s complexity, its many forms, and its inseparability in the interactions and potential transformation of conflict actors.
2018
In this paper, I argue that philosophical and practical peace work depends in some part on bringing conceptions of power out of the null set of our reasoning by deliberately keeping a plurality of notions of power and, moreover, that the lessons learned by direct-action organizers may offer a strategy for doing so. Peace workers, including scholars and activists, who ignore or downplay the critical role power plays in our reasoning and actions risk weakening our acuity to detect and address key power dynamics in complex interpersonal, intergroup, and intersociety relationships. This includes a range of circumstances, such as trauma, gang violence, and warfare, to name a few. For the most part, I offer a positive argument for a greater and consistent focus on power in peace work through direct-action organizing, with some frequent gestures and provocations about the critical matter of relegating power to null reasoning. First, I outline the critical, negative claim that conceptions of power operate for the most part as ciphers relegated to null reasoning. Second, I provide a brief survey of some leading, candidate conceptions of power that might serve as resources for peace work. Finally, I propose that the principles of direct-action organizing may serve to help peace workers sort among the ambiguities of power without at the same time selecting narrow, homogeneous notions. In conclusion, I suggest the broader importance that the meeting of peace, power, and direct-action organizing may have for human relations.
The Paradox of Power in Conflict Dynamics
Peace and Conflict Studies, 2020
In recent decades the political state has been implicated in genocide, mass violence, political oppression, and targeted deprivations. Yet, in the field of conflict analysis, the meaning of state “power over” in conflict settings is under-theorized. In this article I probe the conceptual depths of state power to show that such power is neither singular nor simple. It’s neither ahistorical nor asocial. Beneath the surface of the state’s wide-ranging practices of governing its political subjects is a fundamental paradox that juxtaposes the state’s authority as the rightful authority over its subjects against the state’s vulnerability to potentially de-stabilizing threats to such authority. Critical to the meaning of state power, this paradox is revealed in an entanglement of contrary forces of state legitimation and its de-legitimation by threatening forces. Such an entanglement is illustrated in the state’s power to protect the nation from aggressors, to enact laws, and to manage its...
The Paradox of Peace and Power: Contamination or Enablement?
In debates about peace most discussions of power implicitly revolve around four types: (1) the hegemonic exercise of direct power related to force, and (2) relatedly, the existence and impact of structural power related to geopolitics or the global political economy; (3) the exercise of international governmentality, soft or normative power, by IOs; (4) and local agency, resistance, discursive or physical. Each of these types of power may be exercised from different sites of legitimate authority: the international, the state, and the local, and their legitimacy is constructed via specific understandings of time and space. Each type of power and its related site of authority has implications for making peace, especially given that they are often not well aligned with each other. ‘Ungovernmentality’, meaning resistance from subjects is the result if power and peace are misaligned. This paper examines in theoretical terms how types of power may be used to block, contaminate, or enable peace of various sorts.
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Peace and justice are often regarded as a settled pairing in theoretical writingsbut what do we know about their empirical relationship? Will deepening research into this relationship pay off at all? Insights from other disciplines which have been involved in the "revolution in human sciences" for decades should serve as a powerful incentive in a field like international relations, which has always closely followed other disciplines for stimulation: Neuroscientists have located the circuits in the brain responsible for adverse reactions to violations of claims for justice. Evolutionary biologists have identified rules of distribution and retribution not only in early human societies but among contemporary social species as well. Psychologists have tracked the emergence of a sense of justice in very early childhood, while in experiments behavioral economists have identified behavior by "average" people that deviated significantly from the model of "economic man" and could only be explained by a sense of justice. The chapter discusses 2
Review.Power: A Radical View by Steven Lukes
In 1974 Steven Lukes published Power: A radical View. Its re-issue in 2005 with the addition of two new essays is much to be welcomed. In this new edition the author reproduces the original text and adds two new chapters in which he clarifies and expands his view of power by acknowledging some of the mistakes and inadequacies of the original version.