Social Reconstruction (original) (raw)

Reconstruction and Social Development

Social development issues, 2023

Reconstruction, after slavery and the Civil War, helped lay down the foundation of what we call Constitutional Democracy in America. As the world wars ended, countries woke up after a long oppressive night of bad dreams. These "undeveloped states" of the post-postcolonial heritage have evolved into the so-called Third World, aka, the "underdeveloped" or "developing" nations. There is a developmental dialectic in the becoming of these "welfare states" striving for democratic governance for progressive social change. A general rubric of reconstruction or "nation building" is usually referred to as Social Development (SD) with implicit specificity of regional goals. This article is a critique of the developmental processes which have impacted human lives and social structures in the global North and South with emphasis on the American history, racial ideology, and political structuralism, loosely entitled "Third Reconstruction.

Social Reconstruction as a Local Process

International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2008

We are now at the twenty-year mark, more or less, of efforts to create a sustainable peace after widespread repression or armed conflict. A whole agenda -and a whole set of institutions and professionals -have emerged to implement "transitional justice" interventions, from truth commissions to international trials to reparations programs and security sector reform. They have all been aimed at creating a new national narrative, establishing a new, healthier relationship between citizens and state, and ensuring through knowledge and action that atrocities will "never again" be the norm. And yet, in many places, it is far from clear that such interventions, no matter how well meaning or well executed -or even necessary --have made much of a difference in the lives of ordinary people.

Rational Reconstruction as a Method of Political Theory between Social Critique and Empirical Political Science

2013

In political theory, the question of the field's objects and methods is an ever-recurring theme. Again and again, this question occasions reflection on the relationship of political theory, not only to the other subfields of political science, but also to neighboring disciplines such as philosophy. Yet what might appear to be a search for disciplinary identity is a manifestation of the function that political theory fulfills for the analysis of politics in general. A bridge or broker between empirical political science, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, political theory is especially vulnerable to conflicts that neighboring disciplines can avoid by leaning back on their own specialized identities. By advancing its ability to translate among disciplines, in one direction as well as the other, political theory becomes the marketplace where well-established and often antithetical traditions of thought and research regularly come into contact with one another and await exchange.

Reconstruction

Reappraising European IR Theoretical Traditions, 2017

In this chapter, we spell out what we mean by reconstruction. The purpose of reconstructing the theoretical traditions including their main characteristics, origins and trajectories as they have evolved in Europe in the twentieth century is threefold: providing concise accounts of broad lines of development and major changes and continuities over time within and of each tradition; introducing main figures who represent and nurture a given tradition, and who reproduce and transform it in specific political, historical and intellectual contexts, to make visible, to define and to strengthen the identity of the European IR community; and thereby identifying the European flavours of each tradition.

The Role of Universities in Social Reconstruction

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2015

The theory of social reconstruction is one of the intended theories in the major of educational philosophy that have had significant influence on the education and training and the academic centers in the west. Based on this theory, the human beings transform into the social engineers that are able to program the evolution route and use the science and technology in the case of achieving the optimum goals. Thus, the academic centers should be question-centered and be aware of the society's matters. This means that they should identify the crises of a society and equip the students for facing these crises by means of utilizing the social reconstruction role. In this regard, the present study investigates the current crises of the society. Then, it suggests 21 roles that the universities, the main centers for reconstructing the society, have to implement in order for resolving these crises; 1-identifying, training, and guiding the new reference groups in the direction of society's optimum values; 2-refining and rebuilding the past values and according them with new valuable creations in society; 3-restructuring the Islamic patterns and texts; 4-strengthening the sense of attachment to national and bias sovereignty; 5-Reconstruction of Cultural Coexistence between different Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Groups in 7-restructuring the coexistence culture between different ethnic groups, religions, and languages; 8-developing and training the life skills appropriate to the effects caused by industrialization and trans-industrialization; 6-strengthening the free-thinking tables 9-recruiting needed human source in the age of information and technology; 10-establishing software in the modern world media; 11-institutionalizing the respect for laws and regulation among adolescents; 12-strengthening religious and valuable norms and redefining them; 13strengthening the viewpoint of rural life versus creation of negative attitudes toward urban life; 14-preparing a comprehensive rural life program; 15-changing the adolescents' attitudes towards occupation; 16-training entrepreneuring; 17-admitting and introducing elite graduates for scientific and administrative bodies; 18-strengthening domestic self-esteem in world scenes; 19strengthening the culture of consumption of natural resources especially water resources; 20-creating and strengthening the culture of resistive economy among students; and 21-creating environmental attitudes among students.

Three Approaches to Restoration and Their Implications for Social Inclusion

Ecological Restoration

Building on the Bonn Challenge, the UN Decade advances global restoration on an unprecedented scale. Research increasingly points to the need for greater social inclusion in restoration projects, yet the approaches that favor such inclusion remain opaque in practice. In this paper, we identify three restoration approaches that figure in the international agenda and analyze these through the lens of social inclusion. We argue that: (1) restoration aimed at bringing ecosystems back to a previous state, or "return" restoration, favors natural science at the landscape scale over social inclusion at the community scale; (2) restoration seeking to recreate functional ecosystems in locations away from where the degradation has occurred, or "reorganization" restoration, fails to adequately address historical inequities and perpetuates legacies of exploitation; and (3) "resilience" oriented restoration is promising but remains theoretical, and risks instrumentalizing marginalized communities and their lands as experimental sites for restoration. Though both "return" and "reorganize" restoration face substantial criticism, these approaches continue to play a central role in the major paradigms and practices that enliven the global restoration agenda. To improve prospects for social inclusion in the global restoration movement, we advance that the movement must evolve beyond productivity-based inclusion schemes and address the role that international initiatives play in perpetuating systems of exploitation. Finally, we argue that "resilience" restoration offers the most promising pathway towards meaningful social inclusion when it can empower community members to participate in restoration as agents of change and co-experimenters.