Abstract
My interest in this chapter will be to explore how an orientation to different aspects of temporality affords a way of managing contrastive demands for moral accountability in descriptions of conflict intervention by peace psychologists and other third-party actors. More specifically, I will be concerned to explore how the professional activities of those outside parties involved in managing the various effects of armed conflict are afforded moral legitimacy through the selective appeal to both structural and agentive accounts of related violence, and will consider the way that these different forms of explanation are variably invoked to underwrite the legitimacy of activities on the part of these professional practitioners. We will begin by examining the text of a programmatic description taken from the literature of peace psychology (Christie, Tint, Wagner, & Winter, 2008; see also Christie, 2006 and Christie & Montiel, 2013), and then move on to consider a number of examples of talk recorded in face-to-face interviews with representatives of various humanitarian aid organizations that operate in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. An especially significant feature of the different modes of accountability we will consider is that of the descriptive placement of the particulars of armed conflict along a temporally unfolding trajectory, such that concrete events of violent confrontation are related to a noumenal order of explanatory reasoning wherein those particulars are taken as documentary evidence of the transcendent, structural origins out of which they (those particulars) are said to emerge. Both structural and agentive modes of explanation are made relevant to justify the relationship that third-party actors have with the antagonists of conflict, both for the positive effects those relations are presumed to have on the relationship between said antagonists, and for the entitlement of those outside parties to act upon the related affairs in question.
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Notes
- 1.
These conversational materials were recorded over a six-week period in early 2004 while I was a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Cyprus, and are comprised of open-ended discussions with some 43 different speakers representing various high-profile and lesser-known humanitarian aid organizations. These include various UN agencies, the International Committee for the Red Cross, Care International, Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, and others. Participant identities in the transcripts presented here have been systematically obscured through the use of pseudonyms and the alteration of otherwise revealing details (see below for Appendix detailing transcript conventions). I am grateful to Dr. Eleni Theocharous MEP of the Cyprus chapter of Médecins du Monde, as well as staff of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society for their generous assistance in the collection of these materials.
- 2.
The principal distinction between these related forms of DP can be attributed to how assiduously that approach is adopted (see McKenzie, Forthcoming).
- 3.
Along these lines, Lynch (1993) notes that (p. 190): “ethnomethodologists try to characterize the organized uses of indexical expressions, including the various lay and professional uses of formulations. Inevitably, ethnomethodologists engage in formulating, if only to formulate the work of doing formulating, but unlike constructive analysts, they “topicalize” the relationship between formulations and activities in other than truth-conditional terms. That is, they do not treat formulations exclusively as true or false statements; instead, they investigate how they act as pragmatic moves in temporal orders of action.”
- 4.
The related literature here is voluminous and a bibliographic catalogue of its contributions would run into many pages. A reasonable starting point into that literature, however, would include (Garfinkel, 2002, especially see Ann Warfield Rawls’ editorial introduction, pp. 1–76), Heritage (1984), Hilbert (1992, 2009), Korbut (2014), Sharrock and Anderson (1986), as well as contributions to Button (1991) and Coulter (1990).
- 5.
In her introduction to Garfinkel’s (2002) monographic description of ethnomethodology’s program, Rawls addresses this specific point, elaborating upon the critical significance it might otherwise be taken to have (p. 56): “Social structure is produced locally. Institutional orders are maintained through accounting practices and they also, in spite of the tension involved, require the cooperation of populational cohorts. The fact that persons may be required to reproduce the very social forms that oppress them is a much more powerful and frightening vision of tension and inequality than the idea that independent individuals exist in some sort of primeval struggle against society.”
- 6.
The cultural aspect here is differentiated in terms of some shared set of (prejudicial) beliefs (p. 543): “Closely related to structural violence is cultural violence (Galtung, 1996), which refers to the symbolic sphere of our existence that reinforces episodes or structures of violence.” Note the designative transformation here between the referential terms that culture is meant both to index and to describe: cultural violence is variably taken to refer both to concrete manifestations of, as well as abstract conditions for, violence.
- 7.
Describing the figures they employ to depict these categories, Christie et al. (2008) note (pp. 544, 547): “The ovals … represent three different and potentially overlapping kinds of relationships. Moving from left to right, the first oval depicts a conflictual relationship in which the perception of incompatible goals dominates the relationship. The overlap of the “Conflictual” oval with the “Violent” oval suggests that conflictual relationships may become destructive, that is, marked by periodic episodes of violence. The “Violent” oval depicts a relationship that is dominated by violent behavioral episodes; here there is the potential to move the relationship away from violence and toward an examination of the conflicted features of the relationship (i.e., the overlap between Violent and Conflictual) or beyond violence toward a postviolence arrangement. The “Postviolence” oval indicates the relationship is dominated by nonviolence but has the potential to return to conflictual perceptions or violent actions. […] [These] relationships (whether primarily in a conflictual, violent, or postviolent state) occur within a structural and cultural context. Whereas negative peace processes have three conceptually distinct entry points, contingent on the predominant state of the relationship, opportunities for positive peace processes are ubiquitous and can take place at any point in the relationship whenever social injustices are present, that is, regardless of whether the predominant state of the relationship is conflictual, violent, or postviolent.”
- 8.
Watson and Coulter (2008) describe this axiomatic distinction as grounding theoretical debates that are foundational to the modern European understanding of human conduct (p. 1): “There have been some broadly accepted terms to this debate, which has been cast in terms of a set of binary conceptual opposites such as ‘individual’-‘society’, ‘subjectivity’-‘objectivity’, ‘agency’-‘structure’, ‘psychological’-‘social’ and so on. These oppositions are still preserved, largely uncritically, and this has tended to ossify the debate (Sharrock & Watson, 1988). Over the years, this ossification has taken on a bureaucratic incarnation, given that the conceptual oppositions in which it is rooted have come to gain expression in departmental divisions between disciplines—notably those of sociology and psychology.” In the discussion to follow, I shall simply refer to this distinction with the glosses structure and agency in order to maintain consistency with the terminology Christie et al. employ.
- 9.
Drawing on Mannheim (1952), Garfinkel (1967) refers to this aspect of mundane sense-making with the term documentary method of interpretation (p. 78): “The method consists of treating an actual appearance as ‘the document of,’ as ‘pointing to,’ as ‘standing on behalf of,’ a presupposed underlying pattern derived from its individual documentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in their turn, are interpreted on the basis of ‘what is known’ about the underlying pattern. Each is used to elaborate the other.”
- 10.
In his introduction to the 1831 edition of Schelling’s Die Weltalter [Ages of the World], Žižek addresses this relationship in remarks concerning Hegel’s treatment of the ontological significance afforded with a distinction between temporality and the eternal (Žižek & von Schelling, 1997: 15): “We must be careful not to miss this crucial point: as with Hegel, the problem is not how to attain the noumenal In-itself beyond phenomena: the true problem is how and why at all does this In-itself split itself from itself, how does it acquire a distance toward itself and thus clear the space in which it can appear (to itself).” That appearance, according to (Žižek’s reading of) Hegel, is what time effectuates, not as the condition of its fulfillment, but as its immanent realization.
- 11.
This is also the position developed in certain critically oriented approaches to the study of discursive interaction, including that of some contributors to DP (see Hepburn & Jackson, 2009; Hopkins & Reicher, 2011; Hopkins, Reicher, & Levine, 1997; Parker, 2012; Wetherell, 1998, 2001, 2007). To the extent that such work deploys its analysis of participants’ endogenously furnished sense-making as a way to interject itself into what is, after all, the business of others (and not the analytic business of examining how that participant work is carried out), it departs from the ethnomethodological heritage, abandoning the latter’s distinctive and unique character (Bogen & Lynch, 1990; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970). Related appeals to eclecticism sacrifice conceptual clarity to the fetish of collegiality, usually without achieving either.
- 12.
Elaborating on this same point in her discussion of the way time features in ethnomethodology, Rawls (2005) notes (pp. 177–178): “Instructed action is not a process of bringing an anticipation to reality. In fact, it is the reverse; a process of bringing reality to an anticipation. That is, anticipation is vague, or abstract, until one begins to work out how things might go together. Like a conversation — one starts with something that is constantly changing and becoming something else.”
- 13.
The dialectic relationship involved here is described by Žižek (1993) in his exploration of the German Idealist tradition in philosophy (p. 122): “What Hegel calls “the unity of the opposites” subverts precisely the false appearance of … a complementary relationship: the position of an extreme is not simply the negation of its other. Hegel’s point is rather that the first extreme, in its very abstraction from the other, is this other itself. An extreme “passes over” into its other at the very moment when it radically opposes itself to this other ….”
- 14.
- 15.
This appeal to the individual dynamism of such politically charismatic personalities is redolent of Max Weber’s interpretative sociology (see Giddens, 1971, “Part 3: Max Weber,” esp. pp. 119–181). Note too how, through the use of the indefinite article, references to such persons get formulated in terms that transform the recognition which their detailed specificity otherwise furnishes into a manifestation of abstraction (“a Nelson Mandela,” “a de Kle↓rk,” Extract 2, lines 46–47; “a Václav- Václav Havel,” “a Lech Wałęsa,” “a Nelson Mandela,” Extract 3, lines 28–29).
- 16.
This way of invoking the entitlement of aid recipients as a warrant for humanitarian intervention is recurrent in the corpus of talk from which these extracts are taken, and is also pervasive in the way that cultural identity is made to feature as a participant concern (both in efforts to corroborate speaker claims and to foreclose the potentially damaging implications that would otherwise be relevant for an account of refugee recalcitrance, see McKenzie, 2009, 2012). This deployment of category entitlement is similarly carried out by Clark in remarks taken from a later point in the same interview represented above, where he explains (palis19a, 28:27–28:44): “I’ve never had e:h a Palestinian accuse me of doing that. And saying go away you’re helping the occupation by doing what you’re doing and I think that’s one of the barometers I also ↑use to determine whether >y’know < we’re focusing in the right way or ↑no↓:t is the response of the: Palestinian community here.”
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Appendix: Transcription Conventions
Appendix: Transcription Conventions
The transcription of talk that appears above is based on the well-known set of conventions initially developed by Gail Jefferson (1985, see also Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), and extended by John Du Bois and his colleagues (Du Bois, 1991; Du Bois, Schuetze-Coburn, Susanna, & Paolino, 1993). Included among these conventions in the extracts above are the following:
Explanation | Example |
|---|---|
full stop indicates completion intonation | NGOs that work here. |
Comma indicates continuing intonation | some competition here, |
Underlining indicates additional stress | on the administrative level |
Prolongation of sound indicated with colon | u:m: I mean the competition |
young idealistic u::m | |
False starts indicated with a dash followed by a single space | there are- dealing with issues |
Voiceless articulation indicated with ° symbol | °Mm hm mm hm° |
Talk delivered with an increase in speed indicated with inward pointing arrows | that I think >you’re right< |
All caps indicate increase in volume | BUILD them a school |
Indistinguishable speech indicated with x for each syllable of such talk | xxx- |
Quotation as a presentational feature indicated with double quote | in most cases uh “out to do goo:d” |
Up/down arrows precede marked rise or fall in intonation | NGO um ↑cul↓ture here |
Equal sign indicates no space between two speaker turns at talk or in single speaker articulation | Int politically committed= Clark =Hm uh=I can’t help |
Untimed pause indicated by a full stop enclosed in parentheses | (.) |
Timed pause in talk indicated to | (0.7) |
tenth of a second | (1.2) |
Speaker overlap indicated with | Clark community [is] |
square brackets | Int [but] you |
Audible inbreath of varying length | .hh .hhh |
Audible outbreath of varying length | hh hhhh |
Description of articulatory detail in single parentheses, italicized | (clears throat) |
Obscured word or phrase in single parentheses, italicized | all my (name of organization) |
Editorial comment indicated with remark in double parentheses, italicized | ((some lines omitted, relating details of experience in another country)) |
Syllables of laughter | heh heh |
Interpolated particles of aspiration | You lea(h)rn ve↑ry(h) |
inserted into words, indicated with (h) | qui(h)ck↓ly(h) |
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McKenzie, K. (2018). Structure and Agency in Peace Psychology: Temporality as Mediating Gesture Between Abstract and Concrete Intervention. In: Gibson, S. (eds) Discourse, Peace, and Conflict. Peace Psychology Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99094-1_15
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