People make choices and act in order to realize them.
They don’t simply act, but they have to
act, as we have seen in my blog last week. In their choices people follow what
they consider their interests, or usually they do. Choices don’t need to be
conscious and as a rule people are not aware that they make them. Most choices are
made unconsciously. We follow the stream of life as, for instance, the
sociologist Alfred Schütz has made clear. Only when something needs special
attention we become aware of it. This doesn’t mean that we are a kind of
zombies most of the time. You must see yourself as the captain of an aeroplane
that is flying on the automatic pilot. Maybe you don’t know how the mechanism
works but as long as the plane is moving in the right direction and everything
is okay, the pilot lets the automaton go its own way and doesn’t take action. He
or she only keeps control.
Our interests often clash with the interests of other
people. Then there is a conflict. Usually it is innocent and we would hardly give
it that name. There are social rules to regulate the matter and to solve the discord
in good harmony. Sometimes we find conflicts even fun and we organize them with
the purpose to solve them. Sport competition is a case in point. Then we don’t
talk of conflicts, but we call them games, play, a challenge, and the like. For
the word “conflict” has a negative connotation: We see it as something that must
be avoided. Is it right?
It’s true that a clash of interests and then the
conflict that follows is often associated with quarrel, and, when the quarrel
escalates, in the end with violence and even with war. Since clashes of
interests, so conflicts, cannot be avoided, one could get the idea that society
is based on violence and force. And it’s true that it happens that conflicts
are solved violently. Everybody knows such cases. If we look at states, we call
them war. Is it necessary?
As the American political scientist and peace
researcher Gene Sharp made clear, conflict and violence are two things. They
are not fundamentally related, also not in the last resort. Conflicts cannot be
avoided, so Sharp. Conflict in society helps creativity and brings about
necessary political and social changes like making an end to oppression and
dictatorship. We can express it by saying that conflict has a function (in the
way Robert K. Merton used this concept). But this doesn’t imply that this
function has to be fulfilled by violence. The essence of solving conflicts that
threat to become violent is to look for alternatives that have the same
function as the violent solutions in the sense that they substitute them by
meeting the interests of the people that are in a conflict relation but that
don’t lead to all the nasty effects of violence. Within societies this has already been completely accepted. Think
of mediation, taking legal action, and what other means there are for non-violent
conflict resolution. And if violence is used by private individuals, the police
or another state authority interferes and stops it. In theory this is also
accepted on the international level. The first steps have already been made.
About a century ago the International Court of Justice was established in The
Hague, the Netherlands, for settling legal disputes between states. In the
meantime there are several other international courts of different types. It’s
also a task of the Security Council of the United Nations to prevent that
international conflicts end in wars and to stop wars once they have broken out.
Besides there are international organisations with the task of resolving or, preferably,
preventing violence between states and between major groups within states; both
state organisations and private organisations. Often their efforts are successful
(it’s cynical that usually you don’t hear about it). Too often their efforts
fail yet. But just as once violence was an integral part of conflicts within society but stopped by the development
of functional equivalents, there is no reason to assume that this can’t also
happen between states. However, there is yet a long way to go before violence
as a way of resolving international conflict has been banned. But the first
steps have been taken already.
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