Critical Social Inquiry

BY MYRNA MARGULIES BREITBART ousing, like the built environment in general, is something many take for granted. If you have it, and it's affordable and inhabitable, you rarely think about it. But if you do not, the search for it becomes the central feature of your daily life. This article describes the experiences of a number of women and children who once had no shelter and now have some or who once had inadequate shelter and now have a decent, secure place in which to live. If examined more closely, however, the collectiveexperiences of their day-today struggles and triumphs tell us something morethey tell us how it is that built environments can become complicit with economic and social forces as agents of social control and how, i n certain more favourable instances, Communities for children Photo: WOMEN'S DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME

David Harvey’s response to Simon Springer (2014) raises important questions about the places from which to draw ideas for a radical geography agenda. Nevertheless, Harvey ignores critical contributions that social anarchists (including social geographers) have made to understanding both the theory and practice of social transformation. We draw on studies of the anarchist movement in Spain before and during the Spanish Civil War to explore some of what social anarchism has to contribute to geography and contemporary struggles for a more equitable society.

In this essay I defend a politics of reconciliation as a means of addressing conflict in the hopes of realizing a legitimate ethical-political reality, which is one based in a common and explicit trust. The ideal guiding this model of reconciliation is the affordance of peaceful and reciprocal meaning making or dialogical relations; that is, I understand reconciliation to be both the formation of the conditions of the possibility of cooperative meaning making, insofar as it involves the creation of the secure conditions needed to reestablish basic forms of trust between conflicting persons, and eventually the cooperative meaning making itself that leads to deeper forms of trust such as friendship or solidarity. Insofar as trust is crucial to the health of a democratic political system, a politics of reconciliation is needed in realizing this fundamental relationship, and this politic requires the enactment of a permanent reconciliatory apparatus.

Divisiveness routinely turns violent, thus making research into alternative means of dealing with conflict an urgent necessity. This dissertation focuses on the politics of divisiveness and the techniques of conflict transformation. In this, I offer a robust and operable theory of reconciliation. I argue that reconciliation is the first principle of justice. In this sense, the ideal of justice is enacted through the improvement and coordination of social-political relations, which requires the development of trust and institutions that facilitate the ever emergent demos. This is not to suggest that alternative approaches to justice, such as distributive models, are useless or wrong. Rather, justice requires a consensus which cannot be realized when persons see their neighbors as enemies. In conflicts, activities that benefit the enemy Other, such as the redistribution of wealth, will be taken as an injustice by other embattled social groups. As I demonstrate through various cases, interpersonal and institutional responses, like redistribution, often escalate discord and rarely create a shared sense of justice. Thus, conflict becomes a cyclical and multilevel problem. I explore how we can better respond to the cycle of conflict at individual, social, and systemic levels, in order to realize a legitimate notion of justice. I use an interdisciplinary approach to defend my arguments, drawing on iv philosophy and Conflict Resolution (CR). CR is an emerging field that emphasizes practical responses to conflict, often with advocacy for reconciliation. However, more theoretical work needs to be done to explain the ideal of reconciliation that directs CR practices. Within philosophy, little work has been done on the topic of reconciliation. A vast literature exists on the topic of justice, but this literature offers few practical descriptions of how persons come to agree upon the terms of justice. Thus, theories of justice are often labeled as 'ideal' simply because they are disconnected from the fragmented and conflict-ridden reality most people experience. This dissertation, as a project in non-ideal political theory that is empirically informed by cases and concerns in CR, fills these gaps in both philosophy and CR.