Native title deals with Indigenous people's rights to land and waters, but it does so on 'white' ... more Native title deals with Indigenous people's rights to land and waters, but it does so on 'white' terms that do little to advance 'rights' in the wholesale sense of an incontrovertible moral political principle. Rather, it carries a European 'toughness' forged on the colonial frontier that denies Indigenous rights and is deeply embedded in Australian political institutions. Native title re ects an Aboriginal observation, offered to Bill Stanner by an old Aboriginal man, that Europeans are 'very hard people'. Of course, native title does afford some rights to Indigenous Australians, but these are very limited-nothing like those envisaged by Mabo, the Wik people and others, when they won their famous ghts. After 25 years of administration the native title regime is predominantly a vehicle for the ongoing subjugation and assimilation of Indigenous peoples, in line with the logics of the settlercolonial state upon which Australian law is built.
Table of Contents Contributors Acknowledgements 1: Introduction: Discourse of microcredit: framin... more Table of Contents Contributors Acknowledgements 1: Introduction: Discourse of microcredit: framing and disciplining the subjects of development Jude L Fernando 2: The global political economy of microfinance and poverty reduction: locating local - livelihoods" in political analysis Heloise Weber 3: Disciplining the Developmental Subject: Neoliberal Power and Governance through Microcredit Morgan Brigg 4: Social Capital, Microfinance, and the Politics of Development Katharine N. Rankin 5: Rebuilding Social Capital in Post Conflict Regions. Women's Village Banking in Ayacucho, Peru and in Highland Guatemala Denise Humphreys Babbington and Arelis Gomez 6: Banking on Culture: Microcredit as Incentives for Cultural Conservation in Mali Tara Deubel 7: The Darker Side to Microfinance: Evidence from Cajamarca, Peru Katie Wright 8: Banking on Bananas, Crediting Crafts: Financing Women's Work in the Philippine Cordillera B. Lynne Milgram 9: Microcredit and Empowerment of Women: Visibility Without Power Jude L. Fernando
Indigenous peoples pre-date the contemporary world system of nation-states, and yet are now bound... more Indigenous peoples pre-date the contemporary world system of nation-states, and yet are now bound with this global scheme through asymmetric power relations of colonialism. As colonial exchanges saw the expropriation of Indigenous lands and the concentration of wealth in European hands from 1492, notions of progress, private property and nationhood relied upon Indigenous reference points to conjure the image of a barbaric, romantic or simply earlier past that was ‘naturally’ succeeded in the passage to a modern world.1 The European colonial episode inflicted incredible damage on Indigenous societies, frequently pushing Indigenous peoples to the brink of extinction through genocidal violence, but it also bound Indigenous and European peoples in the generation of European self-understandings that continue to reverberate and dominate in world politics. The asymmetry of many colonial encounters certainly means that many exchanges occurred — and continue to occur — on European terms, but Indigenous peoples have consistently pushed back, troubling and haunting a Eurocentric world order from a marginal position.
How can we pursue conflict resolution beyond the influence of sovereignty? In what ways can we re... more How can we pursue conflict resolution beyond the influence of sovereignty? In what ways can we respond without disavowing cultural others and governing difference? Part I of this book generated these questions through a critical engagement with conflict resolution, yet also suggested that the seeds for addressing them are already partly sown within conflict resolution itself. Conflict resolution is a practically engaged enterprise, committed to responding to people in conflict. This combination of practical engagement and responsiveness is a valuable resource for addressing challenges facing the field. Nonetheless, the possibilities should not be overstated, and realizing them requires sustained critical inquiry. The conceptual grounds for responding to others, including for undertaking dialogue and exchange, have largely remained implicit and continue to risk capture by the influence of sovereignty. There are, for instance, ongoing encounters across cultural difference in conflict resolution, but the field remains largely dominated by Western approaches. This situation reproduces the culture challenge and governs difference, thereby compromising the capacity of conflict resolution to address some of the contemporary world’s most difficult conflicts. We need to explore avenues for dealing with pressing challenges facing the conflict resolution field while remaining cautious about commonsensical appeals to exchange and dialogue. To do so, it is necessary to ask questions about the relations between sovereignty and the field’s advanced theoretical formulations.
Introduction Modern political systems and institutions have in recent centuries gained increased ... more Introduction Modern political systems and institutions have in recent centuries gained increased governmental purchase over both individual subjects and collective lived experience. The growth and spread of formal institutions, most notably the state, sovereignty and rule of law, have been central to this development. By subjugating, bypassing, standing above, or aggregating and consolidating both the regulatory forces and ways of being that operate through guilds, communes, clans, tribes, religious communities and so on, the institutions of state, sovereignty and rule of law have facilitated the subordination and regulation of what can, for the sake of convenience, be termed (local) ‘cultures’. In place of the everyday indigenous and local regulation of social life, the emergence of sovereignty and rule of law in European history, as well as the export of these political and legal forms through colonialism, development and globalisation, facilitate the individual’s subjection to often-distant and abstract entities and processes alongside the transfer of authority to the quasi-transcendental authority of sovereignty and state. These processes are imbricated with wider political developments. The nineteenth-century emergence of legal positivism, for instance, was bound up with both the consolidation of sovereignty within European states and the differential allocation of sovereignty on a global scale through processes that facilitated legal imperialism. Although political and legal formalism have enjoyed considerable success in recent centuries, the rise of formal systems in politics and law from the local to the global has, as is perhaps to be expected, encountered resistance and limits. The increasing pressure for conventional approaches to law to respond to the cultural claims of those to whom it is applied - along with the rise of legal pluralism - are indicative of this phenomenon. Indeed, in the early twenty-first century there appears to be less confidence in the capacity and reach of rational and secular means for governing social life and a dawning recognition that the universal ideals, categories and injunctions of modern formal politics have less purchase than may have been anticipated by modernisers. This may be because such formal and rational forces tend to belong to the realm of imagination rather than lived experience. As Partha Chatterjee points out, people can only imagine themselves in the empty, homogenous and civic space of the nation; they do not live there.
Complex and challenging political problems and conflicts continue to pervade relations between Se... more Complex and challenging political problems and conflicts continue to pervade relations between Settler and Indigenous peoples. This thesis addresses these dynamics by developing an approach for analysing and advancing intercultural conflict resolution in the Australian Settler-Indigenous context. To do so, I foreground ethico-political questions of knowing across cultural difference, and elaborate an approach using the knowing subject as a key methodological resource. By conceiving and practicing selves as unfolding ensembles that can become different while continuing to be what they are, I demonstrate that knowers can connect with, and become susceptible and responsive to, cultural difference. In this approach my professional and personal experiences as a mediator with Aboriginal people become a resource for analysing and engaging relations of cultural governance. I show that conflict resolution subordinates non-Western cultures and selves to Christian-derived quasi-transcendental governance and knowledge schemes of the West. In addition, I demonstrate that this governance operates through liberal "freedom" and the (self-) constitution and regulation of participants in mediation. I nevertheless argue that possibilities for fissuring this governance lie with the susceptibility of selves and the interaction and exchange of political ontologies in mediation. I show that Aboriginal political ontology can work within and against the liberal Settler-Colonial order, potentially to advance Australian intercultural conflict resolution. This thesis therefore shows that asking after selves is promising for addressing the challenge of Settler-Indigenous relations in both knowledge production and conflict resolution.
The Australian journal of Indigenous education, Dec 1, 2001
Waking up to Dreamtime contributes to a currently popular Australian genre of policy commentary t... more Waking up to Dreamtime contributes to a currently popular Australian genre of policy commentary that is skeptical about claims articulated through Aboriginality, particularly those around Aboriginal self-determination. To the extent that this is clearly an important issue for many Australians, Gary Johns and other contributors to Waking Up pose a challenge to many Aboriginal people, to well-meaning leftist commentators, educators, and their sympathetic white Australian supporters. However, with one or two notable exceptions, the book does not address the issues in a way that is respectful of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and people, or attuned to the complexities involved. Moreover, many of the chapters are not sufficiently reflexive about the role of 'Westernality'-the counterpart to Aboriginality. This severely undermines the claims the authors attempt to make but will, unfortunately, likely make the book appealing to those who are seeking simple answers to current fears and controversies.
Native title deals with Indigenous people's rights to land and waters, but it does so on 'white' ... more Native title deals with Indigenous people's rights to land and waters, but it does so on 'white' terms that do little to advance 'rights' in the wholesale sense of an incontrovertible moral political principle. Rather, it carries a European 'toughness' forged on the colonial frontier that denies Indigenous rights and is deeply embedded in Australian political institutions. Native title re ects an Aboriginal observation, offered to Bill Stanner by an old Aboriginal man, that Europeans are 'very hard people'. Of course, native title does afford some rights to Indigenous Australians, but these are very limited-nothing like those envisaged by Mabo, the Wik people and others, when they won their famous ghts. After 25 years of administration the native title regime is predominantly a vehicle for the ongoing subjugation and assimilation of Indigenous peoples, in line with the logics of the settlercolonial state upon which Australian law is built.
Table of Contents Contributors Acknowledgements 1: Introduction: Discourse of microcredit: framin... more Table of Contents Contributors Acknowledgements 1: Introduction: Discourse of microcredit: framing and disciplining the subjects of development Jude L Fernando 2: The global political economy of microfinance and poverty reduction: locating local - livelihoods" in political analysis Heloise Weber 3: Disciplining the Developmental Subject: Neoliberal Power and Governance through Microcredit Morgan Brigg 4: Social Capital, Microfinance, and the Politics of Development Katharine N. Rankin 5: Rebuilding Social Capital in Post Conflict Regions. Women's Village Banking in Ayacucho, Peru and in Highland Guatemala Denise Humphreys Babbington and Arelis Gomez 6: Banking on Culture: Microcredit as Incentives for Cultural Conservation in Mali Tara Deubel 7: The Darker Side to Microfinance: Evidence from Cajamarca, Peru Katie Wright 8: Banking on Bananas, Crediting Crafts: Financing Women's Work in the Philippine Cordillera B. Lynne Milgram 9: Microcredit and Empowerment of Women: Visibility Without Power Jude L. Fernando
Indigenous peoples pre-date the contemporary world system of nation-states, and yet are now bound... more Indigenous peoples pre-date the contemporary world system of nation-states, and yet are now bound with this global scheme through asymmetric power relations of colonialism. As colonial exchanges saw the expropriation of Indigenous lands and the concentration of wealth in European hands from 1492, notions of progress, private property and nationhood relied upon Indigenous reference points to conjure the image of a barbaric, romantic or simply earlier past that was ‘naturally’ succeeded in the passage to a modern world.1 The European colonial episode inflicted incredible damage on Indigenous societies, frequently pushing Indigenous peoples to the brink of extinction through genocidal violence, but it also bound Indigenous and European peoples in the generation of European self-understandings that continue to reverberate and dominate in world politics. The asymmetry of many colonial encounters certainly means that many exchanges occurred — and continue to occur — on European terms, but Indigenous peoples have consistently pushed back, troubling and haunting a Eurocentric world order from a marginal position.
How can we pursue conflict resolution beyond the influence of sovereignty? In what ways can we re... more How can we pursue conflict resolution beyond the influence of sovereignty? In what ways can we respond without disavowing cultural others and governing difference? Part I of this book generated these questions through a critical engagement with conflict resolution, yet also suggested that the seeds for addressing them are already partly sown within conflict resolution itself. Conflict resolution is a practically engaged enterprise, committed to responding to people in conflict. This combination of practical engagement and responsiveness is a valuable resource for addressing challenges facing the field. Nonetheless, the possibilities should not be overstated, and realizing them requires sustained critical inquiry. The conceptual grounds for responding to others, including for undertaking dialogue and exchange, have largely remained implicit and continue to risk capture by the influence of sovereignty. There are, for instance, ongoing encounters across cultural difference in conflict resolution, but the field remains largely dominated by Western approaches. This situation reproduces the culture challenge and governs difference, thereby compromising the capacity of conflict resolution to address some of the contemporary world’s most difficult conflicts. We need to explore avenues for dealing with pressing challenges facing the conflict resolution field while remaining cautious about commonsensical appeals to exchange and dialogue. To do so, it is necessary to ask questions about the relations between sovereignty and the field’s advanced theoretical formulations.
Introduction Modern political systems and institutions have in recent centuries gained increased ... more Introduction Modern political systems and institutions have in recent centuries gained increased governmental purchase over both individual subjects and collective lived experience. The growth and spread of formal institutions, most notably the state, sovereignty and rule of law, have been central to this development. By subjugating, bypassing, standing above, or aggregating and consolidating both the regulatory forces and ways of being that operate through guilds, communes, clans, tribes, religious communities and so on, the institutions of state, sovereignty and rule of law have facilitated the subordination and regulation of what can, for the sake of convenience, be termed (local) ‘cultures’. In place of the everyday indigenous and local regulation of social life, the emergence of sovereignty and rule of law in European history, as well as the export of these political and legal forms through colonialism, development and globalisation, facilitate the individual’s subjection to often-distant and abstract entities and processes alongside the transfer of authority to the quasi-transcendental authority of sovereignty and state. These processes are imbricated with wider political developments. The nineteenth-century emergence of legal positivism, for instance, was bound up with both the consolidation of sovereignty within European states and the differential allocation of sovereignty on a global scale through processes that facilitated legal imperialism. Although political and legal formalism have enjoyed considerable success in recent centuries, the rise of formal systems in politics and law from the local to the global has, as is perhaps to be expected, encountered resistance and limits. The increasing pressure for conventional approaches to law to respond to the cultural claims of those to whom it is applied - along with the rise of legal pluralism - are indicative of this phenomenon. Indeed, in the early twenty-first century there appears to be less confidence in the capacity and reach of rational and secular means for governing social life and a dawning recognition that the universal ideals, categories and injunctions of modern formal politics have less purchase than may have been anticipated by modernisers. This may be because such formal and rational forces tend to belong to the realm of imagination rather than lived experience. As Partha Chatterjee points out, people can only imagine themselves in the empty, homogenous and civic space of the nation; they do not live there.
Complex and challenging political problems and conflicts continue to pervade relations between Se... more Complex and challenging political problems and conflicts continue to pervade relations between Settler and Indigenous peoples. This thesis addresses these dynamics by developing an approach for analysing and advancing intercultural conflict resolution in the Australian Settler-Indigenous context. To do so, I foreground ethico-political questions of knowing across cultural difference, and elaborate an approach using the knowing subject as a key methodological resource. By conceiving and practicing selves as unfolding ensembles that can become different while continuing to be what they are, I demonstrate that knowers can connect with, and become susceptible and responsive to, cultural difference. In this approach my professional and personal experiences as a mediator with Aboriginal people become a resource for analysing and engaging relations of cultural governance. I show that conflict resolution subordinates non-Western cultures and selves to Christian-derived quasi-transcendental governance and knowledge schemes of the West. In addition, I demonstrate that this governance operates through liberal "freedom" and the (self-) constitution and regulation of participants in mediation. I nevertheless argue that possibilities for fissuring this governance lie with the susceptibility of selves and the interaction and exchange of political ontologies in mediation. I show that Aboriginal political ontology can work within and against the liberal Settler-Colonial order, potentially to advance Australian intercultural conflict resolution. This thesis therefore shows that asking after selves is promising for addressing the challenge of Settler-Indigenous relations in both knowledge production and conflict resolution.
The Australian journal of Indigenous education, Dec 1, 2001
Waking up to Dreamtime contributes to a currently popular Australian genre of policy commentary t... more Waking up to Dreamtime contributes to a currently popular Australian genre of policy commentary that is skeptical about claims articulated through Aboriginality, particularly those around Aboriginal self-determination. To the extent that this is clearly an important issue for many Australians, Gary Johns and other contributors to Waking Up pose a challenge to many Aboriginal people, to well-meaning leftist commentators, educators, and their sympathetic white Australian supporters. However, with one or two notable exceptions, the book does not address the issues in a way that is respectful of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and people, or attuned to the complexities involved. Moreover, many of the chapters are not sufficiently reflexive about the role of 'Westernality'-the counterpart to Aboriginality. This severely undermines the claims the authors attempt to make but will, unfortunately, likely make the book appealing to those who are seeking simple answers to current fears and controversies.
Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Planning: Toward a Participatory Approach to Human Security... more Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Planning: Toward a Participatory Approach to Human Security. By Lisa Schirch. Boulder and London, Kumarian, 2013. 229 pp., $22 paperback (ISBN: 978-1-56549-579-1).
Unsettling the settler state: Creativity and resistance in Indigenous settler-state governance, 2011
Debates in contemporary Indigenous affairs rarely question the settler-state framework and its ac... more Debates in contemporary Indigenous affairs rarely question the settler-state framework and its accompanying institutions and processes. This silence persists despite Indigenous efforts to engage the settler-colonial order through repeated calls for treaties, for constitutional change, for self-determination and for better representation on the national political stage. These Indigenous efforts to enter into dialogue with mainstream Australia have thus far received little or no reciprocal movement from the settler state and its associated institutions.
To advance Indigenous affairs governance and develop a dialogue for improved Settler-Indigenous relations in the 21st century requires unsettling the silences around the settler-state and its institutions and processes. Instead, we need dialogue and exchange between Indigenous and Settler orders. Only by embracing the challenges of governance in an open an unapologetic way will we be able to address the anxieties associated with Indigenous governance and contribute to healing the persistent sore of the wider Indigenous-Settler relations that continue to trouble the Australian community.
To address these challenges, Unsettling the Setter State documents and analyses contemporary Indigenous efforts to engage with the settler state and its institutions. Chapters by Indigenous authors and settler interpreters and counterparts highlight Aboriginal creativity, vibrancy, and resistance while providing a crucial resource and pathways for rethinking governance and decolonising Australia in the 21st century.
"Mediating Across Difference is based on a fundamental premise: to deal adequately with conflict—... more "Mediating Across Difference is based on a fundamental premise: to deal adequately with conflict—and particularly with conflict stemming from cultural and other differences—requires genuine openness to different cultural practices and dialogue between different ways of knowing and being. Equally essential is a shift away from understanding cultural difference as an inevitable source of conflict, and the development of a more critical attitude toward previously under-examined Western assumptions about conflict and its resolution.
To address the ensuing challenges, this book introduces and explores some of the rich insights into conflict resolution emanating from Asia and Oceania. Although often overlooked, these local traditions offer a range of useful ways of thinking about and dealing with difference and conflict in a globalizing world. To bring these traditions into exchange with mainstream Western conflict resolution, the editors present the results of collaborative work between experienced scholars and culturally knowledgeable practitioners from numerous parts of Asia and Oceania. The result is a series of interventions that challenge conventional Western notions of conflict resolution and provide academics, policy makers, diplomats, mediators, and local conflict workers with new possibilities to approach, prevent, and resolve conflict."
The new politics of conflict resolution : Responding to difference, 2008
Conflict resolution has come of age as a specialized and coherent field, but struggles to deal wi... more Conflict resolution has come of age as a specialized and coherent field, but struggles to deal with cultural and other differences that fuel key conflicts of our time. This book critically engages conflict resolution's relationship with difference while sharing the field's commitment to responsive engagement to people in conflict. Critical analysis shows that enthusiasm for conflict resolution's practical possibilities unwittingly reinscribes dominant ways of thinking about political community, order, and conflict. This denies difference and orders it on liberal terms. Yet the practical commitment to responsiveness and personal engagement on the part of many conflict resolution scholars and practitioners also offers prospects for rethinking the field's relationship with differences. When combined with critical analysis at the limits of contemporary social science, engaged practice evokes vulnerability and responsiveness to difference. Drawing upon theoretical ideas of relatedness and connection, this book moves beyond dominant ways of thinking in conflict resolution towards possibilities for responding anew across difference.
When the Townsville Peace Agreement formally ended the period of violent conflict in the Solomon ... more When the Townsville Peace Agreement formally ended the period of violent conflict in the Solomon Islands known as ‘the Tensions’ in 2000, it also established a Peace Monitoring Council (PMC) to monitor and enforce the agreement. In 2003, the PMC was transformed into the National Peace Council (NPC) which, in recognition that a high level of animosity remained between and within many communities, was mandated to conduct the work of restoring inter-communal ties that had been broken by the conflict. This case study examines the NPC’s inter-communal mediation work carried out from 2003 to 2006, including by reflecting on the challenges and successes of blending introduced models of mediation with traditional reconciliation processes.
Longstanding and unresolved issues surrounding land tenure, economic opportunity, internal migrat... more Longstanding and unresolved issues surrounding land tenure, economic opportunity, internal migration, and illegal settlement between the indigenous people of Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands Government (SIG) have been recognized as one of the primary drivers of the outbreak of violent conflict known as ‘The Tensions’ in the late 1990s. This case study examines the ongoing talks between the SIG and the Guadalcanal Provincial Government (GPG) to resolve these issues and to open the way to achieve wider national reconciliation.
While Solomon Islands women played an active and important role in creating the necessary conditi... more While Solomon Islands women played an active and important role in creating the necessary conditions for the Solomon Islands peace process, they were largely excluded from the formal peace processes that brought about the end of the conflict known as the ‘Tensions’. This case study examines some of the roles women played during the conflict, as well as in post-Townsville peacebuilding efforts that continue today, while reflecting on the potential for expanding women’s roles in dialogue and conflict resolution processes in the future.
This guidance framework aims to improve interaction and cooperation among local, national and int... more This guidance framework aims to improve interaction and cooperation among local, national and international actors in peace building. It offers advice on principles and actions that can be taken by national and international policymakers and practitioners to improve collaboration and prioritise engagement with local societal practices and capacities. This enhances overall capacity for protection and prevention.
The present document provides policy guidance and principles for operationalising the approach of... more The present document provides policy guidance and principles for operationalising the approach of working with local strengths for peace and protection. The action points are elaborated from the interim framework of engagement (Brisbane, October 2010). This should be considered a draft document, but can be provided to local and international agencies upon request.
This is a brochure introducing the project Working with Local Strengths for Peace and Order in So... more This is a brochure introducing the project Working with Local Strengths for Peace and Order in Solomon Islands.
The findings of this project and the framework for engagement are to a large extent based on field research that was carried out in 2010. Interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with local chiefs and church leaders, women and youth representatives as well as members of the Solomon Islands police, the PPF/RAMSI and community officers.
Findings were summarized in individual field work reports for each locality and in a comparative overview report. The reports focused on peace and order concerns and threats to safety of community members, on the activities of various peace and order actors such as chiefs or the police, and on the relationships between them.
Asking after selves : knowledge and settler-indigenous conflict resolution (PhD Thesis), 2005
Complex and challenging political problems and conflicts continue to pervade relations between Se... more Complex and challenging political problems and conflicts continue to pervade relations between Settler and Indigenous peoples. This thesis addresses these dynamics by developing an approach for analysing and advancing intercultural conflict resolution in the Australian Settler-Indigenous context. To do so, I foreground ethico-political questions of knowing across cultural difference, and elaborate an approach using the knowing subject as a key methodological resource. By conceiving and practicing selves as unfolding ensembles that can become different while continuing to be what they are, I demonstrate that knowers can connect with, and become susceptible and responsive to, cultural difference. In this approach my professional and personal experiences as a mediator with Aboriginal people become a resource for analysing and engaging relations of cultural governance. I show that conflict resolution subordinates non-Western cultures and selves to Christian-derived quasi-transcendental governance and knowledge schemes of the West. In addition, I demonstrate that this governance operates through liberal "freedom" and the (self-) constitution and regulation of participants in mediation. I nevertheless argue that possibilities for fissuring this governance lie with the susceptibility of selves and the interaction and exchange of political ontologies in mediation. I show that Aboriginal political ontology can work within and against the liberal Settler-Colonial order, potentially to advance Australian intercultural conflict resolution. This thesis therefore shows that asking after selves is promising for addressing the challenge of Settler-Indigenous relations in both knowledge production and conflict resolution.
Relational Sensibility and the 'Turn to the Local': Prospects for the Future of Peacebuilding, pp. 12-18, 2013
The past two decades of peacebuilding policy, practice, and research have seen the gradual emer... more The past two decades of peacebuilding policy, practice, and research have seen the gradual emergence and consolidation of a significant discursive phenomenon. This apparently new way of talking about and framing peacebuilding efforts draws upon the practical wisdom of practitioners as well as institutional and scholarly sources of authority to make knowledge claims that influence peacebuilding policy and practice. The discourse has its recent origins in the burgeoning of the peacebuilding field from the early 1990s, and particularly in the challenges made apparent by failures and intractable situations on the ground. In response, more and more practitioners and commentators have come to think differently about what should be done to advance peacebuilding and how to do it, in part by framing frustrations and failures as opportunities for learning and improved practice. In this new way of thinking, opportunities can be realised in significant part by thinking differently about the roles of the interveners and the ‘intervened-upon’; by recalibrating the relations between ‘internationals’ and ‘locals’. The recalibration involves, so the discourse goes, what might be termed a ‘relational sensibility’ – an attitude in which international and local interlocutors are focused, much more centrally than had previously been the case, on partnership, relationship and exchange.
The ‘relational sensibility’ discourse in peacebuilding is apparently in good company for it aligns with significant and innovative shifts that are afoot in our understandings of the social world, from systems-based approaches and complexity theory to the analysis of emergent and networked (rather than hierarchical) forms of order. But this discursive phenomenon also raises important questions. Does it offer exciting news ways to improve and advance peacebuilding practice, redressing previously iniquitous power relationships to secure a more just and peaceful world through a democratizing ethos? Or does it herald a disturbing new era of double-speak that removes responsibility and destroys possibilities for meaningful collective action by dressing up failure as (possibilities for) success while entrenching existing power relations? Or yet again, can understanding and engaging with this phenomenon offer possibilities for transformation by intensifying its best effects and countering possible negative consequences?
The provision of targeted credit has been a longstanding strategy in national development efforts... more The provision of targeted credit has been a longstanding strategy in national development efforts in the South or Third World. In Bangladesh, the birthplace of microcredit through the now famous and globally influential Grameen Bank, rural credit was touted as central to development efforts in the 1970s 1 . However, neoclassical economists, who argued that such practices resulted in a distortion of the market for scarce investment funds, identified subsidised credit as a failure from the mid-1970s 2 . During this same period, a number of Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) experimented with mechanisms for the alternative delivery of credit. These "microcredit" initiatives involved the provision of collateral-free small loans to jointly liable people for the purposes of income generation and selfemployment. The recipients of loans were typically not eligible for credit from commercial lenders, and were predominantly women. Microcredit programmes expanded rapidly in Bangladesh generating a wave of enthusiasm in development circles with the Microcredit Summit Secretariat (MCS) launching a 'global movement to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services, by the year 2005' 3 .
Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker, Mediating Across Difference: Oceanic and Asian Approaches to Conflict Resolution (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), 2011
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Papers by Morgan Brigg
To advance Indigenous affairs governance and develop a dialogue for improved Settler-Indigenous relations in the 21st century requires unsettling the silences around the settler-state and its institutions and processes. Instead, we need dialogue and exchange between Indigenous and Settler orders. Only by embracing the challenges of governance in an open an unapologetic way will we be able to address the anxieties associated with Indigenous governance and contribute to healing the persistent sore of the wider Indigenous-Settler relations that continue to trouble the Australian community.
To address these challenges, Unsettling the Setter State documents and analyses contemporary Indigenous efforts to engage with the settler state and its institutions. Chapters by Indigenous authors and settler interpreters and counterparts highlight Aboriginal creativity, vibrancy, and resistance while providing a crucial resource and pathways for rethinking governance and decolonising Australia in the 21st century.
To address the ensuing challenges, this book introduces and explores some of the rich insights into conflict resolution emanating from Asia and Oceania. Although often overlooked, these local traditions offer a range of useful ways of thinking about and dealing with difference and conflict in a globalizing world. To bring these traditions into exchange with mainstream Western conflict resolution, the editors present the results of collaborative work between experienced scholars and culturally knowledgeable practitioners from numerous parts of Asia and Oceania. The result is a series of interventions that challenge conventional Western notions of conflict resolution and provide academics, policy makers, diplomats, mediators, and local conflict workers with new possibilities to approach, prevent, and resolve conflict."
The findings of this project and the framework for engagement are to a large extent based on field research that was carried out in 2010. Interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with local chiefs and church leaders, women and youth representatives as well as members of the Solomon Islands police, the PPF/RAMSI and community officers.
Findings were summarized in individual field work reports for each locality and in a comparative overview report. The reports focused on peace and order concerns and threats to safety of community members, on the activities of various peace and order actors such as chiefs or the police, and on the relationships between them.
The ‘relational sensibility’ discourse in peacebuilding is apparently in good company for it aligns with significant and innovative shifts that are afoot in our understandings of the social world, from systems-based approaches and complexity theory to the analysis of emergent and networked (rather than hierarchical) forms of order. But this discursive phenomenon also raises important questions. Does it offer exciting news ways to improve and advance peacebuilding practice, redressing previously iniquitous power relationships to secure a more just and peaceful world through a democratizing ethos? Or does it herald a disturbing new era of double-speak that removes responsibility and destroys possibilities for meaningful collective action by dressing up failure as (possibilities for) success while entrenching existing power relations? Or yet again, can understanding and engaging with this phenomenon offer possibilities for transformation by intensifying its best effects and countering possible negative consequences?