Deemed the fifth generation of conflict analysts and resolvers, our generation is a contingency of peers who actively subscribe to the notion that they are true ‘conflict scholars.’ It can be argued that this is an accurate label because the previous generations of scholars came from already established and rather monolithic academic backgrounds such as international relations, sociology, philosophy, and law. Their migration to the newly forming and relatively malleable field of conflict analysis and resolution (CAR) was a necessity; it cultivated the knowledge of other fields and oriented the newly formed collectivity towards conflict. Today one can be a conflict practitioner and focus entirely on intra-personal conflict while another is free to analyze international armed conflict exactly because of this rich history illuminated by diversity.
Where does this leave the fifth generation, those who have entered the CAR field from academic infancy with expectations to contribute just as much as those who founded the field? What answers will we invent, and more importantly, what questions will we ask? A clear dichotomy has emerged within my generation, comprised of those who accept with an uncritical eye any theory that is lectured upon or doled out in a classroom, and those who seek to eradicate all previous structures of CAR with self-defined and self-proclaimed revolutionary ideas and practices. Either way, the presence of structure is a crucial indicator of what type of action my generation should partake in.
Further, a central question to the fifth generation’s existence as scholars is whether CAR is an art or a science. Do we exist in the moment, constructing nuanced products based purely on creativity and contextual elements, or do we systematically analyze each component of a conflict scenario? Why not do both? This combinative inquiry was posed by Rachael Rackley, one of the thinkers in the Conflict Resolution Education APT at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR) at George Mason University, and it led me to see CAR as the sole academic field that existed so comfortably, yet energetically, within the feud between artistic practitioners and theoretical scholars. Strikingly, this feud exists because each group is inclusive of the other. For simplicity’s sake, however, we will assume that CAR is an art form that can be quantified and governed by scientific (read theoretical) guidelines, free to be informed by theory or to inversely inform theory itself. Feedback is truly dialogic!
Because the term ‘dialogic’ is such a central term to this paper, it must be noted that it is used in the sense that Bakhtin intended in The Dialogic Imagination, ((Bakhtin, M. M., and Michael Holquist. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas, 1981. Print.) where past and contemporary works perpetually share in a dialogue to constantly inform each other. In this way, dialogics enable the meaning of past works to be just as malleable as the meaning of future works simply because perception can actively be altered. Different from dialectics, which revolves more centrally around the resolution of a difference between two ideas through a rational discussion or comparative juxtaposition, dialogics allows two or more thinkers to critique, complement, or inform each other, regardless of even being conscious of doing so.
An adept, reflective practitioner within the CAR field (or any field for this matter) would do well to investigate the dialogic relationship between the past and the present so that a more informed future can be realized. This brings us back to the increasingly problematic cognitive schism apparent for many thinkers within the fifth generation, which I am certainly a part of: those who complacently accept possibly outdated or biased theory and those who forge ahead on their own terms do share a similarity. But despite this similarity, both groups refuse to engage in a critical discussion with the past, with their past. Cognitive blindness has never known a truer host than such a scholar. Perhaps no thinker has been as helpful to me in conceptualizing my conversation with the generations that have come before mine than T.S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (from The Sacred Wood, 1921).
In it, Eliot confronts the dialogue between tradition (artists past) and the contemporary (artists present). Eliot’s description of the English writer as the artist generates a sense of the historical, similar to the feelings invoked when we are called the fifth generation. Previous generations of conflict scholars (read S-CAR professors) pushing this identity upon us undoubtedly conjures a sense of the historical and the contemporary melded together, sometimes devoid of critical engagement and at other times stubbornly at odds with each other. Subsequently, we as participants in this generation project our own uncertainties and expectations into the future, governed of course by the historical and the contemporary. Eliot certainly realizes this dialogic (trialogic for the sake of including the future context) dynamic and expounds upon it:
“This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity”1 (emphasis added)
Eliot understood better than most the importance of dialogics in the expansion of a field. We as the fifth generation can stand to learn quite a bit from those who have expressed similar concerns in the past and have acted upon those concerns. An example of this happening within S-CAR is the inception of the Applied Practice and Theory program in 1993. Birkhoff and Warfield’s “Development of Pedagogy and Practicum” (1996) explains how the APT was designed as a response to a perceived rigidity in higher learning. In this environment, students witness a sharing of power between themselves and the professor-facilitator, creating an experience not hindered by hierarchy or stark power imbalances.2 The APT was a previous generation’s answer to the “how?” that seems to be ever-present when improvement can be invented or innovated.
An awareness of such a historical sense brings with it the notion of judging ‘good’ art from ‘bad’ art, essentially in discerning talent from banality. Eliot affirms that an artist is talented if s/he produces good work, and is therefore traditional in the sense of being among others who have produced good work chronologically before her/him. An artist is not talented, however, if (and here arises the dual paradox) s/he does not produce ‘good’ art (lacking talent and therefore breaking the tradition of generations past) and/or s/he does not produce works that are discernible from tradition’s previously defined aesthetics. To judge the artist’s product, according to Eliot, one “must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same” (Eliot 1921), thereby subscribing to a more constructivist interpretation of quality.
It must be noted that the wider literary community may not share my understanding of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Critics of Eliot often accused him of doling out heavy and rather harmful criticism to many relevant generations of literary innovators (namely the Romantic poets). Eliot’s harshest critics regard him as Eurocentric, as he referenced the Western world as the high-water mark of Language (writ large). It is exactly for this reason that the call for a constructivist, impartial reflection conveyed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” seems so at odds with Eliot’s practice. As we are well aware, it is entirely possible to advocate in one’s writing for a practical action to be taken that will never actually be embodied in one’s own personal life.
This being said, if we are to have any lasting imprint on the CAR field, our generation must embrace advocating for an action and subsequently live this action in innovative, creative ways.3 We must accept theory for what it has been, what it is, and what it could be as we struggle with uncertainty. We must exercise our imagination to fight naivety and cynicism as the next generation of the CAR field. The cognitive schism that currently exists can be made irrelevant by recognizing the dialogics between the past and the present and creating voices that proudly build on the tradition of creating something new. We are armed to the teeth to do just that. Eliot states it best in a hypothetical conversation with himself:
“‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
- Eliot, Thomas S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. By T[homas] S[tearns] Eliot. London: Methuen &, 1932. Print. [↩]
- Birkhoff, Juliana E., and Wallace Warfield. “The Development of Pedagogy and Practicum.” Mediation Quarterly 14.2 (1996): 93-110. Print. [↩]
- See Crystal Simon’s article “Bridging the Gap: Incorporating Our CAR Practices into Our Personal Lives” (this issue). [↩]