Jeremy Rinker -Doctoral Dissertation " Justpeace Prospects for Peacebuilding and Worldview Tolerance: A South Asian Movement's Social Construction of Justice "

This dissertation attempts to understand the meta-narratives of justice operating within the Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha, Sahayak Gana (TBMSG), a Dalit Buddhist social movement active in Maharashtra, India.  The movement, a vestige of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s 1956 conversion to Buddhism, is actively fighting for dalits rights by exposing atrocities and rights abuses against dalits, as well as, advocating an identity for dalits as newly self-aware Buddhists.  Such a social action approach has supported both inclusive and exclusive conceptions of social justice, and the dissertation is aimed at understanding this dialectic within the movement and how it can inform conflict resolution practitioners engaged in peace-building practice among marginalized populations. 

In analyzing the justice/injustice narratives routinely produced by movement activists and leaders, the dissertation takes an action science approach of helping the group make better use of the deployment, limitations, and contradictions of these narratives.  The aim of the present work is to build on theories that address the nexus between conflict resolution and social justice in developing an epistemological framework for understanding, in theory and use, actor’s normative commitments to justice.  By unpacking the social justice commitments of TBMSG members, this dissertation exposes the rationale for understanding how in practice narratives are produced and deployed, as well as, constructive of movement members’ conceptions of social change.  In short, Jeremy’s dissertation is a pealing away of layers of reality inherent in movement members’ justice/injustice narratives in order to begin to understand the implementation of social justice as an ideal.

Dissertation Committee: