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Mediating memory, identity, and culture: linking theory and practice of conflict transformation
Presentation by Philip Gamaghelyan
Monday, February 20, 2017
1:30pm - 2:30pm
Metropolitan Building, Room 5183
Conflict resolution holds the promise of freeing approaches and policies with regard to politics of memory and identity from the fatalistic grip of realism. While the conceptual literature on memory, identity, and conflicts has moved in this alternative direction, conflict resolution practice continues to rely on binary frames of realism and acts as an unwanted auxiliary to traditional International Relations (IR). The consequence, often, is perpetuation of conflict discourses, marginalization, and exclusion of affected populations, and resulting ineffectiveness of conflict resolution practice.
Join S-CAR Ph.D. candidate Philip Gamaghelyan in a discussion of his research agenda, including his past, current, and upcoming work. Building on a decade-long research and practice experience in contexts ranging from post-Soviet states to Syria, his scholarship moves away from binary frames that tend to empower the nationalist or violent extremes. He explores the transformative potential that the rethinking and reframing of memory, identity, and conflict can have on conceiving, analyzing, and designing interventions.
The IR discipline, that has long dominated conflict related policy-making, is only one possible lens, and often an insufficient one, for defining, preventing, or resolving contemporary conflicts wrapped in the politics of memory and identity. Other conceptual frameworks can help to complement our understanding of identity and conflicts and reconstruct them as performative and inclusionary rather than static and exclusive phenomena. These transformative frameworks are increasingly influential in conceptual literature and can be applied in conflict resolution practice and policy-making.