ICRoV Sulaimania Conference 17-21 October 2016 - Tentative Program
International Consortium for Research on Violence (ICRoV) Conference on:
Rebuilding War Societies
Continuities and New Beginnings
International Conference in Sulaimania, Kurdistan Region of Iraq
October 17-21, 2016
organised by the Felsberg Institute (FI) in cooperation with the University of Sulaimania and the Center for Iraq Studies (CIS) at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
Rebuilding War Societies: Continuities and New Beginnings
Coping with situations of violent conflict resolution has become part of the every-day life reality of an increasing number of societies in the 21st century that produce specific survival strategies, as well as a certain variety of conflict handling mechanisms. One additional characteristics of the 21st century is that the boundaries between war situations and non-peace constellations have become more and more fluent. Whereas the prominent task of the 1990ies’ post-cold war era was defined as “Reconstruction of Post-War Societies”, the focus seems to have shifted after 2000 towards the “Reconfiguration of War Societies”: in many cases, the rebuilding of societies has to take place in the course of an ongoing violent conflict, and in an increasing number of cases, violent conflict resolution does not result in a change of system, but rather in a redistribution of power and access to resources.
This phenomenon is not new: in retrospect, we can understand that quite a considerable number of revolutions and liberation wars of the cold war era that came to an end after the decay of the blocs made use of a similar approach towards securing power. The reconfiguration of the military as well as the economic sector coincided with a pragmatic realization of a change of the political system.