Root Narrative Theory and Conflict Resolution

Power, Justice and Values

Solon Simmons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000029109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book introduces Root Narrative Theory, a new approach for narrative analysis, decoding moral politics, and for building respect and understanding in conditions of radical disagreement.

This theory of moral politics bridges emotion and reason, and, rather than relying on what people say, it helps both the analyst and the practitioner to focus on what people mean in a language that parties to the conflict understand. Based on a simple idea—the legacy effects of abuses of power—the book argues that conflicts only endure and escalate where there is a clash of interpretations about the history of institutional power. Providing theoretically complex but easy-to-use tools, this book offers a completely new way to think about storytelling, the effects of abusive power on interpretation, the relationship between power and conceptions of justice, and the origins and substance of ultimate values. By locating the source of radical disagreement in story structures and political history rather than in biological or cognitive systems, Root Narrative Theory bridges the divides between reason and emotion, realism and idealism, without losing sight of the inescapable human element at work in the world's most devastating conflicts.

This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, peace studies and International Relations, as well as to practitioners of conflict resolution.

1

Radical disagreement and root narratives

How do you identify the emotional core of a rational argument? If you can do that, you have lit the spark for conflict transformation, because the emotional core of the rational argument is a force that can be used to change the world. Indeed, it is all that ever has.

The emotional core of a rational argument becomes so powerful in peace and politics precisely because it harnesses our primitive emotional instincts to our near infinite capacity for rational problem solving, making us what Giovanni Pico della Mirandola called “a creature neither of heaven nor of earth.” Both research and world events are converging on the idea that that space in which emotional forces are yoked to reason is narrative—the structures that make storytelling possible. Accordingly, this will be a book about narratives, not just about any old story someone wants to tell, but the kind of narratives that define the emotional core of our rational arguments: what I call the root narratives. Therefore, it will be a book about philosophy and core values, about power and politics, but also about how our deepest convictions fall into identifiable patterns that can be recognized in practice and turned to more positive ends. This is a book about the sources of moral authority and the hope for peace.

Because hope is not a strategy, this also has to be a book about the current state of peace thought. I use the somewhat cumbersome word “thought” in the way it would have once been used in the phrases “political thought” or “social thought,” a broad term meant to capture contrasts between quite different justifications for systems of social, political, and economic forms of organization, as was typical in the milieu that produced Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Karl Polanyi, among others.¹ We need a broad term like this to capture the spirit of the conversation of peace and conflict studies, because events have conspired to drive the field into the open again in ways that it might not have been for some time. If you wonder why everyone seems so intent on controlling the narrative, it is because big ideological shifts are underway, big enough, perhaps, to represent a shift in world history on the scale that only our grandparents would recognize.

One way to mark this transition is through the dramatic changes in the political scene in the United States in which Barack Obama, the first African American president, was succeeded by the first truly reactionary president, Donald Trump. The importance of the transition is critical, even when considered in relation to previous shifts like those that brought Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to power. The transition from Obama to Trump not only signals major changes in the domestic affairs of the United States, but also a major change in the structure of international politics, one not seen for almost a century. In the new system, older or more thoroughgoing forms of authority as represented by Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayip Erdoğan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Andrzej Duda in Poland, and Narendra Modi in India appear to be in vogue. The standard assumptions of the liberal international order² are no longer as immediately relevant as they once were. We no longer live in Eleanor Roosevelt’s world. Ours is increasingly less defined by the West and its categories, and more by what Oliver Ramsbotham has called radical disagreement³—disagreement at the level of basic political values and moral intuitions—which is alive in conflicts around the world in ways that it has not been in a long time.

As Lou Kriesberg has argued, conflict resolution developed as a field of basic research in the context of the Cold War when some questions were too hot to address, which was nevertheless a world of relative stability enforced by the antagonism of two ideologically opposed super powers.⁴ We no longer operate in a stable world in which things like democracy, socialism or the international community can be taken for granted. Peace thinkers again have to think big as they did in the run up to the First World War, because the equilibrating trends that have displaced the West have also brought the global diversity of ideological perspectives into conversation in quite radical ways. We have yet to catch up with the implications.

Ideology, the most intensified form of political narrative, is both logical and passionate, demonstrating what Hannah Arendt described as a “curious logicality.”⁵ In his famous book on the subject, The End of Ideology, written just prior to the Kennedy era and the 1960s,⁶ the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote, “what gives ideology its force is its passion… one might say, in fact, that the most important, latent, function of ideology is to tap emotion” (p. 400). Bell’s book—or maybe just its title—became famous because, among other things, it predicted a major shift in political narrative in the mid-twentieth century; class divisions and their attendant ideologies, having roiled global politics since the last decades of the nineteenth century, were fading. The old ideologies were no longer effective, closing the book “on an era of easy ‘left’ formulae.”

Although some of my readers may remember this era directly, most of us have grown up after the “end of ideology,” and therefore never knew what “easy left formulae” felt like. In our time, class analysis was really hard to do. Questioning capitalism in any mainstream setting required great critical effort and was always confronted by powerful pushback, if not outright derision. Sometime after 1978,⁷ the era of class struggle had given way to Fukuyama’s neoliberal “End of History.”⁸ And if class warfare was outmoded, so too was the strongman; few still considered that authoritarian modes of legitimation had much of a serious future, even if a few outliers held on here and there for reasons of the expediency of great power politics.

But today, everything is up for grabs in global affairs, not just in the seminar room but also the stateroom. In this way, our time resembles 1968 less, tumultuous as it was, and 1945 or 1914 more. We seem poised either to adapt a new moral politics to the demands of peace as was done after the Second World War, or to shuffle the deck with faith in a gamble on apocalypse as was true of 1914. We can hope that the rise of both the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the spread of the humanizing technologies of modern media will render war on the scale of the last century unthinkable, but the conflicts we face together are no less foundational than were those faced by our grandparent’s grandparents.

This unsettled nature of our times helps to explain the rise of an analytic concept that seemed outré when I began to use it in the early 1990s, that is narrative. It is hard to turn on the television, let alone read a conflict analysis without someone speaking about the importance of controlling, crafting, managing, or directing “the narrative.”⁹ I have taken to referring to this trend in reference to the vogue that developed around the concept of “attitude” in the social sciences in the 1920s and 1930s: “narrative is the new attitude.”¹⁰ And my explanation for our attraction to the concept, having something to do with generational replacement and the maturation of philosophical trends, has even more to do with our need to address the unsettled nature of the times. Where once Bell could refer to ideology as a concept that applied almost exclusively to economic affairs and the future of capitalism, ideology, his “will fused with ideas,” is precisely what most people are grasping for in their frustration today. Uncertainty displaces expertise and emboldens the layperson’s intuitive and emotional relationship to ideas. Accordingly, many new schools of thought have arisen to help us think better about the intuitive nature of political thought.¹¹

Although our unsettled times will demand technical analysis of careful plans and policy agendas for social and political change, in crises, technical rationality is buried under the public’s emotional reactions to arguments. If we plan to work for peace, we had better develop a better understanding of how ideas become fused with will, and if we can ever hope to faithfully describe the illusive concept of ideology, we had better come to terms with this slippery concept of narrative, the only concept that works both at the level of reason and emotional intuition, values and interests, concurrently.

We are ready for a mature theory of ideology, one that simultaneously recognizes our animal nature and our angelic rationality. We can work with concepts that walk and chew gum at the same time, that give emotional primacy its due, without losing sight of the fact that politics is about power and who wields it for what ends. In this sense, every conversation in the study and practice of peace and conflict resolution is already about or should become one about power. This is a timely perspective. In an incisive essay on the subject, Kevin Avruch makes a prediction about the concept of power in the field that is similar to the one he made about culture many years ago. “It is time we faced power but with confidence, not defensively, and made it our Other on our terms.”¹²

I have written this book to help get us up to speed about power, about the interrelationships of social power and storytelling, how power, narrative, and a theory of peace intersect, and to make power our own. To do this, I show how: we will have to come to terms with the ways that power and moral discourse mutually define one another; how when we speak about justice and speak about power, we are speaking, inversely, about the same thing; and how to recognize the roots of moral authority in stories about the appropriate uses and (ab)uses of power in social life.¹³ Root Narrative Theory does not just examine the stories we tell about how power leads to suffering, it reveals how justice depends on the ways in which we confront and overcome it.

Too many students of peace and conflict studies are unfamiliar with the history of debates about ideology. Most of my students at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, themselves drawn from some of the most contentious zones of conflict in the world, are intimately familiar with ethnic divisions and identity politics. They know how supremacy and hegemony have wreaked havoc on the Global South and feel in their bones what it is about the West that is so infuriating. Almost all have heard of, if not read, Frantz Fanon and can understand the vital truth of his worldview without much effort. Few of them however, even those who are from the West, are familiar with the critical social theory of prior eras. Although every student can speak to the centrality of diversity and inclusion as pillars of positive peace, most see Marxism as either a kind of enduring malady that afflicts extremists in their home context or as little more than an interesting historical footnote. If they have ever thought about John Locke, they see him as a symbol of European and English cultural particularly, if not bias. The classical liberalism that their American oppressors seem always ready to appeal to, strikes them as little more than a thin cover for ethnocentrism and implicit racism, certainly not a source of ideological conviction—will fused with ideas—this even as they accede to neoliberal economic theories with grudging complacence. And most students come to the study of peace never having thought about Thomas Hobbes as anything but a bogeyman subject to Freudian projection—the very wolfman described in his theory. His imagery of “the war of all against all” only seems relevant to those with broad exposure to an international relations curriculum in which “realist” theories of a world characterized by Hobbesian anarchy are standard.¹⁴

I have just chosen to highlight these four thinkers, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, and Fanon to serve as placeholders for the moral authority embodied in what I call the root narratives, the emotional core of rational arguments.¹⁵ I will call them the virtuosi, because, although they did not invent the root narratives they helped to make famous, they did use these story structures in focused and effective ways.¹⁶ Each of the four virtuosi is intended here merely as a stand-in for a mode of thought that is in play in the open space of global affairs today, a representative that has bored so deeply into our conception of political philosophy that even as the story I tell here becomes more complicated, we, as readers, will have trouble forgetting them or what they stand for. The four virtuosi were chosen not because they are the best, but because they are so specialized. Each thinker is a representative of a form of criticism of institutional social power that has become so familiar in modern political thought that we can almost think of the virtuosi as figures of speech, each representing the whole domain of thought with which they have become associated. They are the paradigmatic critics of power.

As a critic of a certain kind of social power, each thinker has also become a kind of prophet of a certain kind of peace. If we underst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Radical disagreement and root narratives
• 2. Root Narrative Theory: between social power and scales of justice
• 3. The story system: deep structures of the moral imagination
• 4. Critics of power, prophets of peace: Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Fanon
• 5. Imagining security: Defense, Unity, Stability
• 6. Imagining liberty: Consent, Property, Merit
• 7. Imagining equality: Reciprocity, Nation, Accountability
• 8. Imagining dignity: Recognition, Liberation, Inclusion
• 9. Conclusion: from Root Narrative Theory to root narrative practice
• Index