Session 6: War, Peace and Everyday Life

Session 6: War, Peace & Everyday Life
Chair: Leonard Hammer

Intercultural Everyday Life Via Henri Lefebvre
Jones Irwin
St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland

The theme of interculturalism depends for its formulation on the possibility of inter-disciplinarity in the social and human sciences. In his important text, Philosophy in Cultural Theory , Peter Osborne has traced the development of Cultural Studies from the original need for a greater connection between the academy and the wider society and culture. Evolving (as Osborne understands the discipline) in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, the driving force of Cultural Studies was political or “more broadly, political-educational – a political project of popular education….and cultural democratisation”. From the beginning, the strength of Cultural Studies derived from its capacity to study the present, to address what was happening here and now. Moreover, this process also involved an attempt to extend such analysis of the present to include the contemporary experience of all, and not simply the experience of one aspect of reality or one section of society (Osborne cites Raymond Williams’ conception of “whole-ness” as constitutive of culture). Already in this original conception of Cultural Studies, we have the seeds of the current debate. In simplified terms, it is clear that as more attention was given to studying ‘culture’, it became evident that Williams’ original conception of a ‘wholeness’ of culture (implying a unity) was becoming increasingly problematic. It is in this context of a challenging of a univocal or unifying definition of culture that I think we can best understand the genealogy of the paradigms of both multiculturalism and interculturalism, recognizing in different ways the irreducible fragmentation of William’s original ‘whole-ness’. This theoretical and empirical backdrop to interculturalism is I think, while highly invigorating, also severely complex and problematic. Its problemacity is heightened from an academic point of view by the increasing specialisation and isolationism of much work in the human and social sciences (as well as the humanities). In this paper, I want to address the particular work of the French thinker Henri Lefebvre, whose writings in the 1940s and beyond were a crucial catalyst towards both inter-disciplinarity in the academy and the foregrounding of the problematic of inter-culturalism. The eclectic energy and resources of Lefebvre’s thinking provide, I believe, an interesting path into the intercultural problematic.

War and Peace in the North Caucasus: The Cases of Dagestan and Chechnya
Robert Bruce Ware and Dr. Enver Kisriev
Department of Philosophical Studies, Southern Illinois University, IL USA and Dagestan Scientific Center, Russian Academy of Sciences, Mahachkala, Dagestan, Russia

It is difficult to find a more dramatic contrast between cultures of violence and peace than along the border that separates the Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. Yet in many ways the starkness of this contrast is surprising.
In terms of geography, history, ethnicity, religion, and socio-economics the two republics have everything in common. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the peoples of Dagestan and Chechnya were allies in a common fight against Russian imperialism. They share the Islamic faith and numerous cultural bonds, and they are together at the bottom of the Russian republics on lists for nearly every socio-economic indicator.
Yet whereas Dagestan settled fairly comfortably into the federal systems of the Soviet Union and Russia, and remains closely connected to Moscow today, Chechnya sporadically resisted Russian domination throughout the twentieth century and has been enmeshed in two brutal wars during the past six years. With weapons and funding from Islamist groups around the world, Chechnya is likely to be a battleground for many years to come, and to foreshadow other Islamist conflicts.
Few regions of the world have been the scene of more protracted ethnic conflict than the Caucasus, where the collapse of the Soviet Union has had its most tragic consequences. Yet even by regional standards Dagestan is remarkable for the extremes of its and economic deprivation and ethnic diversity. Since these conditions have been compounded by the rigours of social transition; by the collapse of a central authority that previously guaranteed order and subsidized most of the Dagestani economy; by an influx of refugees from the three bordering republics that have been mired in violent ethnic strife; by the nearly complete isolation of the Republic from 1994 to 1996 during the first Chechen conflict; and by recent pressures of Islamic fundamentalism, there would seem to be few localities with a greater potential for ethnic conflict.
Surprisingly, Dagestan is one of the only administrative units in the Caucasus to have avoided this fate. There have been, and probably will continue to be localized conflicts in the Republic. But mechanisms existing within Dagestani society have so far prevented them from assuming threatening proportions. Ethnic relations in Dagestan are extraordinary not only for their rich diversity, but also for their relative tranquility.
Why is there peace in Dagestan? Paradoxical as it may seem, it is Dagestani society’s intricate ethnic structure, the very cause of its most pressing problems that has inhibited conflicting elements from taking radical steps. This has involved the development and preservation of a complicated and often precarious ethnic parity among the thirty-plus ethno-linguistic groups that comprise the peoples of Dagestan. It is a spontaneous and highly political balancing act that has required the cultivation of patterns of restraint and cooperation among groups competing for increasingly scarce resources. Yet it remains a hard-pressed, patchwork process borne more than led by a government struggling to reconcile the legitimacy of its established elite with the strains of increasing economic disintegration, the demands of democratic transition and the recovery of an indigenous political culture.
Our comparison of Dagestan and Chechnya draws upon our field work in the region over the past five years, including a large population survey and open-ended elite interviews that we completed in the summer of 2000.

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An Inter-cultural Learning Environment in post-Soviet Azerbaijan
Khalida Isazedeh
Baku Slavic University, Azerbaijan

The paper will explore the needs and opportunities for creating an intercultural environment in the higher education system of Azerbaijan. It will give a short review of the history of the country that was a polyethnic society with its own traditions of cultural and linguistic diversity but for many decades suffered from the bureaucratic centralization ideology of the USSR that kept people suppressed and close-minded.
The article will focus on the fundamental changes occurring currently in Azerbaijan since it gained its independence and became a part of international community open to the whole world, recognizing and respecting minority cultures and giving opportunities to each ethnic group to study at the scholarly level their languages, literature, history, etc. The author’s observation is that today’s education system in Azerbaijan demonstrates the tendency towards creating a multicultural learning environment where there is a shared awareness of the presence of many cultures or subcultures that critiques any failings and discriminatory practices in education. But the main challenge addressed by the paper is how to create environment that both supports the development of one’s own group identity while fostering common ground between groups. In this concern the paper discusses the distinction between the two approaches that share the common value of the importance of cultural identity for education – multiculturalism and interculturalism.
It gives a broad definition of the concept of interculturalism in education with its potential to help students to become socially aware and active beings, locally, nationally, and globally. The paper also discusses the results of the positive innovations piloted at one the higher education institutions of Azerbaijan, Baku Slavic University that aimed at bringing the interculturalism to the classrooms through developing curriculums from the perspective of integrating the “relevant” cultures beginning with those that are considered to be “closer and thus more understandable” for students.