Session 12: Fear and Peace

Session 12: Fear and Peace
Chair: Neil Whitehead

Reasonable/Unreasonable Fear
Karen Lysaght
Centre for Social and Educational Research, Department of Social Science and Legal Studies, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Republic of Ireland

There has been a bourgeoning interest in the topic of fear of violence in recent years, especially within the disciplines of criminology, sociology, urban planning and human geography. Though a feature of more recent work is a discernable shift toward more qualitative approaches, the mainstay of this literature continues to be quantitative work where emphasis is placed upon enumerating and locating violent incidents, and cataloguing the social characteristics of victims. The findings from police statistics and crime surveys are assessed and analysis provided as to the accuracy of the fears experienced by particular social categories whether this be women, men, gay/lesbian, ethnic minorities, the elderly, children or the disabled. Surveys are used to catalogue subjective fears and to quantify the degree of fear to which particular social categories attest. This information is then judged against the ‘real’ level of victimisation of these pre-defined social categories in order to assess how realistic members of particular groups are with respect to the relative threat faced. This work draws upon a framework which understands fear as being alternatively realistic or unrealistic given examination of the objective indices. The emphasis upon ‘objective reality’ draws clearly upon a dualistic appreciation of the topic where the emotional and fearful are viewed as subjective, chaotic, uncontrolled, and at their most extreme neurotic.
Through focusing upon the actual experience of individuals in a situation where fear is an aspect of everyday life, this dualistic juxtaposition of ‘real threat’ against irrational groundless fear is shown to be only partially valid as best. The case study focuses on the city of Belfast in Northern Ireland , and in particular on those districts where the population live in highly segregated working-class residential areas as a strategy to avoid the possibility of becoming victim to a sectarian assault. Here it is possible to find that residents possess a highly attuned sense of fear which influences their daily lives in a myriad of ways. Fear of violence is shown in these circumstances to be intersubjectively shared, situationally specific, socially constituted and indeed socially constituting. It is a complex aspect of the management of daily life and of spatial negotiation in particular, and one which is not tidily divided between those who are justified in being afraid and those who are suffering merely from irrational fear.

Peace Stories and Peacemaking: Applying Narrative Thinking to Northern Irish Children’s Ideas About Peace
Ron Smith
Chartered Educational Psychologist, Drumagore, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland

This presentation describes practitioner research designed to examine Northern Irish children and adolescent’s views about peace from a Narrative perspective. That is, from a perspective which gives a central role to the storied nature of human conduct. The work was informed by a postmodern social constructionist interpretation of narrative psychology. In recent years our understanding of human development has profited greatly from research focusing on the exploration of narrative and language as the principal means by which people make sense of themselves and their experiences (Daiute and Lightfoot, 2004). However, a critical review of the extant literature on children and adolescents’ understandings about peace and war appears to reflect little of this scholarship.
Children’s poetry served as data and data-analysis involved putting into practice two collaborative modes of analysis applying insights from “Appreciative Inquiry” (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987). Narrative analysis aimed to shed light on: the dominant stories used by children and adolescent’s in Northern Ireland to construct peace; children’s social and psychological worlds relevant to peace education and the potential of using story-based approaches as incentives or levers for improving school effectiveness for peace.
The meanings given to peace were read as storied representations conforming to literary forms such as “the tragedy”. Children as young as five or six were found to have peace stories to tell. However, notwithstanding their variety and complexity, the stories were also interpreted as very underdeveloped in the sense of viewing peace as an active process of stimulating creative human relations and very problem-saturated. Narrative dialogues were found to have great potential for opening up the status -quo within educational organisations to transformation and the creation of new peace cultures.