Resolving Structural Conflicts

Drivers and Persistence of Death in Conflicts: Global Evidence

“…Given these sober facts, the significant amount of wealth spent on managing deaths from conflicts could otherwise have been used to fund socioeconomic projects related to sustainable development goals. this narrative is broadly consistent with the literature on what it takes to resolve conflicts and promote peace (Bodine and crawford 1998;lenski 2014;Malhotra 2016;rubenstein 2017).…”

Conflict resolution in activist networks: Reflections on prework, power, and engaging with change in Appalachia

“…In the United States, the dynamics of structural violence have recently come more into focus as racial and economic inequality, growing corporate influence, climate change, and gendered violence have sparked some of the most visible social movement actions in US history (Berry & Chenoweth, 2018;Davis, 2016;Hadden, 2017;Jaffe, 2018;Moss & Maddrell, 2017;Thomas, 2019;Westra, 2014). At the same time, in the field of CR there are active debates about the need for and limitation of efforts to integrate practices that critical frameworks point toward, including our relationship to constructive forms of conflict escalation such as: (a) nonviolent direct action, (b) mass mobilization, and (c) popular education (English & Sweetman, 2017;Jackson, 2015;Rubenstein, 2017). The implications of these critiques for critical CR practice, however, are far from settled and represent a major potential pathway for growth in the field.…”

“…These approaches often start with taking a position of partiality, which includes working with those advocating for systems change and actively escalating conflicts in order to shift power imbalances. Rubenstein (2017) refers to this shift in priorities as a new "structural wave," which sees destructive conflict as symptoms of wider systemic arrangements that should be transformed or overthrown.…”

Ending the Global Kleptocracy: Financial Innovation for the 21st Century

“…It is to say that societal organization became fundamentally pathological and power structures became exploitative. We see the rise of pathocracy (Priels, 2023b) and institutionalized, systemic violence (Rubenstein, 2017). To date, global capitalism remains such a totalitarian, anti-social, and utterly unjust socio-economic system that has captured humanity in a web of systemic corruption and exploitation (Priels, 2023a).…”

“…Ideally, they would start to understand how inter-elite competition that puts us all at risk of nuclear catastrophe and World War 3, arises from a millennia-old problem that the science of Cliodynamics has identified as the perverse wealth pump (Turchin, 2023). Ideally, human beings would develop socio-ecological intelligence and resolve structural violence for once and forever, by understanding its structural causes (Priels, 2023b;Rubenstein, 2017;Turchin, 2023). In this paper, I present a workable and fundamental first step towards the global resolution of systemic violence: an interest-free mutual credit service, that can be implemented immediately within the existing system.…”