Ideology, Discourse, and Conflict

The course explores the diverse relationships between, on the one hand, the human use of symbols and messages (both verbal and non-verbal) and, on the other hand, political ideologies and movements, collective identities, power, conflict (including social conflict, revolution, and war), and security. In has been recognized since at least World War I that conflicts are primarily ???wars of ideas,??? not just contests of arms. According to Vladimir Tismaneanu, a Harvard scholar of political transition, ???individuals need something more than bread and water: human beings need to make sense of their very existence, to find a cause worth living for [and, one may add, fighting for], to construct a set of values that allow one to make distinctions between good and evil??? (x). Such symbolic sense-making is fundamental to the creation and survival of human communities and to the construction of collective identities, including those of nations, groups, and movements (including social movements, criminal organizations, prison gangs, and insurgencies). Today, especially, international conflicts increasingly involve asymmetrical confrontations with diverse networks of actors in loose, horizontal coalitions coalescing around shared narratives and symbols, often based on a common ideological (political or religious) identity or simply on the idea of struggle itself as a unifying, motivating, and organizing mechanism