Im just reading Adis Maksićs Ethnic Mobilization, Violence and the Politics of Affect about the bitter experiences of the Bosnian war. There are many books by Jewish victims of the Nazi Party in Germany, including one by my father.

good point Jon

'Victims' in Northern Ireland is a highly politicized concept - as it also is in Israel-Palestine: most people who lived through the conflict are in some sense victims, in some sense survivors, and some of them are also perpetrators.

Self-determination important and the question is always who is the people who is to self-determine.

Thanks Russ & Jennifer. The question is about the current book and yes, also a general question about knowledge, knowledge production and centrality. Counterpoint in this instance means that direct , rather than paraphrased voices of the oppressed/victims/victimised can enrich discussion on peacebuilding , and they can decide on the concept/category that would describe their situation.

I have found in South Africa that we sometimes impose an external category on ourselves and others without allowing for agency and transition on the part of the victimised.

It is always difficult to balance giving direct voice to some of the great multiplicity and variety of people affected by conflict and to find patterns in their responses

I struggled with that in my recent book, Identity Change after Conflict. There I systematically used long quotations from interviews. But that wasnt enough. The patterns were found by analysing their voices and concepts. But one cannot simply take concepts from that multiplicity of voices - there are too many opposing ones. Agency yes indeed, it is necessary to show the space for agency and choice: within a context where agents, including ourselves, are not always immediately conscious of that space and where agency is often systematically thwarted and has perverse consequences. Thus the soc-sci concepts had to be open to everyday voices, without being reducible to any in particular.

More generally, there is a theoretical issue as to how - in writing - to allow for conflicting rationales and perspectives and at the same time to show patterns of interaction and response that potentially are applicable in other situations. Again its an issue I have struggled with in various works, and in the Northern Ireland case Dynamics of Conflict was specifically conceptualized so as to be able to show the rationale of different positions - we have worked much more on this since then. THeoretically, there are lots of ways to think about this: I find thinking with critical theory, and with Bourdieu, while adapting their concepts gives a way forward that goes beyond mainstream variable oriented analysis (yes of course I know they personally were sometimes sexist etc - but its the concepts rather than the particular views that are important)

Interesting concepts, all. I would be interested in the perspective of family conflict and reconciliation. This ranges from argument and estrangement to sexual victimization, both of which touched my family, and I could write much about both! Good luck in your endeavors.

Ann