I struggle with the blogging format. For me it is somewhere between a note, a short story, a haiku and a poem (hence the name of my blog and infrequent postings). Recently, I had an insight however at an ISA bloggers forum that might help me resolve some of my difficulties with the medium and get back to some posting: I am a visual person as well as a transmedian and the incorporation of this aspect of my thinking/creative process has not been an easy one but could be useful. I am thus going to start putting forward some of my visualizations of conflict/contention - as blogs in an of themselves. Some I have thought about a bit. Some - not so much. Sounded like blogging to me or the kind that I would do.
The figure above emerged out of a paper that I wrote with Rose McDermott (entitled an evolutionary theory of state repression) that we are still trying to get published. I need to find the original drawing as it is a bit crazier than the one above. I remembered liking the funnel imagery as I felt that governments attempted to funnel their citizenry through some machine which pumped out good citizens. Not quite Chaplanesque (from Modern Times) but not far off; perhaps more like a Philip K. Dick title "Do Governments Dream of Electric Citizens" (not his title, mine but totally ripping off his work).
At an early stage in our thinking we wanted to acknowledge that prior to the establishment of a nation-state different actors would use diverse forms of force and coercion to get the upper hand (e.g., lethal action [killing], restrictive action [bans/curfews], covert action [spying], cooptation [giving a seat at the table] and political alliance formation), but after a while one coalition/actor would rise above the others and form the nation state.
After this was done, a governing entity would then "select" in an evolutionary sense which actors they wanted to live with (using cooptation, representation and channeling) and they would "select out" those actors that they did not want to live with (using repression/human rights violation). After a while, we intuited that citizens would get the message and they would put forward ideas (e.g., democratic inclusion) and tactics (e.g., non-violence) which they felt that the government would like (i.e., that would be more likely to result in cooptation than coercion and violence). Hubris and not keeping up with new sentiments, however leads governments to problems.
As a result, we suggest that in order to understand repression you have to understand socio-political control as well as the co-evolutionary adaptation of challengers/citizens to governments and vice versa.
For the paper, we stripped away the first part (focusing on the coercive-wielding phase) but I always liked the earlier (coercive generating phase) being considered at the same time.
After this was done, a governing entity would then "select" in an evolutionary sense which actors they wanted to live with (using cooptation, representation and channeling) and they would "select out" those actors that they did not want to live with (using repression/human rights violation). After a while, we intuited that citizens would get the message and they would put forward ideas (e.g., democratic inclusion) and tactics (e.g., non-violence) which they felt that the government would like (i.e., that would be more likely to result in cooptation than coercion and violence). Hubris and not keeping up with new sentiments, however leads governments to problems.
As a result, we suggest that in order to understand repression you have to understand socio-political control as well as the co-evolutionary adaptation of challengers/citizens to governments and vice versa.
For the paper, we stripped away the first part (focusing on the coercive-wielding phase) but I always liked the earlier (coercive generating phase) being considered at the same time.
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