NEWS FROM THE DIRECTOR
The big news from UWA is the completion and release of its Review of Course Structures Report: “Education for Tomorrow’s World: Courses of Action” http://www.coursestructuresreview.uwa.edu.au/?a=84109. It includes a powerful set of recommendations that could position UWA as an educational leader and have an important impact on future growth and development of the CIHS. The UWA report calls for a greater broadening of undergraduate learning and proposes that all students include four units outside of their degree-specific major. We have been developing two first year units that closely fit with the thrust of the UWA report. We plan to have these IHS units ready for online delivery to remote and regional, mature age and international students by the latter half of 2009. This would give us the experience and time to adapt the units to “blended” learning (a mix of online and face to face learning) to be well positioned to make a major contribution to the proposed new UWA curricula. Soon, we will have the prototypes of these units ready for discussion and comment on our website. We will then welcome your input to help make these units outstanding!
Associate Professor Neville Bruce
Director, Centre for Integrated Human Studies
NOTES FROM THE LAST SEMINAR, WAR AND CONFLICT
Dr Carmen Lawrence, speaking about the preconditions for war and conflict, declared that her expertise was not in the history of war and indeed her personal experience was of campaigning against Australia’s involvement in various wars. The focus of her talk was how people got involved in war and civil conflict. She quoted Elie Wiesel as saying that the 20th century was “a violent century” with its world and civil wars, the Holocaust, assassinations, bloodbaths, the Gulag, and atomic warfare, and suggested the 21st century was shaping up to be similar or worse. In the last 15 years there have been more than 100 armed conflicts, most within nations, and 100 million deaths. Modern warfare had removed the distinction between civilians and combatants, and many of the casualties were women and children. However, she believed humans were not doomed to repeat this pattern endlessly: there was nothing inherent in human nature that meant we had to settle conflict in bloody battle; nor was the problem one of knowledge: we understand the causes of conflict, the problem is in how we respond. We urgently needed to prevent wars, through education, example and good governance. A simple definition of war was “the use of violent means to achieve political ends”, and war occurred often (and increasingly) within states. War was largely carried out with relatively cheap, conventional and small arms weapons, supplied from countries in the developed world, including Australia. The causes of interstate war were many and varied, and included resource ownership; disputed boundaries, often the legacy of colonialism; and religious, cultural and ethnic grievances. Many of these factors support or exacerbate each other. Poverty and illiteracy make populations susceptible to propaganda. And yet we are all capable of inhuman behaviour. Slavery, the treatment of Indigenous people in Australia and elsewhere, the Holocaust, and events such as the bloodbath in Rwanda suggest that individual psychopathology is not the explanation for such behaviour. The depiction of some groups as “other” enables the perpetration of violence against them. Our identity as individuals and as part of a group is central to our relationship with other people and whether we see them as like
ourselves or as different to the point of not being human. People who feel themselves under threat may be less tolerant of difference, more likely to embrace stereotypes and more likely to show animosity to outsiders. Recognition of these risk factors can help us prevent war and conflict. In the first instance, we should reject suggestions that this is impossible.
Robyn Carroll declared her commitment to mediation and education and suggested that since many lawyers become politicians or advise politicians, training lawyers in mediation and other non-adversarial processes may have a far-reaching effect on the practice of politics in our society. She gave the background to mediation by examining the nature of conflict and the various approaches to conflict resolution. Our legal system is adversarial, which means that the onus of defining the issues in a dispute lies with the parties involved rather than with the judge. There has been a shift in recent years towards a more consultative, collaborative approach that recognises the interests and needs of the people in conflict and may work on building relationships to achieve settlement.
Mediation is a structured problem solving process of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Mediation is often beneficial to people in dispute as it gives them an “excuse” to settle without being seen to have backed down. Broadly within society there has been a move towards ADR in schools and universities; business; courts; and even in government.
Media references
Karen Connolly
Integrated Human Studies
School of Anatomy and Human Biology
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway Crawley WA 6009
+61 08 6488 3647 email: kconnolly@anhb.uwa.edu.au
In the office on Mondays and Thursdays - for urgent enquiries please phone Neville Bruce on +61 08 6488 3292
