Kevin Avruch, Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution: Culture, Identity, Power, and Practice.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
K evin Avruch introduced the concept of culture to the scholarly field and practices of conflict resolution in the 1980s.With his most recent book, Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution, Avruch continues his contribution by bridging theoretical concepts and analysis with the more practical world of conflict resolution practitioners.By elaborating on his previous work and providing new conceptualizations of culture and power, Avruch successfully addresses the problems of context and pretext that peacebuilders face in the field, suggesting alternatives to render conflict resolution practices more effective.Using a cultural sociological approach to conflict resolution and theories of international relations, Avruch's publication focuses on how culture has informed the practice of conflict resolution, and makes the important claim for the adoption of new conceptualizations of concepts, such as culture and power.First, throughout Chapters 1-8 -chapters previously published in the aftermath of the book Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998) -Avruch elaborates on his previous discussions of culture and conflict, and demonstrates how the context, which affects our understanding of concepts such as culture and identity, remains problematic for conflict resolution.The author thus suggests an alternative understanding of culture, where culture is a constructed, fluid, and changeable concept (p.48).He is indeed sceptical of defining culture in a homogeneous, coherent and rigid way, demonstrated by his discussion of Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" (Chapter 6), where he makes the case that "a nuanced theory of culture has several advantages for advancing a coherent notion of conflict resolution" (p.94).This need for a new conceptualization of culture is explained by the connection between culture and conflict, and where theoretical conceptualizations provide a pretext upon which the practice of conflict resolution is understood.Avruch argues that theories of international relations and related theoretical conceptualizations influence the field of conflict resolution.For instance, our understandings of culture have affected post-conflict practices, such as human rights (Chapter 3), negotiation processes (Chap-Marie-Eve Hamel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, UK.Her research focuses on the post-conflict social reintegration of the survivors of ethnicized sexual violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".