Throughout the novel A Separate Peace, John Knowles depicts a character-versus-self conflict through Gene Forrester’s, the protagonist, progressively worsening insecurities and a major epiphany. During his time at the Devon Boarding School, Gene shares a dormitory with his best friend Phineas, Finny. However, Gene’s jealousy of Finny’s natural athletic ability and leadership qualities causes him to create an internal conflict due to his low self esteem. His covetousness of Finny flourishes to the point that he must rationalize why he begrudges Finny to the extent he does; he reasons that the rivalry he concocts is mutual. Gene continues with this mindset that Finny is equally envious of his own intelligence until the evening when Leper states…
Over the course of the years world history has continued to change. New conflicts are constantly developing. In order to keep these conflicts under control special foundations and laws such as the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights have been founded. Despite the creation of the United Nations and the issuance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conflict has continued in the post-World War II era. The attempts at keeping peace have and have not been effective since conflicts around the world keep reoccurring…
There are many people in the world that are at war with each other and it’s a shame to see so many different types of ethnic groups that are so much different but on the other hand have a lot of things that are in common. Since the beginning of time there has always been some kind of jealousy or arguments between ethnic groups and each of their ways of lives can be a bit different which can cause hate crimes and such to each of the different ethnic groups. Psychology can come into play to help solve some of the problems that can occur between two ethnic groups. Cross-cultural psychology is a branch of psychology that looks at how cultural factors influence human behavior. (Shiraev & Levy, 2010) So in other words we as a whole can use cross culture psychology to help determine the human behavior and why a certain ethnic group can think about another one just because of the differences the two may have. Some of the differences between two ethnic groups can be religion. Not all cultures or ethnic groups pray or believe in the same God in the same way. (Shiraev & Levy, 2010) An example of this would be in the United States we have so many different types of religions that can have to do with the way a person dresses for church such as a Baptist church may not have a dress code but if a person was to go to a Catholic church a dress code is put into place. But there are many differences in religion just within the United States.…
The Bosnian War was an ethnic conflict that ravaged the former Yugoslavia from 1992-1995. The war was marked by the systematic mass rape and murder of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian nationalists. In order to understand the genocide in Bosnia, one must first examine the recent history of the torn Balkan region.…
Analyze the reasons for separatism with and/or across national boundaries and discuss its consequences [40 marks]…
A Separate Peace, written by John Knowles, is a seemingly simple yet heartbreaking story that gives the reader an inside look and analysis of the reality of human nature. Set permanently in the main character Gene’s point of view, the audience is first taken to the present of a reflective and, now, wise man (Gene) and then plunged into his past back in 1942 to relive the harsh lessons that youth brought him. Along with vivid imagery of the tranquil days of the past, a view into the social construct of a boy’s private school, Devon, and the looming presence of World War 2 on the horizon, there is also a significant power struggle that the reader can observe almost instantly. Conquering the need to be supreme in the situations of the war, high…
First, a theoretical concept, identity is used to understand various aspects of identification processes and explain their impact on social relationship and social conflict. Edward E Azar describes the violent events as Protracted Social Conflict (PSC), which means social conflicts happen when communities are deprived of the satisfaction of their basic needs on the basis of the communal identity. The deprivation is the result of a complex chain involving the role of the state and international relations. In addition, initial conditions (colonial legacy, domestic historical setting, and the multi-communal nature of the society) play important roles in shaping the genesis of protracted social conflict (Azar). According to Azar, Protected Social conflicts have three different characteristics, such as Genesis, Process Dynamics, and Outcomes Analysis. Genesis refers to a set of conditions that are responsible for the transformation of non-conflictual situations into the conflictual situation. Azar says that there are four key factors in this practice. The four preconditions are communal content, deprivation of human needs, government and the state role, and international linkages. Nepalese conflict is closely related to this theory because people have been dominated by state, and…
Separatism is the wanting or succession of being separate and splitting from a main country, usually because they no longer identify with the main body they are attached/part of. As a result, they feel isolated and excluded from the main body and wish to no longer be a part of it, which can often result in peaceful separation from that body, however it is sometimes very violent and may bring about more negatives than positives. Separatism is often the result of certain needs or reasons that the majority of a population in one area agree with, these reasons include reasons like feeling economically isolated, minorities with different cultures or ethnicities that simply do not belong to the main body, the feeling of being exploited by others, the natural collapse of the state, splitting it into many smaller states. As a result of this, there is many consequences brought about, for example the aim is often succeeded, which is the establishment of clear, separate states or countries, the protection of a language, the growth of political parties, terrorism and civil war. The majority of the consequences are positive, however the negative consequences are never felt softly, they are always hard hitting globally, for example the violence that the separatism of Timor caused. Sometimes separatism will be forced upon people who didn't want it as a result of greed(The partition of Bengal) or due to the nature of the time, for example the separating of East Germany and West Germany following world war 2.…
Researchers David Laitin and James Fearon conveyed over the terms: insurgency, ethnicity, civil war and ethnic conflicts in their personal fashion. Insurgency is a technology of military conflict characterized by an insufficient, faintly armed bands practicing guerilla welfare within rural area which reckons the likeliness of civil wars. Ethnicity is in essence ofa social construction used to explain the ethnic violence. Civil wars are prevalent due to the accumulation of the umpteen number of conflicts since the Cold War. They came to the illation that neither ethnic nor religious diversity itself cannot be the sole justification to make a country prone to war, neither can ethnic or political grievances be considered a solid vindication. Ethnic conflict is most nearly just the chaotic collision between a similar group of people which conclusively stems from rough terrain, local knowledge, and large populations. It was presumed that it was the end of the Cold War that evoked the unleashing of civil conflicts though Laitin and Fearon refuted these presumption. Additionally, it was in actuality the conditions that favored insurgency that steered…
Conflict is something we all ex prince at one point or another in our life time. According to our author, “Conflict is a part of every interpersonal relationship,...” (DeVito, 2008-2009, p.286). Since people have different views, conflict, a disagreement, is something we all must learn to deal with. The conflict I choose to write about involves a conflict I encountered with my ex-girlfriend a while ago.…
One definition of ethnicity reads as followed “identity with or membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group’s customs, beliefs, or language”. Ethnicity defines many of us but a few want our definition to be “cleansed” and this is when civil conflict arises. Ethnicity is frequently cited as an explanation for conflicts in the post cold war era. Yugoslavia, a prime example of a system that encountered ethnic conflict that led to a violent civil war, consisted of six republics and two autonomous districts. The government at the time wanted control of these republics but the republics wanted to be free from government control. There was a push by several ethnic groups to form their own sovereign states. When Croatia opted to declare independence from Yugoslavia the serbs and Yugoslav troops moved in to convince Croatia to re-enter the union. Croatia was not allowed to go independent. The creation of the new state was based on ethnicity i.e. share a ethnicity and they should be in the same state. But due to the way ethnicity was defined then, which was usually language spoken by a person, different aspects of an ethnic group was ignored causing conflict between one group and another. In this essay I will argue that long standing primordialist hatred, week state nor social grievance caused civil conflict in Yugoslavia but political opportunism by political elites is what caused it. Ethnicity became the base for political power in Yugoslavia. To understand ethnicity I will analyze the conceptualization of ethnicity which fall under two fields of thoughts, Primordialism and Instrumentalism. I will also evaluate grievance, political entrepreneurial, and state capacity arguments of civil conflict as it ties into ethnicity. I finally tie these ideas to the civil conflict in Yugoslavia and how political elites used nationalism to gain control of Yugoslavia.…
Cultural clashes, global wars, international misunderstandings, and ethnic conflicts have been occurring for decades. As early as the 1940s, constant hostility within the Middle East has resulted in suffering to human rights, education, and family structure (Huntington, Fronk & Chadwick, 2001). Culture seems to be implicated as the major contributor to conflict. The increasing modernization is strongly intertwined in this process, as it challenges traditional ideas, conservative values, and educational obstacles. How and why ethnic group conflicts occur will be illustrated in this paper by comparing and examining two ethnic groups at war. The concept of conformity and its relations to the ethnic groups will be explained as well as the kinship between social perception and social cognition. In addition, the necessary social perceptions for the resolution of the conflict will be discussed.…
Step 1. Bring to mind a specific situation in each of the conflict style categories noted.…
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda is, by all accounts, the worst war related disaster since the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in World War II. In Rwanda, 800,000 people died in less than one hundred days. As the well wishers of Europe and the United States turned a blind eye to what was happening in Rwanda, thousands of machete-wielding youths turned Rwanda into a mass grave. Although, the United Nations sent its peacekeepers they were few, severely underfunded, and with a mandate limited only to self defense and protection of foreign interests. In short, the peacekeepers could only watch helplessly as the Rwandese butchered each other. By considering Gourevitch’s arguments, this essay analyzes the reasons why the Europe and the United States turned a blind eye to the genocide in Rwanda. It will also outline the strengths and weaknesses of those arguments, and finally put forward arguments that UN officials should have made in order to convince Europe and the United States to intervene in Rwanda.…
The true test of someone’s character is not determined by how we deal with conflict in our life, but how we deal with all the aspects of our lives.…