Academics’ manufacturing of counter-narratives as knowledge resistance of official hegemonic narratives in identity conflicts

ABSTRACT

This article illustrates how official hegemonic narratives of armed conflicts and history are resisted by academics by generating counter-narratives and how this affects the public perception of identity conflicts. Due to the relatively high status of academics, critical and alternative knowledge production serve as a tool for resistance against the mainstream narrative. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we discuss competing narratives, and how new narratives by various academics challenge the official narrative. In the case of Rwanda where the resistance is more clandestine, we demonstrate how the official narrative is challenged by academics and individuals based outside the country. In the case of Sri Lanka, we highlight how two dominant narratives, one by the government and the other by the rebels, competed with the counter-narratives. Overall, we demonstrate how counter-narratives construed to serve as a form of resistance are unfolding in various struggles, and how the gradual impact of academics’ agencies on changing hegemonic narratives finds a contextual definition.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict
• narrative
• resistance
• knowledge
• Israel-Palestine
• Rwanda
• Sri Lanka

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Ernest Renan, 1947, Qu’est que c’est une nation? pp.7–8: ’L’oubli et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essential de la formation d’une nation et c’est ainsi que le progrès des ètudes historiques est souvent pour la nationalité un danger’ (quoted in Hobsbawm 1991, p. 2).

2. From a lecture and debate on 11 July 2019 at a Socialist Workers Party meeting in the UK with Ilan Pappé: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8KcfLdiTJ0 (accessed on 2019-10-30).

3. From an interview with Benny Morris published in Haaretz, Friday Magazine, 23 May 2010.

4. See Filip Reyntjens, Political Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Ch. 5, ‘Dealing with the World and the Region’, pp. 124–162; esp. The section ‘Dealing with Critical Voices’, pp. 127–134.

5. Human Rights Watch Report, http://www.hrw.org (accessed 2019-03-28)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dhammika Herath

Dhammika Herath holds a PhD in Peace and Development Research. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. In his research and publications, Herath has a strong focus on the fields of development, urban regeneration, post-conflict reconciliation, religious conflicts, and issues of governance.

Michael Schulz

Michael Schulz PhD and Associate Professor in Peace and Development Research, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has published more than 100 scientific articles, book chapters, debate articles and reports, and in particular extensively on issues in the Middle East and North Africa region, dealing with security, civil resistance, democracy and state building, conflicts, and regionalism. In August 2020, his book Hamas between Resistance, Sharia rule and Demo-Islam, will be released and published (Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group). Since 2011 he is part of a research program together, with Mikael Baaz, Mona Lilja and Stellan Vinthagen, financed by the Swedish Research Council, that concerns resistance strategies among demo-advocators in civil society called Civil Resistance Impact on Democracy in Asia.

Ezechiel Sentama

Ezechiel Sentama holds a PhD in Peace and Development Research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, as well as international certificates in Peacebuilding and Development from the American University, US and in Understanding genocide from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has been a lecturer at the University of Rwanda, a Senior Lecturer at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and a Guest Researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has 15 years of research and teaching experience in the fields of conflict, peace and development, with good track of scientific and policy-oriented results that have been made available to the scientific community, policy makers, the civil society, and the general public. Sentama is currently Assistant Professor (Research) and European Horizon 2020-Marie S. Curie Research Fellow at Coventry University in the United Kingdom. His research project is on peacebuilding in Algeria and Rwanda.