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Introduction:
Is there a way to halt suicide bombings? Mari Fitzduff, the former Executive Director of Irish conflict resolution organization INCORE, and now a professor and the Director of the MA Conflict and Coexistence Programme at Brandeis
University, suggests that the violent way a conflict is waged often simply spawns new hatred. She talks about how conflict in Israel and Northern Ireland perpetuates itself.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Conflict Roots
Mari Fitzduff
Professor and Director of the MA Conflict and
Coexistence Programme at Brandeis University
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So it doesn't always work, but what we try and say, for instance is we would say in
most of the guerilla groups it's almost impossible because it will keep popping
up.
You will probably rarely come to the end of suicide bombing in Israel and
etc., simply because, as we know in many situations... Take Northern Ireland.
The martyrs that develop around the grave become the next problem.
Okay, you
shoot a couple of perpetrators, and then they have developed their own mythology
and the martyrdom becomes sort of an ethos. The myths just develop.
Q: It becomes separate from the initial causes of the conflict?
A: They can actually.
This is why the work is incredibly important. We would
talk, for instance, to the military and to the British embassies about importing
skills to various places they're in, because often what the military is doing is
actually counterproductive to what they want themselves. So you have the
military creating people who are prepared to give their lives up to a cause.
My own personal work showed that there was three reasons people became
paramilitaries.
One was mother's milk stuff. It was in the family. That would be very much
the Adams and McGuinness. They could not have been republicans, given the
context and the people they were.
The second was very much an intervention with the local security forces or
their folk being blown up by the IRA. All of these interventions often spawned a
reaction, which actually of course increased the number of people who were
prepared to use violence.
The third one was very much the male thing, particularly among the loyalists.
Sort of the need for meaning, particularly for disenfranchised, unempowered
young men.
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