Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and tables
- Acknowledgements
- Editors’ note
- Foreword
- Foreword
- Chapter 1 Conditions under which language policy affects social stability
- Chapter 2 The case of the Catalan language: Some lessons
- Chapter 3 Language and hegemonic power: How feasible is conflict management by means of language policy?
- Chapter 4 The language issue and the quest for lasting peace in Africa: Prospects and challenges
- Chapter 5 The role of language in the process of constructing, preserving and reinforcing peace in Africa
- Chapter 6 Language policy and identity conflict in relation to Afrikaans in the post-apartheid era
- Chapter 7 Linguistic politics and the Northern Ireland peace process
- Chapter 8 Language policy and conflict management: A view from Galicia
- Chapter 9 Overcoming ethno-liguistic divisions: Developing educational materials in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Chapter 10 On language and peace: Some theological remarks
- Abbreviations and glossary
- Author biographies
Chapter 3 - Language and hegemonic power: How feasible is conflict management by means of language policy?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and tables
- Acknowledgements
- Editors’ note
- Foreword
- Foreword
- Chapter 1 Conditions under which language policy affects social stability
- Chapter 2 The case of the Catalan language: Some lessons
- Chapter 3 Language and hegemonic power: How feasible is conflict management by means of language policy?
- Chapter 4 The language issue and the quest for lasting peace in Africa: Prospects and challenges
- Chapter 5 The role of language in the process of constructing, preserving and reinforcing peace in Africa
- Chapter 6 Language policy and identity conflict in relation to Afrikaans in the post-apartheid era
- Chapter 7 Linguistic politics and the Northern Ireland peace process
- Chapter 8 Language policy and conflict management: A view from Galicia
- Chapter 9 Overcoming ethno-liguistic divisions: Developing educational materials in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Chapter 10 On language and peace: Some theological remarks
- Abbreviations and glossary
- Author biographies
Summary
This essay reflects my ongoing personal exercise of coming to grips with the ambitious overall topic ‘Language and peace: Language policy as a means of peace building and conflict management’. Starting off from accumulated ‘wisdom’ rather than from focused research, the idea is to identify, in a global perspective, certain recurrent features which would ultimately allow me to come up with elements of a typology as well as of a theory on the conflict management potential of language policies. Such a typology would need to be based on case studies of successful and unsuccessful conflict management by means of language policy, from which theoretically relevant features could be generalised by inductive procedures. I trust that such case studies can and will be provided by experts who are familiar with individual ‘cases’. With regard to building up theory, one could also start by tentatively assuming common a priori ‘dimensions’ of the topic which would constitute a starting point of sorts in order to monitor the potential of these dimensions to ‘explain’ certain illustrative cases and thereby allow for theoretical generalisations in a deductive manner. In this paper, which reflects a somewhat preliminary approach to the topic, both deductive and inductive approaches will be implicitly referred to in a parallel manner.
Among the potentially common dimensions, I will examine what I presently conceive of as (1) the political, (2) the ideological, (3) the sociolinguistic, and (4) the historico-geographic dimensions (this list of ‘dimensions’ is not assumed to be complete). I will introduce these dimensions by way of four hypotheses. The hypotheses are tentative at this stage and, partly at least, come close to being ‘trivial’. Reference will be made, however, to illustrative ‘cases’ in point under both a ‘world region’ and ‘national’ approach. The idea is to ignite and fuel our discussions, in a rather general way, towards generating an empirically based typology and to provide the first steps towards a theory of conflict management by means of language policy.
The political dimension: Power and control
First hypothesis: Resulting from political, economic, military, hegemonic patterns of domination, there are social and cultural conflicts virulent in this world, in which language plays a role as both an instrument and symbol of power and control of economic resources. Language policy and its implementation open and legitimise the gateway to the use of language for hegemonic purposes.
- Type
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- Information
- Language Policy and the Promotion of PeaceAfrican and European case studies, pp. 11 - 32Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2014