http://switchandshift.

com/how-equality-is-changing-the-face-of-business
Equality typically suffers from a bad reputation in capitalist environments,
even to the extent that some consider it to be the biggest threat to
capitalism itself. Looking at equality as the even distribution of wealth, it is
indeed painstakingly clear that all animals are created equal, but some are
more equal than others: the 85 richest people in the world have as much
wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest, less than 15% of women hold Executive
Officer positions in Fortune 500 companies and the US income inequality is
at its highest peak since 1928. Yet, is it right to look at equality only in terms
of wealth distribution? When the Red Hot Chili Peppers were referring to
equality in their song The power of equality, they were talking about
equality in the sense of equal rights and people empowerment. In the same
vein, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman made a great comment: A society
that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts
freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
When defining equality as creating more freedom for anyone to contribute to
and gain business success, the future looks bright, with anyone having
talent, motivation and creativity being able to make a dent in the universe.
Here are 4 global shifts towards more equality that will fuel future growth
and change the face of business forever:
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that

puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both. Milton Friedman
Equality Through Open Information
Todays society is flooded with the promises and virtues of openness: open
collaboration, open working space, open sourcing, open innovation, open
universities, open government. Ever since Johannes Gutenberg ignited the
printing revolution, people around the planet have an increasing access to
information and knowledge, with Google obviously accelerating the name of
the game with Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt willing to provide everyone
in the world with all of the worlds information. Similarly, Teslas CEO Elon
Musk publicly released Teslas patents in the belief that applying an open-

source philosophy would strengthen rather than weaken Teslas position.

Young people around the world can learn about nearly any imaginable
subject using platforms such as Khan Academy, supercharging the
democratization of knowledge and skills. According to McKinsey research, the
open information revolution creates a yearly additional value of more than
$3 trillion, spurring hundreds of entrepreneurial start-ups and helping
incumbents drive efficiency and effectiveness.

Equality Through Zero Marginal Costs

In addition to knowledge and intelligence getting increasingly distributed and
disaggregated, digital technology is dramatically lowering transaction,
communication and collaboration costs. In todays maker movement, smart
people with few resources can actually create highly disruptive, worldchanging businesses. For Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Zero Marginal Cost
Society, the dominant force behind this is the shift from vertical to lateral
resource allocation. As a result, he claims we are about to reach the
optimally efficient state where it is feasible to sell at a marginal cost of zero.
Critical business functions such as finance, production, distribution, sales and
marketing are indeed being radically democratized thanks to crowd funding,
3D-printing technology, efficient global distribution and powerful social
media communication channels. Think of the development of Jibo, the
worlds first family robot. Having raised close to $2 million through
crowdfunding (largely exceeding the target amount of $100,000), social
robotics pioneer Dr. Cynthia Breazeal is able to add more features to Jibo as
more funds become available, keeping the robots price affordable at just
$499. The majority of the seeding money can be spent on engineering the
robot itself, with costs related to marketing, sales, ordering and distribution
being close to zero.

Equality Through Mass Collaboration

Mass collaboration is reshaping the way businesses operate. In the
participation age, more and more companies are tearing down the walls they
have built around them, embracing an outside-in perspective and leading
people on the basis of purpose rather than managing them on the basis of
control. In their book Firms of Endearment, Jag Sheth, Raj Sisodia and David

Wolfe point out that companies helping all stakeholders to thrive

customers, investors, employees, partners, communities and society have
grown no less than 3 times faster compared to Good to Great companies
over the last 10 years. Taking such a broader stakeholder approach implies
building a culture of equality, where all stakeholders have equal chances to
participate and drive value and meaning. With nearly 3 billion brand
conversations taking place around the world every day, consumers have
become a highly powerful global marketing machine themselves, either
boosting or working against the effects of traditional brand advertising. The
recent success of the Ice Bucket Challenge is a relevant case in point,
having raised more than $40 million in donations for the ALS organization so
far. The organization left behind the classic fundraising path by actively
engaging anyone around the world in what you could call a trivial act, from
celebrities like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and Ben Affleck to everyday people
like myself.
In the participation age, more and more companies are tearing down the walls they
have built around them, embracing an outside-in perspective and leading people on
the basis of purpose rather than managing them on the basis of control.

Equality Through Sharing

Owning assets and intellectual property is less and less a required ingredient
of business performance. I had the pleasure of meeting up with Santi Pozo, a
young entrepreneur from Barcelona who is in the process of creating a
helmet that not only protects users of minority sports, but also stays intact
after several crashes. Aiming to show the world that it is possible to have
more with less, he reached out to NASA requesting them if they could send
him a sample of material they use in space. And guess what: they did!
Gradually, we are moving from an owning economy to a sharing economy,
with resources being shared among a wider population of users, thereby
making a better and more equal use of existing capacity. Despite defensive
legal actions and counter-lobbying to protect current business models, the
growth of the sharing economy is unstoppable with companies
like Airbnb, Uber, Skillshare and Zopabreaking and redefining the rules in the

hotel, transportation, education and finance industries (and many more to

come).
Equality is becoming ever more central in modern businesses with open
information, zero marginal costs, mass collaboration and sharing creating
more freedom in the business world for everyone. After the dominance of the
command and control management model over the last century, thank God
Almighty, we are free at last! How does equality create new opportunities
for your business?
Copyright: tovovan / 123RF Stock Photo

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Slow Reading as a Practice of Reckoning with Love and Loss

by CR IS T IN A B EL TR N on JUNE 23, 2015

Danielle Allens Our Declaration is a generous and meticulous

work of democratic theory. The books origin speaks
powerfully to its ambitions: Allens decision to teach canonical
works to elite students at the University of Chicago while
simultaneously teaching the same texts to working-class
Chicagoans attending night school demonstrates the authors
belief that no one is ineligible or exempt from theorizing
from reflecting on and thinking with others about the
principles and values that ought to guide our individual and

collective existence. This democratic conviction that our

collective flourishing is tied to the capacity of individuals and
collectivities to think wisely, act creatively, and judge well is
central to the books subtitle: A Reading of the Declaration of
Independence in Defense of Equality.
In titling the book a defense of equality, Allen is taking issue
with a tradition in political philosophy that equality and
freedom are necessarily in tension with each other.[1] By this
logic, freedom and equality represent a zero-sum game in
which equality for the majority necessarily involves impinging
on others freedom. Here, the quest for equality is dangerously
linked to the tendency to limit the greatness of some in order
to create equality for all. InDemocracy in America, Alexis de
Tocqueville referred to this as the leveling effects of equality:
Almost all salient characteristics are obliterated to make room
for something average, less high and less low, less brilliant
and less dim, than what the world had before.
When I survey this countless multitude of beings, shaped in
each others likeness, among whom nothing stands out or falls
unduly low, the sight of such universal uniformity saddens
and chills me, and I am tempted to regret that state of society
which has ceased to be.[2]
For Tocqueville, while democratic peoples have a natural
taste for liberty, their passion for equality is ardent,
insatiable, eternal and invincible. They want equality in
freedom and if they cannot have that, they still want equality
in slavery.[3] Authors ranging from Ayn Rand to Kurt
Vonnegut would pick up this theme, linking the predilection
for equality with dystopian visions of collectivism run amok
worlds where the exceptional are oppressed in favor of the

mediocre. Not surprisingly, arguments about equality become

particularly heated when dealing with the distribution of what
are understood to be limited resources in areas such as
education, housing, and employment. Debates over
affirmative action are a classic example of this dynamic.
Rather than accept this false choice between excellence and
equality, Allen shifts the readers focus to what she identifies
as the Declarations five facets of equality. Central to this
claim is the idea that equality is the bedrock of
freedom.[4] Here, she champions equality as:
co-creation, where many people participate equally in creating
a world together. The point of political equality, then, is not
merely to secure spaces free from domination but also to
engage all members of a community equally in the work of
creating and constantly re-creating that community.[5]
In pushing back against the image of equality as the loss of
excellence, Allen shifts her readers focus to equality as the
sharing of ownership in public life. In making this move, Our
Declaration reminds us that Americas problem has never
been that it suffers from too much equality. If anything, it is
the lack of equality that has been (and continues to be) the
biggest threat to justice particularly the inability of all
Americans to participate equally as co-creators of a shared
world in which all can flourish.[6]
This commitment to collective human flourishing is one
of Our Declarations most appealing aspects. Describing her
experience reading the Declaration with her night-school
students, Allen writes:

Its a clich to say that we fell in love, but we did. Its words
became necessary for us; they became our Declaration.
Through reading them slowly, we came into our inheritance:
an understanding of freedom and equality, and the value of
finding the right words.[7]
Now I wanted to teach them the Declaration itself for its own
sake. I wanted my students to claim the text. They were so
much in need of it. I wanted them to understand that
democratic power belonged to them, too, that they had its
sources inside themselves. I wanted them to own the
Declaration of Independence. I want that for you too, because
the Declaration is also yours.[8]
In asking her readers to claim the Declaration, Allen is urging
them to claim their democratic patrimony, taking up their
rightful place in public life. Moreover, in claiming the
founding, the hope is that readers of the Declaration will fall
in love with American democracy, becoming empowered
subjects imbued with a sense of power and belonging.
Claiming the text, the aim is that readers will experience a
newfound sense becoming a we a people.
This, of course, raises larger questions: What does civic
belonging feel like? Must it feel like love? What other
emotions might be conjured through an extended engagement
with the Declaration?
In posing these questions, I want to build on Allens
suggestion that to really appreciate and understand the
Declaration, it must be read slowly. I believe her emphasis on
slow and close reading could be expanded to include the effort
to linger over the difficult mix of emotions that reading the
Declaration raises. In other words, in lingering over the

founders words, readers should strive to cultivate a

democratic sensibility capable of tarrying with their range of
feelings about the founding feelings such as anger,
disappointment, alienation, sorrow, and loss. These emotions
are equally essential to making the Declaration ours.
And readers, individually and collectively, should feel
conflicted about the document and its creation. Americas
founders were a fascinating, brilliant, and compelling set of
individuals; their co-creation of a new system of government
remains inspiring and moving. Yet these same men whose
words continue to inspire also wrote of the merciless Indian
Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished
destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.[9]This is the
complicated legacy we inherit one in which revolutionary
acts of freedom and practices of white supremacy are
mutually constitutive.
Yet in taking ownership of this imperfect achievement, Our
Declaration serves as an invitation to refuse the easy solace of
denunciation or celebration. Neither represents the
democratic reading practices the Declaration demands, for as
Allen makes abundantly clear, there is nothing simple about
this short and powerful work.
The authors discussion of group writing suggests one
powerful opportunity for sitting with the Declarations
contradictions and tragedy. Noting that Jeffersons original
draft was edited not only by a five-member committee but by
Congress, Allen describes the process by which the founders
deleted all references to slavery while adding numerous
references to God. Despite the result which, arguably,
contributed to generations of violence and human devastation
Allen nevertheless characterizes this process as the art of

democratic writing, a practice that while maddening is

necessary for justice.[10]
I admit that such celebratory language leaves me perplexed.
While group writing may be a democratic art a messy but
important practice that abets compromise such
compromises carry a price. What is democratic, after all, may
not be just. And its here that, as a reader, I wanted Allen to
resist a rush to romance and instead linger over the political
implications of group writing.
How shall we reckon with such violent silence? And how do
such omissions allow readers of the Declaration to feel pride
in the birth of our nations freedom while evading any
sustained confrontation with slavery and its concomitant sins
of rape, torture, and the creation of wealth from stolen labor?
In fact, Allens demand that we read slowly (and together)
seems to invite the possibility of such a reckoning. As she
herself notes when discussing how segregationists changed
the language of separate and equal to separate but equal,
the Declaration provided tools for liberating some and
dominating others. But such moments of acknowledgment
are worthy of elaboration. For if Allen is right, then we owe it
to each other to slow down and truly grapple with the stuff of
tragedy.[11]
Of course, encouraging readers to linger over both the
Declarations beauty and tragedy isnt easy claiming this
inspired and tortured legacy with its echoing inequities should
break our hearts. But perhaps in our current political
moment, the only morally justifiable patriotism is of the
brokenhearted variety.

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/06/23/slow-reading-as-a-practice-of-reckoning-withlove-and-loss/

The following text is excerpted from Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of
Equality (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014) by Danielle Allen, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social
Science.
The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality. It is
out of an egalitarian commitment that a people growsa people that is capable of protecting us all collectively, and
each of us individually, from domination. If the Declaration can stake a claim to freedom, it is only because it is so
clear-eyed about the fact that the peoples strength resides in its equality.
The Declaration also conveys another lesson of paramount importance. It is this: language is one of the most potent
resources each of us has for achieving our own political empowerment. The men who wrote the Declaration of
Independence grasped the power of words. This reveals itself in the laborious processes by which they brought the
Declaration, and their revolution, into being. It shows itself forcefully, of course, in the texts own eloquence.
When we think about how to achieve political equality, we have to attend to things like voting rights and the right to
hold office. We have to foster economic opportunity and understand when excessive material inequality undermines
broad democratic political participation. But we also have to cultivate the capacity of citizens to use language
effectively enough to influence the choices we make together. . . .
....
. . . . The single most transformative experience I had came from teaching the Declaration of Independence not to my
bright-eyed undergraduates but to my life-tested night students. I sometimes taught it as part of the U.S. history unit,
sometimes as part of the literature unit, and sometimes as part of the writing unit. Like the huge majority of
Americans, few of my day students had ever read its 1,337 words from start to finish. None of my night students had.
I started teaching the text instrumentally. That is, I thought it would be useful. These students with jobs were busy.
The Declaration is short. No one would complain about the reading. I could use it to teach history, writing, or political
philosophy. And so I began.
My night students generally entered into the text thinking of it as something that did not belong to them. It represented
instead institutions and power, everything that solidified a world that had, as life had turned out, delivered them so
much grief, so much to overcome.
As I worked my way through the text with those students, I realized for the first time in my own life that the
Declaration makes a coherent philosophical argument. In particular, it makes an argument about political equality. If
the pattern of books published on the Declaration is any indication, we have developed the habit of thinking about the
Declaration mainly as an event, an episode in the dramatic unfolding of the American Revolution. But it makes a
cogent philosophical case for political equality, a case that democratic citizens desperately need to understand.
What exactly is political equality?
The purpose of democracy is to empower individual citizens and give them sufficient control over their lives to protect
themselves from domination. In their ideal form, democracies empower each and all such that none can dominate
any of the others, nor any one group, another group of citizens.
Political equality is not, however, merely freedom from domination. The best way to avoid being dominated is to help
build the world in which one livesto help, like an architect, determine its pattern and structure. The point of political
equality is not merely to secure spaces free from domination but also to engage all members of a community equally
in the work of creating and constantly recreating that community. Political equality is equal political empowerment.

Ideally, if political equality exists, citizens become cocreators of their shared world. Freedom from domination and the
opportunity for cocreation maximize the space available for individual and collective flourishing.
The assertion that the Declaration is about such a rich notion of political equality will provoke skepticism. Is it not
about freedom? The text, after all, declares independence.
The Declaration starts and finishes, however, with equality. In the first sentence, the Continental Congress proclaims
that the time has come for the people, which they now constitute, to take a separate and equal place among the
powers of the earth. The last sentence of the Declaration finds the members of the Continental Congress, as
representatives of their newly designated states, mutually pledging to each other their lives, their property, and
their sacred honor. They stake their claim to independenceto freedomon the bedrock of an egalitarian
commitment to one another. Only on the basis of a community built with their equality can they achieve their freedom.
And, of course, there is also the all-important second sentence, which begins, We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal.
As my night students metabolized the philosophical argument and rhetorical art of the Declaration, many of them, and
I along with them, experienced a personal metamorphosis. They found themselves suddenly as political beings, with
a consciousness that had previously eluded them. They built a foundation from which to assess the state of their
political world. They gained a vocabulary and rhetorical techniques for arguing about it.
In reading the document with me, my students in fact regifted to me a text that should have been mine all along. They
gave me again the Declarations idealsequality and freedomand the power of its language. They restored to me
my patrimony as well as their own, and ours.

https://www.ias.edu/ias-letter/allen-declaration

Hear and Be Head: Music as a Dialogical Space for Co-Creating

Youth Led Conflict Transformation
HEAR AND BE HEARD: LEARNING WITH AND THROUGH MUSIC AS A
DIALOGICAL SPACE FOR CO-CREATING YOUTH LED CONFLICT
TRANSFORMATION
Shoshana Gottesman
Abstract: The calling to use musical spaces, constructed mostly by grassroots music
education programs, peacebuilding education programs, or a mix of the two, is
sprouting up in locations struggling with protracted environments of direct and indirect
violence, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Tunisia, and
Rwanda amongst many others, where conflict transformation is needed to build a
positive peace in conflict and post-conflict settings. Positive peace is the minimization of
direct and indirect violence, including structural injustice, leading to positive visions of
peace as being greater than the absence of war (Barash, 2009, p.146). These
programs expressly construct musical spaces in which learning music is not the only
end, but as well a means to the end in constructing ripe educational conditions for
transferable learning to take hold. Transferable learning, in the form of learning for and
about peacebuilding, coexistence, coresistence, solidarity, human rights, nonviolent

communication and resilience, are interwoven into the process of learning music with a
critical pedagogy. Music holds the key to awakening the imagination to create an
opening of spaces and perspectives in which to engage directly with fostering peace,
equality, and ones own responsibility in achieving freedom.
This current exploration will examine musical spaces as locations for youth lead conflict
transformation in the context of the inter-group ethnicity based conflict between Israelis
and Palestinians. Within a protracted ethnicity-based conflict, the web of human
relationships (Arendt, 1958) is under constant threat as conflict recreates itself every
day in the education sectors, and through political policies, cultural violence (Galtung,
1990), and routine interactions. Israeli, Palestinian, and Palestinian-Israeli youth who
experience this recreation of protracted conflict in a multiplicity of ways and origins
through direct and non-direct violence, in addition to inter-group systemic injustice,
must learn to witness, name, challenge, and disrupt these extremely powerful societal
forces. What role does musical spaces play in facilitating this transformation as an
incubator to challenge and disrupt patterns of protracted conflict and systemic injustice,
ultimately affecting youth socialization to hold their known collective narrative and yet,
with the embrace of their narrative anew which looks beyond the duality of ethnicitybased conflict to include values-based needs, respect, and responsibility to the Others
narrative? Finally, how can Israeli and Palestinian youth musicians author and re-author
themselves through being heard and co-creating musically within these shared musical
spaces, enabling the generating and regenerating of equal social relationships?
Keywords: youth, dialogical, musical spaces, conflict transformation, socialization,
equality
I want to watch the sea. Dip my feet in the water.
Dance on the grass. I want to be one with the rays of sun.
Get me out of here. I want to grow out of this.
Kela & Dana/Heartbeat, The Wall
The field of conflict transformation is ever growing and expanding as communities
across the globalizing modern world become more interconnected and interdependent.
Nation states, commonly exercising the art of conflict resolution and mitigation as a topdown method, are increasingly not the only actors in mending conflicts and seeking
resolutions. With the development of Track II Diplomacy, also known as people-to-people

diplomacy, invested individuals at the grassroots level are partaking in transforming

conflict by utilizing peacebuilding and human rights education to foster a culture of
peace and critically conscious society from the bottom-up. Within the relatively
adolescent existence of peacebuilding and human rights education, a younger
grassroots practice utilizes the expressive arts, and even more specifically musical
spaces, as locations for transferable learning to facilitate the co-creation of youth led
conflict transformation.
This calling to use musical spaces, constructed mostly by grassroots music education
programs, peacebuilding education programs, or a mix of the two, is sprouting up in
locations struggling with protracted environments of direct and indirect violence, such
as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Tunisia, and Rwanda amongst
many others, where conflict transformation is needed to build a positive peace in
conflict and post-conflict settings. Positive peace is the minimization of direct and
indirect violence, including structural injustice, leading to positive visions of peace as
being greater than the absence of war (Barash, 2009, p.146). These programs
expressly construct musical spaces in which learning music is not the only end, but as
well a means to the end in constructing ripe educational conditions for transferable
learning to take hold. Transferable learning, in the form of learning for and about
peacebuilding, coexistence, coresistence, solidarity, human rights, nonviolent
communication and resilience, are interwoven into the process of learning music with a
critical pedagogy. Music holds the key to awakening the imagination to create an
opening of spaces and perspectives in which to engage directly with fostering peace,
equality, and ones own responsibility in achieving freedom. These spaces serve as a
percolator for youth to hear, be heard, explore their self-expression, and amplify their
voices in and between their local communities allowing for the cultivation of bottom-up
generational change.
What are these musical spaces and how are they nurtured into being? What pedagogical
processes of learning create locations of possibilities (hooks, 1994) in these dialogical
spaces enabling youths search of becoming? How can learning fostered in these spaces
with and through music transfer beyond the rehearsal room or dialogue circle through
youths altered attitudes and behaviors, resulting in an active commitment to
witnessing, naming, challenging, and disrupting the extremely powerful societal forces
of ethnicity-based conflict socialization? Ultimately, how can musical spaces facilitate
the co-creation of youth led conflict transformation?

According to education philosopher Maxine Greene, educational philosophy must

engage the educator from his [her] vantage point as actor and from the vantage point
of his [her] newest experiences and his [her] most recent fears. (Greene, 1973, p.7) It
is my belief through my own interactions with theory and practice by working with youth
in locations of systemic injustice such as Harlem and Tunisia, and locations of protracted
conflict in Israel/Palestine, that musical spaces can have profound and enduring effects
on youths authoring and re-authoring of themselves with and through the creative
process of musicking (Small, 1995). Musicking can be thought of as the doing and
undergoing (Dewey, 1934) of collective withness and meaning making with and
through musical encounters as performer and listener. This location of possibilities
(hooks, 1994) supporting the process of authoring and re-authoring of youth multiple
identities and perspectives serves as an opening for youth to read of their world
(Greene, 1995), develop critical thinking, and to reimagine their role in society as active
participants and stakeholders in transforming conflict.
Though this current exploration can be applied to many contexts, it is important to
recognize that educational practices that work in one context may not prove as
successful in another context. At the same time, it is also crucial to contextualize
educational practice and theory. For this reason, and my past and current experiences
working in non-formal educational settings with Israeli and Palestinian youth musicians,
we will focus on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as our context. Hence, this current
exploration will be questioning how Israeli, Palestinian, and Palestinian-Israeli[1] youth
musicians can author and re-author themselves within musical spaces through being
heard and co-creating musically, in which trust and understanding is built by sharing
equally a space of their own, fostering their agency to name the inequalities and
injustices they experience and see in and between their communities. To facilitate ease,
I will often refer to this context as an ethnicity-based conflict or an inter-group conflict,
and on occasion refer to conflict as systemic injustice as well.
Based upon my own experiences as a music education-practitioner and activist working
in grassroots music education contexts before entering academia, I commonly
discovered a privileging of academic language and understanding over practitioner
language and understanding. In my opinion and through an activist-oriented lens, the
point of researching and sharing findings should not be a battle over language and
understanding, but rather a dialogue that invites in all who are interested in contributing
to the discourse. Finally, it is worthy to point out that the purpose of this exploration is

not to explain the history, politics, and narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Though it is important to have a deep understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and understand the many historical, political, and narrative perspectives of the conflict,
it is not what we seek to explain here, but rather the considerations and capabilities
when Israeli and Palestinian youth, with their facilitators, co-create a musical space in
which to transform conflict.
Implications of inquiry: openness to the emergent
Though researchers in the fields of conflict resolution and social activism, music
enthusiasts, and musicians amongst others have explored music and music education
as incubators for personal and collective transformations within youth, the literature
that currently exists mainly observes encounters between youth musician participants
as an explanation of the program and then focus on the outcome of a program. There is
limited literature that explores the educational process, or the pedagogy, of these
spaces as reasoning as to why music can play a powerful role in youths lives and in
transforming conflict. Though this research is important, it does not paint a full picture
of what is really occurring in these musical spaces because it does not include a critical
pedagogy, activist-oriented, or youth-centered lens.
Additionally, the relatively small amount of literature focusing on programs involved in
peacebuilding and human rights education and spaces, especially for Israeli and
Palestinian youth, also only focuses on outcomes without examining the educational
process, and usually categorizes youth participants dualistically as pro-peace-seeking
or anti-peace-seeking. This disadvantages youth participants, by suggesting that they
perceive their world statically without any nuance, while also discounting that what is
peace for one person might not be peace for another person. This approach is limiting,
and most likely inaccurate as it suggests development, learning, and conflict as black
and white with categories already predetermined by the researcher.
These issues in the existent scholarship focusing on the multidisciplinary grassroots
cross-section of youth, conflict transformation, and musical spaces beg to question what
is knowledge and understanding, and what knowledge and understanding is privileged
over other forms of knowledge and understanding. Who has the authority to speak
about this discipline, and to which audience(s)? What knowledge can be considered
emic? It is clear that writer and researcher will always wrangle with issues of bias,
privileging of knowledge and understanding, and ownership. Explorations within this

paper are not without these issues. Through a commitment to inquiry, and approaching
the following explorations from a place of activism and invitation to questioning, it is my
hope to invite every and any individual into these inquiries to seek more questions
beyond the black and white of these very words, and for this entire conversation to be
open to what emerges not on its own, but with those who are passionate about musical
spaces and youth led conflict transformation.
The multidisciplinary nature of this grassroots practice calls upon a theoretical
framework that is able to address this very busy cross-section. Aesthetic education, the
process of becoming, and critical pedagogy of education philosophers Maxine Greene,
John Dewey, and Paulo Freire will provide the main framework, while other recognized
theories, such as Cosmopolitanism Inheritance (Hansen, 2008), vertical and horizontal
identities (Maalouf, 1998), open and closed forms to music education (Allsup, in press),
multimodal critical literacy (Vasudevan), and conceptualizations of youth (Lesko, 2012),
also inform the theoretical framework. Each of these play a role in what I believe is a
youth-centered approach to the raising of critical consciousness of Israeli and
Palestinian youth in musical spaces, fostering equal social relationships and transferable
learning leading to the transforming of conflict.
Pedagogy of youth musical spaces & conflict transformation
All day Im looking through my window and I understand
whatever is his is mine and whatever is mine is yours.
We are supposed to even be brothers, but to me it seems
that doesnt really matter to you.
Well break down the walls, and take down the ags and then well
discover a world where everything is possible.
When we understand that were all human beings
then forever and ever we will be able
to live. We will be able to live!
Guy/Heartbeat, Bukra fi Mishmish
Conflict transformation is a long-term process of generational change where the goal is
not simply product-based (two heads of State signing an accord), but rather
transforming the attitudes and behaviors within society towards building a culture of
peace (Bajaj, 2008) through education for and about peacebuilding and people-to-

people diplomacy. According to the Encyclopedia of Peace Education, a culture of

peace can be defined as set of values, attitudes, traditions, and behaviors that ascribe
to the notions of freedom, justice, democracy, tolerance, solidarity, cooperation,
pluralism, cultural diversity, dialogue and understanding; it also demonstrates a strong
respect for all human rights, nonviolence, and fundamental freedoms. (Bajaj, 2008, p.
164) Developing a culture of peace requires those involved in conflict to imagine
themselves in relationships even with their enemies. It is this recognition and
acknowledgement of interdependency, or space in-between (Greene, 1982), where
those in protracted conflict can cultivate the space necessary to perceive and
experience a change process as genuine. (Lederach, 2005, p.56)
Respected conflict transformation philosopher John Paul Lederach quotes organizational
behavior theorist Margaret Wheatley in saying, nothing in the universe exists as an
isolated or independent entity. Everything takes the form of relationship, be it subatomic
particles sharing energy or ecosystems sharing food. In the web of life, nothing living
lives alone. (Wheatley, 2002, p.89) Within a protracted ethnicity-based conflict, this
web of human relationships (Arendt, 1958) is under constant threat as conflict
recreates itself every day in the education sectors, and through political policies,
cultural violence (Galtung, 1990), and routine interactions. How can Israeli and
Palestinian youth who experience this recreation of protracted conflict in a multiplicity of
ways and origins through direct and non-direct violence, in addition to inter-group
systemic injustice, challenge and disrupt these extremely powerful societal forces?
What roles can musical spaces play in facilitating this transformation as an incubator to
challenge and disrupt these patterns of protracted conflict and systemic injustice,
ultimately affecting youth socialization to hold their known collective narrative and yet,
with the embrace of their narrative anew which looks beyond the duality of ethnicitybased conflict to include values-based needs, respect, and responsibility to the Others
narrative?
This in-between (Greene, 1982) is where real-life relationships between youth
members can be tested, requiring risk-taking, vulnerability, and creativity of all
involved. The ways in which this can occur authentically depends on the space cocreated equally between the youth members involved in co-generating processes of
change. And lastly, this co-generation of equal space and equal social relationships
must constantly be nurtured, and re-nurtured, reflected and re-reflected upon, and
emboldened by individual and collective action.

Ethnicity-based conflict, systemic injustice and youth socialization

We are hungry for the truth.
You are willing to fight to prove youre right.
You will write everything on stone.
What do you do when you cant find a label?
When someone doesnt fit your box.
Well let me save you some time.
There is more than two colors in your simple mind.
Lets make a toast all together. Let us drink from this glass of poison.
You want so badly to know. That the road you chose is correct. So youll bend the facts,
shut your eyes, close your ears. Close your ears.
Neomi/Heartbeat, Make a Toast
According to writer Amin Maalouf, our vertical identity is the many strands that make
the identity we are born with from our location of birth city and country, religion,
language, historical narrative, and culture bestowed upon us by our families. Our
horizontal identity is influenced by our vertical identity along with the influences we pick
up along the path of life, or in other words through our socialization, that is at first
determined by our immediate family and community, and eventually up to our own
discretion through our personal experiences and the communities we become a part of.
Our horizontal identity may mirror parts of our vertical identity or it may not. Conflict
between the two can lead to personal struggle and as well embrace of the in-between
of the multiple identities we all possess. No strand of ourselves is less true than the
other; it is a question of how we make meaning of who we are, and again of who we
arebecoming. A persons identity is not an assemblage of separated affiliations, nor a
kind of loose patchwork; it is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment.
Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole
drum will sound. (Maalouf, 1998, p.26) It is here that our interest lies in the potentiality
of Israeli and Palestinian youths horizontal identities to affect the socialization
connected to their vertical identities through education and their own experiential
learning, and to challenge how they are passively understood by the world by choosing
to actively be heard. By no means is this a temporary journey that begins and ends as a
youth-member of society, but hopefully can be honed to advance a
continuous becoming and growth throughout life.

What is the role and impact of socialization within ethnicity-based conflicts? Ethnicitybased conflicts are created by violence and systematic exclusion of one identity group
over the other for multiple reasons from competition over resources and collective
trauma to imposed or felt denial of narrative and nationhood (Kagawa, 2005).
In an ethnicity-based conflict, identity often becomes a duality. An individual is either
Ethnicity A or an individual is Ethnicity B, and there is no space for anything in between.
In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from the mainstream points of view, one is
either Israeli and the Palestinian narrative negates her or his existence, or one is
Palestinian and the Israeli narrative negates her or his existence. Both narratives claim
that generations upon generations have fought each other for rights to land, freedom,
and dignity, which has become an integral part of each narratives socializations. This
story, a pillar in the understanding and conceptualization of the ethnicity and how they
understand themselves in relation to the Other ethnicity, and at times aggravated
further by atrocious current events, is a story for self-survival and resistance, even when
it means forgoing human rights and justice within the communities of each ethnicity
and within the oppressor-oppressed contradiction[2] (Freire, 1970).
In addition to affecting youths socialization, this story is reaffirmed by its retelling over
and over again within each ethnicities separate spaces. In the majority of cases, Israeli
and Palestinian-Israeli youth attend separate schools segregated often by ethnicity and
religion, and typically live in separate neighborhoods even within mixed-cities such as
Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa. Israeli citizens, including Palestinian-Israelis, are completely
physically separated from Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation in the
West Bank, and Palestinians who live under Israeli military siege and Hamas political
lockout[3] in Gaza. A conflict of this nature includes physical violence and separation,
but as well a more menacing strain of violence where the roots of mistrust and hate
sown through each narratives socialization have become so deep that youth on both
sides are steadfastly socialized to not see or hear the others needs, allowing for a
continuous blind eye to the oppression, dehumanization, and racism evoked on each
other, in often unequal ways.
Whether considered the oppressed or the oppressor in a specific context, this cyclical
process keeps these patterns of socialization alive, and proves detrimental to all who
are involved, delimiting the ability of both ethnicities in co-creating equal solutions.
Those who were once oppressed become the oppressors of others, and it is only the

oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. (Freire, 1970, p. 56)
Freire believes this can only be possible when approached through love, humanization,
critical thinking, dialogue, and praxis. When Freire speaks of critical praxis, he is
referring to an educational process that combines reflection with action, or reflection
and action upon the world in order to transform it (Freire, 1970, p.34). These
approaches can raise the critical consciousness of the oppressor and the oppressed to
read their world (Greene, 1995) and challenge, in solidarity, the culture of silence
(Freire, 1970) within their communities to foster a culture of peace (Bajaj, 2008).
How does this affect youth members of each ethnicity? Both of these levels of negative
peace and systemic injustice are built into youths vertical identity, and hence their
socialization, through overtly visceral objectives and hidden objectives. Without the
means and the spaces in which to question these societal forces and exercise praxis,
youth are disadvantaged by society through their lack of power. Ledearch describes
power as, a conversation that makes a difference: Our voices are heard and have some
impact on the direction of the process and the decisions made. (Ledearch, 2005, p.56)
Lesko explains that the lack of youth voice, and hence lack of access to power, in
combination with the pressure to master their environments (Lesko, 2012, p. 112),
can lead to a need for youth to create their own salvational (Lesko, 2012) tools in
order to act like masters of their own environment. Some might call this acting out,
immaturity, passivity, behavioral issues, or in the case of conflict, direct violence,
structural violence, and cultural violence (Galtung, 1990), but ultimately it is youth
estrangement from themselves in defining and redefining who they are in relation to
how the conflict socializes them, and how they are becoming, which leads to this
outcome. In locations of protracted conflict and systemic injustice, youth need locations
of possibility (hooks, 1994) in which to hear and be heard. Within locations of possibility,
youth can author and re-author themselves, personally and collectively, through the
constructive salvational (Lesko, 2012) tools of musicking in which to master their
environments by being heard, seen, and empathized with.
Locations of possibility
If theres hope, the power to work, and art, then theres life.
Lyrics can move mountains, music and equality.
If your goal is clear in front of you, with patience,
the way to it will be clear.

Tomorrow will be better! Try to create and believe, Yes YOU Can.
If theres the sun and its rays, yes theres hope down here.
The moon and even a bit of light, theres hope, even if its small.
An important step in your life is to hope.
Take your step towards change.
Make your anxiety disappear.
To be free, you have to liberate yourself!
Moody/Heartbeat, Bukra fi Mishmish
Though it can be argued that youth are put more at-risk in our continuously globalizing
world, it can also be argued that through globalization, youth are increasingly attaining
access to their voice and agency unlike before. The nature of globalizations effects, its
uneven spread, its accompanying possibilities and injustices, and even the question of
whether it is at the end of the day a radically new phenomenon or the continuation of
an age-old process continue to be debated vigorously and with feeling. (Stiglitz, 2003,
p. 119) Explorations of narrative, digital storytelling and dialogue across differences and
within similarities have gained further reach on platforms provided through a more interconnected world. More than ever, the possibility to express and seek a multiplicity of
affiliations (Hull et al., 2009, p. 120), stretches beyond the local, and even international
borders. Cosmopolitanism, as Appiah (2005) suggests is not merely universalism, but as
well entails respect for legitimate difference (Hull et. Al, 2009, p. 120). He explains,
We have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are
related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship
(p. xv, Hull et Al, 2009, p.120).
From an educational lens, education philosopher David Hansen suggests using the idea
of a cosmopolitan inheritance as a way to conceptualize teaching and learning in our
globalizing world. A cosmopolitan inheritance, for Hansen, implies educational[4] loyalty
to the local, and the known, while being open to the new, and the unknown. In doing so,
these modes may be in accord with process of socialization, but they do not simply
replicate them. (Hansen, 2008, p.298), allowing for education to be ever incomplete,
ever emergent. (Hansen, 2008, p.302) Through a cosmopolitan inheritance (2008),
learners gain cosmopolitan sensibilities that provide all students with opportunities to
experience local and broader traditions educationally rather than solely from the point
of view of socialization. (Hansen, 2008, p. 300) Cosmopolitan inheritance (2008) is by

no means only limited to the classroom, and can also be embraced through peer
learning and experiential learning.
When co-creating a musical space in which youth agency is fostered for youth led
conflict transformation in ethnicity-based conflicts and systemic injustice, youth must
question and confront realities of oppressor and oppressed through anti-oppressive
pedagogies (Berlack, 2004) and cosmopolitan sensibilities that are awakened with and
through music. By musicking (Small, 1995), youth can author and re-author themselves,
through exercising the Freirean concepts of problem-posing education (Freire, 1970),
critical praxis, dialogue, critical thinking, humanization, and love. This is perhaps the
exact location within musical spaces where youth voices can be cultivated to prosper, to
be heard amongst their peers and by society to transform conflict.
Youth and authoring and re-authoring in musical spaces to unpack narratives,
challenge inequity, and build equal social relationships
What they did in the past,
whats gonna happen I dont wanna see
Unfortunately, the war has become a routine
and peace is unknown.
Whats going on in the heads of the leaders above me?!
Everything repeats in a loop. When will it stop?
I teach life, I appreciate it and live it simply.
I believe in peace.
How, why and when it will come, is our choice!
Moody/Heartbeat, Over and Over
Though space can be viewed as a tangible location, we will view space as a
philosophical location that is translated into practice, and is as well informed by practice
where experiences happen and can be learned from. Uncovering this existent bridge
between theory and practice suggests an exploration of the in-between (Greene,
1982), bringing us to take notice and reflect on the unfamiliar- to awaken. According to
Maxine Greene, In a society that offers only answers, there is no freedom. Similarly,
education philosopher John Dewey speaks about the potentiality of experiences as
locations for continuous doing and undergoing where ideas, thoughts, and emotions can
be constructed and reconstructed through interaction with other objects. The concept of

space is an aesthetic opening for imagining and enacting what did not exist before
through contextualized meaning-making. Greene suggests that these spaces situate the
very relation between freedom and the consciousness of possibility, between freedom
and the imagination- the ability to make present what is absent, to summon up a
condition that is not yet. (Greene, 1988, p. 16)
Both Maxine Greene and John Dewey point to the arts, including music, as an aesthetic
experience, empowering individuals to question their world and think critically. It is
because I believe the encounters with the arts can awaken us to alternative possibilities
of existing, of being human, of relating to others, of being other, that I argue for their
centrality in curriculum. I believe they can open new perspectives on what is assumed
to be reality, that they can defamiliarize what has become so familiar it has stopped us
form asking questions or protesting or taking action to repair. (Greene, 1977, p. 214)
An aesthetic experience allows for the process of effecting transformations that the
human self is created and re-created (Greene, 1988, p.21), with continuous formation
through choice of action. (Dewey, 1916, p.408) As youth in ethnicity-based conflicts
author and re-author themselves through music within a particular space that is open,
while with a supportive structure for creativity, deeper questions are asked and realities
are seen and heard that were not considered before. These realities can then be acted
upon through youths raised critical consciousness (Freire, 1970).
From a purely scientific standpoint, we respond to the sounds we hear by engaging
almost every region of the brain and producing corresponding emotions. These
emotions mirror multiple and nuanced states of human consciousness and feeling
influencing our mood and behaviors.
There are two ways in which this occurs:

Emotion Perception (i.e., music makes listeners perceive the emotions that the
artist/s or songwriter/s is/are trying to convey through the music) (Brooks, 2010,
p.66, Juslin and Laukka, 2004)

Emotion Induction (i.e., music elicits listeners to feel certain emotions themselves
that may be entirely independent of the artist/s or songwriters intent) (Brooks,
2010, p.66, Juslin and Laukka, 2004)

Additional research at McGill Universitys acclaimed neuroscience department

discovered that listening to the music we love stimulates the chemical dopamine in our
brains streaming into the striatum region of their forebrains at peak emotional arousal
during music listening. (Lasar, 2011) Another recent study (Burns, 2012) suggests

that playing music in groups boost childrens ability to empathize with others by
fostering empathy skills with and through music-based games. What is really occurring
here musically and socially? How can youth utilize music in these spaces to really be
seen and co-create, fostering new structures built upon equality, freedom,
peacebuilding, coexistence, coresistence? And finally, how does this musical space
reach beyond youths inner world of building equal social relationships to less safe
spaces in the outside realities youth face daily in situations of conflict and systemic
injustice?
Maxine Greene says in her Teacher as Stranger, We philosophize when we can no
longer tolerate the splits and fragmentations in our pictures of the world, when we
desire some kind of wholeness and integration, some coherence which is our own.
(Greene, 1973, p. 11) Though I do not believe there is one clear process or processes in
which to guarantee a transformative breakthrough over a period of time, I am led to
consider the following train of thought based upon my theoretical studies and
experiences in practice: Through musical authoring and re-authoring, youth can hear
and be heard, and co-create allowing for the unpacking and witnessing of each others
stories, experiences, and realities, fostering critical understanding and trust that can
build equal social relationships. This new socialization can then be shared and witnessed
in and between their friends, families, and communities through workshops, live
performances, and sharing of their music and media co-creations online. This ultimately
brings to the forefront youth voices co-creating as equals critical multimodal literacies,
categories, and frameworks challenging the patterns of systemic injustice,
dehumanization, racism, and violence within protracted conflict.
Through musical authoring and re-authoring, youth can hear and be heard,
and co-create with their peers.
No more killing for living.
No more lying for the truth.
No more gains through losses.
Theres no rebels without causes.
No more war for peace.
No more pain to eat.
No more screaming for silence.
Security through violence.
Confession of compassion.
So we finally learn our lesson.
Hip Hop Hudna[5]/Heartbeat, The Truth

According to the late American communication theorist, James W. Carey, there are two
types of communication, known as a transmission view and a ritual view. When
describing a transmission view, Carey states that, The transmission view of
communication is the commonest in our culture- perhaps in all industrial cultures- and
dominates contemporary dictionary entries under the term. It is defined by terms such
as imparting, sending, transmitting, or giving information to others. (Carey, 1989,
p.15) In other words, a transmission view of communication strictly concerns the
relationship between the sender and receiver of ideas over a distance in space.
The ritual view of communication, tending to be an older influence in society, is
directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of
society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared
beliefs. (Carey, 1989, p.18) In this case, the sending of a message to a receiver is not
of main focus; it is what the message states and how it is stated that in turn conjoins a
community.
When this concept is applied to youth musicking, youth musicians share equal time
upon entering the experience of hearing and being heard, which leads to the potential
of personal and collective authoring and re-authoring. John Dewey speaks of shared
experiences, especially when encountered within the arts, as a constant, enduring
course that runs to fulfillment, but not ending finally in completion and never in
cessation. An experience requires intimate interaction with ones environment where
there are unions and reunions of thoughts, ideas, and emotions, where an individual
recurrently loses and reestablishes equilibrium with his [or her] surroundings. (Dewey,
1934, p. 46) In these experiences, every successive part flows freely without seam and
without unfilled blanks, into what ensues. At the same time, there is no sacrifice of the
self-identity of the parts. (Dewey, 1934, p. 47) In the words of Dewey, where
everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. (Dewey, 1934)
In Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship, Alfred Schutz points to the act
of playing music as a step-by-step uniting experience between co-performers and
performer-audience member through the sharing of several dimensions of time (inner
time and outer time), where all party-members are held to a mutual tuning-in
relationship. (Schutz, 1951, p.93) He explains, It is precisely this mutual tuning-in
relationship by which the I and the Thou are experienced by both participants as a
We in vivid presence. (Schutz, 1951, p.79)
The differences between inner time and outer time are not so crucial to investigate in
this current exploration, but it is important to note why the experience of inner time and
outer time matter to co-performers of music. Co-performers, whether soloist and

keyboardist, rapper and beatboxer, jazz bassist and percussionist, must be able to
communicate together in withness, with their audience (outer time), while also
simultaneously sharing moments of inner time by communicating intimately with each
other. Each of them has, therefore, to take into account what the other has to execute
in simultaneity. He/She has not only to interpret her/his own part, which as such remains
necessarily fragmentary, but he/she has also to anticipate the other players
interpretation of his/her the others part and, even more, the others anticipations of
his/her own execution. Eithers freedom of interpreting composers thought is restrained
by the freedom granted to the other. (Schutz, 1951, p. 94-95) This acknowledgment of
withness in an authentic face-to-face relationship suggests that co-performers are
sharing not only a section of time but also a sector of space. (Schutz, 1951, p.95)
In other words, it is the humanization of each other, which must be co-created, where
the label of human becomes greater than ethnicity, gender, and vertical identity. It is
not that these labels dissolve, but rather co-performers (and performer-audience
member) have entered, through a joint experience and space of musicking in literal
time, a shared and equal agreement in how they will share with each other deeply, how
they will devote to each other musical greatness in co-creating, and how they will
respect each others voices, and therefore rights to freedom and justice. It becomes
understood and felt that if one voice is suppressed, then all voices are also suppressed,
whether in the rehearsal room, on stage, or on the street. In other words, commitment
to ones own freedom and the freedom of others means a confrontation with injustice
and inhumanity. (Greene, 1973, p.282-283) Together, co-performers (and performerlistener) can challenge suppression, separation, and speak up for equality and human
rights, fostering new locations of possibility (hooks, 1994) with and through musical
spaces. In the words of social justice music educators Allsup and Shieh, A starting
point, then: notice inequity. Name the inequity. (Allsup & Shieh, 2012, p. 48)
Unpacking through hearing, being heard, and co-creating
For them I am just a soldier obeying orders,
But the time has come to change the picture!
I have my side, my inner truth
and at the end of every day there are people who understand me.
My mistakes dont make me a shitty person.
When every time pure hate occupies the world
I dont understand how people can keep living
making the same errors again and again.
Hip Hop Hudna/Heartbeat, Boom Boom Boom

The process and ability of youth in conflict and systemic injustice to unpack their
narratives, challenge inequity, and build equal social relationships requires a safe or
safer space in which to be open to vulnerable experiences and potentially reopening
trauma. A lot is at stake, and plenty of mishaps and misunderstandings can happen as
youth confront their own understandings of themselves, their realities, and their
relations with the Other ethnicity. In light of this, musicians, music educator-facilitators,
and grassroots activists must be prepared to rock with the kid (Beam, 2013 p.156)
with Freires critical ingredients of love, care, humility, and solidarity.
For experiences within this space to be a creative and constructive in which youth can
access their agency and lead conflict transformation, it must be a dialogical place of
freedom for youth to question and explore their ideas, narratives, and emotions in
communion with their youth peers- where they can continually identify themselves
(Greene, 1988, p.52) and re-identify themselves within plurality. Freedom in this respect
does not mean each person can do whatever they want to do; it is based upon the
quality of connection between individuals built through the ability to listen and to hear
each other authentically, hence, co-creating a community of equals where everybody
has the same capacity to act. (Arendt, 1958, p. 244). It is a certain embraced
responsibility that each youth-member has ownership in this process of building and
rebuilding freedom, and that each youth-member has her or his own role to play in
making this a possibility collectively. Not only do we need to be continually empowered
to choose ourselves, to create our identities within a plurality; we need continually to
make new promises and to act in our freedom to fulfill them, something we can never
do meaningfully alone. (Greene, 1988, p. 51) Following the words of Maxine Greene,
this musical space must be dialogical.
Paulo Freire speaks of dialogue as an act of creation (Freire, 1970) between women
and men that must not serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one person
by another (Freire, 1970, p. 89), but rather a location of love and hence, liberation.
Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal
relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence.
(Freire, 1970, p. 91) Dialogue must be created and recreated by equal partners within a
space who are both willing to name their world (Freire, 1970; Greene, 1988). In all
cases, these components must be present, otherwise this space cannot be liberatory or
transformative, and hence is not dialogical. In the words of Maxine Greene, when
individuals are empowered to interpret the situations they live together do they become
able to mediate between the object-world and their own consciousness, to locate
themselves so that freedom can appear. (Greene, 1988, p.122) According to Freire, In

problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way
they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see
the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. (Freire,
1970, p. 83) In problem-posing education, dialogue is indispensable to the act of
cognition which unveils reality. (Freire, 1970, p. 83)
In the situation of an ethnicity-based conflict like in Israel-Palestine, co-creating this
dialogical space of freedom with youth does not happen overnight, and in fact takes
several stages over a period of time. These are not linear stages, as in A leads to B
which leads to C, and so forth. This is a deepening process that is ritualistic and circular,
similar to the shape of a corkscrew. Youth must be constructively put on edge to take
risks, or in other words embrace vulnerability, musically and through dialogue, by
personally and collectively questioning and confronting the conditions of conflict:
trauma, erasure, witness(ing), and mourning (Berlack, 2004). This is the place where
music plays a big role in the awakening of possibilities for youth involved in conflict to
acknowledge these conditions and to unpack them musically and with dialogue, through
which trust can be built, and eventually equal social relationships. Like the corkscrew
example, this process is ongoing, essentially leading youth and their youth peers in
doing and undergoing (Dewey, 1934) throughout each stage of building and rebuilding
freedom.
According to University of Houston Professor Brene Brown and researcher of
vulnerability, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seenreally seen. (Brown, 2010) These kinds of attention, to see and to be seen, to notice
and to be noticed, to hear and to be heard, to care and to be cared for are the building
blocks in which vulnerability can be embraced. Quoting of the words of Robert Kegan,
American developmental psychologist and author at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education,
We all have something to offer.not the gift of our analytic mind or vast experience, not
our own faith or optimism about life, not our sympathy, but a kind of attentionthe root
word of which is tend meaning to hold. Its about holding another personproviding for
another person the sense that they are with someone who understands something of
what they are actually experiencing is an extraordinarily precious gift that provides the
feeling that they are not alone company and accompaniment that enables people to
make moves and changes in which they otherwise could not (Zuckerman, 2014)
Berlak refers to erasure as the failure of individuals to perceive, recall, and respond
with appropriate empathy to evidence of inhumane treatment that is, or has been, right
before their eyes. (Berlak, 2004, p. 132) The lack of notice and acknowledgement, the

lack of seeing and of hearing, of a minority group or the other by the majority,
another minority group, or the enemy narrative can be challenged musically and then
therefore, socially. This lack of notice and acknowledgment occurs on two levels:
1.

Believed competition or erasure of one narrative over another for survival or

perceived survival

2.

Erasure of current racism, or systemic injustice, in society against one or multiple

minorities or narratives within that society.

Both of these levels of negative peace and systemic injustice are built into youths
vertical identity, hence their socialization, and experienced through repetitive trauma
and erasure. In either case, each group is delimited by their frames of reference, so that
erasure and therefore dehumanization goes unquestioned. That is, the victims,
bystanders, and perpetrators do not have the languages, categories, or frameworks by
which to name and categorize the events and cannot, therefore assimilate them into full
cognition (Felman, 1992, p.5). Their preexisting culturally shared frames of reference
both delimit and determine what they can know (1992, p.xv). (Berlak, 2004, p.133)
Whether perpetrator, victim, and bystander, which are often not so easily
distinguishable labels amidst conflict and many times mix into shades of gray, it is
necessary for each to witness the dehumanization and revictimization that they have
been a part of and have contributed to. Hearing and being heard within an embraced
space of vulnerability as identified by Brown (2010) can enable the beginning or
continued process of mourning that made it possible to witness and integrate the
trauma evoked and/or restimulated by the encounter. (Berlak, 2004, p.136)
Through musicking (Small, 1995), strong bonds can be created that did not exist before,
where emotions, stories, and ideas are explored, shared, witnessed, and activated
within this dialogical space. The ability to create a vulnerable space with and through
music is where emotions are expressed that otherwise could not, because of a lack of
common language or simply, there are no words capable of explaining trauma inflicted
upon someone or the inflicting of trauma upon another. The co-creation of a shared
musical experience within inner and other time between listener and performer, listener
and listener, or co-performers is where youth can experience constructively being put
on edge. It is here in which empathy and humanization can be established, through
deeply witnessing the stories and emotions of another. Witnessing is not merely seeing
with ones eyes or hearing with ones ears, but being provoked to full presence to
confront erasure and mourn ones previous understanding of her or his world with the
new inclusion of the Others world. It is in these transformative moments in which deep
trust and critical understanding can develop to challenge and disrupt oppressive

languages, categories, and frameworks of youths socializations to then formulate

together new structures and equal social relationships through learning and co-creating
critical multimodal literacies, categories, and frameworks as strands of their horizontal
identities.
Co-creating critical multimodal literacies, categories, and frameworks in a
dialogical space and amplifying them to the outside world
I said why wont you let this go.
Cause the skys clear, its easy to see
That this is mad. This is insanity.
Nowadays everybody seem to lose their minds.
Nowadays everybody seem to stand in line.
So I said, Why wont you let this go?
I know sometimes it feels like every thing will fall apart.
I count the bodies as you fill up your bank account.
Why is it so? I think that you and I will never know.
Thats why Im telling you. Why wont you let it go?
Oh Oh Oh. Hes got a gun. He fears no one.
He sees himself like no one else.
I walk ahead, without any violence
Stop affecting others badly
When all you need is to express yourself
So spell your heart out in a peaceful way
Be peaceful and listen
Dont get stuck in the past, but learn from it
Live in the present. Live every minute and focus on it
Set a goal and be your lifes master
And if you get into trouble, let it go, and ow.
Moody and Guy/Heartbeat, I Said
Israeli and Palestinian youth interpreting, analyzing, reading, and questioning of their
worlds with and through music in a dialogical space is a means of multi-modal critical
literacy through which youth self-expression has a space to be, even when conflicting
self-expressions and realities. This space in-between is balanced through the quality
and deepness of social relationships continuously fostered by youth members, the
understanding that youth members are co-investigators in Freirian-informed dialogue
and critical praxis with each other, and ultimately, the respect and value for the truths
within each others stories and experiences (Freire, 1970).

These various modes of self-expression and praxis are all locations of possibility for
youth to hear and be heard, and co-create, through the authoring and re-authoring of
their understanding of their world and experiencing new literacies, frameworks, and
categories to question and challenge their socialization. When musicking (Small, 1995)
is interpreted as an open text for multimodal critical literacies that support the many,
and multiple ways in which ethnicity-based youth can author and re-author themselves
within positive conflict and withness, co-creating is more than adding sound to the
world, but rather the composing of selves through sound and text (Allsup,
Forthcoming, p.4) A critical music education pedagogy that supports open-texts
provides the space for cosmopolitan sensibilities and curricula, and anti-oppressive
pedagogies. In this place of action, youth learn for and about peacebuilding,
nonviolence, solidarity, human rights, social justice, coexistence, and coresistence, with
and through music, and develop the creative skills and tools through transferable
learning in which to transform conflict through their messages, voices, and commitment
to the freedom of each Other.
Through composing (Allsup, Forthcoming) with a critical music education pedagogy and
cosmopolitan sensibilities, youth can actively challenge the patterns of current unequal
and structurally violent systems by co-creating new structures, frameworks, and
languages that are dependent on equality, human rights, coexistence, and coresistence.
This can be through many means of composing (Allsup, Forthcoming), including multiple
ways of composing (Allsup, Forthcoming) at the same time. For example, self-expression
through songwriting lyrics, rhythms, harmonies, and melodies, creating musicals,
singing, writing sonatas, spoken word, improvising, producing music videos, sampling,
instrumental performing, rapping, beatboxing, sound installations, djing, and so forth
are all ways of creating and co-creating. When infused with youth messages of social
activism and presented to their communities, these new languages, frameworks, and
categories can reach beyond the rehearsal room and intimate meeting spaces of youth
peers to be heard in less safe spaces in youths communities.
Finally, how do youth in an ethnicity-based conflict amplify their messages and voices
beyond the equal space they continually co-create amongst each other? How does
interaction with their communities in turn affect youths own co-creating of equal
space? Historically, music has been used in various forms of social activism, such as
protest music and collective singing. Multiple social movements striving for social
justice, civil rights, solidarity, and human rights, such as the Civil Rights Movement in
America and the New Song Movement in Latin America, built a sense of belonging to
something larger and gained strength when communicated with and through music.

Protest music and collective singing reinforces feelings of belonging to a larger

community, something larger than themselves and empowers activists to believe that
they can ultimately affect change. (Brooks, 2010, p.68) The advent of social media,
such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has amplified in particular the potency and
space for the messages of collective singing and protest songs even further through the
ability to inspire millions to be put on edge in raising their voices and joining in the
call for social change and equity. Growing up with the world of social media and new
media, research shows that youth are the most adept at using these new technological
tools to their advantage in order to be heard by their communities.
As weve reviewed, the act of musicking (Small, 1995) between youth in an ethnicitybased conflict can build and rebuild equal social relationships in withness when
dialogical, where all involved equally agree to name their world (Freire, 1970) and
commit to the communion of each others freedom. The next step is for youth to take
their messages and co-creations into their communities. By composing (Allsup,
Forthcoming), youths authoring and re-authoring can be shared beyond their inner
space to less safe spaces from everyday interactions within their family, schools, and
communities through live cultural productions, such as performances and workshops to
multimedia through new media and social media, such as YouTube, SoundCloud,
Pinterest, and Facebook amongst other social networks. Here, Israeli and Palestinian
youth can be active, inventive, creative beings, busy making what sense of it they can,
drawing on the local and global cultural resources to which they have access. (Hull et
al, 2009, p. 134)
In addition, these self constructions and re-constructions are not limited to only online
presence, but rather intertwined with every day life as these forms of new and social
media have become texts in Israeli and Palestinian youth members daily being in
formal and non-formal education settings. Just as youth culture is expressed, and at the
same time influenced by music on these new media and social media sites, Israeli and
Palestinian co-created youth cultures have the potentiality to influence their social
media surroundings and be challenged by it. In addition, since youth culture has the
power to create and recreate itself quicker than ever before, this also signals that Israeli
and Palestinian co-created youth culture has the ability to spread quicker and further
than ever before. Whether this happens in the form of a youth Palestinian rapper that
uploads her outlet of self-expression onto SoundCloud, a joint Israeli and Palestinian
youth musician quartet uploading their performance of Beethovens String Quartet Op.
127 onto YouTube, an Israeli youth jam band sharing their personal countdown of
favorite artists, social activists, or whoever on Facebook or Pinterest; Israeli and

Palestinian youth can amplify their reading of their world into new spaces in which to
hear and be heard, and co-create. This platform extends their new critical multimodal
literacies, categories, and frameworks beyond the rehearsal room of equalizing space
and building of equal social relationships, but into the larger space of glocal everyday
interactions.
I am what I am not yet[6]; We are what we are not yet
As this current exploration of musical spaces and youth led conflict transformation
comes to a close at this juncture, it is important to touch upon a few loose strings. In
particular, these include educational process, limitations by physical boundaries,
structural boundaries, ideological boundaries, and finally where additional scholarship is
needed. Due to the lack of room, each of these will be explored briefly.
The Process of the Educational Process
In many ways, the ability for youth to lead conflict transformation depends on the
quality of the social relationships built between youth members, and the quality of the
educational process where knowledge and understanding can be shared horizontally
between youth members, and youth members and facilitators. It is possible, as Hansen
says, that youth members will carry sensibilities with them wherever they go.
(Hansen, 2008, p. 304) Certainly this is hopeful, though of course most progressive
educators who follow John Dewey, Parker Palmer, and Maxine Greene will agree that
there is no guarantee when a transformative educational breakthrough will happen. To
quote Hansen again, A cosmopolitan sensibility is not a possession, not a badge, not a
settled accomplishment or achievement. It is an orientation that depends on the
ongoing quality of ones interactions with others, with the world, and with ones own
self. Like education itself, it is ever incomplete, ever emergent. (Hansen, 2008, p.302)
Based upon my experiences and the writings of Dewey, Greene, Freire, the quality of
interactions and educational process depends on providing an (e)quality of
experiences within a open-text, youth-centered approach to teaching and learning with
a critical music education pedagogy fused with anti-oppressive pedagogies. This
suggests a musical space that is open for youth voices to express their learning
interests, while also supporting peer learning, experiential learning, and horizontal
learning. Ultimately, learning and teaching in these musical spaces should be catered
and contextualized to youth needs. For this reason, the processes of learning and
teaching will look similar, and yet uniquely different within each youth group of Israelis
and Palestinians, since each youth groups interests and needs will depend on their
personal experiences, interests, and what they bring to the table.
Israeli and Palestinian youth physical and structural boundaries

So tired of escaping the truth reading the news and pretending its all good.
And all I see is these walls that you build
The humans you kill
The money spent on building more weapons instead of feeding the poor.
You kill. You take. You grow hatred all around.
Why not grow peaceful generations in this hopeless town. Tell me why
Im not asking for a country or a flag. im not asking for my land.
I cannot translate my pain into a language youd understand.
I cant take it no more.
I cant face you no more.
Rasha and Neomi/Heartbeat, Hopeless Town[7]
The ability for Israeli and Palestinian youth to lead conflict transformation hinges upon
the ability for each ethnicity to arrive to their agreed meeting space safely, physically
and emotionally, and on time with their musical instruments and other accessories.
There are many physical and structural boundaries that affect and inhibit the ability of
movement for each ethnicity, though often unequally. These forms of systemic injustice,
whether physical boundaries such as a wall or checkpoint, structural boundaries such as
walking in the wrong neighborhood leading to police frisking or the throwing of rotten
items, or even emotional boundaries of perceived threat, are all challenges to the
sustainability of youth members interactions. Even within a mixed city, such as
Jerusalem, Jaffa, or Haifa, it difficult to choose a common location that is not inflicted
with these boundaries of systemic injustice. In addition, another structural boundary is
the drafting of Israeli youth into the Israeli army at the age of 18, whereas PalestinianIsraeli and Palestinian youth do not go to the army, are not allowed to enter the army,
or are against joining the army. Instead, they usually enter the work force or apply for
university. This direct separation of both youth ethnicities from each other creates
additional barriers and challenges to their continued activism post high school.
Israeli and Palestinian youth ideological boundaries
Besides the challenging ideological hurdles of youth socialization that youth must
overcome to transform conflict, there is also a need to address the newest ideological
boundary affecting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is the issue of normalization.
According to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS)[8]movement, normalization
is as the participation in any project, initiative or activity, in Palestine or internationally,
that aims (implicitly or explicitly) to bring together Palestinians (and/or Arabs) and
Israelis (people or institutions) without placing as its goal resistance to and exposure of
the Israeli occupation and all forms of discrimination and oppression against the

Palestinian people. (BDS, 2007) Debating whether the BDS movement is the correct
method for social change, conflict transformation, and or even ending the occupation is
beyond the scope of this current exploration. It is important to clarify that utilizing
musical spaces for Israeli and Palestinian youth led conflict transformation can be
perceived as an act of normalization, yet in many ways when cultivated with a critical
and anti-oppressive pedagogy will not fit the categories of normalization or antinormalization. Adhering to the words of Maxine Greene to push beyond the dualities and
the words of Paulo Freire to resist a culture of silence (Freire, 1970), these musical
spaces we address in this exploration are locations of possibility for questioning,
challenging, and resisting. Again in the words of Maxine Greene, If the uniqueness of
the artistic-aesthetic can be reaffirmed, if we can consider futuring as we combat
immersion, old either/ors may disappear. We may make possible a pluralism of visions,
a multiplicity of realities. We may enable those we teach to rebel. (Greene, 1977,
p.295)
Looking ahead: additional room for study and emerging possibilities
We have explored much in this inquiry-practitioner narrative reflection, and surely
theres plenty more waiting further exploration. A few of these topics include looking at
specific music education methods and practices that are connected to co-creating a
dialogical musical space, exploring the idea of transferable learning further and how it
relates to pedagogy, inquiry-practitioner participant observer research of grassroots
music education and/or peacebuilding programs working with Israeli and Palestinian
youth to led conflict transformation, and the list continues.
It is easy to say that the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict looks bleak after just
another round of Track I Diplomacy negotiations between the Israeli government and
the Palestinian Authority have disintegrated once again. The future seems unsure from
here. What is clear is the need to continue to (re)invent, (re)extend, (re)generate, and
(re)revise our notions of reality, and surely we cannot do this alone. Israeli and
Palestinian youth have the power to challenge the status quo of violence, separation,
occupation, and inequality by pushing the boundaries in and between their communities
to seek the unknown and the stranger hidden behind walls, checkpoints, and fear. It will
be a long-term process, perhaps even a life project, but every day is a potential day for
both Israeli and Palestinian youth who have done and undergone grassroots critical
music education and peacebuilding programs to create change.
This notion of youth-led conflict transformation with and through musical spaces
extends beyond the context of Israeli and Palestinian youth, and is indeed applicable
and relevant to youth throughout the world seeking to hear and be heard in locations of

conflict and systemic injustice. Dialogical musical spaces, filled with consonances and
dissonances, love, harmonies, care, rhythms, humility, sound and solidarity, are
liberatory places in which youth can imagine and proactively co-create locations of
possibility.
Acknowledgements
Hear and Be Heard is written in honor of Israeli and Palestinian youth musicians and
artists doing the hard work to be heard and alter their realities by challenging the status
quo. This paper is dedicated to Jerry/Yoram Gottesman.
Thank you for all of your support: Linda Goldstein, Mica Segal, Tamer Omari, Randall
Allsup, Osseily Hanna, Ranen Omer-Sherman, Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz, Mark Albertson, Felisa
Tibbitts, Kimball Gallagher, Michal Levin, Heartbeat, The Jerusalem Youth Chorus,
Teachers College, and so many dear friends and family.
Hear and Be Heard CDIME Hear and Be Heard PDF version

CHAPTER X

EQUALITY AND FREEDOM:

Two Values To Be Rediscovered in the Transition To
Democracy
GEORGI KARASIMEONOV

EQUALITY AND FREEDOM

The issue of the role and relationship of the values of liberty and equality is as actual
today as it was centuries ago when liberal ideas began to question the organic and
holistic view of society and the place of individuals therein. Whereas the doctrine of
natural rights and the Kantian view of the autonomy of the individual are accepted as
the core of liberalism, the concept of equality in its relation to liberty remains under
discussion.
Classical liberalism accepted the notion of equality as normative for the citizens
before the law. The followers of Kant saw personal freedom in the context of equal
autonomy for all. In other words, the quest for equality is legitimate when it does not
interfere with the fulfillment of individual autonomy.
Equality is the right to freedom; it is classical liberalism subordinated to liberty. For
many liberals it is a tool, guaranteed through democracy's equal suffrage, etc., to
achieve individual freedom and autonomy. Equality in liberty means that each person
should enjoy as much liberty as is compatible with the liberty of others, and may do
anything which does not diminish the equal liberty of others. According to Norberto
Bobbio, very early in the development of the liberal state this form of equality
inspired two fundamental principles that came to be expressed in constitutional
provisions: (a) equality before the law, and (b) equality of rights. The idea of the rule
of law and the state of law (Rechtstaat) was developed on the basis of liberal
conceptions of the relationship between liberty and equality.
The rule of law had to guarantee equal freedom for its citizens: equality before the
law. Any other state interference in personal autonomy was condemned as restricting
personal freedom. The minimal orlaissez faire state was the classical liberal view on

the role of the state in society. The notion of equality of rights extends beyond the idea
of equality before the law since it presupposes the equal enjoyment by all citizens of
certain fundamental constitutionally guaranteed rights.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
The idea of equality of opportunity as a condition for achieving liberty is already a
deviation from classical liberalism. It has a social component connected to a new
understanding of the role of equality in a much larger sense than pure normative
equality or equality of rights. It sees the achievement of freedom as not only restricted
to the efforts of the individual by itself, but in a societal context where equal
opportunity are given to everyone to achieve personal freedom. Extending the reach
of equality of opportunity to all classes and groups in society brought a new
dimension to the idea of liberty.
To a great extent, socialism is a result of that understanding of equality. Freedom for
everybody as precondition for freedom for all was the closing sentence of the
"Communist Manifesto". The phrase was very much forgotten by orthodox Marxism,
not to speak of Leninism and Stalinism. It was Bernstein in his reformist socialism
who reminded socialists of the liberal strand in some of Marx's work.
The discussion regarding the boundaries of equality of opportunity and the extent to
which it is acceptable without interfering with the value of liberty has never ceased.
Proponents of the welfare state (social liberalism and social democracy) have different
views on this point. Some accept the view in support of equality of opportunity "at the
start"; others see it as equality over the life span of an individual. The common idea
behind these divergent views is the notion that the state has the main responsibility for
assuring everybody the opportunity to realize their potential talent and professional
capabilities. This implies equality of opportunity for education, work, health,
retirement, etc. In other words, the notion of equality of opportunity has expanded so
much in scope that at the beginning of the 70s liberals returned to the classical issue of
equality or freedom, or, more ideologized, freedom instead of socialism. The attack
against the welfare state was a direct reflection of these sentiments of liberals-conservatives as well as neo-conservatives. All of them feared that the value of
equality in its concrete political implementation was endangering personal liberties
and restricting the territory of individual autonomy and achievement.
EGALITARIANISM

In its Leninist-Stalinist version Communism turned the whole equation upside down.
Social equality was the aim of the communists, while individual liberty was subdued.
Egalitarianism against social differentiation, "collective freedom" against personal
liberties was the ideological base of the attack by the communist partocracy against
human rights and freedoms. In the name of "collective equality" personal initiative
was repressed and eventually was to a large extent restricted. Private property was
declared evil and banned; personal achievement was not well regarded.
A uniform society was created in which all were equally poor, equal in their misery,
equal in the deprivation of happiness and security, equal in their small homes, equal in
their small salaries and, in the end, equal in their irresponsibility to their job and
community. Communism created a pseudo-equality or equality in the lack of freedom
for all. Of course, for part of the populace this was a condition for being accepted,
while it corresponded to a life and work style based on irresponsibility and little or no
effort. The value of liberty was suppressed as bourgeois individualism. The ruling
elite saw the greatest danger to its dictatorship in autonomous thinking and
expression. Of course, in that Orwellian society, some were "more equal" than the
great mass of people; today many learn the truth of that deceitful pretense of
"equality" in totalitarian communism. The ideology of communist egalitarianism was
a facade behind which the higher nomenclature had unlimited freedom for personal
enrichment, possessed a multitude of privileges, and were corrupt even to extent of
criminality.
Egalitarianism as ideology and political praxis failed because it destroyed the basis for
personal freedom and individual autonomy. It was formal equality without freedom; it
was forced equality based on political repression. The state "planned" the scope of
equality and defined the boundaries of personal freedoms. The state totally
overwhelmed civil society and restricted its autonomy. Every attempt to assert one's
autonomy or individual liberties outside state regulations was severely punished.
As Bobbio rightly observes, libertarianism and egalitarianism are rooted in profoundly
divergent conceptions of man and society--conceptions which are individualistic,
conflictual and pluralistic for the liberal; totalizing, harmonious and monistic for the
egalitarian. The chief goal for the liberal is the expansion of the individual personality,
even if the wealthier and more talented achieve this development at the expense of
that of the poorer and less gifted. The chief goal for the egalitarian is the enhancement
of the community as a whole, even if this entails constrictions of the sphere of
individual freedom.
SOCIAL CHANGES

The transition from totalitarianism to democracy in Eastern Europe in 1989-90 is

linked to fundamental changes throughout the structures, institutions, habits and
beliefs of society. It is a painful process of revival of civil society and of the identity
of all social groups and individuals. Society awakens from a deep trauma and an
experience that brought serious damage to all aspects of social and individual life.
History has not known such a great upheaval when, in a short period, a society had to
move from one status to another, radically changing its political and economic
foundations.
This process is related to a change in values affecting fundamental notions of relations
between human beings, between social groups and even within families. Communism
destroyed not only the economic base of natural human relations (private property,
market economy, etc.), but tried politically and ideologically to erase in the minds of
people classical liberal and democratic values. Today the values of freedom and
equality have to be rediscovered and put into practice in brand new conditions on the
path leading to a pluralistic parliamentary democracy and market economy. All this
must take place in unstable political conditions, economic crises, a rise of national and
ethnic conflicts, a lack of international security, and so on. What challenges face the
newly-won personal liberties and how will these post-communist societies move from
egalitarian irresponsibility to competitive inequality?
THE CHALLENGES OF PLURALISM AND
POLITICAL LIBERTIES
Political pluralism is one of the major achievements of the transition from
totalitarianism to democracy. It has manifested itself in the formation of many parties
and political movements which compete with each other. Pluralism has manifested
itself also in the freedom of the press and expression, and in the restoration of
fundamental human rights. The monopoly of party rule was broken and the totalitarian
suppression of fundamental freedoms has been eliminated.
At the same time these newly won freedoms are threatened by two major negative
aspects of post-totalitarian development. One is the lack of understanding and of
tradition to support the ideas that liberty means responsibility and goes hand in hand
with the rule of law. With the collapse of the supercentralized police state a vacuum
was created in the authority of the state so that liberties are being applied in the
atmosphere of growing irresponsibility and lack of respect for the law. This is further
stimulated by the passive attitude of the police and other major institutions engaged in
law enforcement. The former hostile attitude to the totalitarian state which enforced
law through oppressive methods has not been transformed in the conditions of
democracy into a new positive attitude to state structures. Many react in that way

because they are discontent that part of the former nomenclature are still in strong
positions, especially in the provincial cities.
The notion of the rule of law and its relationship to political freedoms and civil
liberties is lacking in the minds of great parts of the populace. This has encouraged
individuals and groups to many gross violations of the law. The crime rate has grown
enormously, economic speculation, disobedience of many kinds (nonpayment of
taxes, "free" use of public transport, etc.), and other manifestations of nonrespect of
law threaten to undermine democracy and turn it into anarchy. The danger of chaos is
a good argument for conservative and antidemocratic forces in their growing
aggressiveness against democratic changes.
The trials of former higher members of the nomenclature also showed another aspect
of nonrespect for law. These trials became caricatures of the judicial process because
their main aim was to punish for the sake of punishment in reaction to popular
demands for justice. This might be a justified moral demand, but the course of these
much-publicized trials showed a shortness of legal provisions. The Ceausescou
phenomenon does not correspond to notions of the rule of law.
The other negative effect of the post-totalitarian transition is the lack of democratic
culture in the implementation of civil liberties. Freedoms not only are normative
notions, but have an ethical component related mostly to the way they are used in
daily life. Democracy is not only symbolized by institutions, but is a way of thinking
and behaving which excludes nondemocratic means (for example, the destruction of
the totalitarian state) in order to reach formal democratic ends.
The lack of democratic traditions and culture which characterize nations with a
longstanding practice of democratic government results in the revival of certain
aspects of totalitarian culture in the practice of political pluralism. Even political
parties and politicians engaged in the democratic cause cannot escape the pitfalls of
autocratic manners and nondemocratic behavior manifested in the use of ideological
tools, terminology and even concepts from the former communist ideology.
Fanaticism and extremism have been recent aspects of political pluralism in Bulgaria.
The democratic values of tolerance, respect for opponents, compromise, social peace,
nonviolence, etc., have been lacking in political life. The negative elements of
political behavior undermine democratic institutions and endanger democracy itself
by creating new animosities and social conflicts resembling a civil cold war. Revenge
and hate have dominated the political scene; bipolarization and confrontation have
characterized many political relations. Revolutionary logic confronts evolutionary and
reform-oriented policies.

In other words, the civilized understanding and application of civil rights and liberties,
with a harmony between content and form, will take a long time; in the meantime
these liberties themselves could be threatened. As Voltaire once said: it is hard to win
freedom, but it is much harder to make use of it.

CHALLENGES OF THE MARKET ECONOMY

If political pluralism has at least gained some hold for the time being, in these fragile
conditions the path to a market economy creates much more fundamental problems.
The destruction of private property and of the bases for a market economy created not
only an egalitarian and uniform society, but a specific attitude towards professional
work and personal initiative. The egalitarian ideology destroyed the psychological
attitudes of competitiveness and striving for personal achievement. The paternalistic
state, which Kant called the worst state, created an attitude of passive obedience to
orders from "the top" and a psychological atmosphere of irresponsibility and lack of
individual initiative. This, of course, was stimulated by salaries which made almost no
differentiation among physical and intellectual work, between various professional or
social strata, etc.
In the transition to a market economy a completely different system of working
relations, work habits and enumerations has to be created. This is done on the basis of
reintroducing private property as a basic human right constitutionally protected, and
privatization which must dismantle state monopolies and create the base for
competition. Painfully, the economic reforms are reintroducing the institutions and
principles of a functioning market economy. This process, never before experienced in
history, carries with it many unknown and serious consequences for the populace.
First, it leads to an "explosion" of the "leveled" society and its structures. Social
differentiation begins to uproot the old psychological attitudes of egalitarianism.
Communist equality is substituted by a growing difference in incomes and social and
material conditions. A small strata of very rich entrepreneurs, speculators, or former
nomenclature is coming to the fore. At the same time, in the aftermath of inflation and
monetary reforms, of great masses of people--especially those with fixed incomes--are
impoverished. Unemployment is reaching dangerous levels and creates a group of
people directly suffering from the market developments. The speed with which all this
happens catches people in a state of great confusion and unpreparedness, combined
with suffering and lowering living standards.

This situation leads to growing animosity against the introduction of "wild

capitalism". This could turn into animosity toward the liberal values of individualism
and the new democratic institutions. In May, 1991, a poll taken by an official
institution showed that 40 percent of the populace preferred law and order even if it
meant less democracy, in other words, fewer liberties--and this even before they had
the chance really to enjoy them. The nostalgic attitudes toward the past, when all had
their guaranteed work and social security, has begun to "infect" more and more
people. Egalitarian notions have begun to revive and create an atmosphere of
animosity toward new businesses, the new rich, and private initiative.
The further dwindling, due to the economic crisis, of a middle class which is generally
the social base for a stable democracy, creates serious threats to liberal and democratic
values. In other words, new reforms have not, for the moment, created favorable
conditions for the revival and furthering of liberal values. Democracy and individual
liberties have to prove their role and value in the face of political instability and the
economic catastrophe which puts them and their political and ideological proponents
in unfavorable surroundings. After the euphoria accompanying the revival of liberal
values and the rise of liberty over communist dictatorship and egalitarian
irresponsibility, the tide has begun to turn in favor of a growing desire for stability and
law and order, even at the expense of democracy and liberty. The emergent desire for
a return to the monarchy and the rise of nationalistic parties reflect that mood.
At the same time, the erosion of the old social security system furthers insecurity and
leads to a growing desire for equality and social guarantees for justice and solidarity.
In other words, economic distress generates a need to find a new dimension to the
values of equality and justice without which the value of liberty will be very
vulnerable. But the resources for achieving equality of opportunity and individual
development are more and more lacking. The distributive and redistributive
capabilities of the state are shrinking in step with the crumbling of the old economic
system before the new market economy has proven its effectiveness in the tide of
economic growth.
The question of survival haunts a growing number of people. Before the values of
liberty have taken hold to create a new type of democratic culture and a democratic
form of relationship among citizens, the process of atomization of society is speeding
up. The breakup of paternalistic attitudes has created a vacuum which must be filled
by a new form of civil community of independent and self-confident individuals. But
that process will need time, appropriate conditions, and at least a stable economy and
a functioning political pluralism.
The conflict between liberty and equality, between individual autonomy and collective
solidarity, will have brand new dimensions in post-totalitarian societies. It will take

great political mastery to evade deepening that conflict and to design policy that will
create conditions for the most favorable applications of both liberty and equality. As
both values are needed for policy decisions, the way in which they will be harmonized
will depend to a large extent on the success or failure of political parties and
governments as democratic institutions.
http://www.crvp.org/book/series04/iva-8/chapter_x.htm

Winning the Service Game

Revisiting the Rules by Which People Co-Create Value

Benjamin Schneider
, David E. Bowen

Abstract
The chapter presents a summary and extension of our book, Winning the Service Game, published in
1995 by Harvard Business School Press (Schneider & Bowen , 1995). We summarize the rules of the
game we had presented there concerning the production and delivery primarily of consumer services and
note several advances in thinking since we wrote the book. We emphasize that people (customers,
employees, and managers) still are a prominent key to success in service and that this should be fully
recognized in the increasingly technical sophistication of service science . The foundation of this thesis is
the idea that promoting service excellence and innovation requires an understanding of the co-creation of
value by and for people. Further, that such co-creation is most likely to effectively occur when an
appropriate psycho-social context is created for people as they produce, deliver and experience a service
process. Such a context is the result of understanding the complexities of the people who are a central
component of the service delivery system.

Political Philosophy

Freedom and Equality in the Comparison

of Political Systems
Wolfgang Balzer
Universitaet Muenchen

ABSTRACT: The notions of freedom and equality in a group are precisely defined in terms
of individual exertions of influence or power. Freedom is discussed in the version freedom
from influence rather than in the version freedom to do what one wants. It is shown that at
the ideal conceptual level complete freedom implies equality. Given the plausibility of the
definitions this shows that political folk rhetorics in which freedom and equality often are
put in opposition are misled and misleading. Quantitative notions of more freedom and
more equality are introduced and shown to be independent of each other. The bearing of
these conceptual exercises on the comparison of political systems is discussed.

During the last 5000 years the competition and contest of large, human communities or
political systems, of which modern states are the pressing example, often was decided by a
simple, `evolutionary' mechanism: war and force. However, the increasing destructive
power of artifacts which are developed with the help of scientific knowledge seems to
diminish the importance of this deviceat least among communities with a somewhat
rational leadership. For the mere use of modern techniques increases the risk of selfdestruction even for that party which otherwise would be said to have won the `contest'. In
this situation it would be desirable to have other, less violent criteria to check whether some
political system is better than another one. If we could compare the quality of political
systems in a purely conceptual way the practical competition among systems could be
reduced to attempts at enlightening the citizens of the respective other system.
Recent views of the quality of political systems focus on different aspects or dimensions
expressed by terms like freedom, equality, solidarity, human rights and welfare. The
problem with such a multi-dimensional approach to the quality of political systems is that
the different dimensions have not been analyzed in precise terms and have not been
thoroughly compared with each other. There is no save knowledge about how the different
aspects jointly affect the quality of a political system. While the effect of each single aspect
ceteris paribus is quite clear, problems arise when two or more of them are varied
simultaneously. In `folk' political rhetorics it is a common topic that freedom and equality,
as well as freedom and solidarity, compete with each other or even are incompatible. When
these labels are used as being characteristic for given political systems we arrive at the usual
rhetoric of political competition among states where, say, a `free' state and a `socialist' state
(= a state charcterized by equality and/or solidarity) strive for domination. These
prescientific opinions lead to the expectation that a scientific investigation will yield similar
results.
I think that this expectation requires caution. In the the real-world examples the key terms
usually are applied to states without much justification, and in a propagandistic vein. In
order to overcome this unsatisfactory situation the basic notions have to be studied in more
precise terms and have to be compared with each other with respect to their contributing to

the quality of political systems. In will go some steps in this direction and present some
results showing that the scientific study of these aspects or dimensions is promising. I
concentrate here on the most important notion: freedom and equality.
As a background for my explications I use a theory of social institutions combining a power
centered view of social affairs in the spirit of, say, Machiavelli, and a systemic, formal
model of such affairs, see (Balzer, 1990, 1993). This theory is intended to model
comprehensive social institutions like political systems and statesamong other things. (In
the social sciences presently the game theoretic view seems to prevail when institutions are
discussed. However, what are called `institutions' in the game theoretic approach are not
political systems, but more local and abstract things like `promise', `convention' and the like.
Up to now game theoretic analysis has not been able to model and to explain one single
political system of the kind I am discussing here.) According to my theory a social
institution is given by four parts: a micro-system of individuals and their actions and social
relations, a macro-system of social groups and their properties and relations, and two
`images' of these two systems: a set of `micro-images', images of the micro-system which
are internalized by the institution's members, and a `macro-image' in which the macrosystem is represented in some more objective way, for instance by written laws, norms,
myths, poems, pictures and the like. Concentrating on the macro- and micro-systems, one
basic feature of this theory is that individuals are engaged in power relations. Each
individual tries to exert power over other individuals (or to influence them). An individual
power relation in which power is exterted is constituted by the two individuals involved plus
one action performed by each of them. For instance, Peter may exert power over John by
uttering the command `Go and get me some cigarettes' and by John's getting the cigarettes,
where Peter's action is the utterance and John's action is to get the cigarettes. A second basic
feature is that individual power relations can be used to characterize groups and a status
relation among groups. Roughly, a group G has lower status than another group G' iff many
members of G' exert power over many members of G but not vice versa. Inside one group,
on the other hand, the exertions of power are in equilibrium. The third important feature is
that in a social institution the groups are ordered by the status relation such that they form a
connected, transitive graph with a unique top-element. This top-element is the `top-group', a
group which has highest status and whose members therefore exert power over most
members of the other groups (see (Balzer, 1990) for details).
In a model of this theory freedom and equality can be defined as follows. At the micro level
a model contains four kinds of objects: persons $i,j$, actions $a,b$, and points of time $t,t'$.
Persons perform actions and exert power over each other. Moreover, they have intentions
and causal beliefs. I use the expressions that person i at time t performs action a; that i by
doing a exerts power over j so that j does b in the period from t' to t; that at time t, i intends
that j should do a; and that, at t, i believes that action a partially causes action b. With these
expressions we can define the action space of person i at time t to consist of all actions
which are possible for i at t. I say that j's action b at t is the aim of an exertion of power iff
there is some person i, some earlier instant t' and some action a such that i by doing a exerts
power over j so that j does b in the period t',t. With these two auxiliary definitions we can
define that person j is free at t iff no action b in j's action space at t is the aim of an exertion

of power. That is, no action b in j's action space is induced by some other person's exerting
power on j and influencing j to do b. Actually, in the present context the restriction to actions
from j's action space makes no difference. It can be proved that one might equivalently use
arbitrary actions.
This definition of freedom exclusively in terms of individual exertions of power apparently
is exposed to a well known criticism of behaviorist approaches to power, see (Lukes, 1974).
It seems that important ways of exerting power in a less direct, `structural' way are not
covered, like for instance excluding an issue from the agenda, or hiding an exertion of
power behind the obligations of one's own social position. Yet this impression is misleading.
First, in the present account, the notion of action is not understood in the naive way of
positively doing something. Actions form a `space' of actions in which there is room for
neutral behavior (doing nothing) and also for negative behavior (expressed by a negated
proposition) to count as an action, see (Balzer, 1993), Chap.6. Second, in the context of a
social institution, each exertion of power is directly linked to mental predicates of intention
and causal beliefs, and indirectly linked to macro-features like social positions and norms. I
cannot describe the details here but just note that in an institutional embedding an exertion
of powerthough at the surface described by a relation among actors and actionsmay
acquire the full status of social or institutional power which is required for a proper
understanding of domination, compare the definition in (Balzer, 1993), Chap.12. When
embedded in a social institution, the present definition of freedom expresses much more
than the merely behaviorist absence of tokens of influence.
Of the two basic versions of freedom: freedom `from' influence and freedom `to do' what
one wants, the above definition covers the first notion. It is difficult to relate these two
notions in precise terms because the domain of humans wants is so fuzzy. If we could
distinguish, in a given state, the domain of materially possible actions which j could perform
if nobody would exert power over him and the domain of actually possible actions obtained
by removing from the first domain all those actions which are made impossible by other
persons' exerting power over j then we might say that `freedom to do' is constrained in two
ways. First, it is constrained by the domain of materially possible actions. A person cannot
perform materially impossible actions, whether she wants to do so or not. Additional to this
first constraint, `freedom to do' is further narrowed down by other persons' influences
making materially possible actions impossible. Under this perspective, if the domains of
material possibility depend on the level of welfare then the level of `materially possible'
freedom, i.e. freedom that would prevail in the presence of freedom from influence, is
higher in states with a higher level of welfare. However, this distinction does not seem to be
fruitful for in reality the `material' level and the level of influence are heavily dependent on
each other. For instance, a rise of the level of welfare usually is accompanied by increased
suffering of exertions of power so that the overall freedom `to do' of a person does not
increase (or even decreases) when welfare does. Moreover, freedom `to do' allows for ideal,
individualistic realization of freedom: I simply cut down my wants in order to become
completely free (as the Hegelian slave). This shows that freedom `to do' is not well suited
for discussions of essentially social matters like the comparison of political systems, and

that freedom `from' is the right notion to be used in such contexts.

Equality can be defined by distinguishing $external$ and $internal$ equality. Let us say that
two persons i,j at t are externally equal iff they exert `the same' power over third persons k,
and are affected by third persons exerting power over them in `the same' way. Clearly, `the
same' here must be interpreted somewhat liberally. I take it to mean that whenever i exerts
power over some k by means of some action a then there is an action a' by which j exerts
power over k, and vice versa with i and j interchanged, and that whenever some k exerts
power over i by means of some action a then the same k also exerts power over j by some a'
and vice versa with i and j interchanged. In a more fine grained analysis one would use
action-types and require that a and a' be actions of the same type. i and j are internally equal
at t iff each exertion of power of i over j is matched by one of j over i and vice versa.
Finally, we can say that i and j are equal (at t) iff i and j are externally and internally equal at
t. Note that this definition captures social equality as contrasted to physiological or other
kinds of `non-social' equality. Two persons may be equal in the sense defined but still
widely differ, say, in strength, intelligence or wealth.
It is easily seen by counterexamples that one person may be free but not equal to another
one, or may be equal to another one but not free. Also, it can be shown by way of example
that even complete equality of all persons in a group may go together with the absence of
freedom in that group. In the reverse direction there is a positive result. If all members of a
group are free then they are equal, or, more briefly: total freedom implies equality. This
result holds for the notion of `freedom from', and may be expressed in still other terms as
saying that equality is a necessary condition for freedom (`freedom from'). In the
comparison of political systems these notions typically are used in a quantitative way
allowing for `more' and `less'. The definitions just described can be modified and turned into
comparative notions of more freedom and more equality being present in one group than in
another group of about the same size. Problems in application then arise in mixed cases like
that of an increase of equality together with a decrease of freedom. There is no commonly
accepted way of combining different criteria in order to obtain a definite result.
The condition of `more freedom' on this account is directly linked to the presence or absence
of power relations. An increase of freedom by the above definition implies that less
exertions of power are made: `more freedom implies less exertion of power'. On the other
hand, equality may vary without any change in the numbers of exertions of power, for
instance, by mere `redistribution' of such exertions in the population. Moreover, the
quantitavie notions of freedom and equality are independent of each other. This can be
shown by logical comparison, and by showing that under fixed, hypothetical conditions, a
variation in one dimension is compatible with no variation in the other. For instance, if
freedom increases the degree of equality may remain unchanged. In particular this shows
that freedom and equalityeven if both are defined in terms of poweryield different
criteria for the ranking of political systems. The fact that both these notions can be defined
in terms of power does not imply that the comparison of political systems in these two
dimensions can be `reduced' to one, more basic criterion formulated in terms of exertions of

power.

References
W.Balzer, 1990: "A Basic Model of Social Institutions," Journal of Mathematical
Sociology 16, 1-29.
W.Balzer, 1993: Soziale Institutionen, Berlin: de Gruyter.
W.Balzer, 1994: "Exchange versus Influence: A Case of Idealization," in B.Hamminga (ed.),
Idealization VI: Idealization in Economics, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the
Sciences and the Humanities Vol 38, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 189-203.
S.Lukes, 1974: Power: A Radical View, London.

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