Since the interpretive turn in the social sciences some fifty years ago, the study of conflict, and of long-running disputes in particular, has given prominence to the role of narrative and discourse in the perpetuation of antagonisms. As Peter Coleman wrote in a much-cited essay in the 1990s, conflicts of all kinds are driven and sustained by stories: once “contradictory narratives emerge for each of the disputing groups and become promoted to unquestioned fact or truth,” he wrote, those disputes “often cross a threshold into intractability”. But how do such narratives emerge? How do they relate to the original events that triggered the dispute? And how much change do these narratives undergo in their early stages?
Divergent Discourses is a joint SOAS-Leipzig University project, funded by the UK and German research bodies (the AHRC and DFG), that aims to explore these questions by studying the earliest accounts of the Sino-Tibetan conflict. That conflict began with the entry of China’s People’s Liberation Army into Tibet 74 years ago. At that time, the two parties to the dispute immediately turned to public media – primarily to newspapers – to convey their interpretations of events. By collecting and studying newspapers from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the project aims to trace the early formation of these accounts, which evolved into the deeply divergent narratives that have sustained the conflict till today.
Read the full article by Robert Barnett and Franz Xaver Erhard on the SOAS China Institute’s blog …
