A Critical Survey of International Journal Articles on Conflict Resolution (1957-2019): A Semantico-Deconstructive Approach

Introduction

(Source: Churchill’s first speech as Prime Minister, House of Commons, 13 May 1940)

The above quoted excerpt from Winston Churchill’s speech might have shared Charles Darwin’s famous key word ‘survival‘(The Origin of the Species, 1859) to highlight British policy of ‘adaptability during warring situation’ (Bartlett, C.J. 1989: British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century) The20th century saw a deep upsurge of military and civil conflicts across the globe. World War IIisconsidered as high watermark of such conflicts because several nations were brought into the world= widebloody military parade. The belligerent Power Blocks called the Allies (UK, France and USSR) and the Axis (Italy, Germany and Japan) proclaimed them as agents of change.

After the Second World War, Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany, two spheres of military influence underUSSR and USA respectively. During the 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were working to develop new technology under the shade of Cold War.. Nazi Germany had been close to developing the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at the fag end of the Second World War,

USA and USSR were also engaged in developing satellites as a part of a goal set by the International Council of Scientific Unions, which had called for the launch of satellite technology during late 1957 and early 1958. Over the course of the decade, the United States tested several varieties of rockets and missiles, but all of these tests were of no avail.

On September 9, 1957, American President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The Act marked the first occasion since ‘Reconstruction’ that the federal government undertook significant legislative action to protect civil rights of the American citizenry..Although President Dwight Eisenhower had tried his best to downplay the importance of the Sputnik launched by USSR to the American people, he pumped in additional funds and human resources into the NASA – operated American space program in an effort to catch up with Soviet Space Research. The U.S. Government suffered a severe setback in December of 1957 when its first artificial satellite, named Vanguard, exploded on the launch pad. This failure served as a visible reminder of how much the US had yet to accomplish to be able to compete militarily with the Soviet Republic. It was on January 31, 1958, the United States succeeded in launching its first satellite, the Explorer. The Explorer was still slighter than Sputnik, but its launch sent it deeper into space. The Soviet Republic responded with yet another launch, and the space race continued in between the US and USSR..

The present chapter has critically surveyed almost thirty International Journal Articles on Conflict Resolution written by reputed authors and published during AY 1957 – 2019 (last 62 years. The list of these Articles has been enclosed as reference.

The chapter has considered the major national and international conflicts of the world during the Cold War period as shown in the following table at the backdrop because most of these International Journal Articles have least mention of these shattering conflicts.

Methodology

Semantico - deconstructive approach has been used to survey all the International Journal Articles (henceforth called IJA) and to understand the relationship between the genotext and the phenotext in question. The present chapter has followed Derridian ‘Deconstructive Approach’ (Of Grammatology, 1997) which is consisted of conducting critical readings of texts and looking for meanings that run counter to the intended meaning or structural unity of a particular text.