Music and Conflict Studies Growing in Popularity

Music departments are starting to catch on to the concept of music and conflict and peacebuilding. For example, Keele has a module now entitled Music, Conflict and Social Change run by Dr Fiorella Montero-Diaz. This is part of the wider trend of engagement by applied ethnomusicologists such as Samuel Araujo, especially from those scholars from the global south. 

Long Time - The State of Things in Music and Conflict Transformation

It has been a very long time since I posted anything on this blog, for which I am mightily sorry. I have not been idle, though. I have finally submitted my PhD thesis entitled "Singing to be Normal: Tracing the Behavioural Influence of Music as Conflict Transformation" and I will complete my viva in August. I have an article under review in Poetics, I'm co-authoring/co-editing a book with Olivier Urbain from the Toda Institute entitled Music, Power and Liberty, and I am now an editor and journal manager of the Music and the Arts in Action Journal. I have a couple of conference presentations coming up, including "Protests as Events/Events as Protests" at Leeds Metropolitan University and the European Sociological Association Arts Branch conference in Turin. I have been spending the rest of my time applying for jobs or trying to create my own. Hopefully something will materialise before I starve.
So what has the world been up to since my last post? What follows are some things that have caught my attention:

In Jamaica and other hurricane prone Caribbean countries, poverty and a lack of opportunities has led many men to become involved in crime and violence. Recently, Catholic Relief Services have started the Youth Emergency Action Committee with the help of USAid in order to refocus youth attention on how to best respond to hurricanes and help their communities. They have discovered that the most successful manner in which to do this is through rap music in what they labelled 'edutainment.' This approach has also been used successfully for sex and AIDS education in Ghana. What seems to be happening here is not directly the result of the music, but music that appeals or resonates with a particular group promotes a more attentive mode of attention where messages located in the lyrics may infiltrate into memory, especially if the experience is enjoyed and repeated.

Cambodia Living Arts is an organisation founded by Arn-Chorn Pond, a musician, former child soldier and survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide. The principles behind the organisation suggest that the arts are needed in order to restore identity, pride and hope to the population. This is particularly remarkable in Cambodia where, according to the Huffington Post, up to 90% of artists were killed. As in other dictatorships, despots are often the first to understand the power of music and the arts. In order to control a population in order to commit atrocities, the victims need to be seen as less than human. This is impossible if the victims are engaged with cultural expression which is the ultimate humanising activity. Despite this fact, aid agencies rarely support cultural activities. This has been criticised by research conducted by the Post-conflict Reconstruction and Development Unit at the University of York as well as by the popular press like the Huffington Post. As a result, Cambodia Living Arts has produced a month-long arts festival in New York called Season of Camboda, with the support from various American philanthropists in order to raise awareness. The localised use of music in this case is the real music and conflict transformation work, yet that is not what is seen in the festival. The festival is an advertisement and fund-raiser, yet that is what audiences will remember. They will also remember a spectacle of sorts that represents a culture they are probably less familiar with. the danger here is that music and the arts is still seen as entertainment or representing a culture that is somehow rarefied, separate and unknowable. Hopefully the festival has been successful in raising awareness and funds for the important work that they do in their own communities. I hope that their work is not commodified too much in the process.

That's probably enough for this post.

Toda Institute Music, Power and Liberty Conference

In early February this year I presented at the Toda Institute's Music, Power and Liberty Conference in Paris. The Toda Institute is infamous in my mind for publishing the first academic book on the subject of Music and Conflict Transformation entitled, funnily enough, Music and Conflict Transformation, edited by the director of the institute, Olivier Urbain. Due to the leading nature of such a publication I have naturally analysed pretty much every page in depth and I unfortunately found it generally wanting in terms of empirical and theoretical rigour or practical application. So it was with some trepidation that I accepted the invitation for this conference. I am happy to report that my fears were unfounded. I found the papers presented at conference stimulating, utterly relevant, and the approaches significantly more grounded and realistic than in the previous 2008 publication. There is a slight danger of perhaps too much cynicism, but there still seems to be enough drive and optimism to keep the momentum going.
The papers presented in Paris will eventually make their way into a book to follow the original Music and Conflict Transformation book, and since I will most likely be involved in this project to one degree or another, I will not comment on each paper just yet. Suffice it to say for now that there were three broad categories that were addressed:

1) Music, Power and Social Change: Music has been actively engaged with in the socio-cultural arena to influence the status quo; either to keep it static or to challenge and overturn it. There were many presenters from North Africa and their talks were completely resonant with my current research on the role of the arts in the Arab Spring.

2) Unification versus Censorship: There is the age old battle of using music as a tool of expressing togetherness and/or fostering social unification versus powers that would rather keep people apart, usually for social control purposes. There is also the continued battle between the romantics and the realists.

3) How music influences belief systems through education and technology: Increasingly researchers are talking about belief and how this is a key factor in behaviour and also how music and education influence belief. More recently there have been studies on how music and education is transmitted via social media and other technological platforms, thus effectively spreading belief.