Niclas Jonathan Rautenberg

This essay discusses the normative significance of the spatial dimension of conflict events. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with political actors – politicians, officials, and activists – and on Heidegger’s account of spatiality in Being and Time, I will argue that the experience of conflict space is co-constituted by the respective conflict participants, as well as the location where the conflict unfolds. Location and conflict parties’ (self-)understandings ‘open up’ a space that enables and constrains ways of seeing and acting. Yet, a purely transcendental phenomenology will remain oblivious to the quasi-transcendental, societal structures of power that shape a person’s conflict experience. To illuminate these facets of the phenomenon, phenomenology has to join forces with critical theory. Introducing Garland-Thomson’s feminist distinction of fit/misfit, I will illustrate how power shapes conflict space in manifold ways. The essay thereby fills a gap in the philosophical literature that rarely analyses political conflict as a phenomenon sui generis.

Though political conflict is inevitable in democratic societies, it has garnered little attention in political philosophy as a phenomenon sui generis. In this PhD thesis, I survey the landscape of approaches to conflict and develop a critical-phenomenological basis for a more thorough philosophical understanding of the phenomenon. A key assumption is that the structures of conflict experience manifest in context-relative modalities shaped by power. To bring out these differences, I conducted qualitative interviews with political actors—politicians, civil servants, activists—which I analysed with the tools of phenomenology and critical theory. My dissertation reveals that agents can perceive the same conflict differently, at times drastically so, and explores how this variability impacts the suitability of practical proposals to resolve conflict. The dissertation is organised into five parts: (1) discusses a dominant paradigm in political philosophy, i.e., Rawlsian political liberalism. By uncovering its conflict typology, I show how intractable conflicts remain a problem in Rawls’s well-ordered society. (2) addresses Modus Vivendi Theory, i.e., a realist alternative approach. While I argue that the theory can potentially tackle a wider array of conflicts, it still remains too indeterminate to provide normative guidance. (3) marks a shift from immanent critique to a critical phenomenology of conflict. Focusing on the role of space and location in conflict, and combining phenomenology with feminism, the chapter shows how (a) variations relating to spaces matter for the viability of practical solutions to conflict; and (b) how power asymmetrically structures scopes of possible action in these spaces. (4) combines phenomenology and critical philosophy of race to illustrate the role of the body in conflict—both as the vehicle of action and as the object of social perception. (5) elaborates the normativity of the political world, developing a phenomenologically-informed understanding of political conflict missing in the literature.

This article investigates the structure of racialized conflict experience. Embarking from a conflict event in Ta-Nehisi Coates's autobiography Between the World and Me and contrasting the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz with insights from Black phenomenology, I argue that Coates's experience discloses conflictual, but intertwined, modes of being-in-the-world. Further, it presents an instantiation of a particular kind of conflict, i.e., corporeal conflict. Corporeal conflict applies whenever the body is politicized, i.e., when it becomes the marker for traits representative of a rival political group. Understood this way, racialized conflict is always political. I conclude the article with some remarks on the shortcomings of two dominant conflict theories in political philosophy and the potential for an alternative, phenomenological approach that enables new ways of engaging the other in conflict. The analysis is preceded by a meditation on the role of the White researcher in critical philosophy of race.