The paper aims to investigate the idea of conflict in the polyvocal thought of Georg Simmel. To be correctly interpreted, it must be read through the Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie, manifesting itself as a head problem of its philosophy. Indeed, the life/ form conflict summarizes in itself all the singular contrasts that mark the existence of man. Beginning from the idea of culture and its crisis, through some crucial junctions of the Simmelian philosophy, some moments of its production have been investigated, in order to highlight the adialectic and eternal nature of the conflict in life, which has become the «hidden king» of our Kultur. The conspicuous points that have allowed a not always linear navigation have been identified not only through the particular and original Simmelian philosophy but also by virtue of a not strictly chronological reconstruction of his last production which goes from 1914 to 1918. In this way, it was proposed a key to understanding the conflict and the philosophy of life that highlights the character of reciprocity and of what can be defined as Simmel's uniqueness, the apax of his thought, still decisive for our contemporaneity.

Through the original essays of Simmel we understand why the dynamic flow of life and history, the fallible, reciprocal self, never fully possesses itself as an identity, reliable and secure. This does not translate a negativity that is displaced in the middle, between the negative and the ego: that is, the otherness, the navigator in the in-finite. The non-proper-ego, never identical to itself, is made and generated by the other in conflict. As with Hegel, the ego is made up of the relationship with the other also for Simmel. An alterity that (re) composes it and erodes it in the life of the forms of mutual self. One can not think-of-thinking life as a flow in which consciousness, bodies and things are displaced out of this relationship. The textures of this tangle make life, society, philosophy, politics, science and art, that is culture, make us re-know as individual subjects of desire, power and knowledge, in our limit, in an ontology of the human and of the non-depoliticizing social, in which the principle of reciprocity rises to a constitutive dimension of the uneasy bond of the becoming of being, to which we can be subtracted from the moment that the human being is an imperfect, missing being.

With the Call “Conflict theories and philosophies of peace. 100 years after Georg Simmel’s Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur”, we have aimed at reopening a discussion regarding conflict and peace in a comparison between the Simmelian theory of conflict and other theories of conflict and philosophies of peace, and to, ultimately, establish its heuristic reach in explaining conflicts of various natures, both those that are traditional and well-known and those that are new, from everyday conflicts to those that are social or cultural, and through to armed conflicts.

Scienza e Pace / Science and Peace invites the academic community and the public to the presentation of its last thematic issue "From conflict to Peace. On the way with Georg Simmel". The issue collects the Research Papers received through the call entitled "Theories of conflict and philosophies of peace. 100 years after the publication of Der Konflikt der Modernen Kultur by Georg Simmel".

The presentation will take place on November 29, 2018, at 4 PM, in the Aula Magna of the Department for Political Sciences, via F. Serafini, 3 (ground floor).

Confirmed interventions:

Enza Pellecchia, Director of the Sciences for Peace Interdisciplinary Centre - University of Pisa

Book review of V. Bartolucci, G. Gallo, "Capire il conflitto, costruire la pace", Mondadori, Milano, 2017.

This paper surveys the state of the play with regard to women’s inequality and the processes of changes leading to potential empowerment in selected Muslim majority countries. This paper uses the framework of sociologist Goran Therborn’s existential inequality, which is complemented by the capability approaches of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The main objective of the paper is to bring to light the steady, albeit tardy, empowerment of Muslim women amidst social structural adversities and to highlight diversities in women’s existential inequalities in the selected Muslim majority countries where the narratives of women are often reduced to unverified generalizations and stereotypes. The underlying purpose of the paper is to generate debates and promote further evidence-based investigations on the subject of gender inequality/equality, and gender justice in the Muslim majority countries.

Recent works have linked the big increase in income inequality in many developed economies since the mid-70s with a mainly market led internationalization, which, on one side puts a downward pressure on the wages of low qualified workers and on the other side pushed upwards the wages of CEOs. This market-led internationalization is fueled by a finance sector, facilitating mergers and acquisitions across the world. The endebtment of firms, countries and households thus induced by these mediations of the finance sector, opened an era of financial crises. Has the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) altered these phenomena? Is financialization the only factor of this lasting rise in inequality? Why is this issue not more predominant in national political debates? The many factors fueling income inequality contribute to obfuscate the ensuing damages, at a time when a more egalitarian society seems necessary for a successful transition to environmentally sustainable modes of development.

One of the most negative consequences that economic inequality can have is to curb intergenerational mobility, that is, to make the fate of individuals more dependent on the economic conditions of the family of origin. In this work, based on empirical evidence, it is argued that in our age inequality affects intergenerational mobility through multiple channels, not just the human capital to which reference is more often made in literature. Furthermore, we highlight some reasons why, depending also on these mechanisms, it is possible that a vicious circle is established between inequality and intergenerational immobility.

The question of inequality and political violence is hotly debated. While some suggest that inequality leads to grievance-based violence, others suggest opportunity to dissent is what matters. Rather than large armed violence that is rare, we use political repression, or one-sided violence, to test propositions about inequality's role in the dissent-repression nexus. Using several measures of property inequality and equity, defined as equal access to political power and public goods, we find that inequality and equity matter for predicting political repression. The substantive effects of equity, however, are far greater than that of income inequality. We find only very small substantive effects of horizontal inequality measured as ethnic exclusion and discrimination on state repression, and these effects surprisingly are conditioned positively by strong democracy. These findings raise questions about horizontal inequality and grievance-based rebellion because increasing democracy should allow less repression of grievance-based dissent. The results are robust to the inclusion of several relevant controls, alternative specifications, estimating method, and dependent variables measuring repression.

This article reviews the main points of the academic debate relative to the relationship between economic inequality and conflicts. After clarifying what is meant with the expression 'economic inequality', I recall how it is measured and report the basic facts on income and wealth inequality within countries, across and between countries and at the global level and provide the possible explanations for them. I then discuss the main question posed by this article, namely the correlation between economic inequality and conflicts. The possible correlation existing between within countries inequality and internal conflicts is also examined, together with the role played by social capital, that can be undermined by economic inequality. Finally, the correlation between cross-country inequality and external (or international) conflicts is analyzed, one of the most relevant of which today is represented by migrations.