Catharsis: The intersection of conflict and human rights

A catharsis; a release; a culmination; or a climax of sorts, is what human conflicts always seek. Even when antagonists have a material or ideological reason for maintaining a conflict, it seems a historical reality that humans always want to return to an equilibrium.

This is however not always a yearning for complete peace, but at least for an experience where balance is restored and sufficient and shared assumptions of what it us to be human are realised – a place where human rights and freedoms have returned in such good measure that violent conflicts are mediated.

This must be a situation that satisfies and corresponds to a public sense and perception of the actual events of and what was seen to be achieved during a catharsis. This outline finds expression in psychological wards between individuals, or political or social ones between groups or larger collectives such as states and societies.

With a global media infrastructure continuously deepening its role as storyteller of local and global conflicts, catharsis even in far-off places have become intimate ones for viewers and readers everywhere. Catharsis has become a spectre, a production on a global stage. The attempt to bring catharsis, to bring release and resolution, has become the centre piece of local and global politics. At this centre of political drama, the storytellers choose villains and heroes.

The public figures and personalities that are so painted however willingly join the production so as to locate themselves as either of the two. How a leader or political groups cast themselves in relation to a particular conflict directly impacts how they are seen in the public’s sense of the catharsis that the citizen yearns for.

To be able to curate that storyline is a powerful thing, because it determines how leaders and groupings are positioned in relation to the public’s reading of the authenticity of their commitment to catharsis, to realise. The problem however is that on the way to a catharsis, it is in the interest of the political powerful to maintain the tension and slow the progress to reach equilibrium – to be seen to work hard to end conflict and realise the promise of a balance returned, and yet to not do so much as to actually achieve it. In this perspective, discouraging as it may be, to remain a hero is never to accomplish a catharsis, though seemingly to keep working for it. This is surely not true for all leaders or groupings engaged in political struggle, but it does beg the question of how one would know?

A useful way to decide on the authenticity of any project claiming a return to balance and experiences of human freedoms realised as its purpose, is to review the tools employed to achieved change. A promise of peace is not enough, as is a withdrawal of the apparatus of social, cultural, or military war.

A campaign of human engagement that seeks actual catharsis which can be observed in events is needed. A real commitment to catharsis can be measured by the amount of more or less effort made to bring conflicting parties to dialogue, and secondly, the effort to develop a roadmap to return rights and freedoms to the daily lives of citizens. Such a roadmap is one that reveals and realises restorative justice and holistic reconciliation.

In the symbolic political terminologies of global storytelling: it is to curate a production that makes heroes of those that achieve a return to transformative discourse – a production that showcases the breaking down of barriers, new collectives, and a catharsis itself, rather than the runup to it.

*Rudi Buys is a higher education consultant. 

Cape Argus