2006, Vol.4, No.2

Civil Society and NGO 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.84

pISSN : 1599-8568
https://journal.kci.go.kr/civil&NGO

Social conflict is broadly defined as a circumstance in which at least “one party manifests the belief that it has incompatible goals with another”(Kriesberg, 2003:7). If social conflict is waged within the context of political and judicial institutions, it is considered to be positive and even essential to maintaining healthy democracy. Yet, if it erupts violently outside of political and judicial boundaries, conflict becomes a negative force, which destroy people’s livelihood and the cohesive community life to which individuals’ identity and safety is deeply connected. In an effort to resolve complex social conflicts, an innovative approach called conflict resolution has been developed and practiced mainly by civil society actors over the last twenty-five years in Western democracies such as the US or the UK. Civilsociety actors have utilised a wide variety of methods that range from community-based conciliation, problem-solving workshops, and conflict resolution skills training to public dialogue over policy issues that address the destructive dynamics of conflict. By conducting case studies on twonon-governmental organisations(NGOs) engaged in conflict resolution activities in the US, this article seeks to examine how civil society actors have participated in addressing and resolving social conflict in particular cultural, social, and political circumstances. To be specific, this article attempts to understand how thenotion of conflict resolution has been applied to accomplish three positive impacts effective conflict management, empowerment of individuals for civic participation, and violent prevention. The analysis of conflict resolution programs also seeks to understand the extent to which the case study organisations contribute to enhance the capacity of citizens to become meaningful participants in civil society realms and democratic processes overall.

As for the Manifesto Movement during the last 5·31 local elections, there have been approaches focusing on campaign pledge review rather than prospect as a civil movement. This article makes clear the meaning of the Movement and implication as a new civil movement. The Manifesto Movement does not finish as an event during elections, but has cycles from collecting opinion to formation of operating system and infrastructure, policy implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. The Movement during 5·31 local elections was an important attempt for capacity-building of grassroots movement, despite limitation of current local politics and encroaching on local issues by central politics, and has proved some potentialities. Some critics argue that the Movement has limitations such as possibilities of political abuse, final effect, review criteria consisting of individual indicator, and value free based review. But they have to keep in mind that the Movement is continuous deliberation and monitoring for putting manifestos into practice until next elections, not merely written campaign pledge. And they have to dismiss the old idea that they can affect voters’ mind under the premise ‘we are the good NGOs’. This article argue that we can find prospect for developing new civil movement based locality through the Movement.

According to Bernard Manin, Greek Athens’ citizens considered ‘the equal possibility’ and ‘the resemblance’ between rulers and citizens, which had critical roles in democracy. In this idea, they adapted ‘the kleros’ as a method of selecting their representatives. However, under representative democracy emphasizing the superiority of the representatives who are selected by the election system, the frontier between the representatives and the citizens has been naturally set up, and has been strengthen continuously. This separation has been regarded as a structural cause of various public conflicts between the government and the citizens, and as an escalator of the conflicts to be more serious one. These situations can be easily found in determining national or regional polices especially relevant to the interests of the public. Through this article, I insist that these kinds of conflicts should be resolved by the complementation of participative, associative, deliberative elements to the representative systems. As an example, if anticipated social disputes in a specific regional development plan, ‘consensus conference’, or ‘citizen jury’ under local government or local assembly can be legally institutionalized to mitigate the conflicts. The Civil Jury case in Ulsan has been asserted as the first, successful deliberative citizens’ participation model in Korea. Although the jury could quickly put an end to the chronic conflict, which is the major reason to be regarded as a successful one in many analyses, the jury had some deficiencies to be an exemplary of the deliberative citizens’ model,due to the failures in introducing timing, in assembling members, in dealing information, and in restoring trusts.