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SOCIAL CONFLICT AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT: A CASE OF BANGLADESH
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Economist has treated development as if it were nothing more than an exercise in applied economics, unrelated to political ideas, forms of government and the role of people in society. So our development strategies were in some aspect incomplete. Nowadays, miseries of common people increased and we all became a hopeless nation. But the situation let not continual more. I draw attention to society as a unit of nation and social conflict as a root cause of under development the quality, frequency and intensity of social conflict profoundly affect the structure of any society and the life of human being in it .a minimum of realism about conflict in our society is a prerequisite for our survival for development
RESEARCH CONTEXT:
Bangladesh got independence from Pakistan (former west Pakistan) on 16th dec.1971. Nine months long freedom fight was our last experience of interstate conflict. The history of social conflict starts in a newborn country from that time. Social conflict as a root cause of underdevelopment is our subject of attention.
CONFLICT
In popular parlance the word conflict is used both as noun, to mean a fight, struggle, collision, and clashing (of opposed principles etc) and as an intransitive verb: come into disagreement, struggle, clash or incompatibility.
SOCIAL CONFLICT
Not all episodes of conflict are equally significant from a sociological perspective. Sociologically viewed “conflict does not mean random disorder’ rather it refers to, meaningful action in pursuit of goals’ (Rex 1981:104,119). If is particular kind of societion (Simmel 1955:13) or social relationship (Weber 1964:132);it entails the formation of collectivities and has implications for inter connected institutions.
Lewis Coser (1956:8) suggests that social conflict may be taken to man “a struggle over values and claims to scare status, power and resources in which the aims of the opponent are to neutralize, injure or eliminate their rivals’ defined thus, conflict is a comprehensive category, encompassing a variety of phenomena from brawls in the bazaar to wars between nation
VARIOUS DIMENSIONS OF SOCIAL CONFLICT AND THEIR IMPACT
As conceived by Rousseau, Hobbes and other thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a “state of nature’ in which notions right and wrong, justice and injustice had no place, was a possible condition of men, unregulated by external constraints such as law and customs hence this thinkers postulated a state of society in which ceasent conflicts of interest made orderly social life impossible until men finally agree to restrict their rights.
The resultant “social conflict’ is not a historical event. It is a device for analyzing social relationship, and enables us to visualize what human relationship, might become in the absence of external constraint and mutual adaptation.
In every society there are individuals who refuse to accept the conditions, which make social order, possible .the criminal In sense, is one who violates the social contract.
If the society is infested with such criminals who succeed in flouting the law, the social contract will dissolve in “the war of each against all’ which Hobbes visualized.
There are various dimensions of social conflict there are as follows:
1.family sphere
2.cultural sphere
3.political sphere
4.work sphere
1. FAMILY SPHERE
Of the innumberable inter-personal conflicts which we encounter in every day life, those which take place in family sphere are perhaps sociologically the most significant this because the family is the basic unit of society and still the most important group known to human kind. It includes-partition of joint family, changing value system of the family member, juxtaposition between indigenous reality and the implemented legal norms, marital interaction and adjustment in urban nuclear families
Since the structure of family is itself a variable, the sources the nature and the consequences of conflict with in it are obviously varied. However, it can hardly be gain said that conflict with in the family has far reaching consequences for the wider social fabric.
2.CULTURAL SPHERE
In cultural sphere, identity conflict is the common feature. Identities concern our sense of self. How ones sense of self is constituted depend on ones experiences which growing up in the “process of socialization in ones particular social milieu. It includes-caste riot, communal conflict (sense of community among the citizens and sense of separation originated from-religion, social bonds, ideas and symbols), ethnic violence (grows in the childhood-the sense of our’s and sense of other’s) the physical and social distances among society members, identity conflict (Hindu-Muslim, Bangali-Pahari)
Such exclusive identities are particularly prone to conflict. Their conflicts may recurrent and the recurrent pattern may include varied measures of violence. Feelings that our identity is threatened can serve to arouse as to high emotional pitch, which may be directed against people believed to be one’s enemies. It is common enough for emotionally exited groups to get into orgies of violence.
3.POLITICAL SPHER
The unequal distribution of power and authority is ubiquitous and pervasive. It is often regarded as a structural imperative of complex social organization while societies and groups have evolved ideologies legitimating this equality, none of them has ever experienced unquestioned acceptance of its legitimacy.
Conflicts over the distribution and experience of power and challenges to authority are ever present. This sphere includes-student rebellion, factional conflict. Interaction among different sphere of politics etc.
Such conflicts and challenges are brought with far reaching consequences for the societies and groups concerned no where in conflict is a political sphere more apparent and pervasive than in the relation between political parties on the one hand and among individuals and groups with in a party on the other.
4.WORK SPHERE
Human beings distinguished other social activities require patterned relations upon cooperation carries on inbuilt proclivity for conflict. This is, because of conflict of interests implicit in the generally inequitable relations between categories of person involved in a particular productive activity.
This sphere includes mainly two sectors
a. Conflict in agrarian sector (land lords vs. landless laborers)
b. Conflict in industrial sector (employers vs. workers/trade union)
The extent, the conflict in the work sphere draws on social sources which are not mobilization has far reaching consequences for the economy, polity and society in which they take place.
Writing in 1895, Engel’s conclude that class conflict was the dominant motif in European history especially since the industrial revolution of the last century “for time produced clarity in class relationships …... and a genuine bourgeoisie and a genuine large scale industrial proletariat and pushed them into the foreground of social development”.
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