Someone’s got to do it, so why not get the defining of “Conflict(s) in Context(s)” over with. “Context” is the quandary. We know it as everything that surrounds something else. Being more specific is difficult. I know from experience that it’s nontrivial to define; in programming, one can construct a ‘computational context’, which figuratively surrounds some computation, some list of instructions. The context says whether the computer is going to follow those instructions once, several times or never. It could also say to follow only odd-numbered instructions or follow them in reverse order. The instructions are inert and it’s only with a context that we can understand them through executing them. Essentially, the context describes how our verbs relate to our nouns, be they the executing of a program, the interpreting of a sentence, or the waging of a war.

It may not be the best of ideas to execute a war in the same way as a program, but we can certainly interpret them. We draw context from outside knowledge and assumptions, but the war in question is unchanged however we look at it. That of course assumes that there’s an objective truth about a war that we can approximate with our subjective perspectives.

Leaving the philosophy on simmer for a moment, we can define conflict. An understanding of it is supposedly seared into our genetics, but I’ve learnt to take my instincts with a pinch of salt. A simple recipe for conflict is to have something that wants something, and some obstacle that impedes that goal. The year’s topic will focus on agents that are either humans or group of humans, and the obstacles will be other humans. A war is quintessential—two groups at odds.

It begs the question of who is the agent and which is the obstacle. In a two-sided conflict, there are two interpretations of who is impeding whom. That’s where the contexts come into play.

Armed with a concrete contextualisation of contexts with respect to war, we can define it as what we choose to focus on and build off of when we try to understand a war. We have to start somewhere, so we will end up with a skewed perspective of war, so it’s helpful to try again with another different perspective. If one partly trusts many agreeing perspectives, one can mostly trust what they agree on. If we collate, for instance, two semesters of weekly seminars’ viewpoints, we might get closer to understanding.

I thought I’d come out of this blog post with a solid foundation of clear definitions. I’m becoming confident that that’s impossible. A ‘context’ is the average of a thousand incomplete definitions such as this one.

Featured Image: MagicalQuote.com (2017) Universal law is for lackeys. Context is for kings. [Text Template on Photograph] Star Trek: Discovery Quotes. https://www.magicalquote.com/seriesquotes/universal-law-is-for-lackeys-context-is-for-kings/