Wonder How BC Doukhobors Would Have Fared Today...

A tale of two burkas 

NP: The case of a fully veiled Egyptian immigrant who reportedly quit her French-as-a-second-language class at a Montreal CEGEP sooner than show her face to male classmates, then filed a human rights complaint, hardly comes as good.. MORE...

For eighty years, the media represented the Sons of Freedom, a radical group of Russian Doukhobors, through stories of nude demonstrations, children kidnapped by the RCMP, the torching of schools and other buildings, and the bombing of railways and bridges. These events created consternation for governments, orthodox Doukhobors, their neighbours and the general public - until the mid-1980s, when an accord was negotiated between the Doukhobors and government. "Negotiating Buck Naked" examines how the accord was reached, why it worked when numerous other interventions failed, and how it changed the patterns of conflict between the factions. What enabled the violence to end? How was the accord reached, and what factors enabled it to succeed? What lessons can be learned from this experience? To answer these questions, Cran develops a theoretical framework for understanding the process of dispute resolution, emphasizing that competing discourses are juxtaposed and that these different but equally valid narratives must be negotiated. Using this approach, Cran extracts from the Doukhobor conflict valuable lessons for understanding the nature of both terrorism and hegemonic practices, and traces how we view conflict and intervention from a Western perspective.