ABSTRACT
Violence is both a global and a local issue. Is there a political solution to violence? Can research contribute to creating the conditions for a culture and practice of nonviolence? The overarching – or underwriting – research question, then, is how research methodology can be applied to reframe the key social institutions that both constrain and enable the expression and development of our powers as individuals in association with each other. Power, then, is not the problem. The problem is how it is configured to produce the spaces in which we live our lives with others. It is the long-recognized distinction in political theory between constituting powers and constituted power that is at stake. In face-to-face terms, in the local circumstances of our lives, what enables or prevents us from forming whatever associations we want in order to accomplish whatever we want?
