ABSTRACT
First of all, under the dominance of debates on terrorism and global antiterrorist strategies, conflicts often tend nowadays to be interpreted in terms of dangerous generalizations about clashes of civilizations. Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence (2006) offers a devastating critique of such claims, the idea that what individuals are is a function of what civilization they belong to, and that civilizations are constituted as separate, hostile realities. Second, conflicts tend nowadays to be seen as pathological or even criminal accidents, in a society that would otherwise be ordered and harmonious. Harmony has once again become a guiding idea in the description of societies, at least as a possible goal – maybe as the counterpart of fears also described most often in generalized terms. As sociologists, however, we know that this is nothing but a fiction – that conflicts are the normal way in which societies live and change and that for this reason they might give us precious insights about social changes currently occurring. Third, current conflicts tend to be interpreted as conflicts no longer over inequality and social justice, the issues that citizenship strategies have characteristically targeted, but rather on identity and cultural diversity. It is often argued that current conflicts, given their focus over identity claims, make the narrative of citizenship out of date, show that it has failed in governing social fractures and has eventually turned into a system of privileges and therefore of exclusion. Civil society,
in turn, is often now analysed in terms of the collective action of groups of independent experts, more or less able to bring pressure on decision-makers.
