Abstract

SEFCHOVICH, Sara. Social conflicts as discursive conflicts. Cultura representaciones soc [online]. 2014, vol.9, n.17, pp.110-148. ISSN 2007-8110.

Social actors undertake collective action in order to raise demands and claim solutions to their needs and problems. These actions can be pacific or violent; they can disappear after a time or turn into social movements. What I pretend here is to show that the above mentioned actions give place to a diversity of discourses, which present different versions of those actions, most of the time contradictory amongst them. The reason why this happens is that there are no ways of looking at them and understanding them with the objectivity that the positivists claimed. It is a fact that we can only understand and attribute sense to them by making use of mental schemes, knowledge and know-how, previously established ways of perceiving and understanding, values, purposes and loyalties. Due to the fact that society is a field of conflict in which ideologies clash and interests are confronted and since we, as part of it, are not exempted of this way of functioning, the discourses on social conflicts, by gathering, transmitting and receiving the so called "reality", necessarily select, arrange, accommodate and organize and even reconstruct the social actions of those who elaborate or receive them. This applies to both verbal and nonverbal discourses. All this alters completely the way of perceiving, understanding, facing or solving those discourses by the actors involved, and by external groups and the State.

Keywords : Social actions; social conflicts; discourses; mediation; interests.

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