Paper Short Abstract:

This paper wishes to start critically examining one of the strongest conceptual hegemonies of social sciences: the Conflict Theories. We will question if they are still sufficient for our current needs, and explore an alternative look into a more nuanced, agency and cooperation focused approaches.

Paper Abstract:

For the past many decades, social sciences have been deeply moulded by the thoughts of scholars such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault or the members of Critical Theory, shifting the focus of the field towards relationships of power and conflict, in what is now widely known as the Conflict Theories (CT) paradigm.

While inspiring many important or admirable social changes and academic outlooks, we have now reached a point where Conflict Theories have grown into a powerful hegemony of its own, dominating the majority of the academic discourse and narrowing our perception of social dynamics, at times even stifling criticism and innovative avenues of thought. All the while, CT-generated narratives can carry some hidden aspects of ethnocentric and enlightenment-rooted influences that may be of concern. I aim to explore the hegemonic role CT has gained, demonstrate some of its limitations and wester-centric biases, and show how it may be at odds with the projects of Decolonization and Pluriversal Anthropology itself.

After outlying the possible issues of CT, I will briefly introduce a possible paradigm modification, tentatively called Cooperation-Oriented Approach. Rooted in extensive-multidisciplinary library of studies of cooperation, I wish to expand our methodological and epistemic tools of analysis of human social dynamics, with emphasis on mutualism, co-dependency and individual agency, that could enrich and transcend the limitations of the older, power-and-conflict-focused paradigms. I will argue that the need to cooperate may be underappreciated in our understanding of social dynamics, and propose new ways to study and reflect it.