6 Months Plan for Turkish and Armenian Students
In this take-home exam, you have the opportunity to demonstrate in an analytic manner your understanding of major religious approaches in the area of reconciliation.
In the second section of the course, we have considered several different approaches used by practitioners of reconciliation work: 1) interfaith dialogue (Abu-Nimer), 2) a non-dialogic perspective (Gopin), 3) a biblically based approach (Lederach), and 4) a spiritual/mystical effort (Halevi).
Write a paper addressing the following prompt :
You are the head conflict resolution/reconciliation expert at a university, asked by its president to address a conflict between two student organizations, one dedicated to Turkish identity and culture, the other to Armenian identity and culture (with religion, of course, as part of each culture; Turks are mostly Muslim, Armenians are Christian).
Each organization claims that the other is bringing biased speakers to campus who distort history and further contribute, thereby, to the alienation of students from one another and deepen the suspicion and distrust each set of students has about the other. (Before you get started, you will need to read pp. 148-151 in Halevi’s book for a very brief introduction to the historical conflict involving Armenians and Turks.)
Your job is to develop a six-month plan of action that utilizes and integrates three distinctive approaches to conflict resolution/reconciliation drawn from the four categories listed above. This plan of action, to be developed as a proposal for the president, needs to argue as forcefully as possible for the usefulness, adequacy, and promise of success of each of the methods selected, alone and in combination. It should also point out in some detail why you have decided not to include the fourth approach (from a fourth category) in your proposal; this means that you need to say enough about this approach to demonstrate you are familiar with it and to explain why you find it less helpful or perhaps not a good fit for this particular situation (this piece should be no shorter than a substantial paragraph).
How you construct the plan of action is up to you, but keep in mind that I have an expectation of coherence and integration for the essay. Beyond that, the paper should not be a rehashing of class discussions. In evaluating the essay, I will be looking for accuracy, comprehensiveness, coherence, integration, and creativity.
Use specific evidence from relevant texts to support your analysis. You should make an effort to use authors’ ideas that back up or inspire your plan. You may use quotes as well, but when you do, use them judiciously to support your argument, not to make it for you (in other words, don’t introduce a new point using a quote; introduce it by discussing it as part of your proposal. Keep in mind that a bunch of quotes strung together does not an integrated essay make). For our purposes, when citing from the texts, you may simply place a parenthesis with the author’s name and page number following the quote or paraphrase, using this format: (Lederach, p. 28).
Audience
You are writing this paper for me, so you can assume that I am well acquainted with the works under consideration; you need not, therefore, spend too much time summarizing each work in detail . Focus on analysis, not on elaborate descriptions of authors’ experiences with reconciliation.
Style
The essay should be 5-6 double-spaced pages in length, typed or word-processed, with dark and legible black print, standard margins (1″ all around), and pages numbered and stapled together; please use Times New Roman, size 12 font; no spaces between paragraphs, please. Use a substantive title to provide your reader with your intentions in the paper. You may go over the length limit, but you may not exceed 7 pages. Learning to write well involves discipline, and page limits demand that you condense your ideas in productive ways.
A polished paper requires careful attention to style and writing mechanics. “The medium is the message”: I cannot evaluate your paper adequately if I cannot readily understand it. I suggest you read the paper out loud to yourself to catch awkward or wordy constructions. The essay should read as naturally as you speak. Big words do not necessarily enhance the quality of an essay—they frequently obscure for the reader what you mean if you do not use them properly or if they appear stilted in context.