This is rather complicated, so I will explain it step by step. I need 2 things:

1. An essay, 12-15 pages. Times New Roman, 15. Spaced 1.5.
This is what I told my prof I would write about:
I’m very interested in violence and political space. I would like to do a comparement between consensus- and conflict directed approach of political space.

In traditional media you often find an analysis that we are living in a decennium of resistance movements. We can see an alarming tendency. Where a lot of resistance movements start peacefully, a significant part of them seem to make the switch to the use of violence. The Arab Spring became the Arab Winter. Some parts of the world are on permanent military supervision. Also the tone of the public debate is changing. Do those resistance movements get too much space, when you take the escalations into account? What are the boundaries? The recent arise of these movements and the attention they get make us forget that resistance movements are/were present in every time. The role of violence in this gets too often filtered out, and when it does get mentioned, it is presented as wild deeds of a mass, led by a group of agitators with bad intentions. Also, they often were events that made the democratic course of the struggle harder.

My research question would be: what ideas on the political space clarify this dual attitude towards political violence? This question is also applicable in the reversed sense: what does the existence of political violence tell us related to processes in political space? I would like to analyse these questions using two approaches: a consensus directed approach and a conflict directed aproach on political space. This first approach I perceive as a political vision that shows us that because of dialogue and a rational approach, we can protect and treat the present pluralism in society. The possibility of achieving consensus between all parties. The second approach is the challenger of the first one. This one says that political space is made out of conflict and unbalanced power relations. The goal of the parties isn’t finding consensus, it’s achieving hegemony. I am interested in these two approaches because of two reasons. The first one is that the discourse regarding the political model – that the West and hence the biggest international organisations promote, that is the parliamentary democracy with the separation of powers – is too strongly defined by some basic ideas of the consensus based approach. Secondly, as an addition, makes the conflict related vision some very relevant en according to my judgement appropriate remarks towards the belief of the reachableness of consensus. This conflict approach helps to approach some ideas that are perceived as self-evident and to approach them critically by putting them in a hegemonial context.

This was his answer:
The topic for your essay sounds very interesting. I am happy for you to proceed with the topic as you suggest. I would only recommend that you do integrate into the essay readings of the course that are relevant to the topic in some way. !! Good referencing is very important !!

Obviously, I don’t expect you to do all these readings. But you will have to read at least 5 for part 2. And it is very important that parts of the readings are included in the above essay.. Very important..

Part 2:
I need 5 response papers. Each 1 up to 2 pages. So you will have to read at least 5 of the texts, and write a critical/personal opinion of it. In the files you will find 1 response paper that I wrote myself, you can use this as an example. (I don’t think it’s a very good one, I’m sure you can write 5 better ones, but it’s just to give you some sort of guideline).

So, what files are included:
– a course outline (that also says which pages must be read in the texts)
– a whole bunch of texts
– an example of a response paper.

Concerning part 1, I know that what I wrote my prof is very specific. You don’t have to do exactly that, but just definitely something quite in that direction…