After Beslan: Childhood, Complexity and Risk

Abstract

This paper addresses the events at Beslan as a crisis point at which the postmodern celebration of difference spills into unbearable chaos. However this chaos turns out to show specific, dynamic or complex self-organising structures. Such dynamics, instead of obeying ‘normal’ ranges exhibit widely different scales of magnitude and intensity. Central to these interactions is the formation, however loose or opportunistic, of identities that also produceothers: the formation of micro-ethnicities that state how the ‘other’ or outgroup can be treated, mistreated or ‘deconstructed’. They construct a view of ‘natural’ relations that are essential to their continued existence. That model, and the charged concept of the natural, is reinterrogated in the context of less intense but equally ‘irrational’ or abnormal and structurally similar conflict in British schools.