APPROACHES TO ADDRESSING INTRACTABLE CONFLICT: FIVE PARADIGMS

Over the past several decades, the applied literature on social conflict has put forth a large array of approaches for prevention, intervention, and reconstruc­tion work with protracted social conflicts.

The Realist Paradigm

Historically, this perspective has been the dominant paradigm for the study of war and peace in history, politics, and international affairs. Essentially a politi­cal metaphor, it views protracted conflicts as dangerous, high-stakes games that are won through strategies of domination, control, and countercontrol.

The realist approach highlights the need for strong actions to provide the protections necessary and requires that we find effective methods for minimizing acts of aggression and for bolstering a sense of social and institutional stability, while at the same time confronting the underlying patterns of intergroup dominance and oppression that are the bedrock of many conflicts. Examples of this approach include the use of direct force, Machiavellian approaches to statesmanship, game theoretical strategies of collective security and deterrence, and “jujitsu” tactics of community organizing (Alinsky, 1971). They also include acts of stabilization to offset uncertainties, such as establishing clear and fair rules of law, a trustworthy government and judiciary, fair and safe voting practices, and a free press. In some settings they involve activism to offset power imbalances including raising aware­ness of specific types of injustice within both high-power and low-power commu­nities; helping to organize, support, and empower marginalized groups; and bringing outside pressure to bear on the dominant groups for progressive reforms (Deutsch, 1985).

The Human Relations Paradigm

An alternative to the realist paradigm emerged primarily through the social- psychological study of conflict and stresses the vital role that human social inter­actions play in triggering, perpetuating, and resolving conflict. Based on a social metaphor, its most basic image of intractable conflict is of destructive relation­ships in which parties are locked in an increasingly hostile and vicious escala- tory spiral and from which there appears to be no escape. With some variation, these approaches view human nature as mixed, with people having essentially equal capacities for good and evil, and stress the importance of different exter­nal conditions for eliciting either altruism and cooperation or aggression and vio­lence. This orientation also identifies fear, distrust, misunderstanding, and hostile interactions between disputants and between their respective commu­nities as primary obstacles to constructive engagement. Thus, subjective psy­chological processes are seen as central as well, significantly influencing disputants’ perceptions, expectations, and behavioral responses and therefore largely determining the course of conflict (see Deutsch, 1973). From this per­spective, change is thought to be brought about most effectively through the planful targeting of people, communities, and social conditions, and is best mobilized through normative re-educative processes of influence (Fisher, 1994).

The human relations approach promotes a sense of hope and possibility under difficult circumstances. It stresses that we recognize the central impor­tance of human contact and interaction between members of the various com­munities for both maintaining and transforming protracted conflicts. Human relations procedures include various methods of integrative negotiation, medi­ation, constructive controversy, and models of alternative dispute resolution systems design. In addition, scholars have found that establishing integrated social structures—including ethnically integrated business associations, trade unions, professional groups, political parties, and sports clubs—are one of the most effective ways of making intergroup conflict manageable (Varshney, 2002).

The Medical Paradigm

This view pictures intractable social conflicts as pathological diseases, as infections or cancers of the body politic that can spread and afflict the system and that there­fore need to be correctly diagnosed, treated, and contained. A medical metaphor, it views its patient, the conflict system, as a complicated system made up of vari­ous interrelated parts, which exist as an objective reality and thus can be analyzed and understood directly and treated accordingly. These patients are thought to be treated most effectively by outside experts who have the knowledge, training, and distance from the patient necessary to accurately diagnose and address the prob­lem. This perspective views humans and social systems as basically health-ori­ented entities that, due to certain predispositions, neglect, or exposure to toxins in the environment, can develop pathological illnesses or tendencies that are destruc­tive. Treatment of these pathologies, particularly when severe, is seen as both an art and a science, with many courses of treatment bringing their own negative con­sequences to the system. Although not as common as the realist and human rela­tions paradigms, the medical model is particularly popular with agencies, community-based organizations, and nongovernmental organizations working in settings of protracted conflict.

A classic example of the medical approach is Volkan’s Tree Model (Volkan, 1998), which recommends working collectively with communities in conflict to unearth the “hidden transcripts” (hidden resistances), “hot” locations (symbolic sites), and the chosen traumas and glories that maintain oppositional group identities. This diagnostic phase is followed by a series of psychopolitical dia­logues between influential representatives of relevant groups, who then work toward a “vaccination” campaign to reduce poisonous emotions at the local community, governmental, and societal levels.

The Postmodern Paradigm

This perspective portrays intractable conflicts as rooted in the ways we make sense of the world. A communications metaphor, its most basic image is of con­flict as a story, a narrative or myth that provides a context for interpretation of actions and events, both past and present, which largely shapes our experience of ongoing conflicts. Thus, conflict comes from the way parties subjectively define a situation and interact with one another to construct a sense of mean­ing, responsibility, and value in that setting. Intractable conflicts, then, are less the result of scarce resources, incendiary actions of parties, or struggles for limited positions of power than they are a sense of reality, created and main­tained through a long-term process of meaning making through social interac­tion (Lederach, 1997; Pearce and Littlejohn, 1997). This highlights a form of power as meaning control, an insidious, although primary form of power, which is often quietly embedded in the assumptions and beliefs that disputing parties take for granted. It suggests that it is primarily through assumptions about what is unquestionably “right” in a given context that different groups develop and maintain incommensurate worldviews and conflicts persist. Thus, change is believed to be brought about by dragging these assumptions into the light of day through critical reflection, dialogue, and direct confrontation, thus increas­ing disputant awareness of the complexity of reality, of our almost arbitrary understanding of it, and of the need for change.

The postmodern approach can be operationalized through a variety of channels, including targeting how conflicts are depicted in children’s history texts, challenging the media’s role in shaping and perpetuating conflict, and working at the intragroup level on renegotiating oppositional identities (Kel- man, 1999). Many NGOs facilitate small dialogue groups of disputants who come together with the support of carefully structured facilitation to share their memories and experiences of conflicts in the presence of others who hold profoundly different views. These dialogues offer an experience that is distinct from problem solving, mediation, or negotiation in that they dis­courage persuasion and argumentation and encourage alternative forms of intergroup contact that emphasize learning, openness to sharing, and gath­ering new information about oneself, the issues, and the other. Other exam­ples of this approach include the reframing of environmental conflicts (see Lewicki, Gray, and Elliot, 2003) and is evident in the work of groups such as the Public Conversations Project, the Public Dialogue Consortium, and the National Issues Forum (see Pearce and Littlejohn, 1997).

The Systems Paradigm

In essence, the system’s perspective is based on an image of a simple living cell developing and surviving within its natural environment. A biological metaphor, it views conflicts as living entities made up of a variety of interdependent and interactive elements, nested within other, increasingly complex entities. Thus, a marital conflict is nested within a family, a community, a region, a culture, and so on. The elements of systems are not related to one another in a linear manner, but interact according to a nonlinear, recursive process so that each element influ­ences the others. In other words, a change in any one element in a system does not necessarily constitute a proportional change in others; such changes cannot be separated from the values of the various other elements that constitute the sys­tem. Thus, intractable conflicts are viewed as destructive patterns of social systems, which are the result of a multitude of different hostile elements inter­acting at different levels over time, culminating in an ongoing state of intractability. (See Coleman, Vallacher, Nowak, and Bui-Wrzosinska, forthcoming, Pruitt and Olczak, 1995.) Power and influence in these systems are multiply determined, and substantial change is thought to occur only through transformative shifts in the deep structure or pattern of organization of the system.

Ironically, the systems orientation is one of the most common, and yet least well-developed of the conflict paradigms. Its approach encourages us to see the whole. It presents the political, the relational, the pathological, and the episte­mological as simply different elements of the living system of the conflict. Thus, it stresses the interdependent nature of the various objectives in intervention of mutual security, stability, equality, justice, cooperation, humanization of the other, reconciliation, tolerance of difference, containment of tension and violence, com­patibility and complexity of meaning, healing, and reconstruction. It suggests that through the weaving and sequencing of such complementary approaches, it may be possible to trigger shifts in the deep structure of systems like Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and the Middle East, in a manner that may produce a sustained pattern of transformational change. However, a great deal of work must be done for this worldview to become useful at an operational level.

The five paradigms and various associated procedures outlined in this section provide us with an extensive menu of perspectives and options for addressing intractable social conflicts. Each approach is supported to some degree by empir­ical research, and each offers a unique problematique, or system of questioning, that governs the way we think about intervention in conflicts. Ideally, however, we must develop a capacity to conceptualize and address intractable conflicts that is mindful of the many factors and complex relationships inherent to the phe­nomenon and of the complementarities of these diverse approaches.