CONCEPTUAL INNOVATIONS
Integral to the development of this body of practice and later developments from it were three conceptual innovations. The first - broadening the definition of conflict - was explicit in Burton’s work from the start.
Kelman’s roots in social psychology deepened and broadened it. Following from the first, the second was also articulated by Burton as he challenged the traditional paradigm in the academic study of international relations - a change still not fully accepted. The third - the concept of a continuous political process as an instrument of change in its own right - originated in the 1970s outside the academic fields of international relations and conflict resolution and has been slower to gain explicit academic recognition.Broadening the definition of conflict
The first innovation was broadening the definition of conflict to recognize the basic human needs that may lie at the roots of conflict as well as the physical interests over which governments and groups differ, fight, and negotiate. For instance, John Burton beginning in the mid-1960s recognized that some problems and conflicts are not ready for formal negotiation. People, for instance, do not negotiate over their identity. In such cases, dialogue provided necessary space for talking around and talking through these problems to understand often unspoken causes before attempting to devise ways of dealing with a conflict. This talk often permitted participants to redefine problems in terms of unmet human needs. This approach made it important to focus on the mode of communication that came to be referred to as dialogue rather than on the familiar language and exchanges of negotiation and diplomacy because dialogue opened the door to broader exchanges that revealed the deeper human causes of conflict.
Burton, like psychologist A. H. Maslow in the 1940s, referred to basic human needs such as physiological (food), safety, love, affection, belongingness, self-respect and the esteem of others that grows from capacity and achievement, and selfactualization (self-fulfillment).
As a former diplomat turned scholar, Burton brought attention to those needs in contrast to the exclusive focus of scholars in international relations on material interests as causes of conflict (Saunders, 2005: 6).Burton distinguished what he came to call deep-rooted conflicts from disputes over tangible interests that could be negotiated or differences that could be talked through. He later firmly insisted that conflict resolution refer to the former and dispute settlement to the latter (Burton, 1987, 1990a, 1990b). EdwardAzarused thephrase protractedsocial conflict to denote mostly intra-state conflicts, the primary sources of which lay in denial of basic human needs, assaults on identity, and social injustice (Azar, 1983).
“It follows,” observes Ronald Fisher in his 1997 book on this early experimental thinking, “that the central unit of analysis in protracted social conflict is the identity group, defined in ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, or other terms, for it is through the identity group that compelling human needs are expressed in social and often political terms... conflicts arise when identity groups perceive that they are oppressed and victimized through a denial of recognition, security, equity, and political participation” (Fisher, 1997: 5).
Broadening the political paradigm
The second conceptual development followed from the first - a refocusing of the paradigm for the study and practice of international relations. As the definition of conflict was enlarged to deal with its human dimensions, it became apparent to some practitioners that a state-centered or a government-centered paradigm for the study and practice of politics was not large enough to include dialogue among citizens outside government as a serious instrument of conflict resolution.
As I have noted earlier, John Burton as a former senior Australian diplomat recognized that the traditional paradigm for the analysis and conduct of international relations was no longer large enough to take account of the broadening range of conflicts.
He proposed what he called the “pluralist paradigm.” The point was simply that conflict was no longer primarily an affair of governments - that it engaged people at all levels of society. This was apparent in his first workshop on the conflict surrounding Malaysia, in which guerrilla movements played a significant role. Much later in the 1990s when the lid of Soviet control was removed from so many situations, we came to speak colloquially of “ethnic” conflict, usually referring to violent intra-state conflicts in which a minority group challenged government, or such groups fought each other in conflicts that were beyond the reach of governments and, often, the conventional instruments of conflict resolution. Ultimately, those conflicts gave birth to the concept of the “failed state.”Articulation of a new paradigm in the United States came later, perhaps because most of the early innovative work in dialogue as conflict resolution was based in disciplines related to social psychology and psychoanalysis rather than to international relations. Significant academic work in international relations beginning in the 1970s recognized the proliferation of nonstate actors such as multinational corporations (Keohane and Nye, 1977) and the increasing permeability of international borders (Brown, 1972). Only when Harold Saunders became involved in nonofficial dialogue in the 1980s - like Burton bringing diplomatic experience to this work - did a practitioner in dialogue feel the importance of a paradigm shift in international relations. “Having worked for five US presidents and with other world leaders,” he says, “I was convinced that the conceptual lenses that a leader or a citizen uses to give meaning to events will determine how he or she acts. The only lasting way to change fundamental policy and behavior is to change those conceptual lenses” (Saunders, 1999: xv). His experience in the Arab-Israeli peace process of the 1970s led him eventually to his “relational paradigm,” positing “a cumulative, multilevel, open-ended process of continuous interaction engaging significant clusters of citizens in and out of government and the relationships they form to solve public problems in whole bodies politic across permeable borders” (Saunders, 2005: 7-8).
It was increasingly recognized that conflict must often be dealt with at different levels of society where needs went unmet and that such a challenge could only be met by innovative instruments.A continuous political process
The third conceptual innovation was the idea of a continuous political process to change a political environment or to transform relationships - an idea that warranted attention in its own right as an instrument of change. This concept had its roots in the Arab-Israeli peace process after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
The US government under three presidents and three secretaries of state launched an intensive mediation lasting through six years, 1974-1979. It began by producing Egyptian- Israeli then Israeli-Syrian disengagement agreements in January and May 1974. The strategy was that a sequence of cumulative agreements, each building from the last, could emerge from and contribute to a powerful political process that could change the political environment and make further agreements possible. Ultimately, after a second Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement - “Sinai II” - in September 1975, the fourth and fifth in this sequence were the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the Egyptian- Israeli PeaceTreaty of 1979. This process was conducted through a diplomatic innovation that journalists called “shuttle diplomacy” because, at the beginning, the secretary of state and his team flew back and forth between capitals daily during a mediation, steadily putting together the elements of agreements through what we today might call a “virtual” dialogue between parties who for political reasons initially would not meet face to face.
This idea of a continuous political process began broadening thinking to include not just human needs as causes of conflict but also to ask what role they play in influencing an evolving process of interaction among groups in conflict and how that interaction might be changed. It has been difficult for many in the field to get their minds around the idea of focusing on the process of interaction itself - instead of focusing only on the actors - but that interaction is the essence of relationship.At the beginning of the twenty-first century, practitioners deal with relationship intuitively, but scholars in politics and international relations have not widely accepted the idea. On the other hand, it came naturally to psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan, who in the late 1970s began conducting what he called psycho-political dialogues that systematically probed the deeper needs that drive a destructive interaction.
He later wrote extensively about large group identity and the process of interaction and about interventions to change those patterns of interaction.The importance and political impact of this insight was dramatized by Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat's dramatic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977. Declaring that “a psychological barrier” between Egyptians and Israelis “constitut[ed] 70 per cent of the whole problem” (Sadat, 1991), Sadat through a political act transformed the political environment by addressing the historically rooted Jewish feeling of exclusion and the perception that no Arab country would accept Israel as a state in the Middle East. At that moment, the negotiating position he presented was not acceptable to the Israeli government. The change in public perception of the possibility of peace, however, opened the door in the ongoing political process to a change in relationship that permitted negotiation of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Conceptually, it dramatized that the nature of the overall relationship - the process of interaction itself - is worthy of analysis in its own right.
In fact, that insight is embedded in the phrase “peace process” itself. Those flying on the diplomatic “shuttle” missions of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in early 1974 began calling what they were doing the “negotiating process” because they were intent on building momentum by mediating one agreement on top of another in a cumulative process. When they realized that each agreement was changing the political environment by enhancing a sense of the possibility of peace in the minds of people, they began using the term “peace process” to capture the multilevel character of the change that was taking place. In each case, the idea of a cumulative, open- ended continuous process was the instrument of change.
Three lessons emerged for those involved in the peace process: first was the power of a continuous political process to change relationships; second was the importance of the human dimension of conflict; and third was the recognition of the multilevel character of deep-rooted human conflict between bodies politic - the way it permeated life at all levels of a body politic and the fact that it shaped the identities of the conflicting parties.
Nothing could have underscored these points more vividly than President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem.The next laboratory that contributed to the idea of dialogue as a process rather than as a workshop or a meeting was the Regional Conflicts Task Force of the Dartmouth Conference - the longest continuous bilateral series of meetings between American and Soviet citizens, which had begun in 1960. In 1981 at the thirteenth plenary, the Conference leadership decided to establish two task forces to meet between plenaries to probe the question: what happened to detente - the intensive diplomatic effort in the 1970s to improve the Soviet-US relationship? Harold Saunders, who had by then left government, was asked to be the US co-chair of the task force to study Soviet-US interactions in regional conflicts - those conflicts in which the superpowers competed through proxies. Evgeny Primakov - later foreign minister and then prime minister of the new Russia after 1991 - was the Soviet cochair.
Meeting every six months throughout the 1980s, they learned that bringing the same group back together at semiannual intervals created four opportunities: (1) They were able to create a cumulative agenda with questions left unanswered at the end of one meeting forming the agenda for the next. (2) They developed a common body of knowledge. It was not just knowledge of the other's formal positions but an understanding of why those positions were important - what needs they met. (3) They learned to talk analytically together rather than polemically. (4) Later, in 1992-1993, they learned to work together.
By 1991, looking back over 18 meetings, it was possible to discern a pattern through which dialogue evolved when more or less the same participants came back together repeatedly. Saunders began writing about a staged process. In 1993, he and the Russian cochair of the Regional Conflicts Task Force - Gennady Chufrin, who had succeeded Primakov in 1989 - first published a description of Sustained Dialogue as a five-stage process (Chufrin and Saunders, 1993). Eventually, those five stages took the following shape:
Stage One, "Decidingto Engage": the period when initiators begin a "dialogue about dialogue" or citizens talk among themselves about a serious problem and ultimately decide to take the risk of talking with the adversary.
Stage Two, "Mapping and Naming Problems and Relationships": when participants and their moderators first sit together, they will engage in a period - perhaps lasting over several meetings - in which they will vent their grievances, their anger, their positions, their perspectives. Though often a disorderly exchange, it is important for the participants to be heard and for the moderators to begin getting a sense of the dynamics of the relationships involved. This stage ends when dialogue participants come together around a problem that they feel they must work on together. At this point, the quality of the talk changes palpably from talking at each other to talking with each other about a problem they agree affects them all.
Stage Three, "Probing Problemsand Relationships to Choose a Direction": the moderators' style will shift from permissiveness to be sure everyone is fully heard to a somewhat more directive approach to help the group focus their analysis and probe beneath the surface for the problems and relationships behind the problems. Participants will inevitably begin talking about what they might do to deal with the problem and deliberating among possible approaches. They identify ways of entering conflictual relationships to change them. At some point - again, perhaps, after a prolonged period which may include time between meetings when they reflect and talk with others-they will reach not a detailed plan of action but a sense of direction in which they might consider moving.
Stage Four, "Scenario Building - Experiencing a Changing Relationship": participants have identified the relationships that must be changed to address the real causes of the conflict. Now they begin to consider what steps can accomplish that purpose, who can take those steps, and how the actors can move in a complex of mutually reinforcing interactive steps that can build momentum around a multilevel process of change. They list the main obstacles to change, remembering that these can be feelings as well as practical factors; list steps to overcome each obstacle; list who can take those steps. Finally, they arrange steps and actors so they reinforce each other, draw in new actors, and build momentum.
Stage Five, "Acting Together to Make Change Happen": once participants have developed a tentative scenario of actions, they must decide whether and how to take that scenario into the larger community to engage others (Saunders, 1999: Chap. 6).
In laying out the five-stage process, the authors underscored that they were not proposing a linear process but rather a progression of experiences in which the tasks gradually evolved. It was expected that participants' minds would wash back and forth over the stages as they rethought earlier judgments in light of new interactions, revisited premises in light of new insights, or tackled new aspects of a problem. This was also seen as a framework flexible enough to be adapted to different cultural traditions and problems.
The first test of the newly conceptualized five-stage process began in March 1993 when three Americans and three Russians from the Dartmouth Conference Regional Conflicts Task Force began a dialogue process at the height of the civil war that had broken out after independence in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. Participants represented most of the principal factions in the civil war. Five meetings were held in 1993, six in 1994, six in 1995 and 36 in all by the tenth anniversary in 2003. That experience not only tested successfully the usefulness of the five- stage conceptualization but also demonstrated that conceptualization of the dialogue process made possible its transfer from one conflict to another.