IMPLICATIONS OF MULTICULTURALISM FOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Developing a multicultural perspective of conflict resolution can improve the provider’s levels of effectiveness in many predictable ways. Pedersen (1997) summarizes a dozen positive advantages of the multicultural perspective for conflict resolution.
1. Recognizing that all behavior is learned and displayed in a cultural context makes possible accurate assessment, meaningful understanding, and appropriate interventions relative to that cultural context. Interpreting behavior out of context is likely to result in misattribution.
2. People who express similar positive expectations or values through different culturally learned behaviors, share the “common ground” that allows them to disagree in their behaviors while sharing the same ultimate positive values. Not everyone who smiles at you is your friend and not everyone who shouts at you is your enemy.
3. By recognizing the thousands of “culture teachers” each of us has internalized—from the friends, enemies, relatives, heroes, heroines, and fantasies—we can better understand the sources of our own identity. As we encounter conflict we are likely to imagine how one or another of our culture teachers might respond and respond accordingly.
4. Just as a healthy ecosystem requires diversity in the gene pool, so a healthy society requires a diversity of cultural perspectives for its psychological health. By considering many different perspectives in problem solving, we are less likely to overlook the right answer.
5. Recognizing our natural tendency to encapsulate ourselves, a multicultural perspective protects us from imposing our self-reference criteria inappropriately by challenging our assumption. We see the dangers of a one-size-fits-all monocultural perspective.
6. Contact with different cultures provides opportunities to rehearse adaptive functioning skills that will help us survive in the diversified global village of the future.
By learning to work with those different from ourselves, we can develop the facility for our own survival.7. Social justice and moral development require the contrasting cultural perspectives of multiculturalism to prevent any one dominant group from holding hostage the standards of justice. Every social system that has imposed the exclusive will of the dominant culture as the measure of just and moral behavior has ended up being condemned by history.
8. By looking at both cultural similarities and differences at the same time, according to a quantum metaphor, it becomes possible to identify nonlinear alternatives to rigidly absolutist thinking. It is not just the content of our thinking but the very process of thinking itself that can become culturally encapsulated.
9. We are able to continue our learning curve to match the rapid social changes around us by understanding all education as examples of culture shock. Education is a journey through many different cultures.
10. Spiritual completeness requires that we complement our own understanding of ultimate reality with the different understandings others have in order to increase our spiritual completeness. All trails do indeed lead to the top of the mountain.
11. The untried political alternative of cultural pluralism provides the only alternative to absolutism on the one hand and anarchy on the other. Our survival in the future will depend on our ability to work with culturally different people.
12. A multicultural perspective will strengthen the relevance and applicability of conflict resolution by more adequately reflecting the complex and dynamic reality in which we all live.
Western and non-Western cultures have become more interdependent as multiculturalism has become more prominent (Liu and Liu, 1999). This multicultural global perspective of reality has replaced a “superpower” dominant monocultural perspective as a point of reference for both consumers and providers of conflict resolution.
The implications of this change have required the redefinition of “competency” to fit a multicultural context both at the domestic and international levels.Identifying Multicultural Competencies
Defining multicultural competencies builds on multicultural theory as the foundation. The ultimate multicultural theory is based on a contextual understanding of sociocultural behavior. To understand human behavior it is important to understand the multicultural context in which that behavior is learned and displayed. Understanding the multicultural context of sociocultural conflict is therefore important to defining professional competence in conflict resolution.
In attempting to provide professional guidelines for multicultural competence, the American Psychological Association has adopted a list of thirty-four multicultural competencies (D. W. Sue, and others, 1998) divided into three dimensions of awareness, knowledge, and skill, which apply to the field multicultural conflict resolution.
Dimension 1: Awareness of one’s own assumptions, values, and biases: Being aware of one’s cultural heritage; being comfortable with differences but aware of one’s limits; knowing about oppression, racism, and discrimination; and being skilled in self-improvement toward a nonracist identity
Dimension 2: Understanding the worldview of the culturally different client: Being aware of emotional reactions toward other racial and ethnic groups, knowing the culture of a client’s population and its influence on society, being skilled in psychological issues from other cultures, and being actively involved with ethnic minority groups
Dimension 3: Developing appropriate intervention strategies and techniques: Being aware of religious and spiritual indigenous mental health resources; knowing how each culture fits with other cultures, institutions, and assessments; and being skilled in providing culturally appropriate services through multicultural conflict resolution