Lan Bui-Wrzosinska

Rethinking Intractable Conflict: The Perspective of Dynamical Systems

Intractable conflicts are demoralizing. Beyond destabilizing the families, communities, or international regions in which they occur, they tend to perpetuate the very conditions of misery and hate that contributed to them in the first place. Although the common factors and processes associated with intractable conflicts have been identified through research, they represent an embarrassment of riches for theory construction. Thus, the current task in this area is integrating these diverse factors into an account that provides a coherent perspective yet allows for prediction and a basis for conflict resolution in specific conflict settings. We suggest that the perspective of dynamical systems provides such an account. This article outlines the key concepts and hypotheses associated with this approach. It is organized around a set of basic questions concerning intractable conflict for which the dynamical perspective offers fresh insight and testable propositions. The questions and answers are intended to provide readers with basic concepts and principles of complexity and dynamical systems that are useful for rethinking the nature of intractable conflict and the means by which such conflict can be transformed.

Peace is in Movement: A Dynamical Systems Perspective on the Emergence of Peace in Mozambique

The Mozambique peace process is one of the most promising cases of an intervention strategy that transformed a protracted, intractable conflict into a resilient social system of sustainable peace. After 16 years of extremely violent civil war, a series of semi-official interventions led to a successful transition to peace in 1992, much to the surprise of the international community. This article uses the dynamical systems perspective to explore how the escalation, maintenance, and transformation of the Mozambican conflict may be understood and systematized. First, this article analyzes how the social system lost its adaptability after the country had gained independence, and illustrates how a strong enmity system was created and maintained in the country. This article discusses how various counterintuitive conflict transformation initiatives changed the political landscape and promoted the re-establishment of adaptive functions of the social system, moving Mozambique from war toward peace. This article an...

Attracted to conflict : dynamic foundations of destructive social relations

Overview: Conflict in Human Experience.- Origins: The Promise of Dynamical Systems Theory.- Foundations: The Dynamical Perspective on Social Processes.- Patterns: Trajectories of Conflict.- Traps: Intractable Conflict as a Dynamical System.- Escape: How Intractable Conflicts Can Be Transformed.- Sustainability: The Dynamics of Enduring Peace.- Epilogue: Conflict in the 21st Century.- Design for Workshops on the Application of Dynamical Systems to Intractable Conflict.- Simulation of Attractor Dynamics.- References.- Author Index.- Subject Index.

Dynamical Foundations of Intractable Conflict: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue conceptualizes and investigates intractable social conflict from the perspective of dynamical social psychology. This approach represents a distillation of the concepts, methods, and tools associated with dynamical systems and complexity science that were initially developed in mathematics and the natural sciences. In this article, we provide an overview of the dynamical perspective on conflict, identify the key concepts that are directly relevant to understanding how conflict can transform from constructive to destructive, and suggest how an understanding of the dynamical bases of conflict can be used to resolve conflicts that appear intractable. We conclude by providing brief overviews of the other articles in the special issue.

Sustainable Peace: A Dynamical Systems Perspective

The complex, dynamic nature of the interplay between conflict and peace requires a set of interpretative and analytic tools that are designed to capture complex dynamic processes. Indeed, the efficacy of attempts to establish sustainable peace is contingent on the employment of such tools. In this chapter, we first discuss the basic distinctions identified in peace research that are relevant to the dynamic and structural properties of peace. We then we outline the essence of the dynamical systems theory (DST) approach to social sciences and its relevance for integrating existing conceptual frameworks in the peace literature. We emphasize the notion of attractors, which plays a critical role in the characterization of dynamical systems. The attractor concept is especially useful for understanding the interplay between structural and dynamic characteristics of peace. We conclude by suggesting practical implications of the approach as well as some new research questions.

Studying Trajectories of Conflict Escalation

The present chapter describes research in progress which is developing a simple, replicable methodology aimed at identifying the regularities and specificity of human behavior in conflict escalation and de-escalation processes. These research efforts will ultimately be used to study conflict dynamics across cultures. The experimental data collected through this methodology, together with case-studies, and aggregated, time-series macro data are key for identifying relevant parameters, systems’ properties, and micro-mechanisms defining the behavior of naturally occurring conflict escalation and de-escalation dynamics. This, in turn, is critical for the development of realistic, empirically supported computational models. The article outlines the theoretical assumptions of Dynamical Systems Theory with regard to conflict dynamics, with an emphasis on the process of conflict escalation and de-escalation. Work on a methodology for the empirical study of escalation processes from a DST perspective is outlined. Specifically, the development of a progressive scenario methodology designed to map escalation sequences, together with an example of a preliminary study based on the proposed research paradigm, is presented. Implications of the approach for the study of culture are discussed.

Overview: Conflict in Human Experience

This is a book about conflict. But it is also a book about essential features of human nature that are expressed in every type of human interaction. In an even broader sense, this is a book about the basic processes that link conflict to a vast array of phenomena in the physical world. These seem like incompatible agendas. Conflict is not the only way humans interact, after all, and the conflicts that define human interactions would seem to have little in common with things like weather patterns, landslides, or bacterial growth. But as we shall see, science in recent years has exposed a set of basic operating rules that connect processes of all kinds in physical and social reality. This synthetic view is more than an abstraction; to the contrary, breakthroughs in mathematics, empirical methodology, and computer simulations have enabled scientists to identify the ways in which common processes and properties are manifest in very different phenomena. Our aim is to describe this new perspective and shine its concepts, methods, and tools on the recurrent and all-important issue of conflict in interpersonal, intergroup, and international relations.

Foundations: The Dynamical Perspective on Social Processes

The preceding chapters have established the rationale for reframing the essential features of conflict in terms of the principles, metaphors, and methods of dynamical systems. As emphasized in Chap. 2, however, this reframing would be impossible without the accumulated insights and evidence provided by the study of peace and conflict and by the principles of interpersonal and intergroup experience established in social psychology. It is through the interaction of these elements—peace and conflict studies, social psychology, and dynamical systems—that the emergence of a dynamical perspective on conflict can even be envisioned, let alone developed and verified. Our aim in this chapter is to provide a broad outline of this emergent product.

Origins: The Promise of Dynamical Systems Theory

The dynamical systems approach to conflict is relatively new, but it has deep roots in other orientations and research agendas. Particularly noteworthy are three very distinct areas of inquiry with equally distinct historical pedigrees: peace and conflict studies, social psychology, and complexity science. As the John Whiting quote implies, each of these traditions is valuable yet limited, focusing attention on particular aspects of the phenomenon, often at the expense of others. Considered together, however, these three lenses impose structure on the “chaos” of conflict, enabling the emergence of a unique and coherent perspective on the development, maintenance, and resolution of conflict in interpersonal, intergroup, and international relations.

Escape: How Conflicts Can Be Transformed

Kurt Lewin (1948) famously observed, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” This simple statement captures a truism regarding the interplay of understanding, prediction, and control that characterizes every area of science. Predicting how a phenomenon will be manifest under different conditions, let alone controlling the process, is intimately linked to a coherent and generalized understanding of the phenomenon at issue. Humans, after all, did not land on the moon or send satellites to other planets by focusing on how to do these things. Space exploration would have remained a flight of fancy had it not been for several centuries of scientific concern with basic principles of physics and chemistry. This realization is relevant to the understandable concern people have for resolving the difficult and protracted conflicts that characterize interpersonal, inter-group, and international relations in today’s world. Practitioners are motivated to tackle such conflicts head-on, but their likelihood of success is ultimately constrained by the degree of scientific understanding concerning far more basic and mundane aspects of psychology.