Peter T. Coleman

Characteristics of Protracted, Intractable Conflict: Toward the Development of a Metaframework-I

Protracted, intractable conflicts mark a new research frontier in the field of conflict studies. These intense, inescapable conflicts over issues such as critical resources, identity, meaning, justice, and power are complex, traumatic, and often resist even the most serious attempts at resolution. But why are they intractable? What characteristics distinguish intractable conflicts from more tractable, resolvable conflicts? Scholars have begun to identify a diverse array of interrelated factors. This article is the first in a three-part series that presents a metaframework for protracted, intractable conflict: a broad conceptual framework for theory building and intervention. This article begins the series by outlining the unique characteristics and challenges posed by conflict in this domain.

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.

Introduction Intractable Conflict: New Perspectives on the Causes and Conditions for Change

Past approaches to the study of intractable conflict focus on a variety of variables that contribute to and sustain destructive social systems. Although rich in case analyses, the extant literature often treats these variables in situ and typically disassociated from each other. This special issue examines the causes and conditions of intractable conflicts through exploring relationships among complex processes. This introduction presents an overview of the articles in this issue and draws from them to illustrate how the processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization relate to intractable conflicts.Past approaches to the study of intractable conflict focus on a variety of variables that contribute to and sustain destructive social systems. Although rich in case analyses, the extant literature often treats these variables in situ and typically disassociated from each other. This special issue examines the causes and conditions of intractable conflicts through exploring relationships among complex processes. This introduction presents an overview of the articles in this issue and draws from them to illustrate how the processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization relate to intractable conflicts.

Intractable Conflict as an Attractor: Presenting a Dynamical Model of Conflict, Escalation, and Intractability

Decades of research on social conflict has contributed to our understanding of a variety of key psychological, social, and community-based aspects of conflict escalation and intractability. However, the field has yet to put forth a formal theoretical model that links these components to the basic underlying mechanisms that account for intractability and transformation. This paper presents such a model: a dynamical-systems model of intractable conflict. We propose that it is particularly useful to conceptualize ongoing, destructive patterns of intractable conflict as strong attractors: a particular form of self-organization of multiple elements of conflict systems, including psychological, social, and community-level factors. Our dynamical model of conflict intractability is specified, and some preliminary implications of this approach for conflict de-escalation are discussed.

Psychological components of sustainable peace

Introduction.- Effective Cooperation, the Foundation of Sustainable Peace.- Constructive Conflict Resolution and Sustainable Peace.- Creative Problem Solving: Not Just About the Problem.- Transforming Communication for Peace.- LIF PLUS: the life-improving force of peaceful language use.- The Role of Equality in Negotiation and Sustainable Peace.- Sustaining Peace through Psychologically Informed Policies: The Geohistorical Context of Malaysia.- Justice, Activity, and Narrative: Studying of the World March for Peace and Nonviolence.- Gender and Sustainable Peace.- The Psychodynamics of Peace.- Culture of Peace.- Reconciliation between Groups, the Prevention of Violence, and Lasting Peace.- Sustainable Peace: A Dynamical Systems Perspective.- Fostering Global Citizenship.- A Framework for Thinking about a Global Community.- Education for Sustainable Peace: Practices, Problems and Possibilities.- The Essence of Peace: Towards a Comprehensive and Parsimonious Model of Sustainable Peace.

Beyond the Ivory Towers Organizational Power Practices and a“Practical” Critical Postmodernism

The aim of this article is to consider how the important insights offered by critical management studies (CMS) can be made more accessible to wider audiences and used to inform organizational practice. The authors start by briefly discussing the main ideals and aims of CMS, touching on the heterogeneity of the field and focusing on the issues that CMS scholars have had to address to find receptive ears among non-CMS scholars and practitioners. They then proceed to suggest how CMS may become better able to reach those audiences by offering more accessible concepts and methodologies. The notion of organizational power practices is introduced as a way to facilitate that task by making CMS-inspired investigation of power more accessible and relevant to everyday organizational concerns.

Emotional intractability: gender, anger, aggression and rumination in conflict

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how peoples gender‐role identities (self‐identified masculinity and femininity) affect their perceptions of the emotional role of the humiliated victim in conflicts (and the norms surrounding the role), and how these perceptions affect the negativity and aggressiveness of their responses and the degree to which they ruminate over conflict and remain hostile over time.Design/methodology/approach – This paper builds on literature on humiliation, aggression, gender, and rumination and presents a correlational scenario study with 96 male graduate students from a large Northeastern University.Findings – Males with high‐masculine gender‐role identities are more likely to perceive the social norms surrounding a humiliating conflictual encounter as privileging aggression, and to report intentions to act accordingly, than males with high‐feminine gender‐role identities. Furthermore, participants are more likely to ruminate about the conflict, and therefore mai...

Social Entrepreneurs and Constructive Change: The Wisdom of Circumventing Conflict

Ashoka Fellows—social entrepreneurs—often operate in a context of conflict as they challenge critical social problems that are seemingly hopeless and unsolvable. This article presents the strategies they employ, such as building new positive attractors (i.e., social capital) outside the field of influence of the conflict attractors; as a next step, they build a feedback loop between the success of their initiatives and reinforcement of social capital. Through subsequent positive experiences, they introduce constructive change outside of the field of conflict in a manner that modifies the societal balance based on higher levels of trust and tendencies to cooperate. Through this strategy, they make conflict less relevant and less salient. Several case studies are presented as illustrations of this approach, and general principles are identified.

Putting the peaces together: a situated model of mediation

Purpose – Research on conflict mediation presents a scattered, piecemeal understanding of what determines mediators’ strategies and tactics and ultimately what constitutes successful mediation. This paper presents research on developing a unifying framework – the situated model of mediation – that identifies and integrates the most basic dimensions of mediation situations. These dimensions combine to determine differences in mediator’s strategies that in turn influence mediation processes and outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – The approach used by this paper was twofold. First, the existing empirical literature was reviewed on factors that influence mediator’s behaviors. Based on the findings of this review, a survey study was conducted with experienced mediators to determine the most fundamental dimensions of mediation situations affecting mediators’ behaviors and mediation processes and outcomes. The data were analyzed through exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis. Findings – The resu...

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.