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Learning Objectives:After studying the material in this unit, students should:
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Introduction "The reasons which have led us to this enterprise may be summed up in two propositions. The first is that by far the most important practical problem facing the world today is that of international
relations - more specifically the prevention of global war. The second is that if intellectual progress is to be made in this area, the study of international relations must be made an interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing
its discourse from all the social sciences and even further." In this unit we describe the historical evolution of conflict resolution. It started in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, when the development of nuclear weapons and the conflict between the superpowers seemed to threaten human survival. A group of pioneers from different disciplines saw the value of studying conflict as a general phenomenon, with similar properties whether it occurs in international relations, domestic politics, industrial relations, communities, families or between individuals. They saw the potential of applying approaches that were evolving in management, industrial relations, social work, social psychology, international relations, communications and systems theory to conflicts in general, including civil and international conflicts. A handful of individuals in North America and Europe began to establish research groups, formal centres in academic institutions and professional journals to develop the new ideas during these early years. However, they were not taken very seriously. The international relations profession had its own categories for understanding international conflict, and did not welcome the interlopers. Nor was the combination of analysis and practice implicit in the new ideas easy to reconcile with traditional scholarly institutions or the traditions of practitioners such as diplomats and politicians. Nevertheless, the new ideas attracted interest, and the field grew and spread during the 1970s and 1980s. The number of scholarly journals and institutions rapidly increased. The field developed its own subdivisions, with different groups studying international crises, internal wars, social conflicts and approaches ranging from negotiations and mediation to experimental games. We describe the development of conflict resolution firstly by reviewing the early roots of the field in peace research and non-violence movements. Secondly, we identify individuals who have contributed strategically to the development of the theory and practice of conflict resolution, whom we take as exemplars of key developments. These include Mahatma Gandhi among the precursors; Kenneth Boulding, Johan Galtung and John Burton among the founders; and Herbert Kelman, Roger Fisher, William Ury, Adam Curle and Elise Boulding among those who carried the subject forward thereafter. Needless to say, many others also played important roles. The selections are intended to be illustrative rather than comprehensive.
Early peace research Sorokin was a professor of Sociology in Russia, but following a dispute with Lenin in 1922, he left for the USA where he founded the Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930. The third volume of his four volume Social and Cultural Dynamics, published in the late 1930s, contained an analysis of war including a statistical survey of warfare since the sixth century BC. Both Wright and Richardson referred to Sorokin's work, but he had a limited influence otherwise. Richardson was born into a prominent Quaker family in Newcastle in the north of England. He worked for the Meteorological Office, but served from 1913 to the end of the war with the Friend's Ambulance Unit in France. His experience in the war, his background in science and mathematics and his growing interest in the new field of psychology all combined to lead him to research into the causes of war. He took a second degree in psychology in the late 1920s and he spent much time in the 1930s developing his arms race model. During the Second World War he decided to retire from his post as Principal of Paisley Technical College in order to devote his time to his peace research. He compiled a catalogue of all conflicts he could find information on since 1820 and by the middle of the 1940s he had collated his various studies. These were not published, however, until after his death when Quincy Wright (with whom Richardson had entered into correspondence in his later years) and other academics succeeded in having them issued in two volumes (Arms and Insecurity and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, 1960). Philip Quincy Wright was a professor of political science at the University of Chicago from 1923, becoming professor of international law from 1931. He produced his monumental A Study of War after sixteen years of comprehensive research, which was initiated in 1926. This study was one of the first attempts to make an empirical synthesis of the variety of factors related to the historical incidence of war, and was a significant influence on early thinking about the causes and prevention of war. In related fields other important pioneering work was being done which would later be drawn upon to enrich conflict resolution. Prominent here was the thinking of Mary Parker Follett in the field of organisational behaviour and labour-management relations. Advocating a mutual gains approach to negotiation, associated with what was called integrative bargaining , as against the traditional concession/convergence approach associated with distributive bargaining, she anticipated much of the later problem-solving agenda. Whereas distributive bargaining assumes concealment, inflated initial demands and zero-sum contexts, the integrative bargaining advocated in the mutual gains approach tries to redefine the negotiation as a shared problem to be resolved. Pooling knowledge and resources and looking to maximise mutual gain is seen to yield greater payoffs to all parties.
Non-violent activism Many people regard Mahatma Gandhi and his movement to win India's independence from Britain as an important inspiration for modern ideas about constructive conflict management. The objectives of Gandhi's satyagraha ('struggle for truth') were to make latent conflict manifest by challenging social structures which were harmful because they were highly inequitable, but to do this without setting off a spiral of violence. In the Gandhian model of conflict, which contains within it built-in inhibitors of violence, the objective is not to win, but to achieve a higher level of social truth and a healthier relationship between the antagonists. Gandhi was a strong voice for non-violence (ahimsa) in conflict resolution, perhaps exemplified by his famous quote, "bring your opponent to his senses, not to his knees." Modern conflict resolution theory owes much to his successful struggle to overcome injustice while remaining faithful to pacifist values. Buddhism has also had an important influence on the theory and practice of conflict resolution. Conflict resolution scholars such as Johan Galtung and Adam Curle have applied insights from Buddhism in their thinking about the transformation of violent conflict into peaceful social relations. Buddhist teachings locate the deepest roots of conflict in the perceptions, values and attitudes of conflictants. While this does not ignore what Gandhi would have seen as oppressive structures, it does direct the peacemaker to focus on gaining self-awareness and developing self-knowledge.
Galtung (1981) articulated the distinction between direct violence (children are murdered), structural violence (children die through poverty) and cultural violence (whatever blinds us to this or seeks to justify it). We end direct violence by changing conflict behaviours, structural violence by removing structural injustices and cultural violence by changing attitudes. To this can be added his further distinction between negative and positive peace, the former characterised by the absence of direct violence, the latter by the overcoming of structural and cultural violence as well. He saw the range of peace research reaching out beyond war prevention to encompass study of the conditions for peaceful relations between the dominant and the exploited, rulers and ruled, men and women, western and non-western cultures, humankind and nature. Central here was the search for positive peace in the form of human empathy, solidarity and community, the priority of addressing 'structural violence' in peace research by revealing and transforming structures of imperialism and oppression, and the importance of searching for alternative values in non-western cosmologies such as Buddhism. Another influential idea attributed to Galtung is the conflict triangle, which we discuss in Unit 1. He was also the first to make an analytical distinction between three tasks which could be undertaken by the international community in response to conflict: peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding (1975). These have been adopted by the United Nations to describe the differences between varieties of intervention operations undertaken at different stages of conflict. We discuss peacekeeping and peacemaking in Unit 5, and peacebuilding in Unit 6.
Boulding's publications have focused firmly on the issue of preventing war, partly because of the failures of the discipline of international relations. His book Conflict and Defense advanced the thesis of the decline or obsolescence of the nation state, while Perspectives on the Economics of Peace argued that conventional prescriptions from international relations were unable even to recognise, let alone analyse, the consequences of this obsolescence. If war was the outcome of inherent characteristics in the sovereign state system then it might be prevented, in Boulding's view, by a reform of international organisation and by the development of a research and information capability. Data collection and processing could enable the advance of scientific knowledge about the build up of conflicts, to replace the inadequate insights available through standard diplomacy. For example, the first issue of the JCR in March 1957 included an article by Quincy Wright proposing a 'project on a world intelligence centre', anticipating what has more recently come to be called early warning and conflict prevention. For Boulding in these formative years, conflict resolution meant the development of a knowledge base in which 'social data stations' would emerge, forming a system analogous to a network of weather stations. These centres could gather a range of social, political and economic data and produce indicators of social temperature and pressure and predict 'cold or warm fronts' in social relations. One of Boulding's most influential ideas has to do with the concept of power. In everyday usage, the term 'power' is ambiguous. On the one hand it means the power to command, order, enforce - coercive or hard power . On the other it means the power to induce co-operation, to legitimise, to inspire - persuasive or soft power. Hard power has always been important in violent conflict, but soft power may be more important in conflicts managed peacefully. Boulding (1989) calls the former threat power ('do what I want or I will do what you don't want'). Following earlier theorists of management-labour negotiations, he distinguishes between two forms of soft power: exchange power, associated with bargaining and the compromising approach ('do what I want and I will do what you want'), and integrative power, associated with persuasion and transformative long-term problem-solving ('together we can do something that is better for both of us'). Conflict resolvers try to shift emphasis away from the use of threat power and towards the use of exchange and integrative power (see Box 6). Third parties, like politicians and governments, may use all these forms of power.
This was linked to attempts to co-ordinate international study through the formation of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), which held its first conference at Groningen in Holland in 1965. At the same time, during 1965 and 1966, Burton began to develop his theories about the use of controlled communication, or the problem-solving method , in international conflict. This resulted in the formation in 1966 of the Centre for the Analysis of Conflict established under the Directorship of Burton and based at University College, London. Burton later spent a period in the mid-1980s at the University of Maryland, where he assisted Edward Azar with the formation of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management. Azar and Burton developed the concept of protracted social conflict, an important part of an emerging overall theory of international conflict, combining both domestic-social and international dimensions and focused at a hybrid level between interstate war and purely domestic unrest. This model anticipated much of the re-evaluation of international relations thinking that has taken place since the end of the Cold War. Burton made ambitious claims for this new approach in conflict analysis and conflict resolution, describing it as a decisive paradigm shift. What made it possible to unlock these intractable conflicts for Burton was above all the application of needs theory through the problem-solving approach. Needs theory holds that deep-rooted conflicts are caused by the denial of one or more basic human needs, such as security, identity, and recognition. Needs, being non-material, cannot be traded or satisfied by power bargaining. However, crucially, non-material human needs are not scarce resources (like territory or oil or minerals might be) and are not necessarily in short supply.
Three groups of scholar-practitioners were involved in the development of the theory and practice of problem-solving workshops: a group based at University College, London, a group at Yale University and later, a group at Harvard University. Initially referred to as controlled communication, the first attempt to apply the problem-solving method was in two workshops organised by the London group. The workshop in 1965 was designed to address aspects of the conflict between Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. In 1966 a workshop was held to address the problems between the Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus. One of the facilitators at the second workshop was Herbert C. Kelman, a leading social psychologist and conflict resolution scholar who later formed the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Harvard University. Kelman went on to become one of the leading practitioner-scholars of the problem-solving method over the following thirty years, specialising in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kelman's long-standing series of Arab-Israeli interactive problem-solving workshops (1974-91) had an important influence on the eventual conclusion of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Many of the individuals involved in these workshops became the chief negotiators on both sides when the negotiations became official in 1991. Kelman has followed up this process with a series of 'para-negotiation' workshops (1991-93), and `post-negotiation´ workshops, facilitating 54 workshops in all so far. The following components are usually understood to be part of a 'facilitated problem-solving' workshop: 1. Participants are influential but non-official figures from the conflicting communities. 2. The facilitators are knowledgeable academics, whose role is to structure the discussion and feed in information from their general experience and knowledge of conflict, but to fundamentally allow the conflictants to determine the outcome of the workshop. 3. The meetings are confidential and non-binding, allowing creative options to be explored. They are seen to contribute to official-level negotiations but in no way substitute for them. 4. Participants are encouraged to listen without judgement to each other's needs, concerns and perspectives. 5. Misperceptions and misunderstandings are cleared up, enabling the disputants to acquire new insights into each other's goals, intentions and fears. 6. The conflict is jointly explored and analysed, producing creative, win-win options that meet everyone's needs. 7. These new understandings are then (hopefully) fed into the policy formation process. This technique was used in a growing number of centres throughout the 1970s and 1980s for a variety of goals, including the facilitators' own research or for educational or training purposes. The approach has its drawbacks, including very difficult questions of ethics and evaluation, but nevertheless there now exists a whole cluster of approaches known variously as interactive conflict resolution, third party consultation, process-promoting workshops and facilitated dialogues, which use many of the essential characteristics of the problem-solving approach. Harvard has continued to be at the forefront of the study of negotiation and conflict resolution. The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School involves a consortium of academic centres, and, in an authentic conflict resolution vein, draws from a range of disciplines including politics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and international relations, as well as labour relations, community negotiations and public planning. We noted in unit one the distinction between positions and interests, which is central to the principled negotiation approach developed at Harvard. The program has had a fundamental impact on the study of negotiation in international conflict, introducing the win-win, problem-solving and mutual gain vocabulary of conflict resolution through the work of Roger Fisher and William Ury. This has been popularised through their best-selling title Getting to Yes (1981) and more recently through the quarterly Negotiation Journal.
Adam Curle's work is an illustration both of the applied nature of conflict resolution and of the crucial link between academic theory and practice. It also provides one example of an approach to Track II diplomacy, in which non-official citizens attempt to affect a conflict by establishing links with counterparts in conflict-affected communities or countries. In the Middle (1987) identifies four elements to his mediation process, inspired by the values and experiences of Quaker practice as well as Curle's experiences in the field and his background in humanistic psychology: 1. building, maintaining and improving communications; 2. providing information to and between the conflict parties; 3. 'befriending' the conflict parties; 4. encouraging what he refers to as 'active mediation,' that is to say cultivating a willingness to engage in co-operative negotiation. In recent years Curle has become involved in peacebuilding work in Croatia at the Osijek Centre for Peace, Non-violence and Human Rights. This work has caused him to radically revise his thinking about the role of mediation in conflict resolution. We discuss the work of the Osijek Centre in more detail in Unit 4: Peacebuilding from below).
Boulding was also an early exponent of the idea of civil society, of opening up new possibilities for a global civic culture which was receptive to the voices of people who were not part of the traditional discourses of nation-state politics. In doing so, she anticipated many of the preoccupations of conflict resolution workers today. Women and children were obviously excluded groups, but she added to these the idea that global civic culture needed to accommodate many other cultural communities that were not heard in the existing international order. For Elise Boulding, the next half of our 200-year present, that is the next one hundred years from the 1980s, contains within it the basis for a world civic culture and peaceful problem-solving among nations, but also for the possibility of Armageddon. The development of indigenous and international citizens' networks could be one way of ensuring that the former prevailed. For Elise Boulding, peace making demands specific 'craft and skills,' which must be taught so that more and more people begin to deal with conflict from an integrative standpoint. In the relationships which make up social and political life, as well as in the structures and institutions in which they are embedded, the success with which these skills are encouraged and operationalised will determine whether, in the end, we are 'peace-makers' or 'war-makers'. Boulding is still one of the most dynamic advocates of peace education and conflict resolution, and has had a large role in bringing these issues to the prominence they enjoy today.
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© 2000, Centre for Conflict Resolution |
