Distance Learning Course: New Developments in Conflict Resolution

Unit 3: New Developments in Conflict Resolution

The failure to fulfil the optimistic expectations for peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding—which the UN Secretary General had proclaimed (in his Agenda for Peace in 1992) to be achievable objectives of a post-Cold War United Nations system—has provoked a revision of thinking about conflict management and resolution. Recently, the field of conflict resolution has come under increasing scrutiny from critical social theory, from the pragmatic perspective of field workers in the UN system and humanitarian agencies of various kinds, and from practitioner-scholars working within the tradition of conflict resolution who wish to strengthen its concepts and practices. In this unit we explore some of these recent developments, with particular attention to the voices and experiences of people who have struggled in conflict-affected communities to affirm values of justice, peace and reconciliation.

Learning Objectives:

Become familiar with some of the critiques of conflict resolution theory and the ways in which these have been addressed.
Understand the importance of culture and gender in a complete view of conflict and conflict resolution.
Develop your understanding of the conceptual underpinnings of current thinking about best practice in conflict interventions.

1. Contingency and complementarity

Social conflicts are complex processes composed of many elements, each of which needs to be addressed if we are to understand and resolve them. The nature of the constituencies involved, the interests of the parties, the belief systems, the perceptions, the relationships, and the needs involved in the conflict must all be dealt with. Because there are so many elements to be addressed, it is unlikely that any one approach to conflict resolution will be able to deal with all of them. This insight gave rise to the idea in the early 1990s that effective conflict resolution required a complex set of responses.

Ronald Fisher and Loreleigh Keashly have developed the "contingency-complementarity" model of conflict resolution. They propose a four-stage model of conflict escalation, each stage having its own characteristics, and a recommended matching intervention strategy (summarised in Box 7 below). They point out that there is a range of possible peacemaking strategies, including conciliation, mediation, negotiation, arbitration, problem-solving and peacekeeping. The appropriate type of intervention is contingent (dependent) upon the stage of escalation or de-escalation that the conflict has reached.

For example, a peacekeeping intervention to control the outright violence of the destruction phase of conflict should be followed up by a programme of third party involvement that assists the parties, through mediation, conciliation and other interventions, to move back down through the stages of escalation. Fisher and Keashly also propose that the use of multiple interventions at different levels (unofficial/ non-governmental and official/ governmental) and stages will be complementary; that is, they will work better than one single strategy to de-escalate the conflict. Their work has reinforced the idea that conflict resolution should not involve simple 'one-dimensional' procedures, whether they be mediation initiatives or problem-solving workshops, but should involve multi-track interventions (we discuss this in more detail in the next section).

In the case of a civil war with ethnic or religious dimensions, it might be appropriate to first quell the violence with a powerful mediator, such as a governmental representative from a major power, who can offer rewards and punishments to the parties in order to pressure them to agree. Such an agreement will not last very long, however, without an improvement in the relationship between the parties. The complementary strategy would offer to follow the coercive intervention up with softer mediation or a problem-solving approach so that the disputants can improve their relationship and resolve the root causes of the conflict. In this model, third parties have a much deeper and more sustained relationship with the conflict and the disputants. We discuss an example of this sort of strategy in the case study on Croatia later in this unit.

There is a danger that models like this reduce conflict and third party intervention to static, predictable processes. We must keep in mind that each conflict has unique characteristics and the choice of intervention strategy must be guided by an informed analysis of the particular conflict, not matched to an idealised stage of conflict as if one was using a cookbook.

Additional Reading


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