Fora Topics - Combined

FD1 - Delegitimization

This question grows out of Daniel Bar-Tal's essay on Deletimization and Heidi Burgess's "Current Implications" section accompanying that essay that explores the deligitimization that was demonstrated over the August 12-13 weekend with the White Nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA and the aftermath which continues to unfold.

How might this conflict --between the White Supremacists and their opponents in the U.S. be de-escalated?  Certainly it would be nice if the White Supremacists would follow Bar-Tal's precriptions to 1) legitimize their opponents, 2) equalize them, 3) differentiate them and 4) peronalize them.  But can and should their opponents --people of color and Jews particularly-- but also moderate and liberal White males--take those steps with relation to the White Supremacists?  

What happens if they do?  What happens if they don't?  Is Bar-Tal right to suggest that these actions need to go both ways? (Or is he not suggesting that?)

Discussion 3: Business as Usual in the Conflict Field

In several of our "Business-As-Usual" posts, I assert that the conflict resolution field is still working with strategies that were designed for small-scale, relatively simple conflicts.  There is a tendency to fall back on a few standard approaches (for instance interest-based bargaining and consensus-building), even in situations where they are not at all appropriate.  There also is a tendency to avoid what we refer to as the "scale up" problem.  In other words, the assumption is made that is a change can be created at a table with 20 people around it, all you need to do is hold many similar discussions with other groups of 20, and the problem will be solve or at least transformed.  

  1. If you agree with our assertion that business-as-usual assumptions are preventing our field from being successful in intractable conflicts, what assumptions do you see that are most problematic?  How do they need to be altered?
  2. What actions or activities do you see among scholars and/or practitioners that are preventing us from successfully grappling with the most difficult conflicts? How might they be altered?

Do you know of anyone who is doing a particularly good job and reframing conflict strategies to better address intractable conflicts?  Who are they and what are they doing?  (It's okay to brag about yourself here if you are challenging "business-as-usual approaches." 

How Do We Build Peace and Resolve Conflict in the Age of Hyper-Partisanship and Donald Trump?

Inaugural Discussion Topic

Many of us in the conflict resolution and peacebuilding fields have spent decades traveling the world advising people on how they should handle the deeply intractable conflicts that have torn their societies apart (often in extremely violent ways that have left a terrible legacy of unrightable wrongs). Now we are witnessing similarly deep divisions within the U.S. and Europe, fortunately, so far, without large-scale violence. Even without widespread violence, however, these divisions are preventing effective governance (perhaps even destroying democracy), sowing hate and fear, and threatening almost everything peacebuilders generally hold dear both in the U.S. and around the world.

For those of us based in the United States (and other countries facing similar problems) this raises an obvious question:  How can we better apply what we already know to our own conflicts—and what more do we need to learn? 

​In other words, how many of the ideas and processes that we have been advocating for and applying abroad can be applied at home? 

  • For those ideas that seem applicable, how can we get these processes going—and thriving? 
  • For those ideas that don’t seem like they’ll work, can they be modified and improved in ways that do apply here?
  • If we think they can’t, what changes need to be made to accomplish peacebuilding on our home turf?  And how do we start that?

For example, when we are abroad, we advocate that adversaries sit down together in dialogues or problem-solving workshops to diminish negative stereotypes and begin to build positive relationships that will enable mutual understanding, empathy, and problem solving.  How can we get our own right and left together to sit down in a similar way? Will we (who tend to be mostly left-leaning) have the credibility to convene such meetings?  If not, who can?  And how can we get influential people to attend such meetings and spread what they learn outside the workshop context to a large-scale audience?

And are such table-oriented processes enough?  Can we figure out how to scale up these processes so that they diminish polarization, distrust, and disrespect throughout our entire society?

And how do we deal with new neurobiological findings that suggest that some people are biologically pre-disposed to distrust outsiders and new ways of doing things, finding their identity and security in traditions of religion, family, and community, while others are biologically pre-disposed to be mavericks, seeking and thriving on diversity of ideas, people, and environments.  Can these groups learn to understand, respect, and coexist with each other?  How can we use our skills to help bring that about?

If our skills and processes are not up to these tasks, what do we need to do to re-tool to meet our current home-grown challenges?

Lastly, why AREN'T we "walking our talk?"

To be fair, some of us are! 

But more of us, it seems, are not.  Many of us have “joined the resistance,” or have continued to focus our efforts abroad, thinking (perhaps), that other people will take care of the situation at home. But the situation here is getting worse and worse, the damage to U.S. democracy, society, the economy, the environment, and  the international system is growing daily. Joining “the resistance” and pushing just one side of the agenda, we believe, is only making our divide deeper and wider, entrenching our conflict in ever-growing intractability and governmental dysfunction. Isn’t it time we stepped up and intervened to help bring both sides together as we do abroad?  Shouldn’t we work with both sides to improve cross-group communication, understanding, and respect as a way to reinstate effective politics, governance, and problem solving? 

If your answer is yes, how can we get more people to help do that? 

And if your answer is “no,” how else do you think we can get out of the fix we are all in? Is "joining" the resistance the best way we can defend our ideals? If so, how can we make resistance efforts more constructive?

We know these are a lot of questions, but please grab on to one that interests you and share your thoughts! 

To do so, however, you need to log in with your user name and password.  If you don't have one yet, request one here! 

D17 - Conflict Pathologies

What do you think are the most important and treatable conflict pathologies? The things that go wrong? The mistakes that people make, especially mistakes that they, in hindsight, will think of as mistakes?

Please discuss these questions here.

Discussion 16: Neurobiology and Conflict

These questions relate both to Guy's video on Social and Psychological Complexity and Heidi's two videos summarizing Mari Fitzduff's monograph entitled Introduction to Neuroscience for the Peacebuilder. (Part 1 and Part 2.) 

Mari ends her mongraph with ten questions that boil down to "now what?!"  We have a slightly more elaborate version of that basic question, but still less daunting than ten questions, below.

  • What can and should peacebuilders do about the cognitive biases and predispositions described in these three videos?  Particularly,
    • how do we address people's emotional needs as well as their rational interests and needs in our peacebuilding work? And,
    • how can we work within the constraints of non-rational/emotional thinking, rather than engage in a futile effort to convert all thinking to the rational approach?

(If you are so, inclined, we welcome you to address any of Mari's questions instead or as well:  (All of these come from Mari Fitzduff, An Introduction to Neuroscience for the Peacebuilder. 2015.  https://www.academia.edu/10234805/An_Introduction_to_Neuroscience_for_the_Peacebuilder. p. 22.)

1.How comfortable are we at accepting the limitations of a “rational’ approach to peacebuilding?  What are the consequences for our work of acknowledging the primary importance of feelings in conflict contexts?

2.If people have brains that are predisposed differently towards outgroups and new ideas, how do we develop strategies that take account of this in our work?

3.How do we work with groups who are passionately committed to only their own group vision of faith or social ideology? 

4.How do we avoid getting caught up in arguments about the ‘truth’ or ‘facts’ as believed by particular groups?  How can we better understand and respond to what is often behind such arguments?

5.How can we ‘nudge’ our societies into their best inclusive behaviors? How can we decrease our tendencies to fear “the other”?

6.What kind of peace agreements can best deliver on feelings of equity and inclusion, as well as ensuring the quantifiable reality of such agreements on issues of land, rights, participation, etc.

7.How do we change our peacebuilding work so that our strategies can take account of the frailty of our inherited human nature that tends towards fear and exclusion of others – as well as our human capacities for cooperation, altruism and courage?

8.How can we help to create/choose/assist leaders who foster community and structural inclusion rather than divisions?  How can we increase the power of such leaders with their constituents?

9.How would we describe our own predispositons along a conservative/liberal continuum?  Do we have moral feelings of superiority about our particular places on that continuum?  Do we appreciate the need for society to have people at both ends of the continuum?

10.How can we pitch/target our messages and campaigns to different audiences in full awareness of their differing neural dispositions?  How do we frame message about our work so that they appeal to the whole brain, and not just the rational part of it?

D15 - Constructive Management of the Commons

What do you see as promising strategies for promoting “power-with” efforts to govern the commons in ways that advance the common good?

What do you see as promising strategies for promoting a more enlightened view of self-interest – one that protects the commons and everyone from devastating “I’ll fight you for it” conflicts?

D14 - Adopting Systems Approaches to Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution/Transformation

Is there anything we can do the push systems thinking approach further into the thinking and practice of conflict resolution and transformation?  How can we move beyond a level-three understanding of feedback loops to a level seven or eight-level understanding of social systems? Do you have any examples of this being successfully done?

Are you aware of successful (or instructive) efforts to promote the more active involvement of a wider array of citizens in efforts to promote more constructive approaches to conflict (utilizing, however unintentionally) an ecosystem model of conflict response?

D13: Complex Versus Complicated Systems

We started to address the implications of complexity-oriented peacebuilding in a few earlier discussions (see D10, D11, and D12). However, based on this discussion of the difference between complexity and complicated (or even simple) systems, we pose the following three questions:

  • What do you see as the key challenges posed by complexity that we need to address?
  • And, what do you see as promising strategies for meeting those challenges?
  • How can we get people to understand and engage with complex problems in the era of twitter, sound bites, and the common belief that everything can be solved with a chosen "quick fix?" 

D12 - What and Who Did We Miss in this "Literature Review"?

We have two discussion questions that relate to this entire unit. The purpose of this unit is to look at the work of a number of our colleagues who have been working on developing a new systems and complexity-oriented paradigm for peacebuilding.  We do not have the time to explore all the ideas of each of these colleagues, nor have we included summaries of all of the people who have been working in similar areas.  So our two questions for you are:

(1) What other ideas from the people we have talked about have you found to be particularly useful in your work?  Put another way, what are their core ideas that have influenced the way you work or think about conflict problems?

(2) What other people should we include in this "literature review" of the "founders" of the complexity-oriented approach to peacebuilding?  What key ideas of theirs have you found particularly useful or influential?  Can you give us citations to sources that talk about ideas?

D11: How Do We Get Smarter? And What Does That Mean?

A line that Heidi and I have been using since President Trump's election is that we need to learn how to "fight smarter," rather than just "fighting harder."  Many liberals have called for "resistance," and there are daily "calls for actions" of things people are asked to do to "fight harder" for liberal principles than they had before.  But much of that fighting harder is still framing the conflict in ways that play into President Trump's hand (see for instance, George Lakoff's article, "How to Help Trump").  If Trump opponents want to either further liberal values, or -- to our mind, more important -- save democracy, then they will need not only to fight harder, but also fight smarter,  which means, among other things, we think, fighting in ways that minimizes unnecessary backlash as we said in the previous post. 

What else does "fighting smarter" or simply "getting smarter" mean?  How does the peace and conflict field need to "get smarter" to be able to transform or resolve today's intractable conflicts?

And -- do you have ideas about ways we all can use this platform -- of a massive open online seminar -- to pursue such a goal?

What ideas do you think need to be part of the new paradigm that takes us farther than herding cats or peacebuilding? And what do we need to remember to include from older paradigms?

 

In this video, Guy reviews a long series of paradigms that have dominated the peace and conflict field over the years, and suggests that we will be proposing a new one which we refer to as "massively parallel peacebuilding" though which we "cultivate peace" rather than "build it." ("Cultivating" assumes that peace is a characteristic of a complex system, whereas "building" is a term generally used for designed and thus complicated systems.)  

  • If you agree with this conceptualization, that what ideas need to be part of such a paradigm?
  • What elements of older paradigms do we need to retain?
  • If you don't agree with the notion of massively parallel peacebuilding and/or cultivating peace, what new paradigm would you propose to better enable the field to deal with the many highly-intractable conflicts that seem to be proliferating? 

9: Examples of the Backlash Effect -- and Ways to Avoid It.

As explained in the video, the backlash effect is the tendency for people to seek revenge for wrongs done to them or perceived to be done to them.  It is measured by what we call the "backlash coefficient," which is simply the number of enemies (or alternatively, problems) you make in the process of eliminating one existing enemy (or problem).  The video used the example of Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are many more examples, even at the interpersonal level.  A parent can harshly punish a child, but the result of that punishment might not be better behavior, but actually worse behavior as the child seeks revenge for what is seen to be an injustice.  In the business environment, a ruling that was intended to streamline the workflow  can actually hamper it as employees try to undercut the change that they view as unfair, unworkable, or otherwise onerous. At the political level in the United States, we saw the backlash very starkly in the election of Donald Trump.  Although there have been hundreds--maybe thousands--of analyses of what happened to bring that surprising outcome about, certainly one key factor was white middle- and lower-class men (and indeed, many women), seeking revenge against either "liberals" or "the establishment" which they saw as having wronged them (or at least ignored their interests) for many years.

So our questions:

  • Are you aware of other good, well documented, examples of conflicts that were intensified and made more destructive by the backlash effect?
  • More importantly, are you aware of successful (and hopefully well documented) efforts to deal with committed adversaries in ways that do not generate backlash?

Discussion 8: I'll-Fight-You-For-It Rules

This video was created before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, but it seems even more relevant now.  What do you think?

  • Is Guy over-reacting--or is the US and the globe really sliding back into “I’ll fight you for it rules?”
  • If so, what can we do to reverse that slide?  

Discussion 7: Dealing with the Problem of Scale

Most conflict resolution processes are what Guy and I call "table-oriented" processes.  Negotiation, mediation, dialogue, even most consensus-building and problem-solving workshops take place with a relatively few number of people (2-50, say) who can fit around the table.  But most of the intractable conflicts we are considering here involve millions or even hundreds of millions of people.  

Often the assumption is that the people around the table are able to speak for and represent the much larger population involved in and/or affected by the conflict, and that the larger population will "go along with" the results of the negotiation.  But that assumption is often not true.  Not all people and interests are represented, and often the constituents strongly disagree with the agreement if there is one.

At other times, it is assumed that participants in problem-solving workshops or dialogues will change their views of "the other" as well as of the conflict situation, and then they will return to their homes and workplaces and spread those changed views.  That often doesn't happen either. More commonly, participants get back to their home turf and slowly (or sometimes not so slowly) revert to the beliefs and attitudes they had before, due to their environment and pressure from peers.

So, what alternatives are there to grapple more effectively with conflicts that involve thousands or millions of people?  Are there effective ways to "scale up" table-oriented processes?  Or are there other processes entirely that work better at these large scales?

Please share your thoughts -- and if you know of case studies or other descriptions of successful large-scale processes, please share them!

Discussion 6: Should (and if so, how can) one tolerate those who don’t tolerate others?

One of the ironies of the 2016 Presidential election in the United States was that liberals were most alarmed by Donald Trump's apparent intolerance and prejudice towards many groups.  Literature and social media posts advocating acceptance or even love of all groups proliferated.  But the one group that apparently wasn't covered in those pleas was Trump supporters.  Few liberals were willing to include Trump supporters in their circle of support, as they labelled them, as did Hillary Clinton at one point, as "deplorables," and hence not worthy of love or tolerance.  

That is the source of this question:  should one tolerate those who do not tolerate others? Maybe don't even tolerate YOU?

Discussion 5: Balancing Emotion and Reason

The questions we asked in Business-as-Usual Part 5 were the following:

  1. What is the “proper balance” between non-rational and rational drivers of decisions? .
  2. How do we attain that balance within our own decision-making processes?
  3. How do we attain that balance at the group or even national level?

Those questions, and indeed, that video, were made before the presidential election in the United States.  Since that time, much more attention has been focused on several related questions, such as:

  1. Why do some people make decisions that are counter to their own interests?
  2. How can we help people sort out true facts from "fake facts" and propaganda?
  3. How do we persuade people in what is being called the "post-fact" era that facts really do matter?  Or don't they?

Feel free to weigh in on any of these questions, though if possible, indicate which one you are answering.  (We are keeping them all together, however, because there is considerable overlap in content.)

Discussion 4: Taking Blame out of the Red-Blue Divide--and other Similar Conflicts

Business-as-Usual Part 3 discusses what we (and many others) call "the blame game" in which each side defines a conflict in terms of the errors or evil of "the other."  Peacebuilders often urge their clients to reframe their "enemy images" into a more complex understanding of the nature of the conflict.  But do we do this ourselves, when the conflict involves us?  

If you are from the United States, please consider the following two questions: 

  1. How can we reframe our red-blue political conflict in terms of EACH SIDES' contribution (as opposed to playing the blame game)?
  2. What effects would that reframing have on the the relationship between the disputants?  On the conflict system overall?  (For example, on the relationship between liberals and conservatives, on our political discourse, or on the US political system overall?)   

If you are from elsewhere, please consider those two questions in terms of a different identity conflict.  The same issues apply in most of them, we think.

Discussion 2: Fostering Constructive Approaches to Difficult Conflicts

What can we do to foster a more constructive approach for addressing difficult and intractable conflicts?

This is, in some sense, the topic of the entire BMI-MOOS, so we are kind of jumping the gun to ask it now.  But it goes hand-in-hand with the previous question.  If we do get people--either conflict scholars and practitioners or the general public --to take the conflict problem more seriously, what do they do next?  

  1. Adressing conflict professionals: How can we get our field to be taken more seriously and to really get a meaningful voice in policy processes and decisions?
  2. If we do get that "voice," what can we say that would be most effective?
  3. What are the channels through which we can gain the most attention and traction?
  4. How can we spread our conflict attitudes and knowledge more widely through the general population?
  5. What advice do we have for the general public that might really be taken seriously?  (We must do better than advise to "love thyne enemy" or the like because people simply don't.  Even the left--which generally preaches tolerance and acceptance -- of all the races, relgions, lifestyles, etc, isn't very tolerant of folks on the right--who don't accept the level of tolerance that the left believes is right. So we have to get more sophisticated than that--at least that's Guy and Heidi's assertion!) What's yours?

Discussion 1: Taking the Conflict Problem Seriously

How can we get people to realize that our “business-as-usual” approach to conflict is destroying our ability to solve our biggest problems?

This question has two meanings, depending on who you see referred to with the words "people" and "our" in the sentence above.  We actually do mean it in two ways.

Meaning (and Part 1):

The first "people" and "our" refers to those of us in the conflict scholar and professional community.  I assume, since we are in this field, that most of us  know that conflict is important.  But do you agree with Guy's and my (Heidi's)  premise that it is the A#1 most important problem of our time that is preventing us from dealing effectively with almost any other substantive problems?

If you do agree with this formulation, than we'd like to hear your ideas about how we can get more people in our field to step up and start addressing what we call "the intractable conflict challenge." How do we get scholars and practitioners to go beyond their often narrowly-focused efforts on a particular conflict or class of conflicts to look at the way conflict in general is "done" in our societies?  What can we, as conflict scholars and professionals, do to influence the way our leadership and/or the general citizenry views and deals with conflict?  

For instance, in the United States, an increasing number of people seem to think of conflict in absolute win-lose terms.  "Compromise" has turned into a "dirty word," and both sides of the political divide are out for the total win.  One can argue that this is normal in an election season (which is upon us as I write,) but most of the social commentators I read agree (as do we) that these divisions and these win-lose attitudes are not going to go away once the election is over.  Indeed, they might even be intensified!  What can we, as conflict professionals, do to address that very dangerous trend?

If you disagree with our assertion...if you do not see the inability to successfully deal with conflict as the A#1 problem, what role do you see conflict attitudes and skills as playing in our current social, political, economic and/or environmental predicaments?  How might we adjust our "pitch" to make it more accurate?

Meaning (and Part) 2: 

The second meaning of "people" and "our" refers to the general citizenry.  I haven't been reading the sociological literature lately, but certainly the poll data and pundit data suggests that the United States populace is getting increasingly polarized.  A surprisingly high number of people are turning to politicians who offer simple answers to complex problems, and who frame most of the issues in "us versus them" terms. The problem is always caused by "the other," and "the other" is anyone who isn't "us."   Facts seem to matter less and less. And this isn't just one side...it is both the Democrats and the Republicans who are doing this.  Some think that this election particularly has made this trend worse, but again, this election is just highlighting trends that have been around for a long time. So again, we have two questions:

  1. If you agree with this, how do we get people to realize how destructive this sort of thought process is -- and how can we get people to stop, think, and listen to what they and the other side is doing that makes the problem worse?  Then, how do we encourage people to stop doing those things?!
  2. And if you disagree with our assertion, what counter assertion would you make?  Do you think the general public is helping reduce tensions in the United States (or elsewhere)? Can you even just highlight a few people who are doing constructive things?  What are they doing to do so, and how can those constructive actions be further encouraged?

Part 3:

Following up on the thought questions we asked in the video comparing intractable conflicts to climate change, what can the climate change movement teach the conflict resolution community about ways to get people to take the problem seriously?  And how can we avoid creating or encouraging "conflict deniers," similar to "climate-change deniers"?