The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  As this happens, the conflicting parties often lose sight of the actual interests underlying their respective positions and the conflict becomes a win-lose one that is not likely to advance the interests of either side. It is not the justifying or giving reasons for your interests that is harmful but rather the claim of moral superiority, with its explicit or implicit moral denigration of the other. Whatever justifying takes place, it should be in the context of full recognition of one another’s equal moral status.

  IMPLICATIONS FOR TRAINING

  There are several important implications here for training in constructive conflict resolution:

  Knowledge of the intimate connection between conflict and injustice has to be imparted. (This chapter is an introduction to the knowledge in this area.)

  Training should help to enlarge the scope of the student’s moral community so that he or she perceives that all people are entitled to care and justice.

  It should help increase empathic capacity so that the student can sense and experience in some measure what the victims of injustice experience.

  Given the nature of the many embittered conflicts between groups that have inflicted grievous harm, we need to develop insight into the processes involved in forgiveness and reconciliation.

  Training should help to develop skill in inventing productive, conflict-resolving combinations of justice principles when they appear to be in conflict.

  Many training programs deal in some measure with the first three implications, but few if any deal with the last two. Before turning to a more extended consideration of the latter implications, I briefly consider the first three.

  Knowledge of Systematic Forms of Injustice in Society

  Some injustices are committed by people with full realization that they are acting unjustly. Most are unwitting participants in a system—a family, community, social organization, school, workplace, society, or world—in which there are established traditions, structures, procedures, norms, rules, practices, and the like that determine how one should act. These traditions, structures, and so on may give rise to profound injustices that are difficult to recognize because they are taken for granted since they are so embedded in a system in which one is thoroughly enmeshed.

  How can we help become aware of systemic injustices? I suggest taking each type of injustice (distributive, procedural, retributive, and morally exclusionary) discussed at the beginning of the chapter and using them to probe the system we wish to examine to heighten awareness of its structural sources of injustice. Illustrations for each type of injustice follow.

  Distributive Injustice.

  Every type of system—from a society to a family—distributes benefits, costs, and harms (its reward systems are a reflection of this). One can examine such benefits as income, education, health care, police protection, housing, and water supplies, and such harms as accidents, rapes, physical attacks, sickness, imprisonment, death, and rat bites, and see how they are distributed among categories of people: males versus females, employers versus employees, whites versus blacks, heterosexuals versus homosexuals, police officers versus teachers, adults versus children. Such examination reveals some gross disparities in distribution of one or another benefit or harm received by the categories of people involved. Thus, blacks generally receive fewer benefits and more harm than whites in the United States. In most parts of the world, female children are less likely than male children to receive as much education or inherit parental property, and they are more likely to suffer sexual abuse.

  Procedural Injustice.

  One can probe a system to determine whether it offers fair procedures to all. Are all categories of people treated with politeness, dignity, and respect by judges, police, teachers, parents, employers, and others in authority? Are some but not others allowed to have voice and representation, as well as adequate information, in the processes and decisions that affect them?

  Retributive and Reparative Injustice.

  Are “crimes” by different categories of people less likely to be viewed as crimes, to result in an arrest, to be brought to trial, to result in conviction, to lead to punishment or imprisonment or the death penalty, and so on? Considerable disparity is apparent between how “robber barons” and ordinary robbers are treated by the criminal justice system, between manufacturers who knowingly sell injurious products to many (obvious instances are tobacco and defective automobiles) and those who negligently cause an accident. Similarly, almost every comparison of the treatment of black and white criminal offenders indicates that if there is a difference, blacks receive worse treatment.

  Moral Exclusion.

  When a system is under stress, are there differences in how categories of people are treated? Are some people likely to lose their jobs, be excluded from obtaining scarce resources, or be scapegoated and victimized? During periods of economic depression, social upheaval, civil strife, and war, frustrations are often channeled to exclude some groups from the treatment normatively expected from others in the same moral community.

  Enlarging the Scope of One’s Moral Community

  The previous discussion of the scope of justice suggests several additional, experientially oriented foci for training. A good place to start is to help students become aware of their own social identities: national, racial, ethnic, religious, class, occupational, gender, sexual, age, community, and social circle. Explore what characteristics they attribute to being American, or white, or Catholic, or female, and so on and what they attribute to contrasting identities, such as being Muslim or black. Help them recognize which of these identities claim an implicit moral superiority and greater privilege in contrast to people who have contrasting identities. Have them reverse roles, assuming an identity that is frequently viewed as morally inferior and less entitled to customary rights and privileges. Then act out, subtly but realistically, how they are treated by those who are now assuming the morally superior and privileged identity. Such exercises help students become more aware of implicit assumptions about their own identity as well as other relevant contrasting identities and more sensitive to the psychological effects of considering others to have identities that are morally inferior and less privileged.

  Intergroup simulations can also be used to give students an experience in which they start developing prejudice, stereotypes, and hostility toward members of competing groups—even as the students have full knowledge that they have been randomly assigned to the groups. Many such experiences can be employed to demonstrate how a moral community is broken down and to illustrate the psychological mechanisms that people employ to justify this hostility toward out-group members.

  It is also useful to give students the experience of how their moral community can expand or contract as a function of temporary events. Thus, research has demonstrated that people are likely to react to a stranger with trust after being exposed by radio broadcasts to “good” news about people (such as acts of heroism, altruism, and helpfulness) and with suspicion after “bad” news (such as murder, rape, robbery, assault, and fraud). By helping students become aware of the temporary conditions, inside as well as outside themselves, that affect the scope of their moral community, they gain the capacity to resist contracting their moral community under adverse conditions.

  Increasing Empathy

  Empathic concern allows you to sympathetically imagine how someone else feels and put yourself in his or her place. It is a core component of helpful responsiveness to another. It is most readily aroused for people with whom we identify, with those we recognize as people who are like ourselves and belong to our moral community. Empathy is inhibited by excluding the other from one’s moral community, dehumanizing him, and making him into an enemy or a devil. Empathy stimulates helpfulness and altruism toward those who are in need of help; dehumanization encourages neglect, derogation, or attack.

  Enlarging one’s moral community increases one’s scope of empathy. However, empathy can occur at different levels. The fullest level contains all
of several aspects of empathy: knowing what the other is feeling; feeling in some measure what the other is feeling; understanding why the other is feeling the way she does, including what she wants or fears; and understanding her perspective and frame of reference as well as her world. Empathic responsiveness to another’s concern helps the other feel understood, validated, and cared for.

  Role playing, role exchanging or role reversal, and guided imagination are three interrelated methods commonly employed in training people to become empathically responsive to others. Role playing involves imagining that you are someone else—seeing the world through his eyes, wanting what he wants, feeling the emotions he feels, and behaving as he would behave in a particular situation or in reaction to someone else’s behavior. Role exchange or role reversal is similar to role playing, except that it involves reversing or exchanging roles with the person with whom you are interacting in a particular situation (as during a conflict). In guided imagination, you help the student take on the role of the other by stimulating the student to imagine and adopt various relevant characteristics (not caricatures) of the role or person being enacted, such as how he walks, talks, eats, fantasizes, dresses, and wakes up in the morning.

  Forgiveness and Reconciliation

  After protracted, violent conflicts in which the conflicting parties have inflicted grievous harm (humiliation, destruction of property, torture, assault, rape, murder) on one another, those parties may still have to live and work together in the same communities. This is often the case in civil wars, ethnic and religious conflicts, gang wars, and even family disputes that have taken a destructive course. Consider the slaughter that has taken place between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi; between blacks and whites in South Africa; between Bloods and Crips of Los Angeles; and among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia. Is it possible for forgiveness and reconciliation to occur? If so, what fosters these processes?

  There are many meanings of forgiveness in the extensive and growing literature concerned with this topic. I shall use the term to mean giving up rage, the desire for vengeance, and a grudge toward those who have inflicted grievous harm on you, your loved ones, or the groups with whom you identify. It also implies a willingness to accept the other into one’s moral community so that he or she is entitled to care and justice. As Borris (2003) has pointed out, it does not mean you have to forget the evil that has been done, condone it, or abolish punishment for it. However, it implies that the punishment should conform to the canons of justice and be directed toward the goal of reforming the harm doer so that he or she can become a moral participant in the community.

  There has been rich discussion in the psychological and religious literature of the importance of forgiveness to psychological and spiritual healing as well as to reconciliation (see Minow, 1998; Shriver, 1995). Forgiveness is, of course, not to be expected in the immediate aftermath of torture, rape, or assault. It is unlikely, as well as psychologically harmful, until one is able to be in touch with the rage, fear, guilt, humiliation, hurt, and pain that have been stored inside. But nursing hate keeps the injury alive and active in the present instead of permitting it to take its proper place in the past. Doing so consumes psychological resources and energy that is more appropriately directed to the present and future. Although forgiveness of the other may not be necessary for self-healing, it seems to be very helpful, as well as an important ingredient in the process of reconciliation.

  A well-developed psychological and psychiatric literature deals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that is, the psychological consequences of having been subjected or exposed to grievous harm, and a growing literature is emerging from workshop experiences centering on forgiveness and reconciliation. These literatures are too extensive and detailed for more than a brief overview of the major ideas here.

  Treatment of PTSD (Basoglu, 1992; Foa, Keane, and Friedman, 2000; Ochberg, 1988) essentially (1) gives the stressed individuals a supportive, safe, and secure environment (2) in which they can be helped to reexperience, in a modulated fashion, the vulnerability, helplessness, fear, rage, humiliation, guilt, and other emotions associated with the grievous harm (medication may be useful in limiting the intensity of the emotions being relived), thus (3) helping them identify the past circumstances and contexts in which the harm occurred and distinguish current realities from past realities; (4) helping them understand the reasons for his emotional reactions to the traumatic events and the appropriateness of their reactions; (5) helping them acquire the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and social support that make them less vulnerable and powerless; and (6) helping them develop an everyday life characterized by meaningful, enjoyable, and supportive relations in their family, work, and community.

  PTSD treatment requires considerable professional education beyond that involved in conflict resolution training. Still, it is well for students of conflict to be aware that exposure to severe injustice can have enduring harmful psychological effects unless the posttraumatic conditions are treated effectively.

  Forgiveness and reconciliation may be difficult to achieve at more than a superficial level unless the posttraumatic stress is substantially relieved. Even so, the processes involved in forgiveness and reconciliation may also play an important role in relieving PTSD. The causal arrow is multidirectional; progress in forgiveness or reconciliation or posttraumatic stress reduction facilitates progress in the other two.

  There are two distinct but interrelated approaches to developing forgiveness. One centers on the victim and the other on the relationship between the victim and the harm doer. The focus on the victim, in addition to providing some relief from PTSD, seeks to help the victim recognize the human qualities common to victim and victimizer. In effect, various methods and exercises are employed to enable victims to recognize the bad as well as good aspects of themselves, that they have “sinful” as well as “divine” capabilities and tendencies. In other words, one helps victims become aware of themselves as total persons—with no need to deny their own fallibility and imperfections—whose lifelong experiences in their family, schools, communities, ethnic and religious groups, and workplaces have played a key role in determining their own personality and behavior. As the victim comes to accept his or her own moral fallibility, he or she is likely to accept the fallibility of the harm doer as well and to perceive both the good and the bad in the other.

  Both victims and harm doers are often quite moral toward those they include in their own moral community but grossly immoral to those excluded. Thus, Adolf Eichmann, who efficiently organized the mass murder of Jews for the Nazis, was considered a good family man. The New England captains of the slave ships, who transported African slaves to the Americas under the most abominable conditions, were often deacons of their churches. The white settlers of the United States, who took possession of land occupied by Native Americans and killed those who resisted, were viewed as courageous and moral within their own communities.

  Recognition of the good and bad potential in all humans, the self as well as the other, facilitates the victim’s forgiveness of the harm doer. But it may not be enough. Quite often, forgiveness also requires interaction between the victim and harm doer to establish the conditions needed for forgiving. This interaction sometimes takes the form of negotiation between the victim and harm doer. A third party representing the community (such as a mediator or judge) usually facilitates the negotiation and sets the terms if the harm doer and victim cannot reach an agreement. In some European courts, such negotiations are required in criminal cases before the judge sentences the convicted criminal.

  Obviously the terms of an agreement for forgiveness vary as a function of the nature and severity of the harm as well as the relationship between the victim and harm doer. As I suggested earlier in this chapter, the victim may seek full confession, sincere apology, contrition, restitution, compensation, self-abasement, or self-reform from the harm doer. (For an excellent discussion of apology and other related issues, see Laza
re, 2004.) The victim may also seek some form of punishment and incarceration for the harm doer. Forgiveness is most likely if the harm doer and the victim accept the conditions, whatever they may be.

  Reconciliation goes beyond forgiveness in that it not only accepts the other into one’s moral community but also establishes or reestablishes a positive, cooperative relationship among the individuals and groups estranged by the harms they inflict on one another. Borris (2003) has indicated: “Reconciliation is the end of a process that forgiveness begins.” (For excellent discussions of reconciliation processes, see Nadler, 2003; chapter 40 in this Handbook.)

  In chapter 1, I discussed in detail some of the factors involved in initiating and maintaining cooperative relations—that discussion is relevant to the process of reconciliation. Here, I consider briefly some of the special issues relating to establishing cooperative relations after a destructive conflict. In the following list, I outline a number of basic principles:

  Mutual security. After a bitter conflict, each side tends to be concerned with its own security, without adequate recognition that neither side can attain security unless the other side also feels secure. Real security requires that both sides have security as their mutual goal. If weapons have been involved in the prior conflict, mutually verifiable disarmament and arms control are important components of mutual security.

  Mutual respect. Just as true security from physical danger requires mutual cooperation, so does security from psychological harm and humiliation. Each side must treat the other side with the respect, courtesy, politeness, and consideration normatively expected in civil society. Insult, humiliation, and inconsiderateness by one side usually lead to reciprocation by the other and decreased physical and psychological security.