The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  Humanization of the other. During bitter conflict, each side tends to dehumanize the other and develop images of the other as an evil enemy. There is much need for both sides to experience one another in everyday contexts as parents, homemakers, schoolchildren, teachers, and merchants, which enables them to see one another as human beings who are more like themselves than not. Problem-solving workshops, along the lines developed by Burton (1969, 1987) and Kelman (1972), are also valuable in overcoming dehumanization of one another.

  Fair rules for managing conflict. Even if a tentative reconciliation has begun, new conflicts inevitably occur—over the distribution of scarce resources, procedures, values, and so on. It is important to anticipate that conflicts will occur and to develop beforehand the fair rules, experts, institutions, and other resources for managing such conflicts constructively and justly.

  Curbing the extremists on both sides. During a protracted and bitter conflict, each side tends to produce extremists committed to the processes of the destructive conflict as well as to its continuation. Attaining some of their initial goals may be less satisfying than continuing to inflict damage on the other. Extremists stimulate extremism on both sides. The parties need to cooperate in curbing extremism on their own side and restraining actions that stimulate and justify extremist elements on the other side.

  Gradual development of mutual trust and cooperation. It takes repeated experience of successful, varied, mutually beneficial cooperation to develop a solid basis for mutual trust between former enemies. In the early stages of reconciliation, when trust is required for cooperation, the former enemies may be willing to trust a third party (who agrees to serve as a monitor, inspector, or guarantor of any cooperative arrangement) but not yet willing to trust one another if there is a risk of the other failing to reciprocate cooperation. Also in the early stages, it is especially important that cooperative endeavors be successful. This requires careful selection of the opportunities and tasks for cooperation so that they are clearly achievable as well as meaningful and significant.

  Inventing Solutions

  It is helpful in trying to resolve any problem constructively (as with a conflict between principles of justice) to be able to discover or invent alternative solutions that go beyond win-lose outcomes such as selecting the more powerful party’s principle or flipping a coin to determine the winner. Flipping a coin provides equal opportunity to win, but it does not result in satisfactory outcomes for both sides.

  For simplicity’s sake, let us consider a conflict over possession of a valuable object, say, a rare antique clock bequeathed to two sons who live in separate parts of the world. Each wants the clock and feels equally entitled to it. Unlike the cake in an earlier example, the clock is not physically divisible. However, they could agree to divide possession of the clock so that they share it for equal periods, say, six months or one year at a time. Another solution is to sell the clock and divide the resulting money equally.

  Let us assume, though, that the mother’s will has prohibited sale of the clock to anyone else. Here is an alternative: the two sons can bid against one another in an auction, and the higher bidder gets the clock while the other gets half the price of the winner’s bid. The auction can offer open bidding against one another or a closed, single, final bid from each person. Thus, if the winning bid is $5,000, the winner gets the clock but has to pay the other $2,500; each ends up with equally valued outcomes. The winner’s net value is $2,500, but the loser also ends up with $2,500.

  Another procedure employs a version of the divide-and-choose rule. A pool to be divided between the sons comprises the clock and an amount of money that each son contributes equally to the pool, say, $3,000. One son divides the total pool (the clock and $6,000 in cash) into two bundles of his own devising, declares the contents of the bundles, and lets the other party choose which bundle to take. Thus, if the son who values the clock at $5,000 is the divider, he might put the clock and $500 in one bundle and $5,500 in the other. Doing so ensures that he receives a gross return of $5,500 and a net return of $2,500 ($5,500 minus $3,000), no matter which bundle the other chooses. The chooser can also obtain a net return of $2,500 if he chooses the cash bundle; presumably he would do so if he values the clock at less than $5,000. Such an outcome would be apt to be seen as fair to both sons.

  The outcome of the divide-and-choose approach as well as the auction procedure seem eminently fair. Both sons win. The one who wants the clock more obtains it, and the other gets something of equivalent value. Other win-win procedures can undoubtedly be invented for types of conflict that at first glance seem to allow only win-lose outcomes. (See Bram and Taylor, 1996, for a very useful discussion of developing fair outcomes.) Training creates readiness to recognize the possibility that win-win procedures can be discovered or invented. Skill in developing such procedures can be cultivated, I further believe, by showing students illustrations and modeling this development as well as giving them extensive practice in attempting to create them.

  CONCLUSION

  The relationship between conflict and justice is bidirectional: injustice breeds conflict, and destructive conflict gives rise to injustice. Preventing destructive conflict requires more than training in constructive conflict resolution. It also necessitates reducing the gross injustices that characterize much of our social world at the interpersonal, intergroup, and international levels. Such reduction requires changes in how various institutions of society—political, economic, educational, familial, and religious—function so that they recognize and honor the values underlying constructive conflict resolution described in chapter 1: human equality, shared community, nonviolence, fallibility, and reciprocity. Adherence to these values not only eliminates gross injustices but also reduces the likelihood that conflict itself takes a destructive course and, as a consequence, gives rise to injustice.

  References

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  CHAPTER THREE

  A DELICATE AND DELIBERATE JOURNEY TOWARD JUSTICE

  Challenging Privilege: Building Structures of Solidarity

  Michelle Fine

  Alexis Halkovic

  We live in a time when structures and relations of inequity are being (re)produced breathlessly and relentlessly on global, national, and local scales. Slowly we grow anesthetized by claims of “progress” and forget to notice the dispossession left behind (Fine and Ruglis, 2009). As inequalities swell within and across nations, the logics of global capitalism permeate social and workplace relations, while competition and individualism are assumed the natural way one might think about “what’s fair.” In this political moment, it is important to remember that many scholars, practitioners, and activists have argued that distributions are made and can be unmade and remade. There are multiple ways—some more progressive and some more regressive—to conceptualize, design policy, structure organizations, and organize movements for redistributive justice. Morton Deutsch, in particular, has encouraged researchers, policymakers, organizers, and managers to consider how social policies and justice frameworks might challenge rather than reproduce privilege, and to facilitate policies and organizations that support shared fates rather than ruthless individualism.

  However, we know well from history and contemporary politics that privilege has long refused to recognize itself; inequality gaps are stubborn, and unequal outcomes are increasingly viewed as natural, unfortunate, and yet inevitable. While newspapers and the Internet and the popular imagination are saturated with images of revolutions in Syria and Egypt, the courageous persistence of Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and groundbreaking legal struggles including Brown v. Board of Education and other civil rights victories, little is known about midlevel social movements, social policies, and organizational strategies launched by coalitions of privileged and marginalized activists, designed to reduce inequality gaps, cultivate a sense of solidarity, and build coherent structures for material and psychological shared fates.

  This chapter is written to help readers review the inevitability of privilege; cultivate conditions for solidarity; and enjoy case studies of workplaces, schools, and public projects designed for shared ownership, diminished inequality gaps, and deep and democratic participation. We focus in particular on the role that persons of relative privilege can play in delicate coalition to challenge inequality, contest privilege, and build cultures of solidarity. We ally ourselves with writer bell hooks (1989) who argues, “Even in the face of powerful structures of domination, it remains possible for each of us, especially those of us who are members of oppressed and/or exploited groups as well as those radical visionaries who may have race, class, and sex privilege, to define and determine alternative standards, to decide on the nature and extent of compromise” (p. 81).

  While we recognize that persons of privilege do not inherently share the commitments and struggles of those who have been marginalized, we believe that many are discomforted by unfair advantage; many would be willing to sacrifice some privilege for more justice, and quite a few would engage in activism or structural reforms, or both, to promote distributive justice. There is indeed a substantial psychological literature arguing that persons of privilege are motivated to amass, retain, and justify privilege at all costs. Yet at the same time, the media report social movements that include persons of privilege spreading across Spain, Greece, Israel, Egypt, Central and South America, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, India, Burma, the United States, and England, insisting on the redistribution of power, resources, opportunities, and participation. In this chapter, we invite you to consider the second half of this vision: that privileged persons, once provoked to recognize injustice, can be mobilized to join with allies to pursue more equitable social relations.

  We review briefly the social psychological literature on privilege and solidarity and present three case studies of social organizations—schools, workplaces and advocacy organizations—that have taken bold steps toward challenging inequality gaps and confronting privilege. We offer these examples as delicate and provisional windows through which researchers, practitioners, educators, activists, and policymakers might take up critical responsibility for movements and reforms that seek to diminish inequality gaps and heighten a sense of shared responsibility for our collective fates.

  THEORIZING JUSTICE FRAMEWORKS: DENATURALIZING INEQUALITY AND PRIVILEGE

  In 1975, Deutsch published a now-classic essay challenging the untroubled assumption within the discipline of psychology that individuals conceptualize justice as capitalist economists might—by calculating and maximizing “what’s in it for me.” Deutsch implored psychologists to theorize and research varied principles of justice; he firmly challenged the taken-for-granted assumption that equity beliefs are “normal,” that greed and personal accumulation are primary motives, and that persons of privilege are comfortable with unfair advantage.

  Defining distributive justice as the distribution of conditions and goods that affect psychological, physiological, economic, and social aspects of well-being, Deutsch distinguished three frameworks for conceptualizing justice: economic, solidarity, and caring. While these orientations may coexist (and may conflict with one another) within a single society, there is always a dominant orientation. In capitalist countries, the economically oriented value system has overwhelmingly determined social policy, institutional arrangements, and social relationships.

  Deutsch was concerned at the time that psychologists had simply imported this logic into the discipline as if it were the natural way to conceptualize justice: individuals are motivated toward personal advantage, and unequal outcomes are therefore a “just” distribution is proportional to personal inputs. Deutsch asked us to recognize that while most workplaces are organized around equity, there are also public and some private institutions organized around equality and need, including libraries, trade unions, public education, and credit unions, along with clean air and water; parks and civil rights legislation based on notions of equality; and social security, disability insurance, healthy family dynamics, and college financial aid based on need. All of these goods are accessible based on a distinct principle of distributive justice. Susan Opotow (2011), in extending Deutsch’s theorizing, has demonstrated that these distinct justice frameworks have profound consequences for influencing a nation’s, community’s, or person’s scope of justice, arguing that justice principles of deserving are extended only to those who are considered to be a part of one’s own moral community. Thus, the narrower one’s sense of community is, the narrower is one’s scope of justice.

  Deutsch elaborated on the social psychological consequences of the economic and equity distribution principle: people are viewed in terms of use value and excess; economic values are insinuated into all aspects of life; greater allocations are made to those who begin with advantage and then appear to be more productive or better able to manage resources; and those in power disproportionately allocate more to themselves, making the system conflictful, precarious, and ultimately dysfunctional. When people are assessed
in terms of use value, the bonds of collective well-being are severely threatened: safety nets fray; elite communities build gates, walls, and prisons, and the poor are left to suffer on their own, often out of sight, sometimes with the “help” of charity. The very fabric of democracy is at stake.

  In a solidarity-oriented society, policies and structures emphasize equal status relations or the “optimum distribution of status for the mutual support of self-esteem” (Deutsch, 1975, p. 146). In such contexts, including labor unions, credit unions, food co-ops, housing cooperatives, and planned communities, for instance, participants enjoy mutual respect and engage through a shared fates orientation. At the moment in the United States, libraries, parks, public services, the right to clean air and water, and civil and human rights are distributed, at least in the abstract, with a solidarity orientation.

  Deutsch argues that in a caring-oriented society, distribution of resources, opportunities, and dignity is based on need, such that there is a sense of shared responsibility for the collective well-being of all members of a society, even if distributions are, at any moment in time, technically unequal. Our social security system in the United States, veterans’ benefits, and Medicare have been organized as need-based, and respect-filled, systems that serve all of those deemed eligible based on their needs. Inclusion and deservingness are assumed. When natural disasters occur, presumably our government attends to people based on need, not income. And yet the neglect of survivors of Hurricane Katrina forces us to understand how race and class dynamics systematically influence who is considered deserving and who is excluded from the moral community of the deserving (Opotow, 2011).