The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  It turns out that physical and verbal expressions are intricately interrelated: both activities are located in Broca’s area of the brain, activated during both speech and expressive movement. In fact, the brain’s pathways for speech are overlaid on the areas associated with sensorimotor work, suggesting that neural processes for verbal language are relatively recent specializations, with movement being a form of prelinguistic communication (Massey, 2009). Movement offers an alternative and instinctual mode of expression, and indeed it may be more effective than verbal language for some forms of expression and cognition: when the language center of the brain is temporarily deactivated, individuals often exhibit savant-like mental capacities, including improved artistic, mathematic, and proofreading abilities (Snyder et al., 2003). Perhaps we can access savant-like facility with conflict through movement. A new book examines these possibilities (LeBaron, MacLeod, and Floyer Acland, 2013).

  Just as a jostling bus ride, singing in the darkness, and the stark reality of somatically experiencing “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland interrupted the diplomats’ patterns of cognition and behavior to yield imaginative openings, so is the alchemy of arts essential for transforming conflict and catalyzing social change. Arts, completely intertwined with culture, are essential in a world that cries out for creativity, even—or especially—in the midst of ashes. Invoking the arts is not to look through a rose-tinted window. It is to be clear and unrelentingly rigorous in finding ways to transform conflict, acknowledging its complexity while trusting its mysteries. These approaches invite creativity and imagination into practice and training in ways that make both more compelling and potentially far more productive. They are explored here as complements to the neuroscience work described above. Together, they offer the potential to deepen cultural fluency and thus the effectiveness of conflict resolution pedagogy and practice.

  ARTS-BASED APPROACHES TO CONFLICT RESOLUTION

  As artist and conflict scholar Dena Hawes (2007) writes, arts-based approaches take conflict parties outside business as usual, disrupting facile narratives and facilitating communication across psychological, physical, cultural, and emotional boundaries. Conflict resolution professor Craig Zelizer (2003) situates them as part of a larger framework of civil society–based initiatives for peace building. This family of approaches has long been used in traditional cultures through rituals to foster and mark progress toward peace, yet has not always been seen as a resource in our reach for scientific legitimacy in conflict studies. Contemporary conflict practitioners sometimes find it difficult to use arts-based approaches even though they span cultural divides and offer connectivity across differences. Yet the age-old division of heart and mind that privileges analytic, reason-based approaches discounts the more diffuse resources of arts at its peril. To counter cognitive habits of enmity, state change and creativity are essential. The plastic, culturally fluent brain can more easily develop new neural associations when creativity is scaffolded through the arts.

  Conflict scholar Tatsushi Arai defines creativity as “unconventional viability” (2009). His definition evokes the oft-quoted statement of Einstein that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Johan Galtung (2009) poses this question in his Foreword to Arai’s book: “What, then, stands in the way [of creativity]?” He answers, “In one sentence: actors deeply engaged not in solving but in winning, victory, the V-word. To conflict parties committed to the goal of winning, Other is the problem, not the relation to Other. Bring Other to heel, and the world is right. Other is Evil, up against our good Self, there can be no compromise, no creative ‘transcendence,’ only victory for the Good over Evil. Moreover, Other should not only be deterred from exercising his evil craft, but be crushed never to rise again.”

  Arts-based approaches are a fruitful counterpoint to this habit, ingrained in many conflict parties’ minds, of seeking to vanquish the other. In the nuanced world of the arts, it is difficult to maintain stark black-and-white dichotomies and a crisp sense of separation from others. People emerge from creating images or moving together in improvised dance with new appreciation for each other’s dilemmas and complexities. With actual experiences of each other’s cultural common sense, they are better able to appreciate commonalities and find ways to bridge differences.

  Arts-based approaches encompass a whole constellation of enacted, somatic tools that foster creative expression, from visual and theater arts to music, dance, and poetry, from the humanities, fine and performing arts to expressive arts, providing fruitful vehicles for imagination and intuition in the midst of conflict. Resonating on the symbolic level where meaning is made, they welcome sensing and feeling—dimensions too often “managed” or sidelined in conventional approaches—as embodied experiences essential for truly transforming conflict. This is important because emotions can be powerful motivators toward transformation just as they are central drivers in conflict escalation. As well, sensing and feeling trigger mirror neurons, thus evoking empathy as experiences are shared (Gallese, Eagle, and Migone, 2007).

  Arts approaches need not be formal. It is useful to tap a wide range of expressive and imaginative tools in conflict resolution processes, whether arising spontaneously or planned. These modes are not used primarily as performances or to generate artistic products (though sometimes participants choose to continue joint efforts that yield such things), but as conduits for accompaniment and change. They can also be vastly beneficial in pedagogy because of their versatility and capacity to help learners deepen creative, somatic capacities (Alexander and LeBaron, 2013).

  Arts approaches need not always adhere to specific forms. They can be as simple as imagery-based metaphors, as in the example of dialogue between pro-life and pro-choice activists in Canada. Invited to identify their heroes or heroines, people from both sides chose Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. This commonality surprised them, interrupting the negative labels each had long assigned to the other. An exploration of what these figures represented to each side—compassionate leadership, justice, and emancipation—fostered emergent mutual respect. From this base of respect, dialogue participants collaborated on a range of social actions to ameliorate the feminization of poverty.

  As is evident from this example, cultural fluency is intricately bound up with arts-based work. Seeing a play in France gave me more contextual understanding than ten lectures about patterns of conflict-handling behavior in France. Humor, tone, textures of engagement, ways of naming or skirting differences, nuances of communication—all these were present in an engaging narrative that literally took me inside the frames of reference of the characters. Participating in creating a play or a piece of visual art—necessitating sharing assumptions about what works and why—is potentially even more fruitful.

  As more neuroscientists study arts, conflict, and change, our field will be revolutionized (Berrol, 2006; Ramachandran, 2000). Collaborations among conflict resolution scholars, neuroscientists, and artists are thus among the most promising for the development of the field going forward. In addition to informing process innovations, these collaborations hold strong promise for pedagogy.

  IMPLICATIONS FOR PEDAGOGY

  In spite of the efforts of many scholars and practitioners, cultural fluency in conflict is elusive. It is a nonlinear developmental process that relies on neuroplasticity and creativity, both of which are augmented through the arts. Cultural fluency is also enhanced when people are motivated to cultivate it. Motivation can come from conflict when parties realize they really do not understand each other yet are interdependent. Equally, conflict can function to short-circuit the curiosity so vital to developing cultural fluency. In learning contexts, cultural fluency is most easily surfaced when a group is diverse and an atmosphere invites safe exploration of shared and differing patterns of paying attention and constructing meaning.

  Over the twenty-five years I have taught about culture and conflict, I have noticed repeatedly that those with pr
ivilege attached to their identities have had a harder time than others in identifying their cultural lenses. To someone who has not felt exceptionalized, culture is harder to discern and its workings may seem exotic. Cultural institutions may reveal and even reify this problem: a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, reveals countless ways that native peoples in North America have been romanticized while also persecuted. Culture is always in some way refracted through the lenses of power, and power unexamined can have disastrous effects for those perceived as other.

  I have developed a suite of pedagogical approaches designed to invite learners to investigate their own lenses and associated cultural assumptions in safe yet boundary-extending ways. These approaches draw on creative and expressive arts as ways of accessing symbolic understandings of conflict and resolution strategies, and on recent neuroscientific findings. They cluster into three categories:

  Individual exploration. Activities include drawing a “culture flower” or other multidimensional figure and filling in different cultural identifications and influences and associated messages about conflict and resolution; identifying cultural metaphors for conflict and ways these have shaped experience and perception; and writing a cultural autobiography that identifies key messages about inclusion and exclusion, acceptable and unacceptable behaviors in conflict, turning points in cultural identification and other aspects of personality formation.

  Group experience. Activities include debriefing and comparing notes on individual explorations; lines of privilege (in which learners line up and step forward or back in relation to privilege or disadvantage they have experienced, physically demonstrating and experiencing their relative positioning); dialogically exploring cultural accounts of familiar cultural patterns and looking for surprises (e.g., an account of American negotiators written by a Japanese negotiator for his colleagues); and simulations like BaFa’ BaFa’ or Barnga (Centre for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, n.d.).1

  Synthesis. Sculpting and expressive arts activities that invite participants to work across modes of expression to embody experiences of conflict related to affiliation; spatial dynamics and positioning; perception and vantage point; and ineffable aspects including power, privilege and disadvantage, and exclusion and inclusion. (For more on the use of expressive arts in conflict pedagogy and practice, see Levine and Levine, 2011, and MacLeod, 2013.)

  Using these and other experiential tools in combination with the cultural continua described earlier, learners move beyond scripted role plays into deeper capacities to understand and work across difference. These approaches stand in sharp contrast with much of the training in the conflict resolution field with its overreliance on planned simulations. We are far better served by stepping outside business as usual to see where and how we need to stretch in the midst of a rapidly changing world (Alexander and LeBaron, 2010).

  IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORY AND PRACTICE

  As the multidimensional and dynamic effects of culture are understood as central to conflict resolution theory and practice, both must change. Cultural fluency involves suppleness and flexibility, the capacity to attend to nuance and what is under the surface, and an ever-refining ability to sense and respond to diverse starting points. As culture is acknowledged, it becomes clear that all theory arises from a particular standpoint, as do diverse approaches to practice. Culturally fluent conflict theory is transparent about which cultural assumptions inform its course. As we have seen, the appropriateness of direct or indirect communication; face-to-face engagement; intervention by outsiders or insiders; particular timing or setting; degrees of formality; neutrality or partiality; a problem-solving, facilitative, or transformative orientation—all of these are culturally shaped. Thus, it becomes clear that there is no universal theory of conflict or uniform best practices in conflict resolution. Everything is exquisitely particular. It is from this acknowledgment that the best practices emerge, as well as the theories and research that explain them. Just as a powerful personal story—think the diary of Anne Frank (2010)—can have universal resonance, so too can a well-crafted, culturally fluent conflict process live beyond any resolution it attains, not only for the parties involved but in its role as a field builder.

  As we stand at the threshold of new worlds shaped by technological advance, transformative scientific discoveries, and possible radiant futures, cultural fluency becomes vitally important. As it is admitted to the canon, new ways of integrating it will be developed. In this is the alchemy, that is more than the sum of its parts, and the way to constructive social and individual change.

  1. These and other simulations were developed by intercultural communication scholars to provide authentic experiences of cultural and worldview differences. See Sandra Mumford Fowler, “Intercultural Simulation Games: Removing Cultural Blinders,” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2006, 30, 71–81. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ace.36719863009/abstract.

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