The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  The Alternatives to Violence Project uses these and related ideas in their work. Founded by Quakers and prison inmates in 1975, this national and international association of volunteer groups is an antiviolence nongovernmental organization that teaches participants about conflict and violence (Alternatives to Violence Project/USA, n.d.). Its motto is “conflict is part of daily life . . . but violence doesn’t have to be.” Its mission is to encourage peaceful individuals and communities by facilitating perspective taking and related conflict resolution skills that can reduce resorting to violence, including managing strong feelings such as anger and fear, dealing more effectively with risk and danger, building good relationships with others, and communicating well in difficult situations.

  De-escalation.

  Because aggression and violence can escalate rapidly, effective conflict resolution programs help individuals detect aggression in its early stages and learn how to de-escalate conflict. Just as the resort to violent behavior can be acquired through social learning, nonviolent responses to conflict, such as discussion and negotiation, can also result from social learning. However, constructive discussions with an adversary can take considerable communicative, interpersonal, and conflict resolution skill. Such skills are more likely to be acquired and used effectively if they have been taught and demonstrated in various spheres, including at home and in school, the workplace, the community, the media, and the larger society (Opotow and Deutsch, 1999). Sensitivity to incipient violence is also important. Early detection offers an opportunity to de-escalate conflict before it gains momentum and escalates out of control. Because history illustrates that violence, once begun, can become extreme, the earlier a person, group, or country faces up to dangerous situations, the better.

  Ron Fisher and Loraleigh Keashly (1990) describe how intervenors, facing violent situations, can effectively de-escalate them in a step-by-step process. At the destructive stage, when parties try to destroy or subjugate each other, intervenors can serve as peacekeepers by forcefully setting norms, defining unacceptable violence, and isolating parties if necessary to prevent violence from escalating. At the segregated stage, when hostility and threats predominate, intervenors can discourage further hostility, help parties examine the dynamics of their conflict, and engage parties in developing ground rules that can move them toward negotiation. At the polarized stage, when conflicts undermine trust and respect, distort perceptions, and support negative stereotypes, intervenors can act as consultants who seek to increase mutual tolerance by suggesting that parties scrutinize their assumptions about an adversary’s unworthiness. They can also help parties identify mutually acceptable conflict resolution processes by encouraging information exchanges that can later serve as a basis for negotiation. At the discussion stage, when perceptions are relatively accurate, commitment to negotiation is stable, and parties believe in the possibility of joint gains, intervenors can facilitate negotiation as mediators who help parties find mutually acceptable solutions.

  Conflict Resolution Programs: Change Efforts

  Effective and sustainable conflict resolution can address both systemic and individual change. These change efforts can proceed in four key steps: diagnosis, intervention, evaluation, and ethics.

  Diagnosis.

  “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” is especially true for interventions involving violence. Solutions that begin without careful diagnosis have the potential to cause additional harm. Because there are many kinds of violence, many kinds of aggressors, and many contexts in which violence can occur, no one conflict resolution intervention is always suitable. However, in general, individuals need to recognize how pervasive violence is, how small arguments can precipitate violence, and how using weapons contributes to violence.

  Accurate diagnosis of violent conflicts considers the issues, parties’ motivations, beliefs, values, and attitudes. Interventions should be based on fact finding and research rather than assumptions and anecdote (World Health Organization, 2002). For example, research indicates that juvenile justice systems can be harmful to girls when it focuses on their crimes and not on the abusive conditions that they may have endured earlier in their lives; their personal history might be related to the crimes for which they are charged. Limiting the focus to a particular crime or criminal history can lead to misdiagnoses and inadequate treatment, and this can begin a vicious cycle of violence and incarceration driving young women further into criminal behavior and the criminal justice system (Simkin and Katz, 2002).

  Preliminary diagnostic work can identify presenting and underlying issues in aggression and violence, including parties’ basic needs, fears, and interests. It can identify those affected by direct and structural violence, including secondary victims, such as children or elderly relatives who depend on primary victims for their well-being. Diagnosis also needs to transcend prevailing norms that may render some kinds of people invisible and some kinds of violence acceptable, inevitable, or innocuous (Farmer, 1998). Myths such as “violence is a natural part of life” or “I saw lots of violence as a kid and I turned out okay” deny the way that violence, enacted in relationships, in the media, and in society, actively shapes expectancies, perceptions, moral norms, and behavior.

  Intervention.

  Because aggression and violence often have multiple causes, they are best addressed by ecological models and coordinated multiparty efforts (World Health Organization, 2002). Intervention strategies for domestic violence, for example, can seek to create healthy family environments and provide professional help for distressed families; monitor public venues in which violence can occur; address situations with the potential for violence; address practices and attitudes that support gender inequality; and address cultural, social, and economic factors that maintain disparate access to goods, services, and opportunities.

  Effective community antiviolence programs are tailored to the issues and resources of the community they serve (Greene, 1998). They listen to community members, including youth, and respect their knowledge and coping skills. They teach participants to recognize warning signs of escalating conflict and instruct participants on the use of nonviolent conflict resolution approaches. Their educational approaches have a psychological component that includes mentoring programs, family cohesion efforts, and counseling. They encourage youth to develop programs that teach, from firsthand experience, the dire consequences of violent behavior. Involving youth in conflict resolution interventions as partners can develop knowledgeable, conflict-savvy leaders for the future.

  Conflict resolution programs working alongside mental health or community agencies approach the deescalation of aggression and violence with a broad array of resources. Deterring domestic violence, for example, can be more effective when advocacy groups, health and social service agencies, conflict resolution agencies, and the justice system cooperate. Conflict resolution efforts at the community, city, state, and national levels can benefit from collaborations that include medical societies, elected officials, the media, and school systems (Currie, 1998; Hawkins et al., 1999).

  Evaluation.

  Evaluation is a crucial but underused element of intervention and training. Because few violence intervention programs are rigorously evaluated for their efficacy, the World Health Organization (2002) urges that evaluation of conflict resolution efforts should have a high priority (also see Flaxman, 2001, concerning school antiviolence programs). Evaluation should not be an afterthought and instead should be built into implementation strategies before programs begin. There are a number of compelling reasons to use formative evaluations (during program implementation) as well as summative evaluations (when a program is completed). First, social contexts change, and aggression and violence can accelerate this rate of change. Second, evaluation builds in the opportunity to revisit program implementation plans with new insights and knowledge as they emerge. Third, diagnosis and design strategies, no matter how carefully they are designed and implemented, can miss key elements or have
unintended consequences. Evaluations can check that conflict resolution programs, as they continue to evolve, are well matched with the project’s goals.

  The physician’s maxim, “First do no harm,” has particular urgency in violent relationships. Evaluations can offer practitioners concrete data that permit assessment of an intervention’s ability to produce constructive outcomes. Evaluation data not only serve research purposes but also offer a practical tool for ensuring that an intervention in fact ameliorates violence and that positive outcomes remain stable over time. Even when an intervention transforms a conflictual relationship into a more cooperative one, conflict residues can remain. Conflicts, particularly violent conflict with roots in the past, can simmer and later reproduce destructive conflict as a journalist notes in his description of intergroup violence in Indonesia: “This round of cruelties has roots deep in the past. And it is but one example of what Indonesia fears most: an explosion of religious and ethnic violence that roars out of control, fed by old hatreds and fresh grievances, defying the peacemaking efforts of local leaders and the restraining presence of armed soldiers” (Mydans, 1999, p. 50). Thus, periodic evaluation of key social indicators can monitor quiescent conflict to detect troubling shifts.

  Ethics.

  Interventions in violent systems pose special ethical difficulties. An intervenor in a violent relationship is a witness to past, current, and potential harm. Therefore, intervention has moral as well as practical urgency. Naming a relationship “violent” invokes particular norms, responsibilities, and obligations; remaining silent also carries moral weight. Intervenors need to be comfortable with forthrightly addressing violence in order to be able to motivate parties to view their relationship realistically and seek safe ways to address conflicts they face. Thus, practitioners intervening in violent systems must be skilled at recognizing violence, coercion, and oppression in relationships. Identifying violence can be difficult. Domestic violence is largely underreported by psychologists conducting marital therapy, teachers and counselors in schools, and emergency room doctors. Research in hospital emergency rooms indicates that sensitivity, courage, and good training are needed to recognize and document domestic violence (Braziel, 1998). When directly asked, victims and batterers tend to admit to violence. When the answer is yes, practitioners who ask the difficult questions need the skill as well as mental health and public safety backup to help parties sort out their situation and their options.

  Nonviolent and Violent Responses to Aggression and Violence

  Research and practice that is attentive to the causes, expression, and amelioration of aggression and inevitable violence connects to perceptions of social injustice (Opotow, 2009, 2001b). The sense that justice has been violated can motivate individuals or groups to protest policies or action they see as unjust. Their action can include nonviolent protests as well as armed struggles (Muñoz Proto and Opotow, 2012). As we write this chapter, civil wars in various parts of the world pit authoritarian governments against rebels seeking participatory governance. Before concluding this chapter, we therefore address collective nonviolent and violent resistance as methods that groups use to redress chronic oppression, violence, and injustice.

  Nonviolence.

  Nonviolence is “a technique used to control, combat and destroy the opponent’s power by nonviolent means of wielding power” (Sharp, 1973, p. 4; also see Kool, 1993). Even in violent or unjust contexts, nonviolent actions can foster peace, such as when social actors refuse to cooperate with unjust procedures (e.g., by going limp during an unjust arrest), intervene to disrupt unfair conditions (e.g., by carrying out a sit-in), or persuade opponents to consider new points of view (e.g., through symbolic public acts, protests, marches, and public statements; Sharp, 1973). A nonviolent perspective is based on the belief that peace depends on the development of sustainable cooperative social relations (Deutsch, 1983) along with a widening of scope fostered by constructive structural change justice (Opotow, Gerson, and Woodside, 2005). Thus, when faced with unjust contexts, nonviolent movements renounce violence and instead engage in peaceful protest to achieve social justice. Two well-known examples of nonviolent activism that mobilized people to redress oppression and social injustice are the Indian independent movements in the first half of the twentieth century and the US civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth-century United States.

  Violence and Resistance.

  Even under repressive sociopolitical conditions, nonviolent tactics can achieve social and political goals. However, in some circumstances, especially under extreme repression, the principles of nonviolence may not be politically effective (Ryan, 2002). To combat harsh and enduring domination, oppressed people may resort to violence, believing that they have little to lose. Violence can offer marginalized groups hope that social change can be achieved and that collective struggle can result in freedom. When violence pervaded all levels of Algerian society under colonization, Frantz Fanon (2004) argued for the necessity of employing violent tactics against the oppression and exclusion institutionalized by the state. He stressed that through violence, colonized people can come to realize their collective power. Violence, he argued, dispels the passivity and despair imposed by a colonial power so that colonized people can recreate themselves and their own society.

  In another place and at an earlier time, Fredrick Douglass, a noted abolitionist leader born in slavery in the United States in 1818, gave a speech commemorating the twenty-third anniversary of the British West Indies slave revolt that expressed similar ideas: “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who want freedom but will not fight are people who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle” (Douglass, 1857, p. 22).

  Both Fanon and Douglass argue that action, even when it takes the form of direct violence, may be necessary to redress structural violence. While nonviolent struggles (e.g., Solidarity in Poland in 1980) can effectively achieve social and political goals in some contexts, struggles may also take a violent form in systems that oppress or enslave.

  Legal scholars, writing about a “right to violence” (Paust, 1983), invoke Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address (1861): “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” Such violence can be directed at people or property. In his struggle against apartheid, Nelson Mandela supported violence against the property of the oppressors but not against the oppressors themselves. Clearly violent struggles can be justified for liberatory or oppressive social change. In either case, morally justified violence has the potential to precipitate new cycles of injustice and violence (Opotow, 2009).

  CONCLUSION

  The way that “stop and frisk” (Grynbaum and Connelly, 2012), “assault rifle” (Goode, 2012), and “drones” (Carr, 2013) have entered everyday speech demonstrates that violence not only has immediate effects but also ripples out into the culture, affecting individuals, institutions, cities, and nations. Addressing aggression and violence effectively means addressing it proactively. Its root causes are not only biological, motivational, and moral but also systemic and operationalized in the political, economic, and legal spheres of a society. Social issues such as poverty, human rights violations, political repression, and economic privation can be a cause as well as an effect of aggression and violence. Effective schools, affordable health care, safe housing, full employment, and environmental safety are social investments that can also ripple out into a society and have long-term positive benefits. As we have argued, the expression and intensity of aggression and violence are susceptible to social context. Therefore, initiatives such as gun control, curtailing media violence, and training
parents and influential community members (e.g., elected politicians, police, school personnel, psychologists, and doctors) to model cooperative conflict resolution processes has the potential to reduce the intensity and prevalence of violence.

  Although aggression and violence affect all social classes, people at the lowest socioeconomic levels bear the highest risks. Therefore, preventative and protective services must be available if violence is to be met. There is a tendency worldwide for authorities to act only after violence has occurred. But investing in prevention, especially primary prevention activities that operate upstream of problems, may be more cost-effective and have large and long-lasting benefits (World Health Organization, 2002).

  Peaceful cultures not only reduce aggression and violence but can also sustain cooperative social relations by emphasizing distributive, procedural, and inclusionary justice (Muñoz Proto and Opotow, 2012). Constructive approaches to conflict can reduce violence when they address conflict forthrightly and foster tolerance of diverse perspectives, the free flow of information, and democratic participation (Opotow et al., 2005). Although potentially dangerous, the struggle for social change to achieve greater equality should not be immediately condemned as it may be a necessary tactic when oppression is institutionalized and intransigent. With these activist and humanistic conceptions of social justice in mind, we encourage awareness of the breadth and complexity of aggression and violence, as well as the range of factors that can cause and moderate their expression. The challenge is to use this knowledge to foster a culture inspired by a vision of moral inclusion, social justice, and peace.