The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

Outcomes

  Finally, the outcomes of many intractable disputes in turn establish the conditions that contribute to their persistence.

  Protracted Trauma.

  The experience of prolonged trauma associated with these conflicts produces what is perhaps their most troubling consequences. Long-term exposure to atrocities and human suffering, the loss of loved-ones, rape, bodily disfigurement, and chronic health problems can destroy people’s spirit and impair their capacity to lead a healthy life. At its core, trauma is a loss of trust in a safe and predictable world. In response, individuals suffer from a variety of symptoms, including recurrent nightmares, suicidal thoughts, demoralization, helplessness, hopelessness, anxiety, depression, somatic illnesses, sleeplessness, and feelings of isolation and meaninglessness. Trauma adversely affects parenting, marriages, essential life choices, and the manner with which authority figures take up leadership roles. It also impairs communities and can hamper everything from the most mundane merchant-client interactions to voting and governmental functioning (Parakrama, 2001). Thus, the links between trauma and intractability seem to lie in the degree of impairment of individuals and communities and, in particular, to the manner in which trauma is or is not addressed postconflict.

  Normalization of Hostility and Violence.

  In these settings, destructive processes gradually come to be experienced as normative by the parties involved. The biased construction of history, ongoing violent discourse, and intergenerational perpetuation of the conflict contribute to a sense of reality where the hostilities are as natural as the landscape. For example, Israeli and Palestinian youth in the Middle East were found to accept and justify the use of violence and war in conflict significantly more than youth from European settings of nonintractable conflict (Orr, Sagi, and Bar-On, 2000). In addition, they found Israeli and Palestinian youth more reluctant than Europeans to be willing to pay a price for peace. Again, what appeared to matter in this study was how the meaning of violence differed for the youth from these different settings. The violence-war discourse in the Middle East, passed down through the distinct parental and community ideologies of the Israeli and Palestinian communities, depicted violence as an act of self-defense and war as a noble cause. This type of ideology has been found to shield youth from the psychological harm typically associated with exposure to violence. Thus, increased levels of violence had become normalized for the Middle Eastern youth and were seen as necessary and useful particularly because of the perception that negotiations were impossibly costly (in terms of the nonnegotiable concessions that would need to be made).

  Persistence.

  What is particularly daunting about this 5 percent of protracted conflicts is their substantial resistance to good-faith attempts to solve them. In these settings, the traditional methods of diplomacy, negotiation, and mediation—even military victory—seem to have little impact on the persistence of the conflict. In fact, there is some evidence that these strategies may make matters worse (Diehl and Goertz, 2000).

  * * *

  To summarize, intractable conflicts are multiply determined, complex, mercurial, exhausting, and rife with misery. Their persistence can be the result of a wide variety of causes and processes. Ultimately, however, it is the complex interaction of these many factors across different levels of the conflict (from personal to international) over long periods of time that brings them to an extreme state of hopelessness and intransigence. Therefore, we must employ models that conceptualize and address them in a manner that is mindful of the many components and complex relationships inherent to the phenomenon. The dynamical-systems approach provides such a model.

  A DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS MODEL OF INTRACTABLE CONFLICT

  Conflict engagement is essentially about change. It revolves around a need or desire to address incompatibilities by changing a situation; a relationship; a balance of power; another’s actions, values, beliefs, or bargaining position; or a third party’s wish to change a conflict from high intensity to low or from destructive to constructive. Therefore, how we think about and approach change or, in the case of intractable conflicts, how we understand conflict systems that doggedly resist change is paramount. There are many theories of change, and disputants as well as conflict resolution practitioners all operate with respect to these theories, whether implicit or explicit, complex or simple, accurate or inaccurate (Coleman, 2004). Dynamical systems theory, a school of thought coming out of applied mathematics, offers new, highly original, and practical insights about how complex systems of all types, from cellular to social to planetary, change and resist change (for more detail, see Coleman, 2011; Coleman, Vallacher, Nowak, and Bui-Wrzosinska, 2007; Vallacher, Coleman, Nowak, and Bui-Wrzosinska, 2010; Vallacher et al., 2013).

  A dynamical system is defined as a set of interconnected elements (such as beliefs, feelings, and behaviors) that change and evolve over time in accordance with simple rules. A change in each element depends on influences from other elements. Due to these mutual influences, the system as a whole evolves in time. Thus, the effects resulting from changes in any element of a conflict (such as level of hostilities) depend on rules-based influences of various other elements (e.g., each person’s motives, attitudes, actions) that evolve to affect the disputants’ general pattern of interactions (positive or negative). The task of dynamical systems research is to specify the nature of these rules and the system-level properties and behaviors that emerge from the repeated iteration of these rules. In recent years, the dynamical systems perspective has been adapted to investigate personal, interpersonal, and societal processes under the guise of “dynamical social psychology” (Nowak and Vallacher, 1998; Vallacher and Nowak, 1994, 2007). The most recent extension of this approach focuses on the defining features of intractable conflict (Coleman, 2011; Coleman, Vallacher, Nowak, and Bui-Wrzosinska, 2007; Nowak et al., 2006; Vallacher et al., 2010, 2013).

  Intractable conflicts seem to operate and change differently from most other conflicts, according to their own unique set of rules. Think of epidemics, which do not spread like other outbreaks of illness that grow incrementally. Epidemics grow slowly at first until they hit a certain threshold, after which they grow catastrophically and spread exponentially. This is called nonlinear change. We suggest that the 5 percent of enduring conflicts operate in a similar manner. In these settings, many interrelated problems begin to collapse together and feed each other through reinforcing feedback loops, which eventually cross a threshold and become self-organizing (self-perpetuating) and therefore unresponsive to outside intervention. In the language of applied mathematics and dynamical systems theory, these conflict systems become attractors: strong, coherent patterns that draw people in and resist change. This, we suggest, is the essence of intractable conflict.

  As a conflict evolves toward intractability, each party’s thoughts, feelings and actions—even those that seem irrelevant to the conflict—take on meaning that maintains or intensifies the conflict. Metaphorically, the attractor serves as a valley in the social-psychological landscape into which the psychological elements—thoughts, feelings and actions—begin to slide. Once trapped in such a valley, escape requires tremendous will and energy and may appear impossible to achieve.

  Despite the self-destructive potential of entrenched conflict, attractors satisfy two basic social-psychological motives. First, they provide a coherent view of the conflict, including the character of the in-group, the nature of the relationship with the antagonistic party, the history of the conflict, and the legitimacy of claims of each party. This function of attractors is especially critical when the parties encounter information or actions that are open to interpretation. An attractor serves to disambiguate actions and interpret the relevance and true meaning of information. Second, attractors provide a stable platform for action, enabling parties to a conflict to respond unequivocally and without hesitation to a change in circumstances or an action initiated by other parties. In the absence of an attractor, the conflicting parties may exp
erience hesitation in deciding what to do, or engage in internal dissent that could prevent each party from engaging in a clear and decisive course of action. Such hesitancy or indecision can have calamitous consequences in the context of violent conflicts.

  This perspective provides a new way to conceptualize and address intractable conflict. Conflicts are commonly described in terms of their intensity, but this feature does not capture the issue of intractability. Even conflicts with a low level of intensity can become protracted and resistant to resolution. We propose instead that intractable conflicts are governed by strong attractors for negative dynamics and weak attractors for positive or even neutral dynamics. Hence, knowledge of the attractor landscape of a system—the ensemble of sustainable states for positive, neutral, and negative interactions—is critical for understanding the progression, stabilization, and transformation of intractable conflicts.

  A relationship between conflicting parties may be characterized by incompatibilities with respect to many issues, but this state of affairs does not necessarily promote intractability. To the contrary, the complexity or multidimensionality of such relationships may prevent the progression toward intractability or even enhance the likelihood of conflict resolution. Because each party may lose on one issue but prevail on others, conflict resolution is tantamount to bartering or problem solving, with both parties attempting to find a solution that best satisfies their respective needs (Fisher, Ury, and Patton, 1992).

  However, it is the collapse of complexity in relationships that promotes conflict intractability. When distinct issues become interlinked and mutually dependent, the activation of a single issue effectively activates all the other ones. The likelihood of finding a solution that satisfies all the issues thus correspondingly diminishes. For example, if a border incident occurs between neighboring nations with a history of conflict, there is likely to be a reactivation of all the provocations, perceived injustices, and conflicts of interest from the past. The parties to the conflict thus are likely to respond disproportionately to the magnitude of the instigating issue. Even if the instigating issue is somehow resolved, the activation of other issues will serve to maintain and even deepen the conflict.

  The loss of issue complexity is directly linked to the development of attractors. Interpersonal and intergroup relations are typically multidimensional, with various mechanisms operating at different points in time, in different contexts, with respect to different issues, and often in a compensatory manner. The alignment of separate issues into a single dimension, however, establishes reinforcing feedback loops, such that the issues have a mutually reinforcing rather than a compensatory relationship. All events that are open to interpretation become construed in a similar fashion and promote a consistent pattern of behavior in relation to other people and groups. Even a peaceful overture by the out-group, for instance, may be seen as insincere or as a trick if there is strong reservoir of antagonism toward the out-group.

  However, any psychological or social system is likely to have multiple attractors (e.g., love and indifference and hate in a close relationship), each providing a unique form of mental or behavioral coherence with different levels of stability and resistance to change. When the dynamics of a system is captured by one of its attractors, the others may not be visible to observers, perhaps not even to the participants. These latent attractors, though, may be highly important in the long run because they determine which states are possible for the system if and when conditions change. Critical changes in a system, then, might not be reflected in the system’s observable state but rather in the creation or destruction of a latent attractor representing a potential state that is currently invisible to all concerned.

  Despite their considerable resistance to change, it is important to recognize that attractors for intractable conflict can and do change. There are three basic scenarios by which this seems to occur (Vallacher et al., 2010). In one, an understanding of how attractors are created can be used to reverse-engineer an intractable attractor. Attractors developed as separate elements (e.g., issues, events, pieces of information) become linked by reinforcing feedback to promote a global perspective and action orientation. Reverse engineering thus entails changing some of the feedback loops from reinforcing to inhibitory, thereby lowering the level of coherence in the system. A second scenario involves moving the system out of its manifest destructive attractor into a latent attractor that is defined in terms of benign or even positive thoughts, actions, and relationships. The third scenario goes beyond moving the system between its existing attractors to systematically changing the number and types of attractors. These three strategies are described in more detail in the guidelines in the next section.

  Dynamical systems theory offers a new perspective and language through which to comprehend and address intractability. Its use requires a working understanding of the main constructs and relationships of complex dynamical systems, nonlinearity, feedback loops, attractors, latent attractors, repellers, emergence, self-organization, networks, and unintended consequences. (For more information, see Coleman, 2011; Vallacher et al., 2010, 2013.)

  TEN GUIDELINES FOR ALTERING THE ATTRACTOR LANDSCAPES OF INTRACTABLE CONFLICTS

  The dynamical systems model of intractable conflict has direct implications for practice (see Coleman, 2011, for a fuller account). Following are ten general guidelines for working with long-term conflicts that have emerged from this approach:

  Leverage instability

  Complicate to simplify

  Read the emotional reservoirs of the conflict

  Begin with what is working

  Beginnings matter most

  Circumvent the conflict

  Seek meek power

  Work with both manifest and latent attractors

  Alter conflict and peace attractors for the long term

  Restablize through dynamic adaptivity

  Guideline 1: Leverage Instability

  Intractable conflicts involve ultracoherent, closed systems that steadfastly resist many good-faith attempts at change. When such coherence and absolute certainty about us versus them provides the foundation for understanding and the platform for action in conflict, it is useful to leverage whatever is necessary to change the patterns. Here the challenge becomes what the organizational theorist Gareth Morgan (1997) refers to as “opening the door to instability.” This entails either capitalizing on existing conditions or creating new conditions that in fact destabilize the system.

  For instance, in research by Diehl and Goetz (2000; see also Klein, Goertz, and Diehl, 2006) of the approximately 850 enduring international conflicts that occurred throughout the world between 1816 to 1992, over three-quarters of them were found to have ended within ten years of a major political shock (world wars, civil wars, significant changes in territory and power relations, regime change, independence movements, or transitions to democracy). From the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory (DST), these shocks created fissures in the stability of the previous systems, eventually leading to the establishment of the necessary conditions for the major restructuring and realignment of conflict landscapes.

  This suggests that events such as those erupting in the Middle East today (e.g., the Arab Spring) promote optimal conditions for a dramatic realignment of sociopolitical systems. Similarly, a family system plunged into crisis by the sudden announcement of divorce by the parents, a child’s diagnosis of terminal illness, a criminal conviction of a family member, or the need to quickly uproot and move out of state for work could all place a family system in a tenuous, high-anxiety state. Such shocks can destabilize protracted conflict systems and allow the deconstruction and reconstruction of the attractor landscape. However, the results of destabilization may take years to become evident, as the initial shock most likely affects factors that affect other factors and so on until overt changes occur. It is also important to note that such ruptures to the coherence and stability of sociopolitical systems do not ensure radical or constructive chan
ge or peace. It must therefore be considered a necessary but insufficient condition when working with intractability.

  Guideline 2: Complicate to Simplify: Mapping the Dynamic Ecology of Peace and Conflict

  A central task for intervenors working with intractable conflict is to avoid premature oversimplification of the problems they face and to identify and work through key elements of the system that are driving or constraining change in a manner informed by the complexities of the situation. Consequently, one of the first challenges for intervenors working in a system with a collapse of complexity (strong us-versus-them polarization dynamics) is to maintain or enhance their own and the disputants’ tolerance for ambiguity, contradiction, and sense of integrative complexity with regard to the case (Coleman, Redding, and Ng, forthcoming; Conway, Suedfeld, and Tetlock, 2001). This includes the capacities to tolerate ambiguous and contradictory information and to view the system holistically; to begin to see different aspects of the problem and how they relate to one another and then to put this information together in a manner that informs action. This is no small task under the pressures and constraints of intense, long-term conflict. Coleman, Redding, and Ng (forthcoming) have developed a two-level framework to help assess and enhance these competencies in decision makers and disputants and to assess and foster the institutional conditions known to be conducive to them.

  One increasingly useful and popular method of enhancing complexity is through conflict and peace mapping. Because destructive conflicts demand attention to the here and now—to the violence, hostilities, suffering, and grievances evident in the immediate context—they often draw attention away from the history, trajectory, and broader context in which the conflict is evolving. Today many peace practitioners employ the use of complexity and feedback-loop mapping to recontextualize their own and the stakeholders’ understanding of the conflict (see Burns, 2007; Coleman, 2011; Körppen et al., 2011; Ricigliano, 2012).