Cover Page

For Meredith, Herwald, Ben and Zand

Start where conflict parties are, not where third parties want them to be.

When Conflict Resolution Fails

An Alternative to Negotiation and Dialogue: Engaging Radical Disagreement in Intractable Conflicts

Oliver Ramsbotham











polity

PREFACE

Two factors have shaped the way this book is written. First, it is a short book about a large subject. Second, it is intended for readers some of whom will have no previous knowledge of conflict resolution or of the Israel–Palestine conflict that is taken as a case study. So the emphasis is on conveying main points clearly without too many qualifications which might obscure the argument. After a somewhat academic opening chapter to set the scene, the text is thereafter kept clear of jargon, acronyms and unnecessary references. Instead of lengthy literature reviews, wherever possible ideas are illustrated in the most simple way by direct quotation and then tested by concrete examples. Under pressure of space, preference has been given to the case study (chapters 5 to 8) over what precedes and follows it. So in chapter 3, for example, there is no attempt to do justice to the rich literatures on dialogue, problem-solving and negotiation. Instead, the main effort is to illustrate how classic conflict resolution sets aside or ignores the radical disagreements at the heart of intractable conflict and why, as a result, there may be no further recourse when that proves premature. Chapter 4 is then able to focus on what might be done to remedy this.

It should be made clear that this book is not a criticism of conflict resolution, which is my own topic and the field I have spent my professional life studying, teaching and writing about. But, however many successes there are, particular attention always needs to be paid to failure, because, as argued in chapter 1, this is where growth and development most readily occur. So the key question is: What can be done when, so far, conflict resolution approaches do not work? The book is intended not as a replacement of conflict resolution but – as made clear in chapter 9 – as an extension of it.

In relation to the case study, this preface is being written in early June 2016. In Israel the Labor Party in 2016 adopted a new Comprehensive Diplomatic Security Plan that affirms renewed commitment to a ‘two-state solution’, as noted in chapter 7, but Avigdor Lieberman’s virulently rejectionist party has recently joined the ruling coalition government. In line with the ‘two-track’ strategy set out in chapter 6, Palestinians plan a major international campaign focused around 5 June 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of the Israeli takeover, demanding an end to the ambiguity of the status quo and a stark choice for Israel: either end the occupation and deliver two states for two nations or give equal rights to all throughout the area subject to Israeli control until a political solution is found. Palestinians feel ambivalent about the nature of a renewed emphasis on a ‘regional setting’ for final agreement, which includes an Egyptian focus on intra-Palestinian reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas and Saudi Arabian intimations about adapting the 2002/2007 Arab Peace Initiative, possibly as part of a ‘Sunni’ Arab/Israeli front against Iran. There is great uncertainty about the succession to President Abbas. At wider international level there is a continually shifting ‘French initiative’, promise of a future ‘Quartet Report’ to rekindle international involvement, talk of a possible ‘swansong’ of ‘Obama parameters’ (perhaps in the form of a UN Security Council Resolution), and uncertainty about the new regional role of Russia. The impact of the outcome of the US presidential election is another imponderable.

Readers who would like to acquaint themselves further with the academic dimension of analysis can consult Contemporary Conflict Resolution (Ramsbotham, Woodhouse and Miall 2016), which provides a comprehensive overview of the conflict resolution field, and my book Transforming Violent Conflict: Radical Disagreement, Dialogue and Survival (2010), for more on the particular phenomenon of radical disagreement.

Kevin Avruch gives a characteristically accurate and succinct summary of the central argument in the book, from which the extract on the back cover is taken. I can do no better than to end this preface by reproducing the full version here:

In his earlier Transforming Violent Conflict (2010) Ramsbotham introduced the ideas of ‘radical disagreement’ (the main linguistic manifestation of intractable conflict) and its communicative counterpart ‘linguistic intractability’ to the lexicon of conflict resolution. He also demonstrated how and why, in the face of these two conditions, the usual methods in the conflict resolution ‘toolkit’ – principled (interest-based) negotiation, interactive problem-solving, and dialogue – so often fail. This book, using the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as its main case, begins where the earlier one leaves off. He describes a form of ‘extended conflict resolution’, built around ideas and practices of ‘strategic engagement’ that constitute the preconditions necessary for conflict resolution to have any chance of success. Along the way he challenges our ideas of the role of third parties and proposes what may be, ethically, the outer limits of conflict resolution itself.

Part I
The Argument

1
LEARNING FROM FAILURE

Bringing warring parties to the negotiating table is the aim of any peace process. But what happens when those negotiations falter and conflict resolution fails? Is everything lost, or are there prospects for meaningful change in even the most intractable of conflicts?

Introduction

This book sums up work I have done over several decades on the communicative aspect of intractable conflicts – beginning with Choices in 1987. Intractable conflicts are those in which attempts at peaceful containment, settlement and transformation have so far gained no purchase. In ‘frozen’ conflicts there is a semblance of peaceful management, but this is superficial and is likely to break down again. I say ‘so far’ because it is always possible that such attempts will succeed in future, as conflict resolution wants, and as has happened in many other cases. But ‘so far’ can go on for years, if not decades, during which time unimaginable destruction and damage to human lives and life hopes may be inflicted. The victims are overwhelmingly the most vulnerable. What, if anything, can be done in these circumstances? The focus is on how best to handle what I call linguistic intractability and its chief verbal manifestation radical disagreement.

In order to get to grips with this challenge we first need to know both what conflict resolution is trying to achieve and what aspects of prevailing patterns of large-scale conflict block the way. This is the job of chapters 1 and 2. The main argument begins in chapter 3.

It will be helpful to remember in what follows that the aim of conflict resolution is to overcome violence, not conflict. Conflict cannot be overcome, because it is inherent in social and political change. And conflict should not be overcome, because without it injustice and unjust systems cannot be challenged. Mahondas Gandhi and Martin Luther King were opposed to violence. But they were not opposed to conflict. They wanted to eliminate the British occupation of India and racial discrimination in the United States. Nelson Mandela wanted to overthrow apartheid in South Africa. To do this, levels of conflict had to be raised, not lowered. Here is King in his famous address from the Washington memorial on 23 August 1963:

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquillizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. The whirlwind of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.1

What does this imply about peace processes in deep-rooted and intractable conflicts? First, that in peace talks between undefeated conflict parties the aim is often not to end the conflict, but to transmute it into non-violent forms of continuing struggle and change. Otherwise the conflict parties will not enter the peace process. For example, this is what happened in Northern Ireland in 1998. Here a ‘post-war settlement’ is a ‘continuation of the conflict by other means’ (which is why, for reasons explained below, I call it Clausewitz in reverse). Requiring an ‘end of conflict’ in such cases is unrealistic and self-defeating. It also follows that a further aim is to separate what I call extremists of ends, who are uncompromising about strategic goals, from extremists of means, who are uncompromising about the use of violence. This is a central distinction in dealing with terrorism, as made clear in chapter 9.

It may seem surprising in the light of this that conflict resolution regularly discounts the radical disagreement that lies at the heart of linguistic intractability as an ‘all-too-familiar’ dead end and a terminus to dialogue that needs from the outset to be transformed, not learnt from. In intractable conflicts this is premature. Radical disagreement turns out to be perhaps the least familiar aspect of intense political conflict. And conflict resolution fails when the conditions that it presupposes do not yet exist, the assumptions on which it rests (often drawn from the social and political sciences) do not yet apply, and conflict parties are not yet ready to behave in the way it wants. It may then find that it has no other recourse when it is confronted by the ‘war of words’ (the radical disagreement) that pervades intractable asymmetric conflict and blocks conflict resolution at all levels.

What is the alternative? The central argument in chapter 4 is that, when conflict resolution fails, we should turn in the opposite direction – to conflict engagement. Instead of ignoring radical disagreement, we should first try to understand what obstructs the way and then adapt practice accordingly. This means starting where conflict parties are, not where third parties want them to be. It means beginning not between conflict parties but within them. Internal disagreements are often more ferocious than external disagreements. And internal divisions can be the main blockage to external accommodation. Above all, it means promoting collective strategic thinking by the main identity groups: Where are they? Where do they want to be? How do they get there? Why are conflict parties prepared to do this when they are not prepared for conflict resolution? Because they want to overcome internal divisions – not in order to ‘understand the other’, but in order to win. So how can this nevertheless be a ‘placeholder’ for a possible future initiation or revival of conflict resolution? A number of reasons are given in chapter 4 and illustrated in the case study. This is the core of the book. Emphasizing strategic discourse within parties to a conflict is often the real key to progress when other avenues are blocked – including the regularly overlooked strategic question of how to influence the internal dynamics of the other side. Chapter 4 also offers a template for how to conduct collective strategic thinking of this kind based on the work of the strategy groups described in Part II. Practitioners may want to try this out for themselves.

Taking as its focus the long-running and seemingly irresolvable conflict between Israel and Palestine, the argument in the case study in Part II is that what is needed in these circumstances is not less radical disagreement, but more. Only by understanding what is blocking the way and by promoting collective strategic engagement within, across and between the groups involved – including third parties – can deadlock be transformed. Chapters 5 and 6 go beyond the tendency among behavioural scientists to treat ‘intractable’ conflicts as primarily the result of correctible subjective misunderstandings. They demonstrate how the differing narratives of the parties to the conflict come out of their ‘lived experience’ and are thus in a basic sense as real as the ‘objective’ conflicts over land and power – and inseparable from them. That is what blocks conflict resolution. In terms of strategic thinking, the case study shows how at the heart of asymmetric conflict lie the radically different requirements of possessors and challengers. The question of the dialectics of power is central here. For example, why should Israelis give up anything if the status quo continues to be better than any strategic alternative? And how can Palestinians transform the status quo when the process of bilateral negotiation brokered by the United States is itself part of what perpetuates it? It is only the promotion of strategic engagement that illuminates these critical dynamics.

Chapter 7 shows the importance of including all the main cross-cutting identity groups in the strategic engagement process in complex transnational conflicts. In this case, it is the neglected constituency of Israeli Palestinians (20 per cent of the population of Israel) that needs for the first time to be fully represented as a ‘core group’ in strategic negotiations.

Using the example of the attempt, between July 2013 and April 2014, by US Secretary of State John Kerry to end the conflict, chapter 8 shows that third parties are not neutral, impartial or disinterested in intractable political conflicts of this kind. It also demonstrates how a conflict resolution approach to negotiation such as principled negotiation needs to be supplemented in times of maximum attrition by a prior strategic negotiation approach, which links strategic thinking within conflict parties to the wider (regional, international) strategic context where prevailing patterns of transnational conflict are now increasingly determined.

Part III looks at wider applications in terms of other phases, other levels and other conflicts. This introduces a new and as yet relatively unexplored frontier in conflict studies. It holds out rich promise for extending conflict engagement in some of the world’s deadliest and most difficult hot spots. A central argument here is for linking conflict resolution to strategic studies. Turning from strategic engagement to ‘heuristic engagement’ (from the Greek word for ‘discover’), chapter 10 explores agonistic dialogue (the dialogue of struggle or dialogue between enemies) and concludes that, in intractable conflicts, conflict parties are not nearer, but much further apart than was supposed. It uncovers why there is no adequate third-party theory or ‘philosophy’ of radical disagreement. Part III ends on a suitably humble note by asking what happens when even strategic conflict engagement and ‘extended conflict resolution’ fail.

Summing the whole thing up, the book argues that, during times of maximum attrition, the radical disagreements that constitute the core of linguistic intractability are best seen as an opportunity rather than as a terminus. This opens up a new dimension in conflict studies. Learning how to understand and respond to this is the central task of the as yet underdeveloped field of heuristic and strategic conflict engagement.

The rest of this chapter offers a survey of the conflict resolution field under the theme most suitable for this book – learning how to respond to failure.

Second-order social learning and conflict resolution

From the beginning social learning theory has been at the heart of conflict resolution. The founders of the field stressed the importance of understanding complex systems in the search for ways of transforming violent into non-violent conflict. Morton Deutsch, John Burton and others drew on general systems theory to explain the cooperative and competitive behaviour of social organisms2 and on game theory to analyse the variety of options available to conflict parties.3 Burton was particularly influenced by the idea of first-order and second-order learning.4 It is not only individuals who need to learn adaptive responses in order to survive but socio-cultural systems in general, whose underlying assumptions and habitual patterns of behaviour tend to resist necessary change. If a system – or species – does not adapt, it is discarded. History is littered with examples of systemic obsolescence. It is a never-ending process, as previous success may prove counter-productive in a new environment. Then it is important to stop investing in what may have worked before and to discover what the altered circumstances demand. The requirement is to learn the right lessons and to adapt accordingly. What are the right lessons? It is by looking at the frontiers of failure – those locations where the system is malfunctioning – that second-order social learning is best achieved.

In the 1950s, when the conflict resolution field was established, the advent of nuclear weapons meant that violent human conflict now threatened the future of Homo sapiens as a whole. This was an existential crisis. For Kenneth Boulding (whose systemic training was in economics), ‘the international system is by far the most pathological and costly segment of the whole social system.’5 For Anatol Rapoport (biologist and mathematician), ‘the illusion that increasing losses for the other side is equivalent to winning is the reason that the struggles are so prolonged and the conflicting parties play the game to a lose/ lose end.’6 Social systems that cling to what Rapoport called ‘default values’ (first-order learning) are not capable of achieving the transformation required. So the ‘critical issue of peace’ – the need to convert destructive into constructive conflict – demanded the ‘incorporation of second order learning in social systems’. And, given the changed environment, this could only be done ‘through a participative design process’.7

Such were the ideas that inspired the ‘early church’ of conflict resolvers in the 1950s and 1960s. The first issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (1957) put it like this:

The reasons which have led us to this enterprise may be summed up in two propositions. The first is that by far the most practical problem facing the world today is that of international relations – more specifically the prevention of global war. The second is that if intellectual progress is to be made in this area, the study of international relations must be made an interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing its discourse from all the social sciences and even further.8

The complex systems that made war not only possible but, in some cases, likely operated in many overlapping spheres – military, political, economic, social, psychological – and at many different levels. So this must be matched by the requisite responses from conflict resolution. That is why the new field had to be interdisciplinary.

But, as they developed their programme, conflict resolution theorists and practitioners found that more and more ‘frontiers of failure’ needed to be taken into account and addressed if the complex system as a whole was to be transformed. What had begun as a focus on the pathology of interstate war had expanded twenty years later (Journal of Conflict Resolution 1973) to take in major drivers of conflict, such as both north–south socio-economic divisions and environmental constraints, which were seen as potential generators of global conflict and therefore in urgent need of systemic transformation:

The threat of nuclear holocaust remains with us and may well continue to do so for centuries, but other problems are competing with deterrence and disarmament studies for our attention. The journal must also attend to international conflict over justice, equality and human dignity; problems of conflict resolution for ecological balance and control are within our proper scope and especially suited for interdisciplinary attention.9

A critical early realization among some of the most creative shapers of the new conflict resolution field was that the stipulations of second-order social learning applied as much to their own enterprise as to any others. In order to keep the field adaptive, innovative and effective, therefore, it was necessary to focus continually on the ‘frontiers of failure’ – those sites where conflict resolution itself did not (or did not yet) work. These were the locations where adaptation and growth were most needed, where reality checks could best be taken, and where new ways of responding were most likely to be discovered.

A brief history of the field can be seen to reflect this Popperian perspective.10

Lessons from the frontiers of failure: conflict resolution in its first fifty years

In the first, heroic period in the 1950s and 1960s, the existing study of international relations was seen to have been taken over by first-order realist ways of thinking which offered no solution to the main systemic threats. The pioneers of the conflict resolution field challenged realist reliance on competitive military defence preparations, balance of power theory, and deterrence as the main preventers of war, because these could no longer be relied on to work in the nuclear age and the penalty of failure would be too high. Instead they looked to a far wider study of human conflict that also embraced non-interstate wars, revolutions, insurrections, and human conflicts at other levels right down to small group and individual struggles. The statistical underpinning for this study was found in earlier analyses of ‘deadly quarrels’ in general by Pitirim Sorokin (1937), Lewis Fry Richardson (1960, posthumous publication) and Quincy Wright (1942). There are accounts of the excitement with which founders of the field greeted the arrival in the United States of Stephen Richardson with microfiches of his father’s as yet unpublished work.

As well as being multidisciplinary and multi-level, the new field also aspired to be multicultural – drawing from non-Western Gandhian, Buddhist and other traditions – and aimed to be both analytic (polemology) and normative (eirenics) and to combine the theoretic (theoria) and the applied (praxis).11 This manifested itself in the way innovative pre-1950 initiatives at different levels were now brought together and integrated into what it was hoped would be a decisive paradigm-shift – including Mary Parker Follett’s ‘mutual gains’ approach in labour relations (1942), Von Neumann’s and Morgenstern’s game theory (1944), Kurt Lewin’s work on the social psychology of group conflict (1948), Crane Brinton’s ‘anatomy of political revolution’ (1938) and David Mitrany’s argument for the ‘functional development of international organisation’ as the foundation of a ‘working peace system’ (later seen to have anticipated the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union) (1943).

At the heart of this distinctive new conflict resolution field were three conceptual nodal points that are worth bearing in mind.

First there was Morton Deutsch’s distinction between destructive and constructive conflict.12 We have already noted in the introduction how the aim of conflict resolution is to prevent or end violent conflict, but not ‘constructive’ conflict.

Second, there was Johan Galtung’s contrast between direct, structural and cultural violence.13 Direct violence is where children are murdered. Structural violence is where children die through poverty. Cultural violence is whatever blinds us to this or seeks to justify it. We end direct violence by changing conflict behaviour, structural violence by removing structural contradictions and injustices, and cultural violence by changing attitudes. These responses relate in turn to broader strategies of peacekeeping, peacebuilding and peacemaking respectively. Negative peace is defined as the cessation of direct violence, and positive peace as the overcoming of structural and cultural violence as well.

Putting Deutsch’s and Galtung’s ideas together, the normative aim of conflict resolution was to transform actually or potentially violent conflict into non-violent forms of struggle and change. In contrast to the determinism inherent in some forms of realism and Marxism, conflict resolution insisted that violence in all its forms is ultimately subject to the possibility of human decision, and that it can and must be overcome if future generations are to survive. Given the deep biological, psychological and institutional roots of violence, this was bound to be an uphill – indeed perpetual – struggle. The odds were not in favour of conflict resolution. There would be setbacks en route.

Third, there was John Burton’s idea that intractable conflicts are rooted in the failure of existing institutions to satisfy non-negotiable basic human needs:

The conclusion to which we are coming is that seemingly different and separate social problems, from street violence to industrial frictions, to ethnic and international conflicts, are symptoms of the same cause: institutional denial of needs of recognition and identity, and the sense of security provided when they are satisfied, despite losses through violent conflict.14

For Burton, although basic human needs – identity needs, security needs, autonomy needs, development needs – are non-negotiable, they are also non-zero sum, so that the door to resolution is always open. The term ‘non-zero sum’ comes from game theory and means that, unlike some conflicts over scarce resources, one side’s gain does not mean another’s loss – indeed, one side often cannot gain security or maximize development unless the other side does the same.

It seems fair to conclude that, in its first two decades, the founders of the conflict resolution field had indeed creatively explored the ‘frontiers of failure’ in the management of human conflict and, as a result, had put together a promising alternative paradigm. The institutional bases for the new approach had been laid, mainly in North America and Europe. A set of complementary methodologies had been formulated, encompassing the ‘subjectivist’ dialogue approach, the ‘objectivist’ rational negotiation approach, and the ‘structuralist’ social justice approach – tentatively corresponding to attempts to address the ‘attitude’, ‘behaviour’ and ‘contradiction’ vertices of Galtung’s conflict triangle. And there had been the beginning of a testing out of theory in practice with the early experiments in ‘controlled communication’ or ‘problem-solving’ workshops.15 Some internal disputes within the field were still unresolved, but this can itself be seen as a sign of potential future growth from a social learning perspective.16

During the next period in the 1970s and 1980s, those working in the conflict resolution field continued to labour under the constraints of the Cold War, intensified by the Soviet takeover in Afghanistan (1979) and complicated by the Iranian revolution (1979). In the early 1980s the nuclear arms race reached its zenith. This was a period of consolidation and development in conflict resolution, possibly less innovative, but still responsive to newly perceived challenges. Notable here at international level, building on Charles Osgood’s ‘graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction’ (GRIT) approach to détente, were Robert Axelrod’s associated conclusions about the ‘evolution of cooperation’ in game theory, together with its implications for arms control (in which Rapoport’s ‘tit-for-tat’ strategy came out surprisingly strongly).17 At domestic level, the whole field of Alternative Dispute Resolution began to be elaborated (covering labour relations, public policy disputes, neighbourhood conflicts, family mediation, etc.).18 While, between the two, Burton’s needs theory was applied with great prescience by Edward Azar to a host of non-interstate intractable conflicts that he called ‘protracted social conflicts’. His analysis in terms of preconditions that made certain societies more prone to conflict, and process dynamics that dictated whether or not in the event major armed conflict erupted, laid a sound theoretical base for what the Carnegie Commission later called ‘structural’ and ‘operational’ prevention.19 All of this was innovative at a time when international relations and security studies were preoccupied mainly with the Cold War confrontation.

This was a period in which negotiation studies (notably the Harvard Program on Negotiation), multi-track diplomacy and mediation studies were put on a firm analytic basis. Conflict resolution centres spread around the world, and the idea of a global civil society that transcended gender and culture barriers was articulated, notably by Elise Boulding, Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), with her promotion of the idea of ‘future imaging’ in all social and political planning, so that decisions are taken in terms of human needs over a ‘200-year present’, which in terms of explanation and understanding reaches back into the past but in terms of impact takes in the equal interests of future generations.20

In the 1990s, the conflict resolution field had reached a point of maturity where the end of the Cold War made a number of its terms and approaches, relatively marginalized in the earlier period, all at once the stock-in-trade of politicians and pundits. Peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding occupied international attention, while ‘conflict prevention’ moved to the centre of the UN’s agenda – and the agendas of regional organizations (OSCE, African Union) and international financial institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund). The ending of the Cold War revealed a world that had long been familiar in conflict resolution – a plethora of protracted social conflicts in which economic struggles to control the resources of vulnerable states, ethno-national efforts to redraw the boundaries of states, and ideological attempts to change the nature of states all demanded a more sophisticated array of management, settlement and transformation approaches than had been widely familiar before. The conflict resolution field responded by elaborating ideas of ‘contingency’ (varying requirements in different conflict types and phases) and ‘complementarity’ (synchronizing a range of responses).21 For example, aid and development agencies that had hitherto avoided conflict resolution, because they did not see their role as ‘political’, now acknowledged that good conflict analysis was essential for the success of their missions and that good conflict impact assessment was necessary to ensure that they ‘did no harm’.22 Most of the environments within which they now worked were intense conflict zones of the kind with which conflict resolution had long been engaged, where traditional ideas of political neutrality were compromised.

Where are the frontiers of failure today?

But greater exposure also brought greater criticism. After a honeymoon period in the early 1990s, when some hoped that the original declared purposes of the United Nations and associated international organizations might at last be realized – and the paradigm shift envisaged by the founders of conflict resolution might actually take place – the skies soon clouded over. Debacles in Bosnia and Rwanda (no doubt unfairly) discredited UN-led peacekeeping interventions. The Oslo peace process in Israel/Palestine, hailed in the conflict resolution field as a textbook example of its methodology, stalled in the second half of the decade and appeared to discredit this mode of peacemaking, while post-war peacebuilding projects in countries such as Cambodia and Haiti also ran into difficulties. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the USA ushered in the ‘war on terror’, to be followed by the embroilments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much of the Islamic world was convulsed by struggles to define its ideological and political identity. Ominous echoes of the Cold War resounded around confrontation in Ukraine. The quiet voice of conflict resolution seemed to be drowned out.

At theoretical level, too, conflict resolution was assailed by critics from the right and from the left. For traditional realists, in a world where irreconcilable interests compete for power, ‘soft’ conflict resolution approaches were dismissed as ineffective and dangerous. What possible answer could conflict resolution have to the lethal combination of rogue states, globalized crime, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the fanatical ideologues of international terrorism? For critical theoretic inheritors of the Marxist mantle, in the structurally unequal world of late capitalism, ‘problem-solving’ conflict resolution approaches were seen to reinforce existing imbalances and to fail to address the need for underlying change. For post-structural theorists, conflict resolution discourse about cosmopolitan values was permeated by unwarranted universalizing assumptions about truth and reality. Beyond this lay even broader assaults such as Paul Salem’s ‘critique of western conflict resolution from a non-western perspective’.23

The key question for the conflict resolution field from the standpoint of second-order social learning is whether it is responding creatively to these critiques. Have theorists and practitioners from around the world acknowledged the cases in which established conflict resolution approaches have so far failed, and adapted accordingly? How are success and failure measured? Is adequate ongoing evaluation built in to the different enterprises so that they can be self-correcting? Is the field still innovative and dynamic? Are lessons being learnt from the frontiers of failure?

Conclusion

In summary, the main thing to take from this chapter is the idea from second-order learning that, when conflict resolution fails, the obstruction must not be ignored or prematurely set aside. On the contrary, what blocks the way must be actively acknowledged, understood and adapted to. We will turn to this task in chapters 3 and 4. But first we must ask how serious current failures are. How high is the mountain that those who espouse the hopes and aspirations of conflict resolution have to climb? What are the dimensions of intractable conflict that conflict resolution seeks to address?

Notes