What are conflict resolution (CR) strategies and how do they benefit those involved in wars? This chapter looks at the expanding field of CR in recent decades. CR offers many strategies that are relevant for combatants as well as for the intermediaries trying to mitigate destructive conflicts. CR ideas are increasingly influential and new developments are largely a response to the changing international environment. However, they are still insufficiently understood and utilised.
Conflict resolution is an area with a diverse range of practice, theory and research. In the late 1970s the CR field was focused on negotiation and mediation. Practitioners and theorists applied the CR approach to a variety of organisational, community and national disputes. As CR workers turned to civil and international wars they gave attention to ways in which intermediaries and partisans can reduce the intensity of conflict and move towards negotiations for an agreement. In the later years of the Cold War, attention was given to interrupting or avoiding destruction escalation, which included enhancing crisis management systems. Recently, attention has been paid to fostering constructive escalation and conflict transformation, for example in public demonstrations to oust an authoritarian government. A major area of CR expansion is aiding reconciliation between former enemies.
Although there is not a consensus about ideas and practices of CR, there are some shared understandings about analysing conflicts and about how to wage or intervene in them so as to minimise their adverse consequences and maximise their benefits.
- Conflicts are inevitable in social life and often serve to advance and sustain important human values including security, freedom and economic well-being.
- Conflicts can become destructive of the values that they are trying to further.
- Partisans blame each other for the bad things that happen in a conflict, including their own conduct. Such self-victimisation reduces the ways to resist the antagonists’ attacks.
- A conflict needs to be analysed to ensure that CR policies will be effective. There needs to be information about the stakeholders’ interests as well as theoretical analysis.
- The social construction of parties to a conflict is not as homogenous as might appear. Adversaries wage conflicts within a larger social context. Intermediary efforts can be initiated with subgroups.
- Conflicts are waged by a mixture of coercive and noncoercive inducements.
Recent global developments, including the end of the Cold War, the impact of technology on war-making and the role of non-state transnational actors, have changed the nature of CR applications.
- Collective engagement by outside parties which are seen to be legitimate is crucial in averting destructive conflicts.
- Multilateral agreements to reduce the availability of weapons to groups who might use them in societal or international wars are important. Governments’ unwillingness to sign such agreements should be addressed.
- Acts by leaders of one side directed at leaders of the other side are particularly important in the context of rapidly increasing channels of mass and interpersonal communication.
- Attention should be paid to this new information and a high priority given to responding to it.
- To bring a destructive conflict to an agreed end, the adversaries need to believe that peace will offer more than war.
- Institutions and the rule of law are needed to implement and sustain agreements.
