This volume explores the evolution of theoretical and practical approaches to intervening in protracted conflicts, following the work of Herb Kelman. Interactive problem solving, as developed by Kelman and others, sought to increase understanding about the microprocesses of international relations. Kelman early on emphasised the centrality of an interactive approach for constructing new identities, new narratives, and new ways forward. Transforming conflict systems requires strategic attention to the interactions between agents of change that provide stability or induce shift. This volume on interactive conflict approaches includes both critical reflections and new ideas from scholar-practitioners who have developed, revised, and expanded these approaches. Contributors take up important issues, from the shape and likelihood of solutions in intractable conflicts to how individuals can exist in realities with seemingly irresolvable inner and outer conflicts. The volume represents the best of current thinking about how the mechanisms, theoretical framework, and application of interactive problem solving should be moved into the twenty-first century context of increasing complexity, increasing uncertainty, and increasing polarisation. This book will be of interest to students of peace studies, conflict resolution, and international relations.

The indispensable guide to conflict resolution in a troubled world Conflict prevention and resolution, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding have never been more important as priorities on the global agenda. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and tensions between the major powers in what is now a multi-polar world, require new conflict resolution responses. The fifth edition of this hugely popular text offers a commanding overview of today’s changing conflict landscape and the latest developments and new ideas in the field. Fluently written in an easy-to-follow style, it guides readers carefully through the key concepts, issues and debates, evaluates successes and failures, and assesses the main challenges for conflict resolution today. Comprehensively updated and illustrated with new case studies, the fifth edition returns to its favoured twelve-chapter format. It remains the leading text for students of peace and security studies, conflict management and international politics, as well as policy-makers and those working in NGOs and think tanks.

This book provides practical tools, models, and frameworks for thinking about how a story is structured, all in order to help us think about conflict. Using examples from literature and films for developing narrative competence in everyday life, the book illustrates a new model of four basic plot types that can push a reader/viewer either toward political struggle (a justice or vindication story) or toward a journey of self-realization (a peace or reconciliation story). The examples used in the book span a wide array of conflict situations, from climate change to native American genocide, from reproductive rights and gender-based violence to Algerian independence and Arab identity, from Jim Crow segregation and civil rights to the Vietnam War and colonial collapse, from Latino educational opportunities to the liberation of Bengal and the emergence of the idea of the Global South. This simple-to-use model of story grammar is integral for the practice of both politics and peacemaking and opens a new window on literary analysis and the craft of storytelling. Along the way, it provides us with a new way to understand human purpose and offers precise definitions of the concepts of peace and justice. This book will be of great interest to students and practitioners of international relations, security studies, political theory, and peace and conflict/justice studies.

This book explains how facilitative mediators, those without material leverage, contribute to progress in peace negotiations. While existing theories of mediation have offered suggestions about what a mediator should get parties to do to reach an agreement, the puzzle that has remained is: how does a mediator get parties to do what is prescribed? The book argues that a communication perspective is key to understanding facilitative mediation and that framing is the main mechanism by which facilitative mediation functions. Based on an empirical analysis of the United Nations mediation in El Salvador between 1990 and 1992, the work breaks new ground by uncovering three underlying mechanisms that explain how a mediator can get their framing adopted by the negotiating parties, thereby advancing the negotiations. The book offers a novel theory of facilitative mediation as framing and an innovative methodological approach that focuses on negotiation impasses to study the process of how negotiations progress. Practitioners will also appreciate the framework for thinking about when and how framing and reframing can be used to increase mediation’s effectiveness as a tool for ending armed conflict. This book will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, negotiation, Latin American politics, and International Relations, as well as practitioners.

This book explores the ways in which memory sites contribute to the dynamics of identity-based conflicts, fueling fears and sharpening divisions, or promoting commonalities and reducing violence. Through an analysis of the dynamics of identity-based conflicts, the book shows how memory sites become intertwined with the transformations of social boundaries and perceptions of relative deprivation, outgroup threat, collective axiology, and power relations. It posits that these two sets of factors – the functioning of collective memory as an ideological construct and the transformation of conflictual social relations – define the role and influence of memory sites in the dynamics of identity-based conflicts. Through multiple case studies representing different dynamics – dealing with fascist and communist pasts in Italy, post-colonial relations between South Korea and Japan, ethnic conflict in Kosovo, and tribal acknowledgment for Native American Nations – the book discusses how memory sites contribute to competition over ownership, fights for legitimacy, claims of entitlements, and negative portrayals of the Other. In doing so, it outlines four major functions of memory sites – enhancing, ascribing, interacting, and legitimizing – and shows how they contribute to and shape the structure and dynamics of conflict. Concentrating on the linkages between memory sites, violence prevention, and reconciliation, the book proposes solutions for promoting peace, including the focus on plurality of heritage, recognition of fluidity of meanings, and resistance to singular interpretations and manipulations by identity entrepreneurs. This volume will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, memory studies, and International Relations in general.

This book examines the complex role identity and religion play in global peace processes. Based on multiple case studies, this book unveils the complex role identity and religion play in peace processes across the globe. It demonstrates that the success and sustainability of a peace process depends on the systemic application of the BRIDGE model that is introduced here. This model describes five major strategies (Bonding, Reassuring, Involving, Determining Guides, and Equalizing) and numerous tactics for how peace processes and accords can deal with the central issues as well as important common challenges that run through identity-based ethnonational or religious conflicts. This represents the first comprehensive account of how the transition from enemies to neighbors is achieved and how intergroup relations and engagement are transformed in peace processes, impacting power, access to resources, legitimacy, and representation in national identity. The model also discusses what forms of peacebuilding authentically represent the interests, needs, and values of religious constituencies, and what can be learned from how religious constituencies escalate and de-escalate conflict. The book demonstrates why religion must also be included in peace processes and permanent solutions, owing to religion’s capacity to enhance commitment to bonding and peaceful values, such as justice, compassion, nonviolence, stability, care for children, and care for the environment, for the sick, the wounded, the traumatized, and the bereaved. This book will be of much interest to students of peace studies, intra-state conflict, religion studies, and International Relations.

San Francisco is a uniquely favored city, but its politics are beset with extraordinary problems. Power is divided among traditional and new minorities, a mayor with modest authority, and a large city bureaucracy guided by insensitive professional norms. The special San Francisco "politics of profit" and ethnic conflict are complicated and profoundly influenced by such external forces as regional, state, and federal government, and by the force of a national economy. Frederick Wirt's fascinating study is based on personal interviews with knowledgeable observers and participants, on an extensive review of special reports, and on a firsthand study of the transaction patterns in the political, business, labor, ethnic, and historical life of the city. In the end, the 125-year political history of San Francisco provides solid new insights on the politics of large American cities in the 1970s. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

Conflict is inherent in virtually every aspect of human relations, from sport to parliamentary democracy, from fashion in the arts to paradigmatic challenges in the sciences, and from economic activity to intimate relationships. Yet, it can become among the most serious social problems humans face when it loses its constructive features and becomes protracted over time with no obvious means of resolution. This book addresses the subject of intractable social conflict from a new vantage point. Here, these types of conflict represent self-organizing phenomena, emerging quite naturally from the ongoing dynamics in human interaction at any scale—from the interpersonal to the international. Using the universal language and computational framework of nonlinear dynamical systems theory in combination with recent insights from social psychology, intractable conflict is understood as a system locked in special attractor states that constrain the thoughts and actions of the parties to the conflict. The emergence and maintenance of attractors for conflict can be described by means of formal models that incorporate the results of computer simulations, experiments, field research, and archival analyses. Multi-disciplinary research reflecting these approaches provides encouraging support for the dynamical systems perspective. Importantly, this text presents new views on conflict resolution. In contrast to traditional approaches that tend to focus on basic, short-lived cause-effect relations, the dynamical perspective emphasizes the temporal patterns and potential for emergence in destructive relations. Attractor deconstruction entails restoring complexity to a conflict scenario by isolating elements or changing the feedback loops among them. The creation of a latent attractor trades on the tendency toward multi-stability in dynamical systems and entails the consolidation of incongruent (positive) elements into a coherent structure. In the bifurcation scenario, factors are identified that can change the number and types of attractors in a conflict scenario. The implementation of these strategies may hold the key to unlocking intractable conflict, creating the potential for constructive social relations.

This work studies the world's most multifaceted and complex political turmoils - Kashmir, using the protracted social conflict theory.

A conflict resolution specialist explores the nature of disputes that become intractable quagmires, and offers cutting edge methods for solving them.