Record, celebrate, and learn from your conflict management breakthroughs.

Most regions of the world are plagued by conflicts that are made insoluble by a confluence of complex threads from history, geography, politics, and culture. These "frozen conflicts" defy conflict management interventions by both internal and external agents and institutions. Worse, they constantly threaten to extend beyond their local geographies, as in the terrorist bombings in Boston by ethnic Chechens, or to escalate from skirmishes to full-scale war, as in Nagorno-Karabakh. Consequently, such conflicts cry out for alternative approaches to the classic, state-focused, and sovereignty-based conflict management models that are practiced in traditional diplomacy—which most often produce rather short-term, ad hoc, fragmented interventions and outcomes. Drawing upon the cases of the South Caucasus, the Western Balkans, Central America, South East Asia, and Northern Ireland, Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management offers a theoretical and practical solution to this impasse by arguing for regional collective interventions that involve a long-term reengineering of existing conflict management infrastructure on the ground. Such approaches have been attracting the attention of scholars and practitioners alike yet, thus far, these concepts have rarely involved more than simple prescriptions for regional cooperation between grassroots actors and traditional diplomacy. Specifically, says Anna Ohanyan, only the cultivation and establishment of regional peace systems can provide an effective path toward conflict management in these standoffs in such intractably divided regions.

This edited volume presents selected papers capturing Herbert Kelman’s unique and seminal contributions to the social psychology of conflict analysis and resolution, with a special emphasis on the utility of concepts for understanding and constructively addressing violent and intractable conflicts. Central concepts covered include perceptual processes, basic human needs, group and normative processes, social identity, and intergroup trust, which form the basis for developing interactive methods of conflict resolution.

Interactive Conflict Resolution is the first book to comprehensively examine this innovative technique for peacebuilding: impartial third parties—through facilitated dialogue and focused analysis—bring together unofficial representatives of groups or nations engaged in protracted, violent conflict. Ronald J. Fisher discusses the works of major theorists as they have applied this technique to situations in Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland, India-Pakistan, and Cyprus, among others. He describes various methods, including intercommunal dialogue, interactive problem solving, third-party consultation, and the psychodynamic approach. Comprehensive in scope, Interactive Conflict Resolution also explores how this technique can be used in conjunction with official diplomacy and other methods of third party negotiations, including mediation and prenegotiations. Fisher also addresses the critical areas which threaten the field, such as funding and institutionalization, and pinpoints the major challenges he sees in the years ahead.

This edited volume presents selected papers focusing on Ronald Fisher’s cumulative contributions to understanding destructive intergroup conflicts from a social-psychological perspective, and to the development and assessment of small group, interactive methods for resolving them. Highlights include schematic models of third party consultations, intergroup conflicts, and a contingency approach to third party intervention. Overall, the selected texts offer a comprehensive description and clear rationale for interactive conflict resolution and its unique contributions to peacemaking.

This first-of-a-kind collection brings together in one volume the strongest available evidence of successful transfer effects from unofficial third-party work to official peacemaking. Using comparative case analysis from several real-world interventions, Paving the Way offers insights into the conditions and qualities of successful programs of interactive conflict resolution from experts in the field. Editor Ronald J. Fisher has assembled a collection of seminal case studies that illustrate interactive approaches to conflict resolution from the Malaysia-Indonesia conflict in the 1960s to the Peru-Equador peace process of the late 1990s. Integrating theory, research, and practice, the cases posit that interactive conflict resolution can make a significant, and sometimes essential, contribution to the resolution of protracted and violent identity conflicts. The methods and solutions offered in Paving the Way will serve as best practices for those in the field and as training tools and resources for scholars and policymakers.

Developments in the use of game theory have impacted multiple fields and created opportunities for new applications. With the ubiquity of these developments, there is an increase in the overall utilization of this approach. Game Theory: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice contains a compendium of the latest academic material on the usage, strategies, and applications for implementing game theory across a variety of industries and fields. Including innovative studies on economics, military strategy, and political science, this multi-volume book is an ideal source for professionals, practitioners, graduate students, academics, and researchers interested in the applications of game theory.

Learn strategies for keeping an already hot situation under control, plus ways to prevent conflicts before they can start.

Das englischsprachige Berghof Handbook ist das internationale Referenzwerk zum Thema Konflikttransformation. The Berghof Handbook offers both practitioners and scholars a systematic overview of the state-of-the-art of conflict transformation.

The dispute between Georgia and Abkhazia is not a conflict of equals. In international conflicts, adversaries may differ de facto on the ground, in terms of population, territory and capability, among other things. As internationally recognized states, however, they have equal de jure status, and fears that inviting the other side to the negotiating tablemight be construed as recognition, for example, rarely intrude. The question of status does pose problems, however, when a conflict is being fought between a recognized state and an unrecognized entity, and these problems may contribute to increase the intractability of such conflicts.This study explores how and to what extent the difference in status between a sovereign state and an unrecognized entity hinders conflict resolution activities. Based on intensive fieldwork and unedited negotiation material, the book provides an in-depth analysis of the negotiations, informal dialogues and grassroots activities that took place in Abkhazia and Georgia between 1989 and 2008.