This discovery-oriented, qualitative study explores how creative resolution options and/or procedures by which to come up with resolution options first emerge, gradually evolve, and subsequently come to be accepted or rejected in a given social and epistemological context of inter-group conflict. In the present study, creativity is defined as unconventional viability, or a social process where actors involved in the conflict learn to formulate an unconventional resolution option and/or procedure for resolution, and a growing number of others come to perceive it as a viable way of coping with the underlying problems from their collective and subjective perspective.
The first phase of the study systematically compares sixteen conflict resolution episodes that reflect diverse historical, geographic, and organizational contexts of inter-group conflict, such as the Oslo peace process, the Helsinki process for moderating the East-West confrontation during the Cold War, and the creation of a binational zone along the Peru-Ecuador border. Each case is informed by an in-depth interview with a leading researcher-practitioner, who has actually designed and/or implemented a creative resolution option in the given context. Six common features of creativity have emerged from the analysis. They concern analogizing, value commitment, combining known elements in a new way, unconventionality derived from conventionality, discoveries emerging in retrospect, and contingency-based, principled flexibility. In addition, five concepts of theoretical significance are introduced to analyze the episodes further and explore new possibilities of theory-building. These concepts relate to actors' roles in conflict work, the longitudinal nature of creativity, the outcome-process link, levels of analysis, and paradigm shifts.
The second phase of the study illustrates how the working concepts apply to account for the emergence of the first nonviolence movement, known as satyagraha, organized by the South African Indian community in 1906-14. Archival evidence and Gandhian literature suggest not only the relevance of value commitment, paradigm shifts, and analogizing to satyagraha's emergence, but also the essential role of M. K. Gandhi's identity transformation as an additional enabling factor for creativity.
The study concludes with suggestions for research, practice, and pedagogic application, including a "future case study" method for facilitating conflict resolution dialogue and experiential learning.