Education in Conflict Analysis and Resolution: The Coming Turn Toward the Goal of Radical Transformation

The Coming Turn Toward the Goal of Radical Transformation

The editors of Unrest Magazine asked me to write briefly about the future of education in the field of conflict analysis and resolution – CAR for short.  But I find it impossible to do this without inquiring more generally into the future of the field, which incorporates both an academic discipline (or disciplines) and a practical profession (or professions).  These diverse but related forms of collective activity can be described as an ensemble, in Michel Foucault’s language, as a “discursive formation.”  Despite their diverse, polymorphous, often inconsistent forms of expression, such formations contain cross-cutting ideational correspondences and resonances – conceptual themes, if you like – such as Foucault’s “docile bodies” and “biopolitics.” [1]  Moreover, the knowledge that new disciplines generate and deploy bears a complex, inter-determined relationship to power which Foucault labels Power/Knowledge.  New academic or professional fields subtend new fields of power, and vice versa.  

The evolution of CAR, one might think, would provide a particularly dramatic and revealing example of the P/K relationship.  There is general agreement that the field emerged as a recognizable discipline in the period following World War II, and that it has since spawned several successive “generations” of theorists and practitioners, each aiming to reconfigure both power and knowledge. [2]  The founding figures, scholar-practitioners like John Burton, Johan Galtung, Kenneth Boulding, Elise Boulding, Herbert Kelman, and Adam Curle, wished to found an applied “science of peace” that would generate practical, non-violent methods of resolving serious international and inter-group conflicts. [3]  From the outset, they engaged in conscious field-creating activities motivated by a desire to alter prevailing ideas and practices in the areas of international and inter-group relations.  Strangely enough – or, perhaps, not so strangely, given the reluctance of both academics and professionals to theorize their relationship to structures of power – there are virtually no studies describing CAR’s evolution in P/K terms.  But without such analysis, how can one foresee the discipline’s future, much less the future of conflict resolution education?  This short piece represents a tentative start in the direction marked out by Foucault and his successors in their studies of psychoanalysis, medicine, penology, public administration, and other modern professional disciplines.

Embarking on this path, one notices, to begin with, a problem in applying the Foucauldian conception of Power/Knowledge to an emergent field like ours.  The rise of the new epistemes that he studies is associated with a more general social and cultural transformation —  the same thoroughgoing, systematic change that others have analyzed under the heading “modernization.”  In Foucault’s work, this transformation seems both irresistible and irreversible.  Who could possibly stop the movements from folk to scientific medicine, from public exemplary punishment to the prison, or from princely sovereignty to biopolitics?  Ultimately, in the philosopher’s eyes, the transformation proves more disciplinary than liberating, which is another way, perhaps, of asserting that it is in some respects not total.  Modernization, as the Critical Theorists show, redefines the agents and forms of domination rather than subverting the principle of domination itself.  But if we ask why the transformations Foucault describes stop where they stop, or what further transformations are now possible or necessary, the answer is . . . . silence.  The “father of postmodernism,” who died much too young, seems to have ended not so much a post-modernist as an end-of-modernist, expressing by his very silence a critical version of Hegel’s backward-focused “end of history” thesis.  This means that we must go beyond him to foresee the future of a late-modern discipline like conflict analysis and resolution.

Consider again the concept of transformation – an idea that now threatens to become a mere “buzzword” – one of those incurably vague terms that seem intended to pacify everyone by authorizing as many interpretations as there are interpreters.  This vagueness springs from the fact that the word implies both thoroughgoing qualitative change and a describable shape or coherence – a “rationality” that involves rough consistency with other epistemes as well as internal consistency.  But this also implies some sort of continuity between the transformed entity or system and prior systems.  The transformation that Foucault describes makes everything new, but it does so in a patterned way that conveys a whiff of organicity despite his avoidance of organic metaphors.  To put this differently, cross-cutting concepts like governmentality and biopolitics suggest that the modern disciplines and professions are subject tointegrative forces, stronger than those tending toward disintegration, which tend over time to produce one episteme out of many.   E pluribus unum.  Obviously, this integration is not seamless; what medicine considers a disease (drug addiction, say) the law may treat as a crime.  Even so, the overall tendency described by Foucault is conservative in the sense that an episteme or praxis once created tends to preserve itself and to harmonize with other epistemes/praxes coming into existence at the same time.  In his work, at least as I read it, there are no Hegelian or Marxist “contradictions” driving a process of further qualitative transformation.

The implications of these ideas for CAR seem to me momentous.  If there is an irresistible tendency towards socio-political and epistemic integration – i.e., if CAR is essentially a “modern” field – the discipline will hold together but become integrated into the existing system of power relations.  It will affect those relations to some extent, but, practically speaking, it will accept the intractability of conflicts involving dominant or hegemonic elites.  If, however, the forces of systemic integration are unable to resolve or overpower genuine social and discursive contradictions, the field, reflecting those contradictions, may well divide, with the adherents of radical social transformation refusing to accept their status as auxiliaries of the U.S. government, the global corporations, or other center of elite power.  In this case, conflict resolution education may well differentiate, or even experience a schism, as educational institutions have often done in cases of intense social conflict and rapid change.  In medieval Europe, the legal profession originally created by the Catholic Church split between secularists and canonists, with law schools reflecting their founders’ and professors’ views of who should be the law’s primary clients.  In the United States, religious movements like the Great Awakening of the 18th century produced new universities dedicated to evangelical ideals and refusing to accept the intellectual or moral authority of existing elites.

The field of conflict analysis and resolution came into existence in three forms, each reflecting and instantiating a different degree of integration with previously existing systems.

(1) Alternative dispute resolution proposed “third party” processes like mediation, arbitration, and hybrid procedures that would serve as occasional or temporary alternatives to litigation.  The primary educational locus of ADR training has been the law schools, and this for good reason: from its inception until now, ADR has been conceived of as a supplement rather than a general alternative to more formal legal processes.  That is, the overall tendency has been to integrate it with the legal system, a movement that, to be sure, transforms law to some extent, while profoundly limiting the further transformation and extra-legal uses of ADR.   (The same thing may be said, mutatis mutandis, of related processes like Public Dispute Resolution and Regulatory Negotiation.)  A famous early example of this sort of self-limiting transformation is the rise of Equity in English law, which changed existing legal institutions by injecting certain Church-derived, conscience-based principles and practices into the legal system, but at the price of subjecting those praxes to the fundamental assumptions and methods of legalism.  A similar issue of the possible advantages and likely costs of integration is at the heart of many current debates in the CAR field, such as current disagreements over whether working for the U.S. government “transforms” the government more than it co-opts the CAR scholars and practitioners.

(2) Principled Negotiation proposed a facilitated, nonviolent alternative to military action as a method of pursuing national interests and discovering bases for multinational cooperation.  Of course, interest-based negotiation is a technique as old as war, to which it relates (as in the case of ADR) as a temporary supplement rather than a permanent substitute.  CAR theorists and practitioners like Roger Fisher, Jacob Bercovitch, and Daniel F. Druckman proposed to improve the effectiveness of negotiation and to increase its appeal to governments and international organizations by studying it as a science and proposing new and improved processes.  A famous example is the Pugwash Conference dialogues that helped Soviet and American representatives develop the terms for several nuclear arms control agreements.  Again, strong integrative tendencies made themselves felt (indeed, the “clients” for these approaches were often government officials), and the notion that negotiation, principled or otherwise, might substitute for war rather than supplement military activities was written off as utopian dreaming or translated into a hope for long-term incremental transformation.  The leading proponent of this approach outside the CAR field proper is probably Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the originator of the ideas of “soft power” and “smart power.” [4]

(3) Analytical Conflict Resolution was intended to take a step beyond Principled Negotiation by devising theories (such as the theory of Basic Human Needs) and processes (such as the Analytical Problem-Solving Workshop) in order to resolve “non-negotiable” conflicts arising out of systemic failures to satisfy people’s basic needs and vital interests.  In the minds of theorists like John Burton and Johan Galtung, conflict resolution processes were intended as alternatives, not merely supplements, to power-based negotiation, power politics, and war. [5]  In the praxis of others, however, integrative tendencies were more pronounced, and CAR was conceived of exclusively as a method of assisting conflicting parties to resolve disputes in the international arena, or in other contexts where no generally recognized system of collective decision making existed.  Again, a key issue for the field was whether those attempting to play a conflict-resolving role should operate independently of governments, including the U.S. government, or whether they should accept integration into existing systems of power and influence in the hope of transforming these structures from within.  As the generation of conflict resolvers that came of age during the anti-system mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s aged, and as government interest in and support for certain CAR theories and practices increased, there emerged a tendency for Analytical Conflict Resolution to move in the direction of Principled Negotiation.

(4) This tendency became even more marked with the advent of Peacebuilding, a recent form of CAR praxis which proposes to combine conflict management with international development work in order to promote reconstruction and reconciliation, especially in “post-conflict” environments following a civil war, invasion, or campaign of counter-insurgency.  In its current forms, Peacebuilding heightens the contradiction between integrative and radical transformation, since the sponsors and funders of such efforts are frequently governments attempting to restore order in societies subject to their hegemony or influence — societies that have been violently disrupted either by internal conflict, Western military intervention, or both. [6]  The tendency of this praxis is to turn conflict resolvers into government-sponsored researchers and government contractors, a status accepted by some of our colleagues on the theory that this will permit them to alter the policymakers’ attitudes and influence their actions in the direction of nonviolent conflict management or resolution.

On the other hand, this high degree of integration has predictable consequences.  Conservative Peacebuilding frames CAR as a fusion of negotiation and international development, ignoring the field’s potential domestic uses outside conventional ADR practices.  It integrates the field into American imperial praxis as a form of “soft power,” subordinating the resolution of conflicts between warring parties to the settlement of disputes among U.S. allies.  (A prime example: the U.S. Institute of Peace, with the support of many CAR professionals, creates a program to resolve disputes among member organizations of the anti-Assad Syrian opposition.  It does NOT attempt to resolve the underlying civil war pitting supporters of the regime against its enemies.)  Furthermore, it prioritizes post-conflict reconstruction and stabilization over conflict prevention and resolution, and, even on the terrain of post-conflict reconstruction defines CAR in terms acceptable to U.S. or European policymakers.  According to the U.S. State Department’s website, “The Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) advances U.S. national security by breaking cycles of violent conflict and mitigating crises in priority countries. We engage in conflict prevention, crisis response and stabilization, aiming to address the underlying causes of destabilizing violence.” [7]  This is undoubtedly sincerely meant, although it is perfectly clear that where the U.S., its allies, or allied groups are parties to conflict, the “underlying causes” of violence are generally ignored in order to obtain a settlement favorable to the favored party.

In response to this development, but even more in response to the continual production of violent conflict by dysfunctional socio-economic, political, and cultural systems, some CAR theorists and practitioners are now proposing a different sort of effort altogether – one that would mobilize the field’s conceptual and practical and skills to seek system-transforming solutions to congenital social problems shared by industrial and less-developed societies alike.  These problems include persistent, trans-generational poverty; growing social inequalities; intense cultural and religious strife; ecological devastation; corporate control of the economy; and the global violence generated by empire-building.  By contrast to conservative Peacebuilding, transformative CAR involves a conscious resistance to socio-political and epistemic integration.  It conceptualizes the field as a multi-disciplinary praxis aimed at helping transform domestic as well as international environments that generate violence.  It calls attention to the need for developing and employing new theories of social and psychological change and new approaches to knowledge, communication, organization, and collective action.  It opens the door to the study and practice of new forms of social action, political in the broadest sense and independent of existing power structures.  And it proposes to use the profession’s convening and facilitating skills to assist groups in conflict to develop new processes of participation, consensus-building, and democratic decision making.

The effects of this new movement on conflict resolution education will be profound.  On the theory side, it will involve a more intense focus on social structures (economic, sociopolitical, psychological, and cultural), how they change, and how people can change them, than the CAR curriculum currently features.  The revised curriculum will be designed to develop students’ skills in envisioning new systems as well as in analyzing existing ones; in this sense, it can be described as fostering “usable utopianism.”  On the practical side, while continuing to emphasize the utility of certain third-party processes, it will involve studying and practicing a variety of activities relevant to constructing and participating in socially transformative movements at all levels from the local to the global community.  And in the field of third-party processes, it will help develop independent institutions capable of offering CAR services to parties in conflict regardless of their relations with the U.S. or European governments.

Certainly, radical peacebuilders (if we want to use this language) will seek allies in other academic and political institutions in the West and around the world – and they will find them!  Unrest Magazine, in my view, is an early manifestation of this effort to take the field in a new, much-needed direction, and to create a community of scholars/activists dedicated to radical (non- integrative) social transformation.  I am pleased to be a part of this burgeoning movement.

Notes:

[1]  Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Vintage, 1982.

[2]  Accounts of the field’s origins and stages of development vary.  See, e.g., John Burton, “History of Conflict Resolution,” in Nature and Society Forum, March 1988. Retrieved 4/5/13 athttp://www.natsoc.org.au/publications/papers/6.-history-of-conflict-resolution and compare Kevin Avruch, “A Historical Overview of Anthropology and Conflict Resolution, Anthropology Newsm 48:6 (Sept. 2007). Retrieved 4/5/13 at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/an.2007.48.6.13/abstract

[3]  These figures and others are interviewed on video by Drs. Christopher R. Mitchell and Johannes Botes as part of their “Founders of the Field” series, available from the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University (scar.gmu.edu).

[4]  See his The Future of Power (PublicAffairs, 2011).

[5]  See Burton’s essay, “Conflict Resolution as a Political System” (George Mason University, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution Working Paper No. 1, 1989), which proposed CAR processes a substitute for adversarial forms of government, and Johan Galtung, Peace By Peaceful Means:Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization (Sage, 1996).

[6]  See Vivienne Jabri, “Human Righs, Sovereign Rights, and Conflict Resolution,” Lynch Lecture presented at School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, Ocober 24, 2012,http://scar.gmu.edu/event/24th-annual-lynch-lecture-human-rights-sovereign-rights-and-potential-of-conflict-resolution (accessed April 16, 2012)

[7]  http://www.state.gov/j/cso/  (accessed April 16, 2013)