Although his undergraduate degrees were in Economics and International Relations, Chris has always referred to himself as, at root, an historian. He is above all an exemplar for scholar-practitioners in our field, a pioneer whose work goes back to the founders’ generation and who continues to contribute to theory and practice long after his formal retirement from the classroom.
In the beginning: In Autumn 1966, Christopher Mitchell was undertaking post-graduate studies in International Relations at University College, London (UCL) when he joined John Burton’s Centre for the Analysis of Conflict (CAC) as a Research Assistant and Junior Lecturer. At that time, Burton and his colleagues were developing the facilitation process which later became best known as “problem solving workshops,” but which, in the late 1960s, was better known as “controlled communication”. Mitchell worked with Burton, Tony de Reuck, John Groom, Michael Nicholson, Frank Edmead and Michael Banks on some of these successful pioneering efforts – Cyprus, Northern Ireland, the Horn of Africa – and on others less successful – a project on the Kashmir conflict that was suddenly aborted by the outbreak of the 1971 Indo-Pak War.
From UCL, Mitchell briefly joined the Conflict Research Unit at the London School of Economics, then carrying out a major comparative project on the training and socialization of diplomats. From there he went to teach as a visiting lecturer at the University of Surrey and thence to the University of Southampton, ending up at the City University, London where he eventually became Professor of International Relations and founded the Conflict Management Group which helped to introduce Alternative Dispute Resolution into England in the early 1980s.
In 1988 he moved to the United States, joining the Center for Conflict Analysis at George Mason University, and again working with John Burton as well as Dennis Sandole, Rich Rubenstein and James Laue. He became Director of the renamed Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution in 1990 and Emeritus Professor there in 2005. Today, in large part thanks to his contributions over the years, the Institute is the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.
Mitchell’s work through the years has focused on a number of closely related areas:
- Continuing development and refinement of the “problem solving workshop” as a paradigmatic Track 2 methodology, including training new generations of students as participants and panelists. This work has resulted in a practical handbook titled The Resolution of Conflict: A Handbook of the Problem Solving Approach (with Michael Banks).
- Research in the field of comparative peace processes. A major work here is his Gestures of Conciliation, which demonstrates among other things that Mitchell never forsook his sensibility as an historian.
- With colleagues including the late Wallace Warfield, Kevin Avruch, Landon Hancock, and numerous S-CAR students, he has researched and written about local peacemaking and local zones of peace, particularly in Colombia and the Philippines. Two edited collections, Local Zones of Peace and Local Peacemaking and National Peace (both edited with Hancock), reflect this work.
Characterizing this body of work is the way Mitchell’s practice deeply informs his research and theory-building. Indeed, he has often said that his work as a practitioner is the basis on which his research and theorizing have grown and matured over the years. He shares this commitment with his mentor John Burton. One result of closely linking practice to theory is the way he has of connecting micro-level aspects of conflict resolution (for example, the various roles of different sorts of third parties) with meso- and macro-level concerns (for example the broader context of asymmetric power relations among the parties and other structural features of the conflict).
In his “spare time,” Mitchell, along with his colleague Johannes (Jannie) Botes, is responsible for curating the Parents of the Field Project (wherein this interview is found), an invaluable retrospective collection of the voices of the pioneering scholar practitioners who helped found the academic discipline of conflict resolution and peace and conflict studies.
Chris Mitchell remains active and fully engaged as an emeritus professor at S-CAR. He consults regularly with international NGOs devoted to peacebuilding, has recruited a new group of students to work on the next stages of the Zones of Peace project, and has recently published what started out as a “revision” of his influential 1981 textbook, The Structure of International Conflict, but emerged in final form as a magisterial analysis of the conflict and peace studies -- by which Chris has always meant theory, research and practice – as the field has grown and ramified over the past three decades. This book, The Nature of Intractable Conflict: Resolution in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave-Macmillan 2014), will inspire rising generations of students and practitioners.
