Capturing The Complexity Of Conflict

The study reported in this volume is an attempt to develop a multilevel theory of violent conflict and war. As such, the study involves: a pretheory for identifying concepts operative at each level, and for explaining how the concepts relate to violent conflict and war.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First-place winner of the Society for Education Studies' 2005 book prize, Education and Conflict is a critical review of education in an international context. Based on the author's extensive research and experience of education in several areas afflicted by conflict, the book explores the relationship between schooling and social conflict and looks at conflict internal to schools. It posits a direct link between the ethos of a school and the attitudes of future citizens towards 'others'. It also looks at the nature and purpose of peace education and war education, and addresses the role of gender and masculinity. In five lucid, vigorously argued sections, the author brings this thought-provoking and original piece of work to life by: * Setting out the terms of the debate, defining conflict and peace and outlining the relevant aspects of complexity theory for education * Exploring the sources of conflict and their relations to schooling in terms of gender/masculinity, pluralism, nationalism and identity * Focusing on the direct education/war interface * Examining educational responses to conflict * Highlighting conflict resolution within the school itself. This is the first time that so many aspects of conflict and education have been brought together in one sustained argument. With its crucial exposure of the currently culpable role of formal schooling in maintaining conflict, this book will be a powerful and essential read for educational policy makers, managers, teachers and researchers dealing with conflict in their own contexts.

The contributors to this fully revised volume, a team of international experts with both academic and professional experience in the field, provide a broad range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives. Covering theory, research and practice, they analyze the different types of conflict and offer a thorough examination of the influences on conflict - structural, situational, strategic and cultural. Exploring conflict management and resolution, they also discuss negotiation, mediation, peace-keeping and peace-building.

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.

Preface Acknowledgements Glossary Foreword Alice Ackermann, OSCE Conflict Prevention Centre 1. Violent Postmodern Conflict: A Need to Go Beyond Symptoms 2. A Framework for Analyzing Violent Postmodern Conflict 3. A Model for Responding to Violent Postmodern Conflict 4. Eliciting the Wisdom of CSCE/OSCE Negotiators: Research Design 5. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Perceptions of Select Peace and Security Issues 6. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Perceptions of Causes of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s 7. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Perceptions of Lessons Learned from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s 8. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators’ Visions of Ideal Peace and Security in Postmodern Europe 9. After 9/11: Peace and Security Issues Revisited 10. Implications for Research, Theory, and Policy Appendix A Appendix B Bibliography Index

This renamed and revised paperback edition of Irwin Deutscher's Accommodating Diversity shares most of the book's original content but reframes the work with teachers and students in mind. Part social policy analysis and part intellectual autobiography, Preventing Ethnic Conflict mines the world's most troubling incidences of racial and ethnic conflict in order to find national policies that defuse the strains of cohabitation and encourage true reconciliation. Debunking the notion that conflict is inevitable when dominant and minority communities cohabit, Deutscher looks at five successful policies, from Swedish legislation dealing with immigrant education to the Chieftaincy act in Ghana, as he examines the possibilities for successful and harmonious intergroup relations. Deutscher concludes that the pursuit of a benign pluralist policy leads ultimately to assimilation, providing a political solution, which satisfies the champions of both diversity and unity. With introductory essays to each section written by Linda Lindsey that place the material within sociological theory, its problem solving focus, and provocative study questions, Preventing Ethnic Conflict is an ideal supplement for courses in race, ethnicity, and social problems.