International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Interactive Conflict Resolution: A View for Policy Makers on Making and Building Peace
Interactive Conflict Resolution: A View for Policy Makers on Making and Building Peace
Pages 251-293
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From page 251... ...
Kelman, John Marks, Joseph V Montville, and Vamp Volkan Editors' Note: Chapters 7 and 8 address a particular approach to conflict resolution, most often called interactive conflict resolution, from the distinct viewpoints of a practitioner (Chapter 7J and a scholar (Chapter 8J.
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From page 252... ...
It is time to recognize at the highest levels that citizens outside government now have a well-developed systematic approach to peace making their counterpart to the mediation, negotiation, and diplomacy of governments. Policy for ending deep-rooted human conflict will not be realistic unless policy makers think in terms of a multilevel peace process that embraces both official and public peace-making efforts.
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From page 253... ...
For three decades now a modest but increasing number of citizens outside government have been developing processes of nonofficial dialogue, analysis, and more recently common citizen action that enable citizens to act systematically to change conflictual relationships. In this paper that process is called "interactive conflict resolution." In the context of a comprehensive multilevel peace process, defining and naming this process give it at last a dignity, seriousness, and systematic character as the citizens' peace process.
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From page 254... ...
After I left government in 1981, I described that official peace process as "a series of mediated and negotiated agreements embedded in a larger political process." It was in that larger process that relationships changedalbeit glacially. I also remember thinking and later writing that, "until political leaders acted to change the political environment, the mediators and negotiators did not have a chance." As I have since learned, that political environment is populated by citizens who alone have the capacity to change human relationships.
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From page 255... ...
One could point to a variety of roles played by citizens outside government in other peace processes Franco-German rapprochement after World War II, Soviet-U.S., Sino-U.S., Guatemalan, Salvadoran, intraEstonian, Armenian-Azerbaijani, Tajikistani, Indian-Pakistani-Kashmiri, Northern Irish, South African. My purpose here is not to detail these other examples.
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From page 256... ...
Confusion about interactive conflict resolution arises because of the different functions it serves in different circumstances or because of the different styles of moderators. Different activities are placed under this umbrella some properly and some perhaps not.
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From page 257... ...
One point of similarity between formal mediation and negotiation and interactive conflict resolution leads to understanding the value of their differences. Both work in a larger political context often in the same political context.
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From page 258... ...
One other definitional issue needs to be dealt with the role of a third party in the process. One of the leading academic definitions of interactive conflict resolution reads "small group, problem-solving discussions between unofficial representatives of identity groups or states engaged in destructive conflict that are facilitated by an impartial third party of social scientist-practitioners [emphasis added]
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From page 259... ...
Governments not just academic departments can judge their work on its merits within an overall peace process. This would inevitably sacrifice some professional expertise, but my experience suggests that such compromise is necessary and acceptable if interactive conflict resolution is to move beyond a small group of scholar-practitioners into wider public usage.
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From page 260... ...
· A purpose in interactive conflict resolution is to probe the relationships that underlie a conflict and work on changing them. As noted above, there will always be two items in the agenda not just the concrete problems that negotiators deal with but also the underlying feelings and interactions that cause those problems and must be changed if they are to be resolved.
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From page 261... ...
Fourth, each group is chaired by a moderator, comoderators, or a panel of moderators often by third-party moderators but sometimes by individuals from each side who accept responsibility to work together to protect the character of the dialogue and to advance the agenda and the relationship. The unique character of each group will suggest particular qualities in the moderators, but the qualities that seem essential underscore the focus of the process on the human dimension of the conflict: · sensitivity to the human dimension of problems what participants as human beings really need, why people hurt and feel victimized, why people may be understandably angry and intransigent and the ability to relate to participants on that level rather than treating them as trainees to be instructed; · commitment to the overall purpose of reconciliation between groups that have real grievances against each other; · sensitivity to the cultural uniqueness of the groups involved; · the ability to convey genuine caring and commitment at a personto-person level and ability to gain respect from participants as a caring person and as a professional; · realistic expectations for the pace at which people can change; · some depth of experience with related problems and the ability to conceptualize that experience so as to draw on it in a particular group; · the ability to help people see common elements in their experiences and views; · a sense of political process the ability to see the whole picture, keep a destination in sight, and not take sides; and · the ability to help participants organize their thoughts.
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From page 262... ...
Interactive conflict resolution involves the full range of problems that affect the relationships involved. Its purpose is to change relationships so that participants can deal with whatever problems arise.
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From page 263... ...
Conceptualizing it as a political process itself enables us to apply the process in very different situations. Finally, one must recognize that any process of interactive conflict resolution takes place in an evolving social and political context.
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From page 264... ...
This gives all of us serious interest in the question: How does one evaluate this work? My starting point, as I have said, is that neither governments nor practitioners in interactive conflict resolution will have an adequate base for evaluation until they enlarge their framework for peace making and peace building.
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From page 265... ...
In the idea of a multilevel peace process, the policy maker has a framework that is appropriate both to policy making and judging the contribution of any effort to deal with conflict. Its primary focus is changing a situation.
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From page 266... ...
Policy makers have a choice between basing their analysis only on government intelligence and diplomatic reporting and reaching out to the analyses of groups outside government with intimate direct experience in the conflict that may not be available to government in certain circumstances. The criterion for evaluation is simply whether a particular source adds a perspective in defining the problem or adds to knowledge.
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From page 267... ...
The disadvantage of this approach is that it does not always provide a sense of how a group works through successive stages over time; the advantage is that it shows concretely what can happen and what the product may be. The difference among these experiences makes an important point: in a multilevel peace process, rarely is one actor likely to make the decisive move; change will result from the cumulative interaction of many actors, sometimes at quite different levels.
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From page 268... ...
· An ambitious effort planned to last 15 years or more is establishing and proliferating dialogue groups across lines rarely crossed in the Middle East, creating sinews for new relationships in a deeply divided region. · More than 20 meetings over six years from the midst of civil war in Tajikistan into the postpeace agreement phase have created "a mind at work in the middle of a country making itself." Absorbing and responding to the unfolding problems of their new country between meetings, participants defined their framework as a multilevel peace process.
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From page 269... ...
Our work has contributed to the peace process primarily through the development of the individuals, the ideas, and the political atmosphere required for productive negotiation. One of the central issues on which discussions have focused from the beginning has been the availability of a credible negotiating partner on the other side a question that reflected the dominant view in both societies that there was no one to talk to on the other side and nothing to talk about.
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From page 270... ...
To be convinced of the availability of a credible negotiating partner, each side had to learn not only that there were people on the other side who were genuinely interested in finding a peaceful solution, but also that these people represented a significant, influential part of the mainstream of their own society. At one workshop in the early 1980s this learning process was particularly prominent.
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From page 271... ...
Meaningful negotiations would be impossible without the belief that there are credible negotiating partners on the other side who are sincere in the search for a peaceful outcome and able to mobilize the support of their constituencies. This belief though not universally accepted and subject to fluctuation with every setback in the peace process has now become part of conventional wisdom, but it took many years of mutual learning before it achieved that status.
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From page 272... ...
Montville, director of the Preventive Diplomacy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., there was an unprecedented, if limited, breakthrough in the negotiation history of the Catholic and Protestant constitutional political parties of Northern Ireland. In a two and one-halfday unofficial track-two diplomacy problem-solving workshop organized by Harvard's Center for Psychology and Social Change and cosponsored by the Iowa Peace Institute, senior representatives of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP)
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From page 273... ...
Years of seminars at the U.S. State Department and Foreign Service Institute, a conference on Northern Ireland at Airlie House in Virginia, collaborative work with Cooperation North in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, and ultimately the founding of the Irish Peace Institute codirected by Limerick University in the republic and Ulster University in Northern Ireland formed the basis for success in Des Moines in 1991.
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From page 274... ...
Finally, it reveals how each path on which a practitioner works represents a cumulative complex of interactions whose implications one can never fully know. Middle East In early 1991 before the official Middle East peace process was regenerated in Madrid, writes John Marks, president of Search for Common Ground in Washington, D.C., we at Search established the Initiative for Peace and Cooperation in the Middle East.
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From page 275... ...
As CSCE had done in Europe, largely through official channels, we wanted to create a whole web of unofficial relationships across the Middle East, connecting the region by bringing together a wide variety of groups retired generals, human rights activists, business executives, editors, conflict resolution specialists. Not only did we want the groups to engage in dialogue, we also planned for them to take on joint action projects.
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From page 276... ...
There was another instance after participants broke down into working groups and then returned to plenary. The civil society group recommended that the group, which included Arabs and Israelis, launch a campaign on certain basic human rights issues, preventing torture and protecting human rights activists.
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From page 277... ...
Among others, it has sponsored unofficial talks between Israelis and Syrians on the Golan Heights for 18 months, which laid out a basis for an eventual settlement if and when that time should come; facilitated Swedish government sponsorship of unofficialfinal status talks held by key Palestinians and Israelis; sponsored jointly authored Israeli-Iordanian, Israeli-Palestinian, and Israeli-Lebanese papers on security issues that reached unofficial agreements, well before official talks reached fruition; sponsored the Middle East's only meetings and joint action projects for Arab, Israeli, Iranian, and Turkish human rights activists; established conflict resolution programs in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan to teach mediation, negotiation, and problem solving; and regularly convened the Middle East's top editors and television executives to encourage support of the peace process and development of joint projects. Comment Like the peace process, this project is itself an open-ended political process.
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The dialogue's experience in its first year reflected the role that unofficial dialogue can have in an environment where no official peace process has yet begun. (This could also be said of the Israeli-Palestinian meetings in the 1970s and 1980s.)
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From page 279... ...
During those three years three dialogue participants were delegates in the official negotiations one con
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They wrote one joint memo on the multilevel peace process and the need for involving Tajikistani society at all levels. Two participants started their own nongovernmental organizations.
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From page 281... ...
SAUNDERS ET AL. Comment 281 First, as with the Middle East initiative described above, the strategy behind the Inter-Tajik Dialogue was to see whether a group could be created from within a conflict to produce constructive results in this case, developing the capacity to design a peace process for the country.
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From page 282... ...
These actions and initiatives may be models of coexistence between communal groups in conflict, political work on actual peace processes, or the preventive "inoculation" against prejudices among children. These actions are the tree's "branches" that symbolize and promote positive growth.
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From page 283... ...
In a discussion of integrating Russian and Estonian children in kindergarten, Estonians recounted that they had heard of situations in which the "aggressiveness" of even a few Russian children in an Estonian class would result in all the children behaving in
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From page 284... ...
These projects were designed to help citizens form their own joint nongovernmental organizations to improve relationships. One was built around a group of elementary school teachers who were organizing classes in Estonian for Russian children.
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From page 285... ...
Cyprus Our work in Cyprus since 1991, writes Louise Diamond, president of the Institute of Multi-Track Diplomacy (IMTD) in Washington, D.C., has been a training-based systems approach to interactive conflict resolution.
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From page 286... ...
that the participants have had the opportunity to meet someone from the other community. Our basic format for the programs follows a five-stage conceptual framework that is generally consistent with the process that Saunders describes as his five stages of a public peace process.
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From page 287... ...
The training workshops also include most of the elements associated by Saunders with an interactive conflict resolution process. They operate on a basis of collectively generated ground rules much like those described earlier in this paper.
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From page 288... ...
If one example could be used to demonstrate the effect of this work, it would be the events of August-October 1996. In August demonstrations by Greek Cypriot motorcyclists and responses by the Turkish side led to the well-publicized killing of two Greek Cypriot citizens in clashes in the UN buffer zone.
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From page 289... ...
A growing human infrastructure exists, providing momentum for peace building from the bottom up and offering an informal individual, group, and institutional capacity for sustaining a viable peace process should there be a nonviolent political settlement. In short, the trainingbased interactive conflict resolution program has grown into a significant social and political factor whose ultimate role in the peace process of Cyprus is still unfolding.
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From page 290... ...
In other words, interactive conflict resolution can help fill a serious gap in the multilevel peace processthe gap left by state-centered thinking about peace processes. This gap, which is only beginning to be recognized, is the space where citizens outside government can work to change the relationships that must be changed if peace is to be sustained.
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From page 291... ...
Sixth, policy makers are likely to have a more precise sense of specific objectives within the multilevel peace process than practitioners of interactive conflict resolution. If they have designed specific courses of action for a multilevel peace process, they will have concrete views about what needs to be done.
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From page 292... ...
An even more ambitious approach is to make this mode of interaction a regular part of the educational experience in school and college. Underlying each of these challenges is the task of learning how to take fullest advantage of both the official and the public peace processes and the opportunities in their working together.
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From page 293... ...
Saunders in A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999~.
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