The Field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution

People have been studying conflict for thousands of years of human history, beginning even before the Greeks [the Armani letters dated between and over being one of the first recorded exchanges of ideas about the possibilities of "peaceful coexistence] and continuing up to the present time. However, it is only over the last 60 years that there have been serious efforts to study conflict and its resolution in a systematic and comparative fashion, bringing to bear the intellectual tools of many disciplines in the search for general theories about the sources, dynamics and means of resolving conflicts, from micro to macro social levels.

Partly spurred on by the devastation of two World Wars, the dangers of the Cold War and the accelerating arms race, scholars and activists from many countries began in the late 1940's and 1950's a major intellectual effort to produce useful and theoretically based knowledge into the roots of human conflict and the means by which the disasters of the first half of the 20th Century might be avoided. In those early days of "conflict research" as it was generally known, investigations were undertaken into arms races, into crisis decision making and the effects of stress on decision makers, into effective means of reducing international tensions, into the incidence of wars and civil wars and into the nature of effective negotiation. Research centers were established in the United States, in Scandinavia, in Canada, in South Africa, in Britain, in Holland and in many other countries, uniting researchers from many backgrounds in an effort to understand and, later, to affect in some positive way, the development of protracted and ostensibly dangerous conflicts that needed to be managed or resolved.

In the 1970's and 1980's much scholarly attention shifted to research into intra-state conflicts, including major civil unrest, and riots, but also including a focus on conflicts within local communities and within the family. In the USA the Alternative Dispute Resolution movement was born, to be rapidly copied in many other countries as an alternative to adversarial ways of dealing with local conflicts ["So Sue Me !" was the title of an early work that argued for alternatives to courts, codes and constables] and -some hoped - as a way of bringing about a transformation of society from the ground up. Scholars also began to research such topics as the most effective ways of preparing for negotiations [the pre-negotiation stage], the use of workshops, discussions and dialogues as alternatives to hard bargaining, and the most effective forms of third party mediation in complex and intractable conflicts at all social levels.

In the early 1980's and through into the 1990's and the new millennium, University courses in this "new" field of study began to be offered and since 1982 ICAR has been part of this growing research and education effort that now stretches across all continents and countries from Latin America to Africa to Asia. The Institute offered one of the first Masters programs in "conflict management" and in 1987 began work on the first doctoral program in the field. Its teaching and research are firmly based in the work already carried out by the pioneers in the field - the Bouldings, Galtung, Burton, Richardson, Kriesberg, Deutsch - but already embrace some of the more recent lines of research and scholarship -entrapment theory, the analysis of narratives, post-agreement peacebuilding processes, conciliation and reconciliation, the "spoiler" problem and the problem for negotiators raised by indivisible goods. ICAR will continue to introduce its students to such ideas and theories in the belief that, from this continuously exciting field, a deeper understanding of the universal phenomenon of conflict will arise, together with new processes for turning those conflicts into productive and creative paths.