A Quick Tour of Beyond Intractability

Welcome to the New Beyond Intractability.
Beyond Intractability is designed to increase the effectiveness of those who are trying to do something about the many intractable conflicts that threaten human society.
The system is both a knowledge base and a community.
The Knowledge Base, which is accessible from the right side of the homepage, provides access to over 5000 articles on all aspects of intractable conflict. (This draws primarily from, and is similar to, the original Beyond Intractability system.)
This section of the site allows full-text searching of the knowledge base as well as browsing of virtual bookshelves on well over 1000 topics.
The site also includes a periodically updated Chronicle featuring stories gathered from all over the web about the nature of intractable conflict and constructive ways in which people are responding.
To this, the New Beyond Intractability adds, on the left side of the homepage, what we call a large-scale, long-term, learning community which is being organized jointly with our new site, the Governance Commons.
The Community is designed to facilitate the systematic development of better strategies for dealing with intractable conflict and inadequate governance.
The concepts underlying this community are explained on the CL3 page.
In case anyone needs persuading, we've also included a section on the nature of the intractable conflict and governance problems and the importance of addressing both more constructively.
The site is also being organized around a series of nine tough challenges that we believe have to be addressed as part of any comprehensive effort to deal with intractable conflict and governance problems.
To provide information on strategies for meeting each of these challenges, we are posting a series of portals which, in addition to the Chronicle, include:
- Education and training pages highlighting foundational knowledge on each topic;
- Practice pages highlighting materials especially likely to be useful for those actively struggling with real-world conflict problems; and
- Research and development pages for those working to improve our understanding of conflict problems and possible solutions.
The project is also built around eight ideas that we believe offer a realistic strategy for addressing these daunting challenges.
To facilitate the CL3 community's collaboration efforts, Beyond Intractability includes a series of participation tools that make it easier for people to publicize their work, find out about the work of others, and pursue collaborative efforts.
We are also actively recruiting, "affiliate" organizations that are doing conflict work.
We are also developing a series of special projects that focus system resources on specific conflict problems.
We invite you to explore the site and tell us what you think.
If you'd like to contribute your insights to the learning community simply fill out a registration form and we'll set you up with a username and password which gives you use the various participation tools.
We hope that you the system useful. And, we would appreciate any suggestions you might have regarding possible improvements.