Beyond Intractability: A Free Knowledge Base on More Constructive Approaches to Destructive Conflict

Conflict Assessment Before one can intervene in a complex conflict, one must do a conflict assessment to understand what is going on. Parties, too, need to do their own assessment if they are to be able to make informed choices about what to advocate and how to go about pursuing their goals. Many of our respondents had comments or advice on the conflict assessment process, as it is so important to both conflict prosecution and transformation or resolution.
Conflict Assessment in General
	Silke Hansen describes how she has to explain her role carefully when she is doing her conflict assessment.
	Determining when events happened is important to understanding a situation, says mediator Silke Hansen.
	Silke Hansen describes how she measures the level of community support before she decides to intervene in a dispute.
	CRS Mediator Efrain Martinez reflects on the sequence he uses to find the key parties in a community conflict.
	CRS Mediator Richard Salem describes who he would talk to first when he first got into a new conflict situation.
	Bob Ensley describes why meeting people in person is best when doing conflict assessments.
	Bob Ensley describes how he finds out what is going on in a town when he first visits a conflict site.
	ICRS Mediator Stephen Thom describes collecting information about a conflict by becoming a "sponge."
	Stephen Thom describes how he persuades the parties to mediate as he does his situation assessment.
	ICRS Mediator Stephen Thom describes how some parties can help the mediator more than others.

This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).

No one is so foolish as to prefer to peace, war, in which, instead of sons burying their fathers, fathers bury their sons. -- Croesus

Featured Links
Organizations Making Noteworthy Contributions to Efforts to Promote More Constructive Conflict

South Asia Terrorism Portal

Other Resources from
Beyond Intractability

The Dynamics of Nonviolent Action
The Dynamics of Nonviolent Action will be of interest to those who seek a better understanding of the mechanism and operation of nonviolent resistance.

Nobel Peace Prize Winners

Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
Soviet nuclear physicist, and 1975 Nobel Peace Laureate

Beyond Intractability Version IV
Copyright © 2003-2010 The Beyond Intractability Project
Beyond Intractability is a Registered Trademark of the University of Colorado
Project Acknowledgements

The Beyond Intractability Knowledge Base Project
Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Co-Directors and Editors
c/o Conflict Information Consortium (Formerly Conflict Research Consortium), University of Colorado
Campus Box 580, Boulder, CO 80309
Phone: (303) 492-1635; Fax: (303) 492-2154; Contact