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Listen/Read Selected Interview Segments on the Following Topics: Different Types of Intractable Conflicts Who Should be at the Table? Framing Intractable Conflicts Neutrality Transformation in Olso Applying Systems Theory Humility Understanding Intractable Conflicts "Tractable" vs. Intractable Conflicts Respectful Polarization Transforming Intractable Conflicts The Benefits of Conflict Time and Intractable Conflicts

Q: Can you give me a brief overview of your work?

A: Sure, so just by title, I'm an academic and faculty here. I'm a psychologist by training- social organization psychologist. I direct a center called the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. We do educational activities with a bunch of courses in conflict and we offer conferences and meetings and things like that. We do some applied projects in the field, mostly work with the school systems, community systems and some non-profit people, the UN for about 8 years locally and in the field, doing a variety of different things but mostly negotiation/mediation kind of training and intervention. So I run that and then I have a body of work which is been mostly in the areas of social power and in the area of intractable conflict and that's in the last 6 or 7 years.

But of late, I've really focused mostly on developing work in intractable conflict and particularly, I started about 3 years ago to back up and get some sort of sense of the Gestalt of the domain. Try to understand, is this a domain conceptually and does it differentiate itself from other conflict domains or domains of interaction in an important way and what are the variables and boundaries of this domain? And then once I did some work on that, what are the many approaches that are out there in an attempt to work with that domain. And ultimately is there a way that we can think about this that not only captures the complex dynamics in here and the dynamism that the fact that these things don't sit still for us, but also begin to incorporate what I call the subjectivity value that who ever sees these looks at these, sees these, thinks about these phenomenon we bring all of our own stuff, our paradigms and discipline and training, our theories, or preferred methods, our assumptions about reality.

We bring all that stuff to our study of the problem into our work with the problem and it limits our capacity to understand the phenomenon and our capacity to work effectively in the system. So how do we begin to develop a way of working both in terms of doing research in the area and in terms of doing intervention in the area that can help us be mindful of the complexity of the dynamism of the phenomenon and be mindful of how our point of view shapes ultimately what we see and do. I've been working in those areas for a few years now and I have a group of doctorate students that I work with here and what we're doing is basically...

Well, we've done a couple of different kinds of research, some qualitative in identity and looking at whatever micro-issues are welded to certain phenomenon. But what we're interested in now, is there's work done in social psychology doing modeling of complex dynamical systems through the use of computer technology mostly but it's really a combination of methodologies where you use some experimentation, some exploratory methods ad then you use computer simulations in order to model multiple factors interacting at a complex level over time. So for an iteration of 100 times. And you can model those with computers to begin to understand dynamic patterns that emerge. So people have been applying this idea, basically what it tries to do is take systems theory which we're all some what familiar with, but what has been criticized because it's a great metaphor and it's a great sort of eristic but ultimately what the hell do you do with it other than say, oh everything's related, great.

So these folks have been trying to model, for example the emergence of personality, so to think about our personalities as not based on our beliefs or our feelings, but based on a complex set of interactions that occur from chronic associations that occur between negative affect and focus of control and belief patterns and how those processing systems affect what we see, our processing environments, what we attend to, ultimately what we do. And from that emerges a sort of stable state of personality at a higher level. So, ???Malta Michelle, who's a social-psychologist across the street and there are people all over the country doing similar kinds of work are trying to use these models of conflict systems to model micro-phenomenon like the emergence of personality or of self-conflict where we get a sense of ourselves or try to model macro-phenomenon like the emergence of public opinion around some entity or even economic and social transitions in certain societal environments right.

So what we're trying to do, I know it sort of turns your head around a little bit, but what we're trying to do basically is develop a model, a computer assimilation model of intractable conflict because the way we're thinking of it at this point is that, well, intractable conflicts can be of different sorts. They can be because some despot is throwing a wrench in the peace works, and that's really what's happening, it's really the bad guy. But I think that that explanation has limited values these days. In some situations it may be accurate, but typically I think what happens in the long term conflicts where people are in relationships where they are stuck and can't get out-in a family system or elsewhere and yet you have long term destructiveness or latency that endures. Typically what you have here is an emerging phenomenon, you have a lot of complex things that happen but the ultimate result in this state of destructiveness, it might be high intensity, it might be low intensity, but it's basically bad and it can cycle in terms of intensity and things like that but basically it stays in this sort of state.

Now, these systems are what we call equi-final, which means it can come from a variety of different combinations, it can be these things that are affecting it or these things that are affecting it but ultimately you see the same kind of phenomenon coming from a multitude of different places through this process that emerges. So we're really thinking of intractability as an emerging phenomenon. As not something that we can say, " you know when I went back and did a survey of the conceptual literature that was trying to help us understand the causes of intractable conflict, there are a sort of essentialists theories that say it's about identity, it's all about identity issues, there are different sorts of paradigms in the sense of saying, this is what it is really about and this is what has to be addressed. And I think that what people said about interval conflict 3 or 4 years ago is that it's a complex phenomenon and it's hard to even generalize that it is one thing or even one set of things because it's ultimately hard to determine and probably multiple determined. And so we have to think in ways that can hold on to the holes. And that's what dynamical systems theory does is it tries to take this metaphor, this set of ideas or statistics and take it into the library to do research. And so it develops into computational models that are not linear.

My favorite example of linearity versus non-linearity is this. People typically say, well if you increase this independent variable then you'll get a increase or decrease in this dependant variable. And that's a linear relationship. And somebody likens that to kicking a stone. If you kick a stone and you see it fly and land, that's a linear relationship. But in non-linear relationships, the change in independent variable may not get a change in the dependant variable, it's completely related to the context that it is situated in and it's relationship to many other variables. So if you get other variables that are highly related to it, you may get to see a small change in the iv, a tremendous change in the dv or you may see a large change in the iv does nothing, because it doesn't have the kind of critical impact, it depends on all the relationships in the system. So to extend the metaphor of kicking the stone, kicking the stone is a linear relationship, kicking a dog is a non-linear relationship cause you don't know if it's going to bite you or run or go out in traffic and cause a car crash, or you don't know what it's going to do cause it's a non-linear system. And it depends on the dog, it depends on how angry the dog is and how mean the dog is and it depends on a variety of variables that will determine what happens. So what they've been able to do.

Most of our models our linear quasi-models in social sciences. And what they've begun to be able to do is develop non-linear computational formulas that account for multiple variables and their various weights, positive or negative and the association with cluster variables and then therefore be able to model the change in this parameter will do in the system over time. So that's what we're doing. We're trying to basically, not only use the ideas from living systems theory to understand the phenomenon of intractable conflict, but we're trying to ultimately bring back into the laboratory where we can use a combination of exploratory research which we've done for the last few years in identity- polarized identities and the importance of investment in those moral emotions like humiliation and rage and investment in those and no only explore those but phenomenon through qualitative research, but the eventually take them into the lab and start to do more experimental research and finally put them into the context of these assimilations that show us, ok, so we see this effect short term, but if we put it into a dynamical system and look at a hundred emulations, is there evidence of any patterns or not? Do those relationships matter over time in a conflict system.

So it's a way to begin to work with a phenomenon in a more sort of empirical way so that's what we're trying to do, to use different methodologies, but ultimately to use computer simulation modeling to see the emergence of conflicts because from the dynamical systems theory perspective, intractable conflicts are what they call a catastrophe. What happens in like marital interactions is that like in model marriages and marriage by non-distressed marriages, marriages that can make it tend to have an interaction space between the spouses that is both positive and negative, but most of the time they stay in the positive side. Most of their interactions are positive, every once in a while they get into a bad thing, have a fight and are screaming, but they kind of learn from it and move back here. What happens sometimes over time in mortal interactions is that there is a slight change in attitudes and the degree of talents they have, their creativity, there are slight changes that happen and ultimately what you see is in what they call there phase space in the kinds of interactions that they have.

You see a complete absence of positivity and you see it becomes a sort of overwhelmed in a negative space, attractive pattern space. And so anything they do, any kind of interaction, any kind of what she says, he says, it moves in that direction, it loses that space, and it loses the capacity for positive interactions. And I think that's what ultimately intractable conflicts do is they develop the space, is it suspiciousness, paranoia, is it trauma? It almost doesn't matter, what matters is that it sort of maintains this space and what is necessary in prevention is to make sure that that space doesn't go away and that you engage with North Korea, no matter what the right is saying, you've got to stay engaged with them because if you loose the capacity for positive space then you're in big trouble.

So what catastrophe theory and complexity theory enabled to sort of model for us is how to understand these things at a different level and ultimately what you want to be able to do is sort of look at the basic parameters of the model and be able to model things and say what slight changes actually cause flips in the pattern? You have a negative response pattern, what are the sort of minor changes that can take place which to us means intervention that can make for a major shift in the pattern and move it into a more positive space as opposed to just increasing or decreasing the tension and level of escalation and balance, which is what we do now. We sort of move the chess pieces around but we don't change the game. And what we want to be able to understand is what are the fundamental shifts in what they call the initial sub-points, the initial decision criteria that you have to work with in order to work with fundamental change, radical change, so that's what we're messing with which may give you a headache

Q: Wow, that's sounds very complex.

A: It does sound complex but here, this is an issues of Personality and Social Psychology Review, which is 2002 vol 6 no 4 and in here, there is an introductory to an article and then there are about a dozen studies. And these people are trying to look at dynamic systems theory and model things like emotional change, stereotype change, personalities emergences I said, theories of marriage and marital interaction, virtual personalities and even dynamical patterns in bi-polar depression. So they're trying to take these same ideas and move them into the research domain where we can actually model and try to test hypotheses around the phenomena that we're interested in. And to me that's what's been missing from systems theory is that even though it's a great set of ideas.

In the social sciences we've been kind of limited because once you get past, yeah there are different levels.. it's hard to know where to move. And there have been theories like multi-level theory which have tried to capture some of the ideas of dynamical systems but still have linear assumptions, so things still operate at different levels and we have to be mindful of them but they're mostly still linear modeling. and this is an attempt to try to develop the math to do competition models for non-linear dynamics. And that's why I think it is important, people are doing it, the models are still crude but they're beginning and they take seriously all these things that we believe are true which is that these are extremely complex deals. When we essentialize them and say, you know, it's really about this, we do ourselves a disservice and people a disservice because I don't think anybody thinks it's really about the sovereign single factor.

Q: So, is the idea that once you can recognize which little shifts cause what reactions given a certain context or variables are set in a certain parameter, then you can take that back into real life and these are the factors, this is how we rate them today, and in our studies it shows that if we view people like x that q will be this way?

A: I think that they claim we can do, and what we're going to try to do is basically establish an intractable pattern that has no positive capacities and then back into the parameters that are important which may offer the potential to bifurcate which is to fork into a different pattern. And that may shut us inside either to the kind of variables or the way change needs to occur in order for that kind of change to happen. And the pattern of the system. And that's what's tricky. In linear modeling, we can show cause and effect. You change this, you see this. But you can't see this in nonlinear modeling, you change this, you don't see it. But what they do see are patterns. So if you change this, you don't see the effect but you see a pattern. You have a set of parameters here which ultimately land in one or two patterns and if you change one parameter it moves and if you change the other parameter it moves and that's part of what they're talking about, identifying the importance of pattern, not necessarily the importance of effect. Because effects are points of data and what you want to look at over time is not just a point of data but a general emergence of a pattern. And it's that that we're interested in understanding. And ultimately interested in changing.

So one of the things that we're interested in is what are the parameters, which maintain that pattern? That hold it there? And again, one of the things that we're looking at to try to put some reality into this is we did an interview study with top agents working on the ground with intractable conflicts so people who are Herb Kelman and George Mitchell and John McDonald who have worked in these studies for a long time. They have their sort of approaches to work. George Mitchell is affiliated with CIPA, who is a former senator associated with the conflict in N. Ireland. So we talk to these people and we did interviews with them and tried to basically unearth their implicit theories about working in this domain, and the assumptions about how to bring people together essentially. And one of the things that came out of the analysis is that there are a sort of course set of 6 or 7 decisions that they make either consciously or by default because they believe them to be true somewhere but they are very important decisions.

One example is degree of inclusivity of the parties. Some people that work in these areas believe that you've got to get as many of the stakeholders and the members of their groups to the table, engaging together as possible. Others say, it's not possible, it's not feasible, you need to work with key influencers, three influential is what Herb Kelman calls them, that level of people under First Track, who have influence in the communities, who you can transform and can become agents for a change. That decision about being exclusive or inclusive with a group is a huge decision and it has impact on the system. Because some would say, working with a exclusive group creates spoilers, creates people who are excluded with the process and therefore become bent on sabotaging it. And there are other kinds of decisions like whether or not the conflict is framed as a problem or in more of a promotive way as an ideal situation that you twant o create. So do you approach intractable conflicts as problems to be solved, or do you approach them as the need to create a vision for the future which is like what Elise Boulding would do in the future imaging stuff. Those are important distinctions and they have an impact on the system, so one thing we could look at would be does a key decision points which determine the nature of the interaction that it changes and has with the system which can have an impact with the system over time and can create different kinds of patterns- different kind of problems and solutions. So really what it will be about for us is identifying the psychological patterns, interactional decision processes and normative processes that happen that make a difference in the pattern ultimately, so at those levels, looking at psychic processes, interactional decisions about how to behave with other people.

There's a great example they use in here about the spread of AIDS. And what they talk about is that men and women differ in their criteria around restricted sex versus unrestricted sex. That men tend to have less restrictive sex, a decision criteria in having less restrictive sex than women who tend to have more restricted sex and that ultimately, that sort of doesn't matter whether you have one partner who is restricted in one part and unrestricted in another, it matters less than if you have a gay community where you have 2 parties who are unrestricted decisions. Those communities, like in gay communities where you have 2 parties you'll see the spread of AIDS at an academic level because of slight decisional differences like that. So again, it's just a way to understand, well what are those key decisional roles that make that kind of a difference in the spread of a disease or in the degree or intractability of a system?

Q: Are those decisions as much party decisions as much 3rd party decisions?

A: I think so. I think that ultimately there are states of people. There are decisions that people make about how to treat other people and that can be between parties or between agents of parties. And I think one of the things that I really learned and that I fundamentally believe is that there is no such thing as neutrality. That neutrality is a game and it's really about positioning yourself vis-a-vis parties. That the decisions that change agents make in the systems have a huge impact on the system and they have to really understand the nature of that impact because it will not be sort of removed, neutral facilitators who are just trying to bring people together in their own interests. We make a lot of decisions that have a huge impact on the nature of their relations and the long-term nature of the conflict.

So yes, my answer to you is that there are decisions that take place between the parties about how they will treat each other and the moral boundaries that they cross or don't cross but there are also decisions that are made by the changes in which I believe have an impact in the systems as well but that we haven't to begun to even think about in our search. And those are some of the things that have come out of our interview studies with these people on the ground is some of the criteria and what we would ultimately want to model at the scene.

Q: And because we're still talking about systems, I presume the choices that we make out of those seven criteria in order to be right ones will depend?

A: I think they'll depend and I think and I think they're often dilemmas. I think that like Herb Kelman talks about a dilemma that he faced at some point right around Oslo which was that he had had this process as a "container" process for years. It was out of the media, it was unplugged from the Track I peace processes. It influenced it indirectly by people maybe going into that mode eventually or influencing their communities through worship or through the media or things. And that was the point but that was the point in and of itself and it was by definition a confidential space.

That was the only way it worked. And then at some point, I think it was around Oslo, they decided that they needed to change that decision because there was this peace process that was on-going and maybe they should react to it and respond to it and work together to put out these white papers that this group eventually did. And as soon as they did that, Herb talks about this quite eloquently. As soon as they made that choice, it changed the nature of what they did, because suddenly the constituents were not involved in a private process where they're just being transformed as human beings, they're in a political process and potentially signing a piece of paper that their constituents are going to see. And the other side is going to see. And that has a whole different feel to it and it was a critical decision that they made. So it's the decision about private versus public process and fundamentally what are you doing and they made this decision to change and it changed what they were doing and whether or not it's the right or wrong thing to do, who knows. But it was a very important decision.

Q: It's certainly a trade-off. You're trading someone's safety and trust in order to gain constituents support and actually change something.

A: Well, again it depends on your theory of change. If you're theory of change is that you have to ultimately go through the main tract one diplomacy in order to affect change because Herb's theory of change was to change society, not just get a peace agreement, you have to change the society. And this is the mechanism for which to change the society. And then at some point because of Oslo, they said we have to get involved, we have to inform this process but by doing so, it impaired this process of the transformation of people and of indirect influence in the community. Now who knows why he did it. Maybe he saw it as impatience, or as a window of opportunity and really wanted to try to feed it but then the Middle East fell apart again and I don't know, was it a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know. But it's an important choice, I know that.

Again, the long-term implications of this are unknown but whether or not you view a process like problem solving workshops as container processes to transform influential individuals in societies at a different level and maintain that and protect that or open it up which shuts that process down and makes it a different kind of process would have an impact on the long-term nature of the conflict. So it would be fascinating to be able to ultimately model something like that if we could. And I know it sort of makes your head spin but part of what they say, like when Mitchell talks about modeling personality is to have a model that looks like this and he'll say, look obviously this isn't somebody's personality but it introduces complexity, it introduces that you take 5 processing parameters of negative associations between cognitions and feelings, and beliefs and things like that and then you have these components of a situation that if you are in a chronic way of processing which is the way that many people in intractable conflict systems move into, sort of an entrenched way of viewing the world, they become more intoned to certain situational signals they see throughout in everything or many things. And they process it that way and they respond in kind. Which is what you see in the Middle East right now.

So what he is saying is "look, obviously this doesn't account for personality, but it introduces complex non-linear relationships and we can take a model like this and over time show sort of phase spaces and patterns in the data which tell us that overtime we do see with a certain configuration, stable patterns emerge and that's what we're interested in, is understanding those stable patterns, how they come from other psychological experiences, interpersonal experiences, and normative experiences within groups and how they establish this plans. I know this is a little abstract. But I do think this is sort of the cutting edge of social psychology's implementation of system's theory and I do think it has tremendous promise for our field, because I don't know people who are actually modeling this phenomenon but they're beginning to take on other complex phenomenon like the emergence of personality or changes in opinion polls-those are macro-phenomenon. So why can't we model these things and learn from them?

Q: What about-I'm trying to sort of think of what this means to someone who's going to go get involved as an agent of change in intractable conflict. Is it too early to try to extract anything in terms of recommendation or things to look out for?

A: I think it is, and I'll tell you why, I think that people have used the heuristic of systems theory in useful ways, Lederach and his theory on sustainable reconciliation processes, McDonald and Diamond in their multi-tract diplomacy-these are examples of people who are taking ideas of systems theory and really trying to apply them. Somebody at George Mason who does multi-level theory-Dennis Sandole-again is trying to take multi-levels and still think of them in linear ways, but complex linear ways with multi-level relationships. Again, those are taking aspects of systems theory and trying to apply them for our understanding of phenomenon and for intervention in that area.

So those are all very worthwhile attempts that use the metaphor or heuristic of systems theory to think about it in applications. I think that in terms of the level that I'm thinking about in terms of engagement with these ideas, it is too soon to know about the implications of applied work. Other than the belief that I think that these are non-linear systems and I think that we're foolish if we think that we can go in and intervene in a certain way and see the long term effects without having all kinds of unintended consequences that we could've never imagined. So I think that, and Lederach has said this for years, but that this requires a profound sense of humility. That these are extremely complicated places and that if we have some fantasy that we have some magic bullet or set of bullets to go in and work here we're misleading ourselves and them because these are very complicated places to work in. Politically complicated and economically distraught and all these other things, but just complex systems.

So I think that's the one thing that non-linear systems tells us is that you can see non-linear systems when they are what we call loosely coupled which means that they go into a state where they are almost, where the connections between things are much lighter. And under those conditions, you can see a linear effect over time, if you change this, you see a little bit of this, change the school system, you see a little bit of this. But when things are tightly coupled which often times happens in protracted situations where everything is related.

Herb Kelman talks about monolithic identities that people's ethnicity and religion and profession all becomes relevant to the conflict. Those are tightly coupled systems and you can't see a change anywhere without it having an effect on the other end of the system. You push here; you see an effect there. So I know that it's discouraging for somebody who's trying to go work on the ground but I think that safest thing that you can say is that a) you have to have humility in working with systems and b) we don't want to speak too prematurely about the implications of the research until we are better informed.

Q: Still, I wonder how the idea of systems theory and its complexity affects the way one would make a conflict analysis. How would I assess a conflict and not sort of fall into the usual underlying causes notions of structural violence or basic human beings needs not being met or a sense of power imbalance. It's a very different paradigm.

A: So, what I'm a fan of and what we're trying to understand is where complexity and sort of metaphor theory meet because the multi-metaphor theory of Garth Morgan and George Lakoff and other people really talk about the importance of your point of view in understanding the phenomenon. Frames are part of it, I'll show you another model that I've been working on. It looks like this. What I think is that basically what I've been trying to do is organize the variety of approaches that are out there to working with intractable conflict and it's hard to organize because there are so many dimensions on which they differ and overlap that how do you organize them in any useful categories? But given that, what we've been trying to do is sort of organize them around 5 basic metaphors for working in this area and that is sort of the dominance/control metaphor, the cooperative needs base metaphor, the post-modern metaphor, which is really about the social construction of meaning and the rebellion of symbolic language and things like that, the pathological metaphor to look at the pathology of the phenomenon--things like violence and trauma and physical and emotional destruction and the need to repair those things, and ultimately, the 5th is the systems metaphor which is the broadest. And those are sort of 5 images that differ on certain assumptions about reality and human nature and power and change that have implications for framing that Lewicki and Barbara Gray talk about in terms of framing. But ultimately, that's all implicit and inform our theories and our practice strategies or theories of practice and theories of conflict. So that there are these sort of more implicit processes and images that we use.

What Morgan says is that we understand the unknown by making quick associations to the things that we know. Or we understand abstract phenomenon that are complex and moving, by associating them with things that make sense to us right. So these images matter. And through these images we channel a lot of information. We try to put together, the images are consistent with certain assumptions and certain frames and ultimately lend themselves to realist theor,y or cooperation theory, or social constructivist theory or the basic theories that underlie these ideas. So one of the things that Morgan proposes in order to manage that, and it is a frame problem that we have, it is not only the disputants that suffer from framing. But that we as interveners have our own frame problems and we forget to look at that. And as I said we're an integral part of this system and I think an important part of the system so it's important that we be mindful of our frames. And one of the things that the approach that Morgan recommends is that we develop sort of a super-ordinate metaphor or frame that is complex enough to accommodate power analyses.

to accommodate resource analyses, to accommodate other metaphorical perspectives in service of understanding the whole. So that's what we're sort of offering living systems theory as a broad based metaphor through which it is useful to see well what's the impact of the power analysis of that, what's the impact of the needs analysis on that. So you have sort of super ordinate metaphors and then you have subordinate metaphors in the service of understanding Gestaldt. So what we think is that these major paradigms are things that in some ways limit and constrict the field's understanding of itself- the field being loosely defined as this eclectic thing. Because we have people like stuck in these camps, like I have a very bright PhD student who is die hard, and everything is about power. And it's all about language and power, and he's a very bright student and he's very well informed and he's been a great asset, but he's stuck there and he can't see that it's one point of view. It's THE point of view. And I think that we fall trap to that. Q:: How un post-modern!. A: Well it is the irony of post-modernism that it privileges itself ultimately.

You know Morton Deutsch is here and I was his student and he's the greatest guy in the sciences as far as I'm concerned but he's created a cadre of people who are stuck in the cooperative paradigm, and that's the answer to everything. Everything is about cooperation. Well, I think that there's a lot of value in that orientation but that ultimately it is limited. So what I think that practitioners need to do is really think about the value of a multi-metaphoric perspective in their approach to have a general organizing scheme that's broad enough to accommodate other kinds of analysis and service by understanding the whole but if you get stuck in any one that it really orients you to a power analysis.

Q: So it sounds like a lot of adaptability and a lot of flexibility.

A: It's a very demanding thing, there's a great book Robert Keegan, he's a learning theorist, developmental theorist of Harvard's education school and he writes about developmentally, in terms of adult learning that this is a stage of learning that this degree of complexity and mindfulness of our own point of view, how we use other people in relationships not own parts of ourselves, basically projection. But that kind of consciousness is extremely demanding, it's a great thing to try to move towards, and ultimately he sees it developmentally as critical for us a species to survive but that under the conditions of modern times it's impossible we just don't have the resources let alone in a conflict setting where you have a real threat from real enemies. So the paradox is that what becomes necessary is a level of consciousness for us as interveners that is extremely demanding under conditions where it's extremely difficult to maintain.

So there's a paradox there as well I think but I do think that ultimately it's what Einstein said, "We're never going to solve problems at the same level of understanding, if we have to move to a new level of understanding in order to, as the same level that created the thought we have to move to a new state of consciousness in order to be able to understand it. And I think that's what this is an attempt to do is think about well, what is the state of consciousness where we need to be as engagers, how do we support ourselves in that kind of place and do work in that kind of place that's really useful for people who are in situations where they can't think like that. And to try to move them there, does a tremendous disservice so what do we do? Could you answer that? I'd appreciate it if you could answer. Take that one!

Q: Let me step back a few hundred yards, and ask if you could talk briefly about marital conflicts, international conflicts, problem-solving workshops, different levels of intervention and yet intractable, sort of runs through them all. What does intractable mean in that sense, I mean what makes them different from other conflicts?

A: I define them most simply as conflicts that endure in a destructive manner. I have this paper, which I won't give you, but I have a paper that I just wrote which tries to differentiate intractable from tractable, and I do it falsely. I say look, I'm separating these things and I'm putting them for conceptual purposes in these two categories because we tend to see in intractable conflicts these kinds of variables and not in these kinds of conflicts. But ultimately my position is that they emerge that conflicts that continue and they continue in a fairly destructive place, again, may change in intensity and violence, the roles may change, the leadership may change, the issues may change, but ultimately they stay in this negative protractor space.

It's the endurance and the malignant nature of them that defines them whereas other other conflicts go away because the people change, because the issues change or ultimately there are positive possibilities from engagement that create new opportunities to interact so the space changes. But intractable conflicts don't. Now, in the paper I do talk about how some issues, you know in a relationship you'll have a multitude of issues, some are competitive, some are cooperative, some are win-win, possibility, and then you may have some issues that are not negotiable in any sort of the way. And to think of them like that is apart of the problem.

And like Pearson and Littlejohn write about this in their book Moral Conflict, where they really talk about some things like the debate on abortion in this country are not resolvable in the way that we think about resolving things. To attempt to do so is apart of the problem, but there are some things that we have to accept as dialogic in that some ways they are sort of permanent, polarized entities that you just have to tolerate.

Q: Is that another category? Is that beyond intractable or intractable? Because intractable still has the notion of solvability but something like that sounds like a permanent conflict.

A: I don't know if intractable has solvability, again it depends. You can have a relationship like, this Boston case, do you know about the Public Dialogue Group (referring to the Public Conversations) in Boston about the leadership of the abortion rights group and the pro-life group? That's a great example of working a conflict where the parties which were 6 women, 3 from each side came together and they created these relationship that were important to them, there was a deep respect for the other side and they helped protect each other from violent members of the communities and supported each other. But ultimately became more polarized on that issue.

So again, is that a solved conflict? It is a relationship that is in a better place than it was, there isn't autistic hostilities and they're not trying to kill each other, they're in fact trying to protect one another, and they have a sense of community about women who care about women's issues and there are super-ordinate goals. And they're more polarized on that issue. So in that interactional space there's actually a fair amount of room for positive interactions. On that dimension, there is no change. And there's not an acceptance of it either, there's not like a "OK, they just differ from me", there's a "now it's even more important that the other side see the truth" So it's a very interesting paradox that they find themselves trapped in.

So weill that issue be resolved? I don't think so, not in our lifetime. But does the nature of the relationships need to stay in this primarily destructive place? No. So there is potential in those kinds of relationship to work the multitude of relationships in the issue and find a fair amount of common ground and support even though some of the issues remain polarized.

A: Yes, that's interesting. That's a good question which I haven't thought through but I think that I would say that the issue is intractable but the relationship isn't because it's moved into a different place so it is sort of how we define the conflict, whether it's at an issue level or a relation level or a broader or system level and the conflict I think is still an enduring conflict. I don't think that issue will change between these groups. Certainly people's attitudes change over time and I think the women's attitudes have changed certainly about the different parties but not about that phenomenon. But definitely the relationships changed in a tremendous way and the support is there. So it is not an intractable relationship anymore even though it continues to be organized around an intractable issue. And that's such an interesting case, I love that case.

Q: Actually, there's a long interview with Jamison interview all about it, she's the director for peace and ???

A: Yes, I know about her, she mediated or facilitated all this.

Q: OK, so in terms of approaching an intractable conflict, is it important for an intervenor to make the distinction between intractable and tractable and if so what sort of elements should one take into consideration? And I know that's a bit specific, but generally?

A: I guess I'll say this, I do think it's important for any conflict intervener to understand the complex nature of the phenomenon, whether it's tractable or intractable because I think that we tend to study conflict as a static thing and not really understand that it's not. And the issues are constantly changing and the attitudes are constantly changing and as Mary Parker Follet used to say, we try to compare fixed things to fluid things and that life is fluid and we take a fixed attitude and say this is it and that does us a disservice, so I guess that as a general principal, it's important to realize that all kind of conflicts differ in dynamic but they differ in the degree of complexity and dynamism. And so whether or not something is intractable, I think ultimately it does have an important implication in the kinds of methods that we use to engage the parties.

We have the issues for example are of an intractable nature and are embedded in meaning and so that's why like the public conversation's project, it uses this dialogic model which is really about learning and discovery as a great methodology for engagement around those issues under the conditions of where it's possible. Obviously often times you need to use other kinds of methods in order to establish the kinds of conditions where you can then have those kinds of practices. Ironically, those women came together because of a shooting. A series of shootings that took place and it was the violence that encouraged them to engage and I'm sure it was suggested that they do and community and church leaders suggested that they do. So there were consolation factors that readied them to come together and do this process and it still took 6 years of quiet closed-door work.

So that's the other thing, is I think it's just in/tractable issues, Lederarch says this is that often times it's going to take you as long to get out of a conflict as it took to get into it. And that we're not mindful of that in our strategies, we think we only loose 70 years. So that's the best we could give, is to think in that scope of time and I think that that often does us a disservice if we think about what we are able to do in the context of the scope of the conflict that could go on for generations. What is it we can do that is constructive at this stage given the likelihood that this is going to continue. I think that's a better formula than to think about solving the conflict. And that's what I think Heidi and Guy's constructive confrontation model which is really about process and not outcome orientation is really heuristic because it's really about let's find a way just to relate so that we don't kill each other and that it's fairly morally or ethically sound, just to move forward. I think that's a very important decision point.

Q: So I'm sure all interveners try to think about what's going to be most useful at the stage the conflict is in now. But maybe they don't think of it in a generational scope, is that the difference?

A: I think so, I think we don't tend to think like that, it's too hard to think like that, but I think it is critical. Lederach sites that. Some kind of Indian nation perspective of southern generations before and after, the decision we make now was affected by many generations and is about to affect and that's a good scope. Particularly for these kinds of national level issues or large inter-group issues. And just look at race relations in this country. South Africans are great at coming to us and saying you guys are still a mess, what are you doing telling us what to do? And they're right. Our race relations have a long history and a long way to go before there is any kind of sense of parity or repair.

Q: Elise Boulding mentions something called the 200 year present which is basically 7 generations thesis, that the people that are alive now are the people that you know could go knowing people as far back as 100 years or more and the people that you know now who are younger than you who've known people who are from that 100 years. That same idea of transference of, that sort of ripple effect.

A: That's interesting.

Q: I've also done a website too, you can check that out.

A: good, I like that .

Q: well, thank you Dr. Coleman is there anything else you'd like to talk about?