About the Substack Newsletter

In this newsletter, co-published on Substack, we share our and our colleagues' latest thinking about intractable conflict-related issues of the day.

History - The Current (Substack )Era

This newsletter started as a "discussion" co-sponsored by Beyond Intractability and the Conflict Resolution Quarterly, following the publication of a framing article on hyper-polarization, written by Guy and Heidi Burgess and Sanda Kaufman and published in the Conflict Resolution Quarterly 39:4, May of 2022. The article was written with the hope of spurring discussion, and that it did. We included, at the beginning of the 2022 BI newsletter page (not the Substack page) several framing articles in addition to our original CRQ article. These included

Three commentaries that were published in CRQ simultaneously (by Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Connie Ozawa, and Barney Jordan),
A fourth commentary by Rachel Goldberg that was sent in later and published in CRQ
A secondary, follow up article to the CRQ article, The Key to Revitalizing Liberal Democracy: Think of It As a Conflict Handling System
We also included an executive summary of the original CRQ Feature article, as that one was very long.

We have widened our scope of discussion considerably since then, to other conflicts (such as the Israeli/Palestinian/Iran conflict), and an investigation of destructive conflict processes in the U.S. and elsewhere. We are also focusing on what we call "constructive confrontation and conflict" and "massively parallel" approaches to peacebuilding, problem solving and democracy.

Beginning with our collaboration with CRQ in 2022, we moved our newsletter to Substack for distribution, although each newsletter is also published directly on Beyond Intractability, as well. The newsletter is still free, and will remain that way, though we thank the people who value it enough that they have pledged to pay for it, if we go the paywall route. (We won't.)

BUT, if you still want to help us, please recommend our newsletter to your network. Also, be sure to tell folks that they can look at the newsletter without subscribing, although Substack hides that fact. Just hit "no thanks" when they ask you to subscribe, and you will go right to the newsletter.

We also invite outside authors to contribute their thoughts to this discussion. See how to do that here.

Before Substack

We did have a newsletter before we joined Substack that we posted on BI and sent out with Mailchimp. Those posts can be found here.

Subscribing to the Newsletter

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Substack Newsletter is Also On BI

We always post our newsletters directly on BI too. (The text of the BI newsletters and the Substack newsletters are the same.) The BI newsletters are found at the Newsletter Archive.

Contributing to the Newsletter

We invite our readers to become contributors to the newsletter. If you are inclined to contribute an article, or even a thought or two, please contact us. We welcome articles that disagree with us (as well as ones that agree with us, or ones that simply go in a different direction). We have always hoped that this would be, to the extent possible, a real discussion about hyper-polarization, other threats to democracy, other intractable conflict challenges and potential responses (we have always felt that "solution" was too optimistic a term). We are interested in materials written specifically for this discussion, as well as links to quality materials that were published elsewhere that we might either link to or repost here.

In an effort to prevent malicious material and bots, we do not allow direct submission or publication of comments. But we do promise to publish all thoughtful and serious contributions (including those that may be critical of our approach). On the flip side, though, keep in mind that we do plan to publish what you send--so if you are sending a private comment that you do not want published, please make that clear.