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Constructive Conflict Guide > Civic Knowledge and Skills That We Can Use to Help Ourselves and Our Society More Constructively Handle Intractable Conflict > Stripping Away "Overlay" Problems That Make Conflicts Appear More Intractable Than They Really Are
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Interpersonal Communication
Robert Quillen wrote, "Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of emotion." These resources explain why interpersonal communication breaks down and how to make it more effective.
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Creating Safe Spaces for Communication
Constructive communication between parties is often facilitated by creating a "safe space" for such communication. This essay describes what such spaces are, how they are useful, and how they can be established.
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More on Constructive Conflict Communication
Empathic (active) listening and I-message are two very powerful communication strategies that work at the societal as well as interpersonal levels.
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Meeting the Authoritarian Populism Challenge 3: Communication, Governance, and Economics
Strategies for limiting the destructiveness of red/blue conflicts based on better communication, fact-finding, collaboration, governance, and economics.
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Carrie Menkel-Meadow: Words Matter!
A wide-ranging essay showing how words can divide us--or bring us together. Better words can lead to better understanding and better actions.
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Alan Yarborough: Getting to Meaning
To better understand both others and even ourselves, we must dig deeper into the words and terms we use to ensure we are conveying precisely what we want to convey and nothing more.
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Effective Listening
Listening, like respect, is something of a "magic wand" for conflict. It doesn't solve everything, but it can help tremendously by showing the opponent that you care and you understand what they are trying to tell you. And once you do understand their concerns, you will be in a much better position to find a mutually-beneficial approach that will meet your needs and theirs.
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Non-Inflammatory Communication
People in conflict often say very inflammatory things that make the conflict worse. But there are ways to explain your core concerns in ways that are respectful and non-accusatory. This helps the other side hear what you are trying to say, and makes it more likely they will respond positively to it.
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Discussion and Persuasion
Rather than forcing people to go along with what you want, it is usually more effective to engage in a respectful analysis of the problem with them, and gently try to explain why you think your views make sense, while honestly trying to figure out why they believe what they do. Such respectful discussions often reveal more common ground than people think they have, and may result in paths forward that work for everyone.
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Promote Civility
Civility is something of a hot-button word, some people asserting it means keeping angry people quiet. It doesn't mean that, but it does suggest that people should express their anger (and other thoughts) in ways that it might be heard and understood.
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Imagine a Positive Shared Future
You can't get to a destination if you don't know where it is. Likewise, if you don't know what kind of future you want, it will be hard to achieve. And if you seek a future that the "other side" strongly opposes, you are also likely to fail. Constructive conflict involves developing an image of a positive shared future -- a future in which everyone in society would like to (or at least be willing to) live.
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Protect Freedom of Speech While Opposing Deceptive Propaganda and Censorship
There is a fine line between freedom of speech, censorship, and control of disinformation and propaganda. These resources discuss how to walk that fine line.
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Improve Cross-cultural and Cross-Party Understanding
We have been writing about cross-cultural misunderstanding -- and remedies thereof--for a long time. Now cross-party understanding is also an important issue. The left and the right in the United States have grown so far apart, and consume such different information, that they really are different cultures--with all the cross-cultural misunderstandings that occurs with traditional cultural differences.
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Dialogue
In normal English, "dialogue" just means talking. But in conflict resolution, it means a particular kind of structured conversation, facilitated by a neutral third party who helps people better understand why --and others-- approach a particular conflict in the ways that they do. It may not result in resolution, but dialogue almost always improves understanding and builds trust between the participants.
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Develop Constructive Uses of IT
Much attention is being paid to the conflict-exacerbating uses of IT, but it can (and is) also being used to bridge divides, increase intergroup understanding, and help build peace.
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Constructive Social Media and Mass Communication
Both traditional mass media and social media has been highlighted as a driver of misinformation, anger, fear, and hate. But some efforts are being made to utilize both traditional media and social media in pro-social, conflict reducing ways. This section looks both at what is being done, and what more could be done to make media a problem solver more than a problem creator.
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Strengthen Local News
Good local news is essential if people are going to become actively engaged in the civic affairs of their communities. But the business model of local news has become much more problematic with the ubiquity of the Internet, which not only provides most people's news, but took away the profit from ads that print media used to provide.
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Promote and Seek Out Balanced News Coverage
We get almost all our information about what is happening in the world from the news media. So when the media feeds us false information, we are unable to make good decisions. Balanced news coverage can help us understand all sides of controversial stories, so we can make decisions that are better informed.
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Communication Failures
Communication often breaks down in conflict. Sometimes it gets cut off altogether. Other times people use hostile language that just makes the conflict worse. Or the disputants' background information and worldviews are so different that they think the other side is "evil," or "stupid," or "crazy," even though they have good reason to think as they do, given the information that they are basing their attitudes and actions on.
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Constructive Communicators
Conflict is driven by the images that we have of one another -- images that derive from often flawed processes of interpersonal and mass communication. Constructive communicators help us overcome the limitations of these processes.
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Communication Skill Builders
Communication Skill Builders focus on teaching people the skills that they need to communicate more effectively with their fellow citizens and, especially, help facilitate communication between people with differing views.
Colleague Activities
Conversations That Matter
A free guide from the Foundation for Developing Compassion and Wisdom to inspire conversations about values based on their "guidelines for life."
Colleague Activities
Is it still possible to change minds in politics?
A conversation about the possibility and difficulty of persuasion in a time of polarization, disinformation, conspiracy theories, political violence, and more. Is it still possible to reach people?
Colleague Activities
Narrative Competency
A short description of the meaning of narrative competancy, together with annotated links to 15 documents on how to develop and use such competence.
Colleague Activities
Jazz and conflict resolution
Jazz is a great metaphor for constructive approaches to conflict. It has tension, yet creates beauty out of chaos. Everyone needs to listen to each other, exchange ideas, and find mutual inspiration.