Book Summary of From Confrontation to Cooperation: Resolving Ethnic and Regional Conflict by Jay Rothman
Citation:
Jay Rothman. From Confrontation to Cooperation: Resolving Ethnic and Regional Conflict. London: Sage Publications, 1992, 246 pp.
This Book Summary written by: Conflict Research Consortium Staff
From Confrontation to Cooperation presents a new conceptual framework
for understanding and resolving protracted ethnic conflicts.
From Confrontation to Cooperation will be of interest to those who
seek a better understanding of the sources of ethnic conflict,
and of possible paths toward resolution of protracted conflicts
generally. This work is divided into ten chapters in grouped in three parts.
Chapters One through Four emphasize the theory of conflict
resolution. Chapter One reviews the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The authors derive a model of ethnic conflict from this case. Their
model emphasizes the perspective of people and their communities
over broader concerns for national interest. Chapter Two then discusses
attempts at initiating constructive dialogue between Israelis and
Palestinians, again deriving a more general model of ethnic conflict resolution
from these cases. The author describes four different approaches to initiating
peaceful dialogue: the positional dialogue approach, the activist
approach, a problem-solving approach, and the human relations
approach. He describes the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and
sketches his own model, a synthetic dialogue approach. Chapter Three
turns toward theories of conflict management more broadly, drawing on
the case of the Middle East. Rothman contrasts an interest-based adversarial approach to conflict resolution, to a
needs- based integrative approach. He concludes this chapter by presenting a
conflict management framework designed to facilitate transition from an
adversarial approach to an integrative one. Chapter Four then offers more
specific approaches to peace-making for deep and protracted conflicts,
using Rothman's transitional model. Chapter Four argues that effective conflict
resolution requires recognizing and often changing basic assumptions
and conceptual frameworks about conflict.
Chapters Five through Seven emphasize the practice of conflict
management through a series of case studies. Chapter Five discusses conflict
management training workshops via the Nazareth case: a series of
workshops held between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Chapter Six explores the
use of workshop methodology in conflict management policy-making,
drawing upon the Taba case. Chapter Seven describes a "piece by
piece" approach to peace-making, drawing upon the Jerusalem
problem for illustration. The "piece by piece" approach "prescribes
that parties locked in deep conflict defuse its intensity, break down
its apparent intractability, and promote mutual confidence for cooperative
problem solving by addressing subproblems and functional issues one
by one."[165]
The final sections of the text consist of three applications.
Application A offers a conflict resolution and training script. Typical workshop facilitators' questions are presented, with discussion and
explanation of each. Application B demonstrates the broader applicability of the theoretical insights of Chapters one through Four, by analyzing ethnic
conflict in Cyprus, and a racial conflict in the United States.
Application C presents materials for running educational simulations
of the sorts of workshops describes in earlier chapters.
From Confrontation to Cooperation offer a fresh understanding of the
process of ethnic conflict resolution. The authors theoretical frameworks
are illustrated by reference to various cases, particularly from the Middle
East.
| 
