Free
Educational Resources for Students and Teachers

Exploring More Constructive Approaches to Intractable Social Conflicts

As you think about your course syllabi for the next term, we thought that you might be interested in an update on the many free resources currently available from Beyond Intractability.org — the website of the Intractable Conflict Knowledge Base Project. This system, which focuses on society's most difficult and dangerous conflicts, includes over 3000 pages of material written with the help of more than 250 experts. Currently available resources include:

1. 350+ Essays / Articles - Succinct, readable, executive summary-type articles describing key conflict dynamics and intervention options. Broad topics covered include, for example:
   • Causes of Conflict;
   • Conflict Dynamics;
   • Culture, Power, and Justice;
   • Peace Processes (Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, Peacebuilding)
2. 70+ Conflict Expert Interviews - With over 100 hours of online audio, plus searchable transcripts.
3. 300+ Book and Article Summaries - Providing quick introductions to key publications.
4. Annotated Conflict Cases - Instructive accounts of typical intractable conflicts, with abundant links to interpretive materials.
5. Four Interactive Simulations - One on racial conflicts in a high school, where users can act as the mediator or one of three disputing parties; another dealing with a complex and deep-rooted ethnic conflict within a community, where players can take on different "third side" roles; and two environmental conflict simulations.
6. Comprehensive Search System - Simple and advanced tools for finding information.
7. Checklists - Suggestions of things for people in different roles to think about as they struggle to deal with difficult conflict situations.
8. Call for Contributors - As a collectively written system based on "open source" principles, Beyond Intractability solicits and depends upon contributions from our constituent community.
9. Guide to Working with Strong Emotions in the Classroom - Useful suggestions for discussing the difficult issues that lie at the core of intractable conflict.
10. Educational Resources - While these resources are designed primarily for students in traditional classroom settings, they may also be applicable in a variety of training contexts.
11. User Guides - Focused on a variety of topics, including: post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding, journalism, conflict/peace journalism, and Bill Ury's "Third Side."
12. Student Contributor Program - providing advanced students with an early opportunity to make a lasting contribution to the field.
13. Group Projects - a quick primer for students wishing to limit the conflicts that often undermine the success of group projects.
14. Build-Your-Own-Text Module - allowing instructors to quickly and easily craft (and revise) primary and secondary "virtual text(s)," focused on immediate student interests and needs.

These, and many other, resources are available from the Beyond Intractability home page. To make things a little easier to find, we've created a special version of the home page that highlights, by number, links to the items listed above:
http://www.beyondintractability.org/brochures/index-education-brochure.jsp

While everything is freely available, we are asking users who can afford it to make a small donation to defray the cost of system operation. Now that the Hewlett Foundation (which funded the creation of Beyond Intractability) has withdrawn from the field, we are depending on these small contributions to keep the system operating. More information can be found on our "Guidelines for Using the System" page (marked as 12 on the highlighted home page):
http://www.beyondintractability.org/about/permissions.jsp?nid=5075

We'd also really appreciate any help you could give us in publicizing the system's availability (by forwarding this e-mail to potentially interested colleagues and students, for example) or sending us suggestions of people and organizations who we should contact.