About the Conflict Information Consortium

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The Conflict Information Consortium, directed by Guy and Heidi Burgess, was founded in 1988 at the University of Colorado with a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.  It was--and still is--a multi-disciplinary center for research and teaching about conflict and its transformation. (It was originally named the Conflict Resolution Consortium, but we changed the name when we started focusing on intractable conflicts, which are seldom resolved.) 

With the Burgesses' retirement from their research and teaching positions at the University of Colorado, the Conflict Information Consortium (the parent organization for Beyond Intractability and the Constructive Conflict Initiative ended as a University program effective May 15, 2020.  However, as retired faculty, the Burgesses are committed to maintaining and continuing to develop the Beyond Intractability system after that date.  It is now five years later; we are about to launch a greatly revised home page, along with a new Constructive Conflict Guide that meshes original BI material with outside resources to present key ideas on each of over 300 topics relating to causes, consequences and responses to intractable conflict. We also are maintaining a substack newsletter that has new material two or three times a week.

The mission of the Consortium has always reflected the convergence of two long-standing streams of work. The first is an interest in conflict resolution education, particularly, the exploitation of the unique abilities of Web-based information systems to speed the flow of conflict-related information among those working in the field and the general public. The second is an investigation of strategies for more constructively addressing intractable conflict problems — those difficult situations which seem to resist any and all attempts to resolve them.

While much of our work is applicable to small-scale, tractable disputes, our primary focus is on large-scale conflicts which divide organizations, communities, nations, and the world overall. We believe that the enormous complexities and destructiveness associated with these conflicts requires a new approach — one which melds complexity and systems theory with conflict theory, and works to "scale up" existing "table-oriented processes" to include whole communities or societies. 

Since this is a huge endeavor, it suggests the necessity of involving intermediaries, adversaries, and bystanders at all levels of society. Therefore, a key part of our mission is making basic conflict information available to as many people as possible, helping them become aware that there are options available that are far superior to the continuation of destructive and often violent confrontations.  Given these two interests, most of our work has entailed the creation, maintenance, and growth of a number of large online knowledge-bases, which are described below.

 

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The first such knowledge base was CRInfo: The Conflict Resolution Information Source.  Started in the late 1990s--in the very early days of the Internet-- this site originally sought to bring all the online information about conflict and its resolution together in one place.  That is no longer possible, of course, but much of the CRInfo material was rolled into Beyond Intractability, our next and continuing project. Hence, despite the name and our earlier introduction, BI contains information about conflict and conflict resolution at all levels of social organization from interpersonal (family, workplace) to international, both tractable (i.e. resolvable) and intractable. 

 

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The second knowledge base, started in the early 2000s and still going and growing today, is Beyond Intractability, the website of the Intractable Conflict Knowledge Base Project, or BI.  This project has  many 1000s of resources, now organized by topic in our new Constructive Conflict Guide. The original BI essays, case studies, book summaries, practitioner reflections, peacbuilder profiles, and user guides were written by over 500 different people. Another 150 or so people have contributed interviews to the project. And many more hundreds of authors are now highlighted in our news and opinion blogs and newsletters which draw on people from outside the conflict resolution field for important insights. Likewise, our Colleague Activities blog highlights activities and reports of our conflict resolution and peacebuilding colleagues.

 

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About nine years ago, we upgraded and supplemented the original BI materials by creating several new seminars and blogs, which we lumped under the title "Moving Beyond Intractability (MBI)." MBI contains two online seminars, one on "Conflict Fundamentals," which draws primarily from updated BI essays, and another on "Conflict Frontiers" which examines issues at the frontier of the peace and conflict resolution field that are leading to the continuation, and in some cases worsening, of many intractable conflicts around the world. MBI also contained several blogs, one the Things You Can Do To Help Blog written for general audiences who wonder what they, personally, can do to make conflicts they care about better.  A second is the BI in Context Blog that presents news stories that highlight the impact of intractable conflicts around the world--and things (both constructive and destructive) that are being done to address them.  A last blog is the Colleague Activities Blog which highlights things our colleagues are doing which relate to topics covered in BI and MBI. All of these seminars and blogs have now been rolled into the main BI site; we are no longer making a distinction between BI and MBI.

 

The Constructive Conflict Initiative 

A 2019 Spin-off from the Conflict Frontiers Seminar was the Constructive Conflict Initiative which called for a dramatically expanded, long-term effort to improve society's ability to constructively address the full scale and complexity of the challenges posed by destructive conflict. Initiative goals included 1) promoting awareness of the severity of the threat of intractable conflicts, 2) clarifying the challenges that must be overcome, 3 and 4) promoting collaborative problem-solving and constructive advocacy, 5) scaling-up constructive small-scale strategies already in use, 6) resisting "divide and conquer politics," 7) accelerating conflict R&D, 8) persuading large numbers of people to get involved in promoting more constructive conflict engagement, and 9) building the funding base needed to support such work. Although CIC initiated this Initiative, it was our hope that many more organizations will get involved, and eventually take over leadership of this effort. 

This has, in essence, happened.  We slowed our pursuit of the initiative in the early days of COVID, and instead began writing—first a major paper for the Conflict Resolution Quarterly on the need for many more mediators and conflict resolvers to become involved in America's big political conflicts in a third party role. This paper evolved, first, into an online discussion on BI, which turned into our current Substack Newsletter. Now, we are glad to say, a great many more organizations have seen the need for healing the many divides that are threatening to break the U.S. and other societies apart. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of organizations that now work on what has become called "bridging," and many more which are focused on strengthening democracy, although that can be framed in a very partisan way, as well as being non-partisan, which was our original goal.

 

 

Constructive Conflict Guide

In addition to extensively reorganizing the site and revamping the home and landing pages of our current active projects, we are deploying in late July or early August 2025 an entirely new Constructive Conflict Guide.  After presenting material on the drivers of polarization and other intractable conflicts, and the risks such conflicts pose to societies, this Guide presents what we call the “Massively Parallel” Approach to Problem-Solving and Democracy. It combines our earlier writings on this topic and takes them  further, fleshing out the many constructive conflict skills that all people can use to address any  difficult conflict  more effectively.  This guide draws materials from all parts of BI, as well as from our colleague and news and opinion posts. It can be read as a book by very committed people, or it can be browsed or searched for "chapters" on particular topics of interest. 

The Consortium has undertaken a number of smaller projects as well, two of which still have an online presence and contain useful information that is not available on the main BI side.

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One is an online tutorial on interpersonal conflict called "Stop Fighting." With a conflict skills quiz and short readings to annotate answers, this tutorial helps people involved in relationship conflicts think through how best to handle them.

 

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The second smaller project is an oral history project on the Community Relations Service. This project was undertaken at two different times, and the interviews are now being combined on the website of The Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project . The first set of about 20 interviews with CRS conciliators and regional directors were done in 1999.  We must give credit here to former CRS conciliator and regional director Dick Salem, who proposed the project and partnered with us to complete it. Due to the limited technology available at the time, we only have transcripts of those interviews. 

We undertook a second round of interviews over the last several years, for which we have video as well as transcripts.  We also have coded the earlier interviews (and are still working on coding the new interviews) according to topic, so it is possible to learn what all of the respondents had to say about de-escalating tensions, gaining entry as a third party, building trust, etc. 

These interviews form a particularly important record of CRS activities, as the agency has already been gravely crippled by lack of funding and limits to the character of its work, and it may be cut entirely sometime soon. But CRS conciliators were highly skilled at de-escalating and even resolving very destructive racial, ethnic, religious, and gender-related conflicts. Hopefully, these interviews, along with Bertram Levine and Grande Lum's book on CRS: America's Peacemakers, can help keep this knowledge alive, even if the agency no longer exists.

Other Older Materials: Conflict Information Consortium Legacy / Historical Content
 

This is content from the very earliest days of the Internet and the Consortium program (late 1980's and 1990's). This content was previously accessible at www.colorado.edu/conflict., but that site no longer exists. This content is presented "as is" and "frozen in time" with no effort to update it in any way.  Sections are titled in the list below with their original web address (even though they are now located on our archive server: https://www.intractableconflict.org/www_colorado_edu_conflict/).

 

Institutional Home and Funding 

From January, 1988 until October, 2019, the Consortium was housed at the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO.  We were primarily funded by the Hewlett Foundation until the early 2000s.  Since then, we received contracts and grants from the One Earth Future Foundation, the JAMS Foundation, the Conflict Transformation Fund, and individual donors. 

In October of 2019, we were informed that University restructuring meant there was no longer a sensible institutional home for the Consortium at CU, and we were asked to retire and take the Consortium elsewhere.  We took it home, and have found that we now have much more time than we had before to work on the BI site (and other related projects). So BI is still very much alive and growing, and we hope to keep it that way for some time to come.