Thank You, Melanie Greenberg and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation!

BI was started in 2000, when Melanie Greenberg, then the Conflict Resolution Program Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, told Guy and Heidi Burgess, who were the directors of the Conflict Information Consortium at the University of Colorado, to "think big!"  We had already been working online with an earlier website called CRInfo (the Conflict Resolution Information Source), which we started in the early days of the Internet, when we thought it was actually possible to compile all the information that was available on the Internet on conflict resolution in one place. 

By 2000, we were getting increasingly interested in the conflicts no one else was willing to touch.  The Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution (the forerunner of ACR) had recently released a monograph on environmental dispute resolution that devoted 1/3 or 1/2 of its attention to describing conflicts that mediators should refuse to deal with, because they were too dangerous, and too likely to tarnish the mediators' or mediation's reputation when the mediation failed.  We decided to study those conflicts, because somebody had to—and few yet had done so.  

Over the next several years we recruited about 100 people, half scholars, half practitioners, to help us formulate what topics should go into what was originally planned as a book, and we convinced many of them to write essays on those topics.  It soon became obvious that this was going to be too big for a book, so decided to create a website.  That was also about the time we got a letter from a colleague in Uzbekistan, saying that he had just earned a degree in "conflictology" and he hoped that we would send him any information we had on that topic.  Heidi naively replied that we had just written a book entitled Encyclopedia of Conflict Resolution and it was available on Amazon (which existed back in 2000!) for $35.00 U.S.  He responded that $35.00 was his annual salary, but he could read anything we published on the web.  That was the end of our book writing days!

The BI Knowledge Base

Over a few years, we created the initial "knowledge base" which was first made up of substantive articles we called "essays."  We then added book and article summaries (to benefit our users who did not have direct access to such), case studies, interviews with leading scholars and practitioners, practitioner profiles and reflections, teaching materials, and information on conflict resolution/peacebuilding education and training, and careers and funding. 

The Constructive Conflict Initiative

We continued to expand our holding in all of these areas, and added new sections of Beyond Intractability (such as the Conflict Frontiers videos and Conflict Fundamental Essays) as funding and technology permitted.  After the 2016 election in the United States (in which Donald Trump was elected President), we became increasingly concerned about the level of conflict and political polarization that was tearing the United States apart.  We responded in 2019 with what we called the "Constructive Conflict Initiative," which was designed to get many more people aware of the dangers of hyper-polarized political conflict, and recruiting more conflict and peacebuilding professionals to begin working in this area.

Then COVID hit, and Guy and Heidi Burgess retired from the University of Colorado, which had been hosting BI ever since its beginning in 2000.  With those two events, our plans for another planning conference, much like the three we held at the beginning of BI were dashed. But the University allowed is to "take our website home," so we did that, and we have continued to work on it as we did before — but with more time, as we are no longer teaching or doing administrative chores. We started to write (more than we had before) and collaborated with a friend, Sanda Kaufman, to write what became a "Feature Article" for the Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Applying conflict resolution insights to the hyper-polarized, society-wide conflicts threatening liberal democracies.

The Hyper-Polarization Discussion

We also created a discussion page on BI to encourage discussion of the several controversial assertions we made in that article.  We moved this discussion onto Substack in 2022, and it is alive and well there, covering a wide range of issues related to political polarization, national and international conflict and its resolution, and an eclectic set of related topics. We also use one newsletter a week to share links to interesting and important articles about colleague activities, as well as articles by people outside the conflict resolution and peacebuilding fields on topics of interest to people in those fields. All of these links are assembled on the Colleague Activities Blog on BI, along with the Beyond Intractability in Context Blog, which has the articles from related fields. 

Constructive Conflict Guide

Now in 2025, we have just rolled out a major reorganization of the BI page, to organize it by topic, rather than by content type. (We used to organize it according to all of those sections we've listed above.) Now we are working to re-organize all the materials from the different sections by the topics they address, and are putting together a new resource, the Constructive Conflict Guide to focus our materials particularly on the topic of threats to democracy (including hyper-polarization) and what to do about these.  We will, of course, be maintaining all the older sections of BI — though many of the essays are now over 20 years old, many have been updated, and most of the ones that haven't are still pretty accurate. But we continue to add new material every few days (mostly through our Substack Newsletter) and will be continuing to develop and improve the Constructive Conflict Guide over the coming months.