About Beyond Intractability – A Different Kind of Information Resource

In Brief

  • BI is a vast, free, set of of online materials focused particularly on the nature of hyper-polarized, intractable conflict and what can be done to address it, compiled by over 600 people over a 25 year+ history.
  • Since BI was combined over 10 years ago with an earlier Consortium website called CRInfo (the Conflict Resolution Information Source), which focused on regular, more "tractable" conflicts, BI also contains a significant amount of material on how to manage and resolve those kinds of conflicts as well.
  • BI is now particularly focusing on escalated, hyper-polarized conflicts that are threatening the stability of Western liberal democracies.
  • The section immediately following highlights the primary sections and how users can find what they are looking for.

 

 

Using BI: A Quick Tour to Help You Find What You Are Looking For

BI has thousands of pages of information, and we have just rearranged it all, so it can seem daunting to find what you need.  But there are a few sections that we think will be of most interest to our readers.  Here's what they are, and how to find them.

  • The BI Newsletter. This newsletter highlights much of the new material being published by Beyond Intractability, as well as older material that has newfound relevance for today's pressing conflicts.
    • It is sent out 2-3 times per week on Substack, and is free.  You can search, browse and read all the past newsletters on Substack, or on the Newsletter Section of BI,.
    • You can also find the newsletters sorted by topic and by type (essays, interviews, links, etc.) on the main BI Newsletter page, which is linked to top menu bar, and to  the home page.
  • The Constructive Conflict Guide is a brand new section of BI which organizes the best of all the BI materials (including our external colleague/news/and opinion links) into over 300 different topics.
    • The first section looks at why we should care about addressing intractability, and how intractable conflicts have costs but also offer opportunities,
    • The second section examines what causes iintractable conflicts (because you can't solve problems if you don't understand what is causing them).
    • The last five sections examine what can be done to reduce intractable conflict and make them more constructive. These sections include
      • One on our "massively parallel strategy for dealing with scale and complexity,"
      • Another on "massively parallel goals."
      • A third, long, section details the many civic skills and knowledge people need to deal with intractable conflict constructively (although we don't all need all these skills; rather, we each need just a few), depending on what task(s) or role(s) we decide to play
      • Tasks and roles are defined in section seven and
      • he last Guide section includes information about a few high-profile cases of intractable conflicts, looking at whether (or not) they are being addressed constructively.   
      • Although the material  in BI and the Guide relates to all kinds of intractable conflicts, the Guide is particularly focused in on the conflict dynamics threatening Western liberal democracies, including, particularly, escalation and what we call "hyper-polarization."
      • The Guide is also linked from the top menu bar and the Home Page and, like the newsletters, it can be browsed or searched.
      • As we explain on the Guide's "start here" page, the Guide is not yet done, but it is stock full of great material, so we are releasing it for public use before we have finished with it.
  • Full BI Knowledge Base. The third box down on the left side of the new Home Page is where you will find the Full BI Knowledge Base. This is where you will find most of the older Beyond Intractability material, organized, largely, as it used to be organized, by project.  (Much of this material also appears in the Guide, but there it is organized by topic, not by project.)
    • If you go to the Full Knowledge Base Landing page you will see the three "Moving Beyond Intractability Seminars:"
      • the Things You Can Do to Help Blog, (short blog posts on things we all can do to reduce the severity of hyper-polarization and intractable conflicts more broadly)
      • the Conflict Fundamentals Seminar (An in-depth review of the fundamental building blocks of the peace and conflict field covering both tractable and intractable conflicts.--a forerunner, of sorts, of the new Guide)
      • and the Conflict Frontiers Seminar (A set of video lectures and articles exploring new (non-traditional) approaches for addressing difficult and intractable conflicts with a focus on scale, complexity, threats to democracy the role of bad-faith actors, and the Burgess's idea of massively parallel peace and democracy building and problem solving.)
      • Also on this page is the "Original BI Knowledge Base" which includes
  • All of this material can be searched using the search link on the top right of the menu bar. Be aware: the search system usually first displays "Your search yielded no results," and then, a few seconds later, it  comes up with lots of results. So give it a minute, please!

  • The top left box on the Home Page takes you to the "About" Section, which you are reading now, and on the top right there is a box about the "Intractable Conflict Challenge," which is, in essence, our mission statement, the raison d'etre for BI. We explain this all more, below.

     

What is BI?

Beyond Intractability (BI) is an online knowledge base, focused on the nature of very difficult, long-lasting conflicts (that we refer to as "intractable") and ways to overcome or deal with such conflicts constructively. It has been built over the period of 25 years by over 600 practitioners and scholars who specialize in studying and dealing with such kinds of conflicts. Over the last several years, we have been particularly focused on threats to democracy, and what to do to address those.  

Since BI was combined over 10 years ago with an earlier Consortium website called CRInfo (the Conflict Resolution Information Source), which focused on regular, more "tractable" conflicts, BI also contains a significant amount of material on how to manage and resolve those kinds of conflicts as well.

You can think of BI as a book, or even an encyclopedia — though it is not "finished;" it is ever changing. You could also think of it as a course, although there is enough material here, if one were to try to read/watch it all, to be equivalent to an entire degree program.  Though we know of a few people who do claim to have read it all (though not for awhile), most everyone uses our search and/or browse tools to browse the different sections, or they follow what's new by subscribing to our Newsletter on Substack..

BI's Mission

We believe that destructive conflict is the most serious threat to democracy and our common future. It ruins personal lives, prevents us from solving other pressing problems (such as deep inequality, racism, climate change, infectious disease, etc.) and it underlies dystopian trends toward authoritarianism, chaos, and large-scale violence. BI's mission, therefore, is to raise the profile of the intractable conflict problem, help explain its nature and causes, and to greatly increase the number of people worldwide who have the motivation, knowledge, and skills needed to address it effectively. By using the Internet to collect and disseminate cutting-edge conflict knowledge, we aim to help people more effectively tackle all conflicts — ranging from the relatively simple interpersonal ones, to the societal-level, complex, intractable conflicts which lie at the frontier of the peace and conflict field.  More

Current Focus on Hyper-Polarization and Threats to Democracy

In 2019, we began to focus our attention on political hyper-polarization, and started something called the Constructive Conflict Initiative. This initiative was slowed down with COVID, but morphed into a major "Framing Article" which Guy and Heidi Burgess wrote with Sanda Kaufman and published in the Conflict Resolution Quarterly.  The article was intended to be controversial, and we started a discussion on BI to discuss the many issues it raised in a continuing discussion.  This has now developed into the Substack Newsletter. 

For more information about BI's History and What is Here, see History/Contents

BI's Achilles' Heel: Organization

The biggest challenge we have faced with BI, ever since the beginning, is how to organize this vast amount of information in a way that people can easily navigate it. We started out just having lists of different content types—lists of essays, case studies, interviews, Frontiers videos, etc. 

Now in 2024-5, we are reorganizing the whole site once again, to focus the materials more effectively on what we see as the most pressing challenges of our time—hyper-polarization, threats to democracy, and violence raging around the world. We are trying to create a set of materials that will help people—again those within and outside the peace and conflict resolution field—to better understand what is going on in the many places where conflict is raging, and to realize that there are things to be done to address these many challenges IF we are willing to work at it.

Far too many people, we feel, are currently taking a "spectator" approach to our raging political conflicts: rooting for "their side," bemoaning the other, but not getting involved. And far too many of those who get involved are doing so in destructive ways—in ways that unnecessarily provoke anger and pushback from the other side, and hence make success of one's own side less likely. If we are going to be able to successfully address the many challenges we face — both procedural challenges such as threats to democracy, and substantive challenges such as climate change, infectious disease, inequality, and racism — we must all play a part in a massive peacebuilding and problem-solving effort.  The new BI will work to make this case and show people how they each can get involved in the effort.

About the Conflict Information Consortium — The Organization Behind BI

BI is the primary project of the Conflict Information Consortium. For more information on the Consortium and its other projects, go to About CIC.

Originally, BI was designed and built by Guy and Heidi Burgess with initial programming help from the programmers at Mediate.com. The original articles (particularly the essays) were written by several hundred scholars and practitioners, some graduate students, others (such as Bill Zartman, Bill Ury, Michelle LeBaron, Morton Deutsch, Peter Coleman, and John Paul Ledrach) who were (and still are) leaders of the field. Graduate students contributed the wealth of case studies, book and article summaries, and peacebuilder profiles, and the original scholar/practitioner interviews were conducted by a recent George Mason University Masters graduate, Julian Portilla.  

In the late 2010s, Guy and Heidi Burgess retired from teaching, which gave them time to develop what became known as "Moving Beyond Intractability," which included two new sets of materials: the Conflict Fundamentals Project (which used BI essays and other materials to put together a seminar, of sorts, on basic conflict resolution knowledge) and the Conflict Frontiers Project which looked at topics such as scale and complexity which are less understood aspects of the field. In 2019, we started the Constructive Conflict Initiative, which was designed to get many more people involved in an attempt to overcome hyper-polarization, which was already becoming a massive problem.

Before that project got underway, however, COVID happened. In addition, the University of Colorado, which had housed BI and its parent organization, the Conflict Information Consortium for over 20 years, decided that conflict was no longer a funding priority of the University, and they declined to continue to offer us office space and other minimal support. So with the blessing of two deans, the Burgesses "took BI home" and have been running it as their "retirement project" ever since. That actually has given us the time and the freedom to develop it much more than we had before.  Over the last 3 years, we have published over 250 new articles (most of which have come out on our Substack Newsletter, and we are reorganizing all 17000 pages of BI into a new Guide to Constructive Conflict — which finally organizes BI by topic (instead of just organizing it as sub-projects as we had done before.) The new Guide is also focused particularly on hyper-polarization, threats to democracy, and what is to be done about it. (While older BI materials actually had a lot to say about that, they were not organized in a way to reflect that issue directly.)

 

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