The Limits of Business As Usual Approaches

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

Part of our inability to successfully address intractable conflicts is that we try to treat them as if they were like other more "normal" conflicts.  So we go about handling them in the same way.  We often point out the difference in scale between a simple "mediation triad" -- a husband, a wife, and a mediator for instance, a conflict involving a whole society.  Consider Israel/Palestine, for example.  That conflict involves roughly 15 million people (not counting Iranians, Arabs, or supporters of both sides around the world, just Israelis and Palestinians themselves). That 15 million people is seven orders of magnitude (seven factors of ten) bigger than the standard mediation triad. The U.S. population, now about 340 million, is eight orders of magnitude larger than the standard mediation triad.  To put that in context, the difference between a person walking at a slow stroll (1.7 miles or 2.7 km per hour) is only four orders of magnitude slower than the speed at which the international space station buzzes around the earth (17,000 miles or 27,000 km per hour). Is it surprising that the techniques that work for family conflicts don't work for society wide conflicts? Yet often, we assume they do, and we pursue what we call "business as usual." 

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