Guide Map (With Descriptions)

1. Introduction, Overview, and User Guide

Version: 1.02 — August 29, 2025

Go To Guide Map (Titles Only, No Descriptions

• Constructive Conflict Guide -- A free Guide to understanding the causes and consequences of intractable conflicts and the ways in which we can all help handle these conflicts more constructively -- from the interpersonal to the societal level.
  • Guide Overview -- An explanation of how the Guide is organized, the information sources upon which it is based, and strategies for using it most effectively.
  • Intractable Conflict Threat and Opportunity -- An overview of both the positive role that intense conflict can play in promoting social learning and the ways in which such conflicts can undermine societal problem solving and democratic institutions while increasing intergroup hatred and strife.
    • The Nature of Intractable Conflict -- A more detailed look at what we mean by "intractable conflict," the factors that distinguish these conflicts from more tractable disputes, and the role played by scale and complexity.
      • Intractable Conflicts and Dispute Streams -- The term intractable conflict primarily refers to long-term, underlying societal tensions and not the more tractable, short-term disputes that occur within the context of the larger conflict.
      • How Are Intractable Conflicts Different from Other Conflicts? -- Intractable conflict also arises from the enormous scale and complexity of society-wide conflict and the fact that handling these complex conflicts constructively is enormously difficult, even in the best of circumstances.
        • Core and Overlay Overview -- Complicating efforts to deal with core moral, distributional, and status issues are overlying problems like escalation, misunderstandings, disputed facts, and procedural hurdles.
        • Scale and Complexity Overview -- Intractability also arises from the fact that society-wide conflict involves millions of times more people than can fit around a negotiation table -- people who are simultaneously pursuing their own competing priorities.
    • Runaway Escalation and Hyper-Polarization -- An explanation of how hyper-polarized intractable conflict, combined with runaway escalation, can be the most destructive force on the planet. It can destroy our personal lives and lead our societies toward a variety of dystopian futures.
      • Small-Group Intractable Conflict Threat -- An overview of the multifaceted threat that intractable conflict poses to our interpersonal relationships, workplaces, and communities.
        • Destroys Relationships -- Even small scale intractable conflicts can destroy once harmonious and rewarding relationships.
        • Poor (Harmful and Costly) Decisions -- When people are embroiled in conflict, it clouds their analytical abilities, causing them to make poor decisions, or to avoid decisions entirely, allowing the default option to occur, even if it is harmful.
        • Psychological Stress and Mental Illness -- Continuing conflict can be very draining on one's psychology, leading to anxiety, depression, and other mental ills.
        • Hate -- Hate spirals are especially damaging, as people who need to cooperate can no longer talk to or trust the other. And hate begets more hate, driving escalation and polarization higher and higher.
        • Fear -- The drive for security is one of human's most fundamental needs. Fears for one's physical, psychological, or socioeconomic well being are very destabilizing and people tend to fight until their sense of security is restored.
        • Anger -- Anger can drive one to act, but it also can be very destructive, causing people to lash out at others in ways that make the situation for everyone worse, rather than better.
        • Violence -- Violence takes many forms -- physical, psychological, and structural. All are very destructive of relationships, trust, and social stability. Sometimes that is the point, of course, but violence often backfires --causing as much harm to the perpetrators as it does to the victim.
      • Societal Level Intractable Conflict Threat -- At the societal level, intractable conflict can destroy societal problem solving capabilities, expose democratic institutions to authoritarian takeover, increase the risk of large-scale civil unrest, and make us vulnerable to external aggression.
        • Organizational, Community and Societal Dysfunction -- Hyper-polarized intractable conflict can undermine trust and promote intragroup hostility to the point where organizations lose their ability to work for the common good -- a process that further erodes trust.
        • Group Oppression of Other Groups -- All-out, us-vs-them, hyper-polarized intractable conflict demonizes and dehumanizes adversaries to the point where previously unacceptable acts of oppression or violence become acceptable.
        • Enabling Authoritarian Strongmen -- When societies become dysfunctional from conflict (or other reasons), this opens the door to authoritarians who may even be appealing to some people because they promise to "save" the downtrodden, and are able to "get things done," while democratic politicians are locked in stalemates.
        • Corruption -- Hyper-polarized intractable conflict erodes our sense of social responsibility to the point where our collective defense against corruption collapses in ways that further undermine the social fabric.
        • Destroys Trust in and the Legitimacy of institutions -- As hyper-polarization builds, parties lose trust in the societal institutions upon which they used to depend. This devolves down to the interpersonal level, as people lose trust in families, friends, and local organizations that hold differing values.
        • Runaway Conflict, Civil Strife, and Large-Scale Violence -- Escalation processes can amplify intractable conflicts to the point where taboos against hate crimes, civil strife, large-scale violence, and war erode and may collapse.
        • Divide and Conquer Aggression -- Internally divided societies are also vulnerable to outside aggressors who use clandestine measures to amplify divisions and undermine a society's ability to defend itself against aggression.
    • The Constructive Conflict Promise: an Engine of Social Learning and Progress -- An exploration of the often neglected positive side of intractable conflict and the ways in which continuing tensions can force us to find constructive ways of responding to society's uncomfortable contradictions.
      • A Vision for a Democracy That Lives up to Its Ideals -- The ability of conflict to advance, rather than threaten, the human condition depends upon having a shared vision of how to build a democratic society that fairly and wisely balances the competing interests of its diverse citizenry.
        • Builds Mutually Supportive Integrative Relationships -- The primary reason modern civilization is possible is because humans have become very adept at working together for the common good. If we lose this ability, we are losing much more than friendships -- we will be losing everything we depend on to survive.
        • Takes Advantage of Mutually Beneficial Opportunities -- Much of the success the democratic societies have historically enjoyed comes from their ability to identify and pursue win-win strategies for dealing with underlying social tensions.
        • The Democratic Ideal Is a Constructive and Fair Dispute Handling System -- A less widely recognized, but critically important element of successful democratic societies is their ability to wisely, equitably, and efficiently handle the giant stream of disputes that characterize all societies.
        • Freedom -- The strength of democratic societies (and the quality-of-life enjoyed by their citizens) is largely attributable to their willingness to embrace the full range of human perspectives.
        • Wise and Equitable Collaborative Problem-Solving -- Successful democracies need to be able to collaboratively solve shared problems in ways that equitably balance competing interests, while also achieving intended objectives.
        • Fair and Equitable Distribution of Resources and Opportunities -- Given the inequities that have plagued democratic societies in the past, it is critically important that today's democracies find fairer ways of distributing income, wealth, and status.
        • Effective Checks on Corruption and Individual Power -- To be successful, 21st-century democracies need much more effective mechanisms for combating the tendency of power concentrations to lead to even greater (and more corrupt) power concentrations.
        • Effective Anti-Violence Norms and Enforcement -- One of the most important functions of democratic systems is to prevent unscrupulous individuals from advancing their interests through violence and intimidation.
        • Defenses against Divide and Conquer Attacks -- Democratic societies must be able to successfully defend themselves from aggressive authoritarian rivals (including those who try to weaken a democracy's defenses by promoting internal divisions).
      • A Resilient Democracy Capable of Defending Itself from Internal and External Threats -- On the basis of the shared, positive vision for society, we can also challenge one another to do a better job of defending that vision from internal and external enemies -- bad-faith actors who seek to dominate and exploit our societies.
        • Liberal Democratic Systems -- The principal strength of democratic societies, the freedoms that it offers its diverse citizenry, also leave it vulnerable to internal conflict -- conflicts that must be successfully managed.
          • Advantages of Democratic Systems -- One key to protecting democracy is promoting citizen awareness of the many advantages of diversity of opinion, free speech, and constructive debate.
          • Democratic Conflict Vulnerabilities to Be Overcome -- Citizens of the democracy also need to understand the dangers that arise when conflicts between diverse communities are allowed to escalate (and strategies for limiting that escalation through conflict resolution, mutual tolerance and respect).
        • Illiberal Authoritarian Systems -- Citizens of a democracy need to understand the dangerous allure of embracing authoritarian systems (and the almost always mistaken belief that strong leaders really will prioritize the welfare of their constituents).
          • Disadvantages of Authoritarian Systems -- For democracies to be successful, its citizens need to understand the often hidden threats associated with authoritarian systems -- systems in which the people are often brutally suppressed and exploited.
          • Authoritarian Threats to Be Overcome -- In addition to being able to defend themselves from direct, "kinetic" attacks from aggressive authoritarian regimes, democracies also need to resist sophisticated propaganda and hybrid warfare tactics.
        • Building the Dispute Handling System that Makes Democracy Work -- With their many strategies for constructively handling disputes, the conflict and peacebuilding fields have much to contribute to efforts to build democratic institutions that really work for everyone.
          • Challenging Domestic Authoritarian Tendencies -- By demonstrating that it is possible to negotiate mutually beneficial ways of resolving difficult disputes, those with conflict expertise can help reduce the appeal of authoritarian, power-over leaders and movements.
          • Challenging External Authoritarian Threats -- Helping to strengthen national defense and deterrence is a critically important (but sometimes underappreciated) component of efforts to preserve the peace.
  • The Complex Factors That Make Intractable Conflict So Difficult -- The first step toward limiting destructive conflict (and promoting more constructive alternatives) is to understand the many factors that make these conflicts so difficult, dangerous, and intractable.
    • The Illusion of Simplicity -- Much of the intractability problem stems from the fact that we fail to recognize the complex nature of intractable conflict and, instead, fall back on simplistic images that see conflict in hyper-polarized, binary terms (e.g. good vs. evil, us vs. them).
    • The Limits of Business As Usual Approaches -- Understandably, we tend to approach conflict using the current generation of conflict-handling techniques. Unfortunately, these techniques are not enough to meet today's complex challenges. We need to do better.
    • Deep-Rooted Core Differences -- Understanding intractability requires understanding how fundamental, "core" tensions over moral, distributional, status, identity, and fairness issues continually pull us apart.
      • High Stakes Distributional Issues -- These are arguments about who gets what when it really matter and splitting "it" in half won't work. Who gets the land, the job, the elite college admission -- when failing to get it seriously harms one's life and long-term prospects for success and happiness.
      • Moral and Value Issues -- Intractable moral conflicts tend to arise when one group views the beliefs and actions of another group as being so fundamentally evil that they exceed the bounds of tolerance and must be blocked or denied.
      • Unmet Human Needs --  Human needs go beyond just food, water, and shelter. They include all those things humans are innately driven to attain, such as love, dignity and safety. When fundamental needs are absent, those denied will usually fight until their needs have been secured.
        • Identity Issues -- Since identity is a fundamental human need, identity conflicts are among the most intractable, as all identity groups want to be respected and treated fairly.
        • Security Issues -- Security is another fundamental human need. It includes not only immediate physical security, but long term security--knowing that one's needs and safety will be met, and psychological security, knowing that one's beliefs and ways of living will not be under attack.
      • Status Issues -- Closely linked to identity and security, status is also related to issues of power, dignity and hierarchy. In many societies, there is a perpetual struggle between those at the top and those at the bottom, with equality a very elusive goal.
      • Inequitable Power-Sharing -- The more unequally power is distributed, the more conflict tends to ensue, unless the power of the tyrannical ruler is so complete that his subjects dare not fight back. Even then, however, the powerful can only rule as long as his supporters (particularly his army) stands with him. If they rebel, regime change is likely, even for the apparently most powerful leaders.
    • Conflict "Overlay" Problems -- A series of problems overlying the core issues make conflicts even more intractable. These include: competing frames, escalation dynamics, communication failures, factual disputes, procedural problems, and collaborative difficulties.
      • Conflicting Visions and Frames -- When people have divergent and competing images of what is happening in the world, why, and what they want, that makes resolving the conflicts between them much more challenging than it is when they share fundamental understandings of what the conflict is about, and how it might be resolved.
        • Failure to Recognize the Need to Limit Destructive Conflict -- Many people think polarization, conflict, and even war is inevitable -- "it is just human nature," some say. But the lethality of modern conflict and warfare makes the importance of conflict limitation and war prevention of utmost importance.
        • Missing Underlying Democratic Vision -- Many Americans who came of age after the end of the Cold War don't have a good sense of how democracy is different from other governmental systems, and why it is superior (at least to those who have grown accustomed to it). And even those who support democracy have widely different images about what democracy is, and what aspects of it are most important to preserve or even strengthen.
        • Us-vs-Them Framing, Enemy Images, and Into-the-Sea Framing -- One common contributor to intractability is the tendency to simplify complex conflicts into simple us-versus-them, good side versus bad side narratives. These go so far as "into-the-sea" framing where adversaries tried to entirely get rid of the other side.
        • History of Past Unrightable Wrongs -- A term first coined to refer to genocides, "unrightable wrongs" are wrongs that are so severe that they cannot be fully remedied. The best that can be done is that truth and responsibility can be acknowledged, and apologies and reparations made to survivors.
      • Escalation -- Guy Burgess calls escalation "the most dangerous force on the planet" It involves the increase in intensity of a conflict -- the number of parties and issues increases, tactics become heavier, hatred increases, and overall destructiveness generally increases as well.
        • Polarization and Hyper-Polarization -- Polarization usually happens along with escalation--causing people to move towards the extremes (the "poles") of each side, leaving fewer and fewer people in the middle. Guy and Heidi Burgess write about "hyper-polarization," which is an extreme form of polarization that is all encompassing -- it involves not only polarization on issues, but also what is widely called "affective polarization," the fear of and hatred of the other side.
        • Weak Societal Integration -- Robert Putnam is famous for his book Bowling Alone which documents the break down of social ties in the United States. Societal integration is essential in keeping societies together. Without it, it is easy for both internal divisive actors or external enemies to ferment strong enough conflicts to break a society apart.
        • Crisis-Related Time and Information Pressures -- When a crisis occurs, decisions about how to respond have to be made quickly, often on the basis of incorrect or incomplete information. These pressures often cause people to do things that make the situation worse, not better.
        • Unwillingness to Balance Partisan and Societal Interests -- When conflicts become hyper-polarized, disputants lose the sense of integration -- of being in a relationship or sharing a society with the other side. So they lose most or all interest in solving problems in ways that work for everyone in the society, seeking only solutions that help themselves at the expense of others.
        • Entrenched Escalation -- Escalation tends to feed upon itself, becoming so "entrenched," that is very hard to back out of the destructive conflict dynamics it spawns, for fear of appearing weak.
        • Hostile, Inflammatory Language and Behavior -- Calling the other side names, demeaning and humiliating them, or accusing them of being the source of shared problems almost always makes conflicts worse, and gets the other side thinking of you in the same way.
          • Left-leaning Polarizing Behavior -- Many of the things the left does and says are very concerning to the right. This section looks at the way the left is alienating the right -- when there are less polarizing ways to make the same points.
          • Right-leaning Polarizing Behavior -- Similarly to left-leaning polarizing behavior, there are many things that the right is doing and saying that unnecessarily alienate the left. There are ways to pursue right-leaning beliefs that aren't so alarming to the other side.
      • Communication Failures -- Communication often breaks down in conflict. Sometimes it gets cut off altogether. Other times people use hostile language that just makes the conflict worse. Or the disputants' background information and worldviews are so different that they think the other side is "evil," or "stupid," or "crazy," even though they have good reason to think as they do, given the information that they are basing their attitudes and actions on.
        • Simple Misunderstandings -- Sometimes conflicts are caused by simply misunderstandings -- people thinking someone said or did something that they didn't say or do.
        • Lack of Communication Skills -- Poor communication skills can make conflicts worse. If people use escalating language, refuse to (or don't know how to) listen well, this leads to misunderstandings and more difficult conflicts than might have been otherwise necessary.
        • Homogeneous Self-serving Information Bubbles -- All people tend to try to reinforce their beliefs. So they like to live with, work with, socialize with, and read and watch people who agree with them. They don't often seek out people or information that disagrees with them. So they often have very distorted views of what is really going on in a conflict.
        • Misinformation and Disinformation -- Intentional distortion of information has become a significant problem in the social media driven information environment. It is trivially easy to make up very believable stories with photographic or "scientific data" as proof. And the mis/dis information strategy of "firehose of falsehoods" has successfully convinced many people that there actually is no truth, or at least no way to ascertain it. So best to just stick with your own beliefs -- right or not!
        • High-Tech Communication Media Problems -- Social media, the Internet, and cable TV has made it trivially easy to reach millions of people with destructive and deceptive information instantaneously and almost for free. And the technology has advanced far more quickly than the social knowledge about how to control it, or control the damage it is doing to our individual and social well-being.
        • Free Speech Limits -- In the United States, both the Democrats and the Republicans are trying to limit the speech of the other. And Europe is even worse. There you can be arrested for things you post on the Internet that are critical of local authorities.
      • Factual Disputes -- Disputes over facts have always been present in technical and environmental conflicts. But the ease in creating "fake facts" has made these kinds of disputes much more common, and difficult to resolve, and it can be very hard for lay people to figure out which "experts" are speaking the truth, and which are not.
        • Lack of Access to Reliable Objective Information -- The line between fact and opinion has become increasingly blurred. Supposedly "objective" news sources paint very different pictures of events -- again making it hard for people who weren't "there" to figure out who is telling the truth and who is not.
        • Manipulated Facts and Politicalization of Fact-Finding -- Governmental leaders are increasingly trying to control the media's access to and publication of facts that harm the accepted narrative, while trying to spread facts that tell their preferred story as widely as possible.
        • Expert Trust and Trustworthiness: The Gap between Experts and the Public -- Spinning of facts, together with scientists' common inability to speak or write in lay-language has greatly harmed the general public's trust in science and "expert knowledge."
        • Fact-Finding Amid Irreducible Uncertainties -- A particularly challenging aspect of science is that there are often irreducible uncertainties -- things that we just can't know, given the nature of the problem, and the extent of scientific techniques for investigating. Lay people often don't understand this or like it, demanding, as former Senator Muskie was once said to do "a one-armed scientist--one who will not say 'on the other hand!'"
      • Dispute Resolution Procedural Problems -- One type of "conflict overlay" are procedural problems--problems of fairness, transparency, predictability, and other procedural missteps.
        • Electoral Processes -- Electoral processes have been widely challenged with charges of gerrymandering, voter suppression, illegitimate voters, erroneous counting, and unfair (though legal) procedures (such as the U.S. electoral college which sometimes allows a candidate who lost the popular vote still win the presidential election).
        • Legislative Processes -- Legislative processes are problematic when they use procedures which may be technically legal, but "smell bad" -- such as the provision that allows just one senator to block a bill from passage.
        • Administrative Processes -- Administrative processes are very controversial when the U.S. President issues executive orders that seem to overstep his bounds, or his administration does things that seem to violate either the Constitution or laws passed by Congress and signed by an earlier administration (hence, having the force of law).
        • Judicial Processes -- Though it is considered in U.S. law to be the "last resort," judges can and sometimes do overstep their authority to enforce the law, and do so in a way that causes observers to claim they are making their own laws, based on their own preferences, rather than the Constitution or legal precedent. This is called judicial activism and is usually very controversial.
        • Law Enforcement Processes -- Law enforcement has often been accused of procedural problems, ranging from over policing and "racial profiling" to inadequately policing certain neighborhoods or certain crimes.
        • Military Responses -- Military procedural problems can stem from bad planning or practice among servicemen and women or officers, or bad orders coming from the Commander in Chief such as what happened during the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan in 2020.
        • Limited Civic Skills -- As we have often said in these pages, "democracy is not a spectator sport." Strong democracies require strong civic engagement. But fewer and fewer Americans have the civic knowledge or skills to participate effectively.
        • Collaboration Problems -- The best decisions usually come out of collaborations where people with different expertise and viewpoints collaborate to evaluate problems and develop solutions that will meet the needs of people of all political stripes. But hyper-polarization makes such collaboration very difficult. Opponents don't trust each other, they don't believe each other, and they seldom are willing to sit down with the other side to listen and learn.
          • Lack of Support for Compromise-based Solutions -- In our hyper-polarized political environment, compromise is seen as "selling out" ones' own side. So it is seldom even considered as a plausible approach to problem solving.
          • Failure to Search for and Recognize Potential Compromises -- Even when parties do sit down together, they often assume that they are in a win-lose situation, and work to win the most they can, instead of trying to either collaborate to "enlarge the pie," or at least look for legitimate compromises that would share whatever is being negotiated fairly.
          • Lack of Forums for Negotiation or No Acceptable 3rd Party -- Sometimes there isn't a neutral forum where parties can meet to negotiate, and they aren't willing to meet on the turf of one side or the other, for fear the forum itself will bias the proceedings.
          • Distrust and Lack of Confidence That People Will Live up to an Agreement -- Another obstacle to negotiation is distrust in the other side. If a negotiator can't be reasonably sure that they other side will adhere to any agreement reached, there is no point in negotiating in the first place.
    • The Staggering Scale of Society-Wide Conflict -- We tend to think of conflict as a simple two party game (perhaps with a role for a third party mediator). The reality of society-wide conflict is that it simultaneously involves the chaos of millions of such simultaneous and interlocking games.
    • The Additional (and Even Bigger) Challenge of Societal Complexity -- It isn't just scale, the intractability of society-wide conflict is also attributable to the complexities of human psychology, social interactions, high-tech communication systems, modern economies, environmental constraints, and other factors.
      • Feedback Loops -- The complexity of conflict stems from the fact that every conflict action invariably helps shape the conflict actions of others in ways that produce a complex and endless series of feedback loops.
      • The Complex Nature of Power -- Power is not just the ability to force someone to do something against their will. It is also the ability to influence others through mutually beneficial exchanges and persuasion.
      • Democratic and Authoritarian Strategies for Handling Complexity -- In democracies, societal complexities are handled through division of labor-based, distributed decision-making which is vastly more efficient than the authoritarian approach in which the leader tries to dictate everything.
      • The Relationship between Complexity, Scale, and Diversity -- Guiding modern societies requires an in-depth understanding of the ways in which millions of people (with a diverse array of motivations) interact in society's many institutional settings.
      • Types of Complexity -- Society is so complex that no single scientific field can possibly understand it all. That's why we have wide range of social science disciplines, each focused on a different aspect of the social, economic, and environmental systems.
        • Psychological Complexity -- Understanding the motivations that lead people to act in particular ways requires an understanding of the basics of neuropsychology, the complexities of cognitive biases, and the mechanics of small group interactions.
        • Communication Complexity -- People act on the basis of what they have learned about the actions of others through society's complex array of communication mechanisms including both face-to-face interactions and many types of print and electronic media.
        • Sociological Complexity -- People do not live their lives in isolation. Rather, they live in a complex and overlapping array of groups, each with their own behavioral expectations and constructive and destructive interaction dynamics.
        • Legal Complexity -- The ability of democracies to effectively eliminate violence as a dispute resolution strategy is largely based on the willingness of people to resolve disputes through a complex, rule of law-based process.
        • Political Complexity -- Rule of law-based dispute resolution processes require a political process for both making and revising laws and directing joint collective action.
        • Economic Complexity -- Capitalist economic markets constitute a complex system driven by Adam Smith's "invisible hand" --- a system that is subject to a wide range of constructive and destructive dynamics.
        • Environmental / Physical Complexity -- Human society exists within the context of a larger physical and biological environment over which we have little control. It is imperative that we understand the limits that this environment places on what we can and cannot do.
    • Challenges Posed by Bad-Faith Actors Who Who Are Trying to Profit by Undermining Collaboration and Power-with Democracy -- Not everyone is making a good-faith effort to strengthen democracy and handle conflict constructively. There are many types of bad-faith actors who, for selfish reasons, deliberately try to inflame and exploit conflict.
      • Types of Bad-Faith Actors -- In order to protect democracy from those who deliberately seek to undermine it, we need a sophisticated understanding of motivations of these individuals and the tactics they use.
        • Power Grabbers -- Unfortunately, there are people whose principal goal in life is to seek power -- power that enables them to exploit and dictate the beliefs and behaviors of others.
        • True Believers -- Some people are convinced that their moral framework and way of living constitutes the "one true path" and that everyone else must be persuaded or forced to follow that path.
        • Spoilers -- Spoilers are those who are resist or try to undermine peacebuilding efforts out of the fear that they will be double-crossed or the belief that the compromises being asked for are unacceptable. They may also be "conflict profiteers" who stand to profit more from war than they would from peace.
        • Conflict Profiteers -- Conflict profiteers are those who profit from conflict, so they work against peace. Their goal is to make as much money as possible by, for example, selling advocacy services or weapons of war, sometimes to all sides at once.
        • Inflammatory Media -- Media channels often profit by boosting interest in conflicts with overly inflammatory coverage and then using their coverage of the conflict to build an audience and the revenue that goes with it.
        • Alienated Nihilists -- Nihilists are people who are so alienated from and hostile toward the larger society that they have given up hope of finding a desirable place for themselves. Some adopt the goal of simply destroying whatever they can.
        • Geopolitical Rivals -- In a world of competing nation states, vast bureaucracies have been created to weaken rivals (often by inflaming internal tensions).
      • Strategies and Tactics Used by Bad-Faith Actors -- Bad-faith actors use many nefarious strategies including information warfare, corruption, threats, and even violence to impose their demands on anyone who resists them.
        • Information Warfare -- Information warfare is getting increasingly common as the Internet and social media make it so easy and inexpensive to drown users in false information.
          • Propaganda -- Unlike misinformation, which is always false, propaganda might be false or true. But it is information used in a biased or misleading way to promote a political cause or point of view.
          • Firehose of Falsehood Attack -- A term developed by RAND to describe a propaganda technique in which large numbers of false messages are sent out rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels, so as to overwhelm the receiving audiences.
          • Target-Cast Deception -- Broadcasting sends out a message widely to everyone in a society. Narrowcasting sends messages out to particular groups, tailoring the message to be most resonant with that group. Target-casting goes even further, targeting individual people with messages designed to draw them into a particular cause.
        • Fear and Hatemongering -- Bad-faith actors try to win support by sowing hate and making their potential supporters fear and distrust "the other side," framing them as the epitome of evil and their own side the ultimate good and savior from evil.
        • Corruption and Economic Exploitation -- Another common strategy of bad-faith actors is to exploit everyone else for their own economic and political gain.
        • Imposing Controversial Values on Other Groups -- The American Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and speech (hence thought), but both the left and the right have been trying to impose their own values on the other side (the right by outlawing abortion, for instance, and the left by allowing it, and promoting other progressive values such as DEI and the support of gender transition.)
        • Disenfranchising Moderates, Denouncing Compromise -- Bad-faith actors insist that their views are the only correct views and opposing views are completely wrong. So they denounce moderates who can see value in both sides as sell-outs or traitors, and denounce compromise as unacceptable submission.
        • Threats, Intimidation, and Small Scale Violence -- Intimidating and threatening people is a standard strategy for bad-faith actors, who take a "might-makes-right" approach to getting what they want. Sometimes the threats and intimidation turn into violence. Here we look at small-scale violence; next we will look at large-scale aggression, such as war.
        • Large Scale Aggression -- When small scale violence grows to encompass much of a society -- or multiple societies -- it can usually be called war. But war, increasingly, takes a variety of forms, including traditional warfare tactics of guns, bombs, tanks, and missiles, to what is called "gray zone" or "hybrid warfare" that includes information warfare, lawfare, and other "soft" strategies, along with terrorism, which deliberately targets civilians for the purpose of instilling fear and demoralization.
          • Kinetic Warfare -- Kinetic warfare is traditional warfare tactics of guns, bombs, tanks, and missiles using by competing armies, and paramilitary units.
          • Hybrid Warfare (incluiding Lawfare) -- Hybrid warfare is a military strategy that blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare, and cyber or information warfare to achieve strategic objectives—often without triggering a traditional, full-scale military conflict.
          • Terrorism -- Terrorism is the use of violence against civilians to instill fear and demoralize the enemy. It is often utilized by nonstate actors, but can also be utilized by nation states for the same purposes.
  • The Massively Parallel Strategy for Dealing with Scale and Complexity -- The massively parallel strategy for dealing with the scale and complexity of societal conflict focuses on cultivating a large array of independent, but mutually supportive, efforts to address different aspects of the conflict simultaneously.
    • Pursue a Complexity-Oriented Approach -- It is not enough to abandon simplistic, us-vs-them thinking. We need to develop and embrace realistic strategies for working at the daunting scale and complexity of modern society.
    • Ideas for Addressing Scale and Complexity to Build Upon -- The first step toward constructively managing scale and complexity is to recognize that this is a long-standing problem and societies have already developed many effective complexity-oriented techniques that we can build on.
      • Theories of Change -- Theories of change are ideas about how a desired change can be accomplished. I think I can lose weight by cutting out desserts. That's a theory of change. So, too is the belief that we can reduce political polarization by encouraging people to talk to each other in dialogue groups, or come together in deliberative fora to jointly analyze and propose solutions to mutual problems.
      • Systems Thinking -- Systems thinking is holistic thinking -- understanding that everything in a system is related in some way and that changes in one part of the system can ripple across the rest of the system, often through interlocked sets of feedback loops. A system's behavior is more than the sum of its parts--it can be chaotic and unpredictable. But at the same time, systems often exhibit certain repetitive behaviors (such as escalating feedback loops), the result of which can be fairly accurately predicted.
    • The Theory Behind the Massively Parallel Approach -- This section outlines a series of more specific strategies that might be realistically used to develop and strengthen massively parallel efforts for complexity-oriented problem-solving.
      • Pursue the Opportunities Created by All Conflict Problems -- All problems create opportunities for the people who can solve them. So instead of seeing problems as insoluble, if we try to figure out how to solve them, even if we fail, we are likely to make things somewhat better.
      • Strengthening the Relationship between Theory and Action -- One problem in the conflict and peace fields is that there is not a strong connection between theory and practice. Most scholarship is done at universities; most practice is done private practitioners, NGOs and government actors. None talk to each other or learn from each other as much as they could or should.
      • Amplifying and Speeding the Natural Conflict Learning Process -- MPP is not a new idea; rather it is a new term to describe a process that has long been happening. But it can be sped up by getting people to understand how it works, and facilitating more awareness of what others are doing and coordinating or collaborating where it makes sense.
      • Implementation, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Adjustment -- After any theory of change is implemented, it is important to monitor and evaluate the results, since complex systems often do not respond in the way we expect. If things are not working, we have to be ready to change course and do something different, not just push harder on a failed approach (as is sometimes done).
  • Massively Parallel Democracy Building Goals -- Massively parallel problem-solving efforts focus on a series of shared goals — goals that are an essential part of building a society in which most everyone would like to live.
    • Cultivating Compromise -- Within almost all disputes there are mutually beneficial ways of resolving the issues (at least as compared to alternatives) . The key is learning how to identify and take advantage of this "zone of possible agreement."
    • Cultivating Respect for Identity Groups -- Societies tend to be divided into competing identity groups with differing circumstances, values, histories, and priorities. Massively parallel problem-solving requires respectful coexistence, if possible, and constructive confrontation, if not.
    • Preserve Electoral Integrity and Continuity -- Free and fair elections are at the core of all democratic systems. Voters need confidence that they can always replace unpopular leaders. This requires a wide range of efforts to preserve electoral integrity and the rule of law.
    • Expose and Delegitimize "Bad-Faith Actors" -- Selfishly motivated bad-faith actors have developed a wide range of deceptive and sophisticated strategies for inflaming conflict and then profiting from the resulting conflagration. They can be weakened, however, by exposure and delegitimization.
    • Promote Reconciliation -- Most societies have terrible histories of past wrongs that, because they involved killing, and often happened long ago, are effectively "unrightable." The ability to build a mutually attractive future requires effective strategies for reconciling these societies, despite such historical wrongs.
    • Promote Effective Communication -- Communication is one of the first casualties of conflict. But there are many ways to improve it which are discussed in this section. Good listening is always a valuable first step.
    • Promote Collaborative Problem Solving -- Much of the success of democratic systems stems from their ability to identify shared problems, assess the strengths and weaknesses of possible solutions, work through differing opinions and priorities, and reach workable compromises.
    • Limit Massively Parallel Partisanship --
  • Civic Knowledge and Skills That We All Need to Constructively Handle Intractable Conflict -- In order to contribute effectively to this massively parallel effort, individuals need to understand conflict dynamics and master the skills needed to handle those dynamics successfully.
    • Stripping Away "Overlay" Problems That Make Conflicts Appear More Intractable Than They Really Are -- Intractable conflicts have core issues -- the things that the conflict is "really about," and usually a set of "overlay" or complicating factors--things that lie over (and often obscure) the core issues and make them harder to deal with. Identifying and then fixing (or at least limiting) the overlay problems is one of the first steps of constructive conflict engagement.
    • Constructive Framing & Future Visioning -- If you frame conflicts as shared problems that need to be solved collaboratively, and work together to develop a vision for the future that will be acceptable to all, you are much more likely to be able to deal with conflict in a constructive way.
      • Complexify Worldview -- Many of us assume that most of our socioeconomic and political problems are caused by the other side, if not one particular person on the other side. While some people with a lot of power can, indeed, be very problematic, the system is always much more complex than one "bad guy." We need to develop a much more complex and nuanced sense of the conflict system we are in, recognizing that there are multiple causes (often including "us") that are contributing to any particular problem.
      • Conflict Assessment and Mapping Tools -- A variety of conflict assessment and mapping tools are available to help understand the complexities of a conflict more clearly.
      • Identifying Leverage Points and Opportunities -- Conflict maps can help identify what aspects of a conflict system might be changeable, and which not. Then one can figure out what the leverage points for change are likely to be, and identify ways in which those leverage points could be accessed and affected.
      • Limiting Divisive Us-vs-Them Framing -- When we define a conflict in us-versus-them terms, asserting that "we" are the "good guys" and "they" are the "bad guys" we are almost assuring that "they" will do the same thing, and common ground (other than defining each other as the enemy) will not be found.
    • Overcoming Communication Problems -- Communication problems are a common overlay factor. Fortunately, there are many ways to remedy these problems as well.
      • Effective Listening -- Listening, like respect, is something of a "magic wand" for conflict. It doesn't solve everything, but it can help tremendously by showing the opponent that you care and you understand what they are trying to tell you. And once you do understand their concerns, you will be in a much better position to find a mutually-beneficial approach that will meet your needs and theirs.
      • Non-Inflammatory Communication -- People in conflict often say very inflammatory things that make the conflict worse. But there are ways to explain your core concerns in ways that are respectful and non-accusatory. This helps the other side hear what you are trying to say, and makes it more likely they will respond positively to it.
      • Discussion and Persuasion -- Rather than forcing people to go along with what you want, it is usually more effective to engage in a respectful analysis of the problem with them, and gently try to explain why you think your views make sense, while honestly trying to figure out why they believe what they do. Such respectful discussions often reveal more common ground than people think they have, and may result in paths forward that work for everyone.
      • Promote Civility -- Civility is something of a hot-button word, some people asserting it means keeping angry people quiet. It doesn't mean that, but it does suggest that people should express their anger (and other thoughts) in ways that it might be heard and understood.
      • Imagine a Positive Shared Future -- You can't get to a destination if you don't know where it is. Likewise, if you don't know what kind of future you want, it will be hard to achieve. And if you seek a future that the "other side" strongly opposes, you are also likely to fail. Constructive conflict involves developing an image of a positive shared future -- a future in which everyone in society would like to (or at least be willing to) live.
      • Protect Freedom of Speech While Opposing Deceptive Propaganda and Censorship -- There is a fine line between freedom of speech, censorship, and control of disinformation and propaganda. These resources discuss how to walk that fine line.
      • Improve Cross-cultural and Cross-Party Understanding -- We have been writing about cross-cultural misunderstanding -- and remedies thereof--for a long time. Now cross-party understanding is also an important issue. The left and the right in the United States have grown so far apart, and consume such different information, that they really are different cultures--with all the cross-cultural misunderstandings that occurs with traditional cultural differences.
      • Dialogue -- In normal English, "dialogue" just means talking. But in conflict resolution, it means a particular kind of structured conversation, facilitated by a neutral third party who helps people better understand why --and others-- approach a particular conflict in the ways that they do. It may not result in resolution, but dialogue almost always improves understanding and builds trust between the participants.
      • Develop Constructive Uses of IT -- Much attention is being paid to the conflict-exacerbating uses of IT, but it can (and is) also being used to bridge divides, increase intergroup understanding, and help build peace.
      • Constructive Social Media and Mass Communication -- Both traditional mass media and social media has been highlighted as a driver of misinformation, anger, fear, and hate. But some efforts are being made to utilize both traditional media and social media in pro-social, conflict reducing ways. This section looks both at what is being done, and what more could be done to make media a problem solver more than a problem creator.
      • Strengthen Local News -- Good local news is essential if people are going to become actively engaged in the civic affairs of their communities. But the business model of local news has become much more problematic with the ubiquity of the Internet, which not only provides most people's news, but took away the profit from ads that print media used to provide.
      • Promote Balanced News Coverage -- We get almost all our information about what is happening in the world from the news media. So when the media feeds us false information, we are unable to make good decisions. Balanced news coverage can help us understand all sides of controversial stories, so we can make decisions that are better informed.
    • Resolve Fact-Based Sources of Conflict -- If conflict is fueled by suspicion, assumptions and misunderstandings, then one of the simplest ways to reduce it is to find out the facts of the situation. Every conflict resolution process needs a solid base of facts to stand on. However, agreeing on "the facts," can be, in itself, a challenging conflict resolution problem.
      • Defending Objectivity and Conducting Trustworthy and Trusted Analyses -- Social issues are usually so complicated that we need to depend on experts to explain the "science" or the "facts" behind the issue. Experts must not only use good scientific methods to conduct their research; they must also be able to explain their findings to the public in understandable and trustworthy ways.
      • Accurately Communicating Factual Information That People Can Use -- Given the amount of disinformation floating around, people tend to distrust "facts," unless they reinforce what they already know, or at least come from a trusted source. Here is information about how to be such a source and how to communicate facts in ways people will understand and believe.
      • Seriously Consider Alternative Views -- We have a habit of believing things that reinforce our existing beliefs, and ignore, dismiss, or even ridicule ideas that are different from, or challenge those beliefs. However, seriously considering alternative views is essential for effective decision making and conflict resolution.
      • Distinguish Factual vs Value Differences -- Empirical facts about "what is" are very different from moral or value distinctions about what "should be." Clearly distinguishing between those two is essential for good decision making.
      • Limit the Influence of "Fake Facts" -- "Disinformation" or "fake facts" are everywhere. They are so ubiquitous, that it is almost impossible to figure out what is true, and what is not. But truth matters. Yet facts will come back to bite us if we get it wrong. So making the effort to sort through fake from real facts is essential to good decision making.
      • Sensibly Deal with Uncertainty and Risk -- One of the oft-misunderstood things about science is that it seldom can make pronouncements with complete certainty. Scientific findings almost always involve some degree of uncertainty, and a level of risk in decision making is unavoidable. So learning how to manage risk and uncertainty is important.
    • Overcoming Hyper-Polarization, Escalation, and the Forces of Disintegration -- Polarization and escalation tend to make conflicts increasingly intense. But there are a variety of conflict resolution strategies that can help de-polarize and de-escalate conflicts so that they at least do less damage, and at best, might be resolved.
      • Rumor Control and Crisis Response -- Rumors fly quickly during crises and responders need to be able to sort out what is true, what not, and what is most needed immediately, both to control the situation and prevent further harm. A lot needs to happen quickly and carefully, so as to not make the situation worse.
      • De-escalation -- De-escalation can take place through de-escalatory language (such as I messages and active listening) and de-escalatory behaviors such as conciliatory gestures, gradual reduction in tension (GRIT) and other measures designed to break negative stereotypes and build confidence between groups.
      • Cooling Off / Anger Management -- This section looks at a variety of strategies that can be used by disputants and/or third parties to cool down heated situations and calm anger.
      • Confidence Building -- Distrust is a common problem in intractable conflicts. Confidence building measures are ways to help parties rebuild trust to the point that the might be able to successfully negotiate an agreement and/or work together to solve a joint problem.
    • Collaborative Problem Solving/Consensus Building -- Collaborative Problem Solving (also called consensus building) is used to settle conflicts that involve many parties and complicated issues. The approach seeks to transform adversarial confrontations into a cooperative search for information and solutions that meet all parties' interests and needs.
      • Identify Goals, Values, Interests, and Needs -- Each of these concepts is different, but understanding all of them is important before one undertakes a negotiation or other conflict resolution effort.
      • Compromise and Negotiation -- In political conflicts today, compromise is often seen as "selling out," and bad to do. But negotiating win-win solutions is often possible, and if not, making compromises that allow all sides to get much of what they want and need is almost always better than protracted conflicts with destructive consequences for all.
      • Expand Networks -- In complex conflicts, there are usually many people, interests, issues, and organizations involved. The more you can reach out to, learn about, and potentially work with others, the more likely you will be able to achieve some, if not all, of your goals.
      • Collaborative Leadership -- Collaborative leadership focuses on shared problem analysis, problem solving, and decision making. It involves actively engaging representatives of all stakeholders in the decision making process, communicating openly, and valuing diverse perspectives.
    • Overview of Third-Party Approaches -- "Thid party" approaches, such as facilitation, mediation, and arbitration and even adjudication, use an outside "third" party to come in to help disputants process their conflict more constructively and, ideally, come up with a decision on how to resolve it.
      • Neutrality and Impartiality -- These are closely aligned concepts, but they are not the same. Neutrality means not taking a side in a conflict, while impartiality is about treating all parties fairly. Some mediators argue that neutrality is impossible, as we all have a side on most issues, but they can still act with impartiality--treating all parties fairly.
      • Facilitation -- Facilitation is a process in which a person helps a group communicate and work together more effectively. Good facilitators can create agendas, help groups communicate effectively, better understand each other and the issues, stay on task and be more creative, efficient, and productive.
      • Mediation, Conciliation, and Related Processes -- Mediation (sometimes called "conciliation") is a conflict resolution process in which a third party assists the disputants to communicate better, analyze their conflicts and their options and to develop a mutually satisfactory solution.
      • Deliberation -- Deliberation is an approach to public problem analysis and resolution that brings people together to collaboratively analyze the nature and sources of a particular problem, identify alternative options and trade-offs that would satisfy as many stakeholders as possible, and then make recommendations about the best way to address the problem.
      • Trust Earning / Guarantees -- Our trust in another individual is grounded in our evaluation of his/her ability, integrity, and benevolence. That's what we need to demonstrate to earn another's trust.
    • Using Equitable Power-With Decision Making Processes for the Tough Core Issues -- This section focuses on the tough issues where win-win solutions don't necessarily exist, or when some groups are demanding more than their fair share. A core principle is that decisions must balance majority rule with minority rights and make decisions with a fair, transparent process.
    • Constructive Confrontation: Handling Conflict More Constructively from an Advocacy Perspective -- Fundamental conflict resolution strategies are useful for advocates, as well as for neutral third parties. To the extent you can advocate for your side more effectively, the more likely you will be successful in gaining what you want. The more you generate push back from destructive strategies, the less likely you are to succeed.
      • Ethical Advocacy -- The first part of constructive confrontation is ethics. If you take a power-over, winner-take-all approach to advocacy, that is not what we would call "constructive." Even if it does get you what you want over the short term, it is likely to generate backlash and make your victory short lived. Better to take a collaborative approach to advocacy so that you work for your goals in a way that respects other sides' legitimate goals as well.
      • Nonviolent Protest Strategies -- Sometimes bad-faith actors do things that simply must be opposed. Violent opposition seldom works -- it usually just enrages the opposition, and if they have superior sources of violence, they will often use them to suppress the protestors. Nonviolent protest strategies, on the other hand, are much less likely to result in repression, and are more likely to gain sympathizers on the other side.
      • Balancing the Three Sources of Power -- Integrative, Exchange, and Force -- Power is usually thought to be force--coercive power. But there are actually three kinds of power that can be mixed and matched -- force, exchange, and integrative power. Kenneth Boulding argued that integrative power is actually the strongest and most important of the three, because the other two need integrative power to function.
      • Using a Respectful Tolerance Strategy to Allow Groups to Coexist with One Another despite Deep Differences -- Democracy is not a system for one side overpowering and oppressing others. It is a system for allowing people with very different values and beliefs to live together peacefully. Tolerance of difference is essential for that.
    • Reconciliation -- Reconciliation involves looking at the past, the present, and the future to figure out a way to overcome past harms and wrongs, and live together in the future with much better relationships.
      • Prospective Reconciliation -- Prospective reconciliation involves looking ahead to figure out how conflicting groups can successfully live together in the future.
      • Build and Repair Relationships -- Society, as well as smaller assemblies of people, are built on relationships. When relationships are loving, respectful, friendly, and trusting, conflicts can usually be resolved without great difficulty. When relationships break down, or never existed, conflict resolution and problem solving becomes much more difficult. So an early step in dealing effectively with intractable conflicts is strengthening the relationship between the disputants.
        • Rediscovering the Golden Rule -- "The Golden Rule" -- "Do Unto Others as You Would Have Others Do Unto You" is a fundamental tenent of all the World's main religions. We should keep that in mind when we engage in conflict.
        • Tolerance -- Tolerance is the appreciation of diversity and the ability to live and let others live the way they want to. It is the ability to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards those whose opinions, practices, religion, nationality, etc. differ from one's own. It involves showing respect for the essential humanity in every person.
        • Respect -- Respect is the recognition and regard for the inherent worth, rights, feelings, and perspectives of others. It involves treating people with dignity, courtesy, and fairness, acknowledging their autonomy and value, even when there are differences of opinion, status, or background. It is, perhaps, the strongest conflict resolution tool there is. Respect costs little to give, and often generates large rewards.
      • Retrospective Reconciliation -- Unlike prospective reconciliation, which looks forward, retrospective reconciliation looks backwards, using a balanced strategy for coming to terms with past wrongs. Truth and reconciliation commissions, apologies, remediation, and forgiveness are usually aspects of retrospective reconciliation.
        • Peace -- More than just the absence of war, peace is the willingness of people (and nation states) to resolve their conflicts through nonviolent means. Some people include justice in their definition of "peace," but we keep it separate, adhering to Lederach's notion that peace, justice, truth, and mercy together are the ingredients of reconciliation (which many people would equate with "peace" alone.)
        • Justice -- Justice is fairness. It can be measured in many different ways -- in terms of equity, equality, "just deserts," or need. It can be manifested in different ways: with retributive justice, restorative justice, distributive justice, or procedural justice, among others.
        • Truth -- Truth should be simple, but it is anything but. It involves determining and agreeing on facts. But in intractable conflict, the facts, be they historical, scientific, or facts about who did what and when, are almost always contested. Finding truth involves developing narratives that most everyone can agree upon. And agreeing on those truths then reinforces trust, a different, but related concept.
        • Apology, Forgiveness and Mercy -- Lederach uses the term "mercy" in his theory of reconciliation, but we usually equate the concept with forgiveness, which is closely tied to apology. All three are involved in restoring a good relationship after a wrongdoing.
      • Trauma Healing -- Intractable conflicts often result in deep trauma, which must be healed if the conflict is to be resolved. There are many techniques that are used: relational and community-based approaches such as group therapy, restorative justice or truth-telling processes, cultural healing practices; expressive and creative techniques such as art, music, or drama therapy, writing or journaling; among other psychological and therapeutic techniques.
      • Using Fair Processes to Make Decisions When When Win-Lose Choices Are Unavoidable -- When win-lose choices are unavoidable, they can still be acceptable (and accepted) by the losers, if the losers believe that the process used to make the decision was fair. That means that it followed standard procedures, allowed all voices to be heard and considered, and followed accepted rule of law.
        • Establishing Electoral Integrity -- Trusted elections are key to stable democracies. All eligible voters must be allowed to vote, and they must have confidence that their vote was actually counted correctly. When charges of election fraud are widespread, even if untrue, that can greatly weaken a democracy.
        • Establishing Fair and Effective Legislative Processes -- Democracies also require legitimate and effective legislative processes. When the legislature is coopted by the executive branch, or is so stalemated so as to be unable to pass laws, or when its rules are seen as unfair, the public's view of the legislature will be diminished, as will the stability of democracy overall.
        • Assuring Fair and Effective Administrative Processes -- In the U.S., administrative processes are those utilized by the president (or governor at the state level) and the federal or state agencies under the president or governor. The actions of all of these people and agencies must been seen as fair and effective in order for the executive branch of the government to be seen as legitimate.
        • Assuring Fair and Effective Law Enforcement -- In the United States, one of the common progressive concerns is "racial profiling," the notion that police unfairly target and treat people of color and other minority groups unfairly. Law enforcement must be done fairly for all to acheive procedural justice.
        • Assuring Legitimate Judicial Processes -- Also essential for procedural justice is legitimate court processes. In court cases, one side will win, and the other will lose. But if all parties have a chance to make their argument, and the court issues compelling opinions that explain their findings in broadly legitimate ways, these findings are likely to be accepted.
        • Assuring Military Actions are Legitimate and Well Conducted -- When military actions are taken without the advice and consent of Congress and/or are seen as illegitimate by a large portion of the population (as, for example, was the U.S. war in Vietnam) this would constitute a procedural problem that should be avoided whenever possible.
      • Civic Engagement --  If we are to have government "of the people," and "by the people," that means that we, "the people," must be involved. That means all of us!
      • Transparency, Freedom of the Press, and Public Oversight -- We, as citizens, should insist on governmental transparency, and press freedom, so we know what is happening in our name and we can take steps to oppose (and hopefully get changed) efforts that we don't like.
      • The Importance of the Rule of Law, Checks and Balances -- Rule of law and checks and balances are key elements of liberal democracy. Rule of law means that laws apply to everyone and procedures and policies should follow those laws. Checks and balances mean that the three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) are independent of each other and provide checks on the over reach of the others.
      • Navigating the Power Contest Hierarchy -- This article explains how the various dispute resolution arenas (e,g, administrative appeals, legislative action, electoral politics, public opinion, judicial review, policing, and military action) relate to one another in a rough hierarchy.
      • Individual Rights and Due Process -- In liberal democracies, individual rights must be protected and due process followed in any attempt to make political decisions.
      • The Continuum between Legitimate and Illegitimate Types of Power -- Politics means jockeying for and utilizing power to make decisions. But power can be obtained and used legitimately -- through free and fair elections, and by following the rule of law, or it can be obtained and used illegitimately. The former usually leads to better decisions and more stable democracies.
      • Majority Rule, Minority Rights, and Preventing the Tyranny of the Majority -- This is another fundamental concept of liberal democracies. While the majority does have the power to make decisions by majority vote, they still have to abide by certain rules (those named in the Constitution in the U.S., for example) to protect the rights of the minority.
    • Find Opportunities to Get Involved -- Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires many of its citizens to get involved in myriad ways from PTAs and local advisory boards, city council meetings, political dialogues and deliberations, and many other ways. This section explains how to identify opportunities.
    • Taking Advantage of (and Promoting) Nonpartisan Civic Education -- Promoting (and getting) good civic education is an important first step. We all need to understand how our government is supposed to work, so we understand when it is doing what it is supposed to do and when it is not. And we need to know how we can respond when the government is not fulfilling its duties.
    • Taking Advantage of Citizen Participation Opportunities -- All political entities from school boards, planning boards, city councils, county, state, and federal agencies have means for public participation. If they are involved in issues you care about, learn what those citizen participation opportunities are, and use them to make your interests and concerns heard.
    • Defending Democracy from the Bad-Faith Actors Who Seek to Undermine It -- Unfortunately, the ability to successfully navigate contemporary conflict also requires a sophisticated array of skills to defend those efforts from unscrupulous attacks by bad-faith actors.
      • A Collective Strategy for Protecting Democracy from Bad-Faith Actors -- For democracy to survive its citizens must be willing to work together to collectively defend it from internal and external threats.
        • Opposing Information Warfare -- Successful democracies must be able to protect themselves from unscrupulous information warfare tactics that use high-tech propaganda techniques to attack enemies, inflame tensions, and undermine the social cohesion that democratic societies depend upon.
          • Resisting Deceptive Propaganda -- Democratic citizens need to dramatically improve their ability to detect and resist the highly sophisticated propaganda that now pervades our high-tech information systems and tries to persuade us to do things that are contrary to our interests.
          • Resisting Firehose of Falsehood Attacks -- A particularly insidious form of propaganda attempts to flood communication channels with contradictory and unreliable information in an attempt to persuade people that there are no reliable sources of information and that is pointless to try to understand who is right.
          • Counter Targetcast Deception -- Targetcasting is a new kind of advanced, high-tech propaganda. It uses the detailed individual profiles now commercially available to craft individualized messages tailored to each voters preconceptions and prejudices.
          • Resisting Disinformation -- This section focuses on strategies for countering deliberate efforts to get large segments of the public to believe things that are objectively untrue (usually as part of a broader effort to get people to do things that undermine, rather than advance, their interests).
          • Unspinning Deceptive Spin -- Here we focus on countering the "spin doctors" who focus on deceptively convincing people that damaging facts really aren't so damaging after all (and should, instead, be interpreted as good news).
        • Opposing Fear and Hatemongering -- This section focuses on strategies for resisting efforts to inflame tensions and persuade people that the concerns of the other side are illegitimate and not worthy of consideration.
        • Opposing Economic Exploitation and Corruption -- This section examines ways of assuring that democrcy's leaders act in ways that pursue the common good (and not the advancement of their narrow selfish interests).
        • Supporting Tolerance and Co-existence with People Who Hold Different Values -- Democracy is not a system for determining which groups get to impose their views on others. It is a system that allows people with different views to coexist in a spirit of mutual respect and tolerance.
        • Opposing Efforts to Disenfranchise Those Who Favor Moderate, Compromise-Oriented Governance -- This section focuses on the many ways in which democracies tend to disenfranchise those with centrist political beliefs and shares strategies for overcoming this problem.
        • Preventing Threats and Intimidation -- Democracy cannot succeed if citizens do not feel free to express their views (and advocate policies based on those views) because of intimidation and threats of violence,
        • Preventing Small Scale Violence -- One job of government is to assure the sense of security among its citizens. That means the government needs to do as much as it can to prevent violence that undermines its citizens' sense of security, although it cannot do so in a heavy-handed way that violates other people's rights.
        • Preventing and Defending Against Large-Scale Violence -- In extreme cases, political tensions can escalate to the point where you have large-scale violence (such as the troubles in Northern Ireland or the United States in the 1960s. Still worse is violence that escalates into civil war.
  • Specialized Massively Parallel Roles / Tasks -- The massively parallel strategy for more constructively handling society's many conflicts relies upon an extensive system of specialization and the division of labor.
    • About the Massively Parallel Roles -- The effectiveness of the massively parallel approach depends upon a society's ability to recruit, train, and support people working in the full range of conflict roles. Leaving some roles unfilled weakens the entire effort.
    • Conflict Strategists -- Conflict roles are divided into two big categories, strategists and actors. Strategists use their sophisticated understanding of social dynamics to identify things actors in each community can do to promote constructive, rather than destructive, conflict.
      • Lookouts -- Lookouts focus on making society as a whole more aware of often unrecognized ways in which destructive conflict threatens their vital interests.
        • Conflict Early Warners -- These are the people and groups that watch the news and warn of situations that are dangerous and likely to escalate into violence (or more violence if violence has already occurred).
        • Discrimination Watchdogs -- Discrimination Watchdogs call attention to what they believe to be unfair treatment of some groups by the larger society
        • Governmental Watchdogs -- Governmental Watchdogs, particularly journalists,  focus on breakdowns in governmental safeguards designed to prevent corruption, power concentrations, and, potentially, an authoritarian takeover of democratic institutions.  
        • Geopolitical Threat Monitors -- Geopolitical Threat Monitors alert us to the fact that geopolitical rivals are threatening and sometimes directly attacking Western democracies.
        • Canaries -- Canaries (named after the term "canary in the coal mine") warn about substantive threats on particular issues, less directly related to conflict processes and democratic functioning, such as climate change, toxic pollution, infectious disease, and financial instability.
      • Democracy Firsters -- People in this group focus on reminding us that we won't be able to solve our many problems until we can fix the systems that enable us to come to agreement about how to solve those problems.
      • Complexifiers -- Specialists working in the various academic disciplines help us understand the complex workings of society in their areas of expertise and, especially, dynamics that threaten the viability of the system as a whole.
        • Behavioral Thinkers -- Behavioral Thinkers focus on the ways people tend to behave in conflict situations, and help us understand why conflicts escalate (and can be de-escalated) the way they do and can.
        • Psychological Thinkers -- Psychological Thinkers focus on finding better ways of adapting democracy to the realities of human neuropsychology by applying the science about how people think and make decisions to democratic processes.
        • Communication Thinkers -- Communication Thinkers look for ways to strengthen democracy by correcting distortions in the flow of information and preventing and/or exposing destructive , hateful, or misleading communication (keeping in mind that "hateful and misleading doesn't simply mean something one side disagrees with).
        • Social Thinkers -- Social Thinkers look for better ways of understanding and managing tensions and synergies between ideologically, racially, and socially diverse elements of society.
        • Political and Democracy Thinkers -- Political and Democracy Thinkers nurture the democratic idea and try to figure out how to better adapt it to continually changing realities.
        • Economic Thinkers -- Economic Thinkers help us cultivate market dynamics that promote the general welfare, while limiting those that foster inequities and inefficiencies.
        • Technological Thinkers -- Technology Thinkers help us understand the complex relationship between the rapid and accelerating technological change and human prosperity, social equity, and human quality of life.
        • System Thinkers -- System Thinkers help us understand the complexity of the social, political, and economic system and  figure out how to meet challenges at the full scale and complexity that is needed to have systemic impact.
    • Conflict Actors -- The ideas for strengthening the system developed by conflict strategists are, in turn, implemented in society's many communities by the more numerous conflict actors (people who also often contribute valuable strategic insights).
      • Democratic Citizens -- The foundation of any democracy is its grassroots citizenry — people who honestly try to fulfill their responsibilities to one another including, to their political opponents.
      • Visionaries -- Visionaries help us imagine a unifying vision for a diverse society that maximizes self-determination while promoting joint action to protect the commons.
        • Co-existers -- Coexisters articulate a forward-looking democratic vision based on constructive competition, balanced with a pluralistic spirit of tolerance and mutual respect
        • Healers -- Healers help people come to terms with the profound wrongs of the past in ways that lay the groundwork for a more attractive future.
      • De-escalators -- De-escalators help us diffuse our escalated and hyperpolarized politics by working to replace anger, hostility, us-vs-them demonization, and, sometimes, violence with a willingness to peacefully and constructively engage with the other side.
        • Escalation Educators -- Escalation Educators expose the dangers posed by conflict escalation and closely linked hyper-polarization, and help people in all walks of life learn the skills needed to avoid escalation and polarization in the first place, and if it is too late for that, reverse it and start to heal its wounds.
        • Mediators and Conciliators -- Mediators and Conciliators help deeply-conflicted parties break down their polarization and escalation by helping them, often for the first time, really listen to and come to understand the concerns of the other side, and helping them reframe their conflict, so they no longer see it as the fault of the other side, but rather as a mutual problem that can be solved.
        • Crisis Responders -- Crisis Responders act quickly to prevent or contain violent (or sometimes just especially hateful and destructive) confrontations.  Their focus may be on preventing eminent violence, bringing an end to ongoing violence, or preventing violence from reemerging (or all of the above.)
      • Constructive Communicators -- Conflict is driven by the images that we have of one another -- images that derive from often flawed processes of interpersonal and mass communication. Constructive communicators help us overcome the limitations of these processes.
        • Bubble Bursters -- Bubble Busters help people see beyond the self-righteous, us-vs-them, good-vs-evil information bubbles in which so many of us now live.
        • Communication Skill Builders -- Communication Skill Builders focus on teaching people the skills that they need to communicate more effectively with their fellow citizens and, especially, help facilitate communication between people with differing views.
        • Bridge Builders -- Bridge Builders facilitate direct human connections that cross political divides and dispel inaccurate and inflammatory stereotypes.
        • Storytellers -- Storytellers can help people gain insight into other people's lives, perspectives, emotions, and experiences. They can help build empathy and understanding across lines of conflict.
        • Mass Communicators -- Mass Communicators are journalists, artists, and opinion leaders who scale up bridge building activities in ways that reach vastly larger numbers of people
        • Free Speech Advocates -- Free Speech Advocates defend the free flow of information between people with different perspectives and different sources of information.
        • Convener / Facilitator -- Conveners and facilitators bring people with differing views together and help them engage in the kind of constructive exchanges that lead to learning and in some cases, collaborative decision making.
        • Disinformation Fighters -- Disinformation Fighters reduce the influence of deliberately deceptive and malicious disinformation and propaganda campaigns designed to inflame tensions while, at the same time, promoting the exchange of reliable information.
        • Media Reformers -- Media Reformers focus on improving the many different types of communication media in ways that will better promote civic life (at both local and national level) while resisting pressures to feature demonizing and divisive content.
        • Conflict Educators / Trainers -- Conflict Educators and Trainers help speed the flow of information on more constructive ways of handling conflict that show people that there are better ways of preventing and solving conflict than fighting (sometimes violently) about it
      • Issue Analysts -- We depend upon issue analysts to help us navigate complexities of modern society in ways that identify workable options for addressing problems and reliably assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each option.
        • Technical Experts -- Technical Experts investigate the extraordinarily complex challenges facing modern society -- things like climate change, inflationary pressures, or infectious diseases that can be very hard for the general public to see or understand. They help develop solutions to these problems, help non-experts  judge the relative risks of different choices, and evaluate the likely results of different policy options.
        • Skeptics -- Skeptics ask hard questions of the experts, pushing them to explain their thinking and respond to alternative lines of reasoning in ways that force them to improve the quality of their analyses and explanations.
        • Technical Reporters -- Technical Reporters (as well as interpreters and educators) help translate the technical jargon so that the general public can understand "what the science says." They also often emphasize the practical implications of studies and the reasons why they should (or should not) be seen as trustworthy.
        • Evaluators -- Evaluators help incorporate public values into the analytical process. Scientists can tell us, within some range of uncertainty, the nature of the problems we face and they can estimate the likely consequences of options for addressing those problems. They cannot, however, say what policy is best for a community or a nation. Evaluators help do that.
        • Science Reformers -- Science Reformers focus on holding scientists and technical organizations to high professional standards and protecting them from political pressures that undermine the quality of their work.
      • Collaborative Problem Solvers -- The complexities of modern society make it very difficult to negotiate agreements on ways to solve problems that wisely and equitably balance competing interests. Collaborative problem solvers can help us do this.
        • Negotiators -- Negotiators  help people and organizations find mutually beneficial ways of working through problems.  They identify issues, interests, options, and figure out how to balance those with the interests off the other side(s). Unlike mediators, however, negotiators work to support the interests of one side only, while mediators do the same thing for all the parties together.
        • Mediators -- Mediators  help negotiators work through disputes that they cannot solve on their own. They help the parties convene and facilitate meetings, communicate effectively, earn trust, work through emotional issues, identify mutually beneficial possibilities, conclude agreements, and then implement those agreements.
        • Consensus Builders -- Consensus Builders go beyond the negotiation and mediation of relatively small scale disputes to help those involved in complex, multi-party disputes develop a broad consensus on ways of handling complex clusters of interlocking issues that affect large numbers of people and involve multiple interest groups.
        • Peacebuilders -- Peacebuilders take consensus building processes one step further by helping design and implement programs that go beyond the negotiation of agreements to broader efforts to bridge societal divides and transform hyper-polarized societies into more peaceful and, ideally, reconciled societies. In essence, they are trying to implement the agreements that mediators and consensus builders help develop.
        • Constructive Advocates -- Constructive Advocates work to defend their group's interests in ways that simultaneously respect, recognize, and help protect the legitimate interests of other groups involved in the conflict, including those on the other side(s). 
        • Global NGOs -- Global NGOs focus on developing, generally with respect to some specific group of issues, solutions that help protect society (or the whole world) as a whole.
        • Philanthropists -- Philanthropists provide critically needed funding for a wide range of problem-solving efforts as well as the broader array of MPP-related  activities. Their highly competitive vetting process plays an important role in assuring that the many MPP-related projects that are philanthropy funded are well conceived and executed.
      • Power Balancers -- For disputes that cannot be resolved through mutually beneficial agreement, there is a need for people and institutions with the responsibility to make hard, but fair, decisions about who wins and who loses and by how much in each specific case. Power balancers try to implement equitable ways of balancing power in such processes.
        • Civic Skill Builders -- Civic Skill Builders teach citizens about the advantages of democratic systems and how to use those systems to constructively handle the large number of difficult conflicts that inevitably occur in any modern society.
        • Civic Reformers -- Civic Reformers work to strengthen institutions in ways that promote wise and equitable problem-solving, while limiting incentives that lead to hyper-polarization and corruption.
        • Ethical Politicians -- Ethical Politicians are committed to serving all citizens with honest debate and a refusal to engage in hate mongering and other destructive tactics.
        • Engaged Citizens -- Engaged citizens are the people who go beyond political hobbyism to actively participate in democratic governance. They serve on advisory committees, support and participate in public interest groups, testify at public hearings, and actively work within their communities to find solutions to common problems
        • Arbitrators and Adjudicators -- Arbitrators and Adjudicators work with legal representatives of contending parties in both private and public settings to resolve disputes about what, exactly, the rule-of-law means in specific situations.
        • Law Enforcement -- Law Enforcement Officials at all levels are charged with preventing citizens from defying the law. Without the remedies that their efforts provide, our legal rights could easily be violated by anyone willing and able to resort to violence and intimidation.
        • Empowerment Leaders -- Empowerment Leaders highlight and work to correct the society's most egregious power inequities and the unfairness that results from those inequities. Their focus is not on "getting even," but rather, they try to build a system that more equitably balances power in ways that all citizens will see as offering a path to a society that is fair for everyone.
        • Nonviolent Protestors -- One kind of empowerment actor, nonviolent protestors, follow the long tradition of nonviolent civil resistance made famous by Gandhi, King, and Mandela. While embracing a commitment to nonviolence, they demand that ongoing injustices be properly addressed, and appeal for democracy to live up to the true meaning of its egalitarian ideals.
        • Network Builders -- Network Builders bring those working to strengthen democracy into mutually supportive networks which increases the effectiveness of all.
      • Defenders -- Defenders are those who help protect all of the above efforts from selfishly motivated bad-faith actors — those who seek to disrupt the wise and equitable functioning of democratic systems.
        • Collective Defenders -- Collective Defenders are alliances of nations (or other social groups) which feel that the best way to defend themselves from attack by unscrupulous foreign (or domestic) rivals is by agreeing to pool their resources to build a common defense. They further agree to come to one another's aid in the event of an actual attack.
        • Ethical Advocates -- Ethical Advocates fight back against the tendency of many advocacy groups to pursue victory to the point where they are not leaving space in society for those with opposing views. They help us understand when our obligations to the larger society should take precedence over efforts to advance our individual and group interests.
        • Corruption Fighters -- Corruption Fighters  focus on strengthening conflict of interest protections and preventing public business from being exploited for private gain by unscrupulous individuals.
        • Constructive Media -- Constructive Media work to defend and strengthen the ability and inclination of media to provide the public with accurate and understandable information about the problems facing society. Their goal is to encourage the media to better support democracy by promoting content that is constructive, rather than inflammatory and inaccurate.
        • Integrators -- Integrators focus on reaching out to those who feel alienated from and left behind by the larger society — people who have lost so much hope that they are falling victim to the various diseases of despair.  Especially worrying are those who have crossed the line into destructive nihilism where they are so resentful of the larger society that they want to do all they can attack and destroy it
        • Geopolitical Defenders -- Geopolitical Defenders work to defend democracy from geopolitical rivals who seek to undermine and destabilize Western democracies and who, if the opportunity arises, may engage in covert and sometimes overt acts of aggression.
  • Information about Today's Big Conflicts and Possible Solutions -- To be helpful, more constructive approaches to intractable conflict need to be applied in the context of high-stakes, real world conflicts. This section of the Guide provides links to in-depth information about some of today's biggest conflicts.
    • Left/Right Identity Conflict --
    • US Electoral Politics --
    • Race/Racism/Structural Violence --
    • Gender/Family/Relationships --
    • Climate and Environmental Issues --
    • Inequality, Class Tensions, and Economic Weakness --
    • Immigration and Cultural and Economic Assimilation --
    • Guns, Policing, Crime, and Drugs --
    • The Israel/Hamas (and now wider) War --
    • Authoritarian Cases --
  • Featured Articles --
  • Massively Parallel Practitioner Interviews -- BI talks with some of the people who have been actively working to limit hyperpolarization about their activities, struggles, and successes.