BI History and Content

History and What is Here

Conflict Essays

BI started out being a set of "essays" written by over 300 scholars and practitioners about the several hundred topics that our original planning team felt were the key ideas about the nature of intractable conflicts, what made them so difficult, and what could be done to address them effectively. Most of the essays were written in the early 2000s, and were considered, at the time, to be the best-available ideas and strategies for understanding how these kinds of conflicts develop, and what can be done to address them most constructively.  The editors of BI (Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess) have, over the last few years, been going through the essays and updating them as needed, as many are now over 20 years old.  Some are showing their age pretty badly, but many really are still pretty up to date.  For better or worse, not all that much has changed when it comes to understanding the nature of these conflicts, or how to change them in constructive ways. 

Case Studies, Book Summaries, Interviews and Other Knowledge Base Materials

Over time, we added to BI a set of case studies, practitioner reflections, and peacebuilder profiles that showed how these ideas played out in the "real world." We also recruited graduate students to write a set of book and article summaries (written for people like a colleague in Uzbekistan who couldn't get the original books or articles), but who was able to read everything we posted on the web. We also recruited a then recent George Mason graduate, Julian Portilla, to conduct audio interviews with the scholars and practitioners who helped us develop BI, many of whom were leaders in the field at the time). Julian asked these leaders of the field to talk about their most important discoveries and insights regarding intractable conflict—things they thought would be most useful for other people to know.  These interviews are available in both audio and text form, and have been supplemented over the last few years with new video interviews with some of the leading practitioners of today.  We also added a number of teaching materials, including exercises and simulations.

Moving Beyond Intractability

In 2017, we started developing a new project and website, which we named  ""Moving Beyond Intractability (MBI)" because this project was built on top of the long-standing Beyond Intractability Knowledge Base with the goal of moving beyond the limits of the knowledge contained therein, and helping as many people as possible "move beyond" intractability in the conflicts they were involved in and cared deeply about.  Rather than writing essays, most of the MBI materials are videos with transcripts—a technology that wasn't available when we created BI, but which allowed us (we hoped) to reach an audience who, from what we read, was getting less inclined to read. And while some of these videos covered "basic conflict resolution material," more were on what we considered to be "frontier of the field issues" such as dealing effectively with scale and complexity, and addressing what we then called "authoritarian populism," which has now morphed into our current focus on "bad-faith actors." We put all of this together into what we called the "Conflict Frontiers Seminar" and put the more "traditional conflict resolution materials" into something we called the "Conflict Fundamentals Seminar." 

Constructive Conflict Initiative

In 2019, we started a project we called CCI, the Constructive Conflict Initiative. The purpose of that initiative was to get more people (both with in the conflict and peacebuilding fields and without) to understand the extent to which destructive handling of intractable conflict was threatening our very future, and to begin working to address the many underlying problems before it was too late. We had originally planned a series of conferences to jump start the initiative, but then COVID hit, and conferences were shut down.  We ended up spending a couple of years just strengthening the knowledge base and MBI, and we began to focus increasingly on the problem of hyper-polarization, because that seemed to be both a cause and an effect of so much of the difficulty we were facing with politics, governance, and decision making in the United States (where Beyond Intractability is based). But the problem of hyper-polarization is much broader than a U.S. problem, so we weren't abandoning our international readers, as we did that.  We also began to expand on the notion of "massively parallel peacebuilding," which is a way of saying that it going to take a massive effort by many people, all working simultaneously and loosely toward the same goals, to transform our many hyper-polarized conflicts into something more constructive.  

Hyper-polarization Discussion and BI Newsletter

This led to Guy and Heidi Burgess working with Sanda Kaufman to write and publish a feature article in the Conflict Resolution Quarterly in 2022 about hyper-polarization and massively parallel peacebuilding. That article was followed by an accompanying discussion that we posted on BI where we hoped to discuss many of the controversial issues raised in the article with colleagues.  That discussion has now been transformed into a Substack Newsletter, through which we have continued to engage with many of our colleagues on a broader array of topics such as hyper-polarization, threats to democracy, and international threats such the war in Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East.  For people who want to follow what is new on BI, subscribing to the Substack Newsletter is the best way to do that (it is free!)

Constructive Conflict Guide

The Constructive Conflict Guide is the newest part of BI. This Guide is built from existing BI content, which is re-ordered to focus on particular topics, rather than types of resource or project from which it came (Fundamentals, Frontiers, etc). The Guide is particularly focused on understanding the factors that cause conflicts to become intractable and what can be done to avoid or reverse those factors once they occur.  As is the case of much of our newer material, it is particularly focused on hyper-polarization and threats to democracy, both in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.