The Intractable Conflict Threat: The Consequences of Runaway Escalation and Hyper-Polarization

The Intractable Conflict Challenge: the Most Serious Problem Facing Humanity (and a Great Opportunity)

Destructive Conflict is the Most Serious Threat to Our Common Future

It ruins personal lives, prevents us from solving common problems, and underlies dystopian trends toward authoritarianism, chaos, and large-scale violence.

Many people believe that climate change is the most serious threat now facing humanity. We assert that destructive intractable conflict is not only just as serious -- but it is the underlying problem that is preventing us from successfully addressing climate change, as we cannot stop arguing about whether it exists, if it is human caused, who is to blame, what should be done, and who should pay.  Similarly, our inability to constructively handle difficult conflict is preventing us from learning to successfully live in diverse communities and nations and it is preventing us from meeting the fundamental human needs of our fellow citizens (including not only physical needs, but also psycho-social needs such as the need for security and a secure identity). In the United States, it is preventing us from providing our citizens with good health care, good educations, and good jobs.  It is threatening our very sense of who we are and what kind of country we want to live in. These conflicts are also being exploited by unscrupulous political actors as part of a "divide and conquer" strategy that is taking us closer to plutocracy and authoritarianism, and quite possibly, large scale violence, as a significant number of people are saying, at least, that they think "Americans may have to resort to violence to get their own country back on track." 

This is not just an American problem, of course. It is being mirrored in Europe, where would-be authoritarians are capitalizing on widespread dissatisfaction with current governments. It is being seen in South East Asia where Modi, for example, is consolidating authoritarian rule in India, capitalizing on the long-intractable conflict there between Hindus and Muslims. It is being seen in Africa, and in Central and South America.

Badly handled conflict is threatening societies worldwide with some combination of three dystopian futures:

• Anocracy – Failed systems of governance that prevent societies from wisely and equitably addressing key social, economic, and environmental problems and leave their citizens worse off than the were before or hoped or expected to be.  This, then, is a positive-feedback (i.e. self-reinforcing) system where citizen malaise leads to greater allure of authoritarians who promise to "fix" all the ills of the current more democratic governments, or, as Donald Trump is promising in the United States, to implement the "revenge" these disenchanted citizens are wanting to take against the elite whom they think has treated them unfairly.
• Autocracy – The cynical exploitation of underlying social tensions by plutocratic and would-be authoritarian actors using divide-and-conquer strategies to increasingly dominate and exploit citizens politically and economically; dismantling democratic checks and balances, and rule of law to increasingly firmly entrench their power.  These efforts are being substantially aided by new technologies that allow for the massive distribution of disinformation, making it virtually impossible for citizens to find out what news is true and what is not, and enabling massive surveillance of citizens' behavior, inflicting severe penalties for any resistant behavior.
• War – In addition to "kinetic war" which is the traditional notion of war involving tanks, bombs, and guns, there is also getting to be the increasingly widespread use of "gray zone" or hybrid warfare which involves subtler, but frighteningly effective digital attacks that twist what people think is true, think they want, and what they "vote for." Both Russia and China (and probably others) have been doing this for a long time, undermining democracy in the west and weakening NATO and NATO members without using guns, bombs, or tanks (except in Ukraine, of course). And these strategies are being utilized domestically as well. As Ann Applebaum write on the June 2024 cover story of The Atlantic, "Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world."

These conflict problems also undermine the ability of democracies to pursue the not-yet-realized ideal of governance that truly is "of the people, by the people, and for the people."  After all, in successful democracies, conflict is the principal mechanism through which unwise and unjust policies are challenged (and unwise and unjust challenges are rejected). Unfortunately, democracy, at its best, is messy, difficult, and incomplete.  It involves making compromises that nobody likes (because they have to give some things to "the other side" that they would rather not give). But it is still the best way to provide the best life for the most people, and is very much worth fighting for and working to improve so it can withstand the attacks of bad-faith actors and improve the life outcomes for more people and groups.

At the individual level, intractable conflict is also very destructive.  It destroys families (through divorce or parent/child/sibling estrangement), it ruins friendships, work relationships (and hence, sometimes jobs). It causes people to make poor decisions, it causes extreme psychological distress that can be completely debilitating.  

Strangely, despite all these very real costs, few people and organizations are working to study or address what we call "the intractable conflict problem." Many chip away at the edges:  there are lots of divorce lawyers and mediators, and growing numbers of societal "bridge builders."  But we need to do much, much more to effectively address the full intractable conflict threat, both at the individual, or the societal level.

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