The Massively Parallel Strategy for Dealing with Scale and Complexity

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

Since society-wide intractable conflicts are almost always very large scale and highly complex, controlling them is something that has to be done on a society-wide level. Small-scale efforts that create islands of peace amid a vast acrimonious sea of conflict might be value as "pilot projects" or "role models" that might catch on and be replicated widely. But they, alone, are not enough to solve societal-level problems. Somehow these small-scale efforts have to be "scaled up" in ways that enable them to deliver what Robert Ricigliano calls "peace writ large."

About four years ago, we (Guy and Heidi) Burgess coined the term "massively parallel peacebuilding," which we later extended to "massively parallel problem solving" and "massively parallel democracy building." This isn't a new idea; it is simply a new name for a large number of efforts that are already happening. The fundamental idea is that successful peacebuilding and democracy building involves 1000s or even tens of 1000s of people and organizations working in different places, in different roles, addressing different issues or problems. Since societies are complex, not complicated systems, there is no top-down leader or organizer. Rather the efforts are coordinated by a process similar to Adam Smith's idea of "the invisible hand." People and organizations see things that need to be done, and they make efforts to do those things — to be helpful or earn money (or both) over the short term, and also in the hopes of contributing to a broader conflict or political transformation over the long term. When all the efforts are put together, ideally, the conflict will be improved (if not completely resolved), or the democracy will be strengthened.

We started out with about thirty peacebuilding roles, but have recently increased the number to fifty two. Some are more needed in some situations, others in others. But usually, most are needed in some form to really successfully transform deep-rooted, highly polarized conflicts at the societal level. The good news is that people and organizations are already fulfilling most of these roles, so MPP and MPDB are already underway. What is needed is for these efforts to become much more visible so that people gain hope, and ideally, join one or more of these efforts to grow the market share that MPP strategists and actors have in comparison to the bad-faith strategists and actors who are trying to ferment more conflict and/or tear democracy apart. Much more information about MPP and MPDB is available in the links below.