The Staggering Scale of Society-Wide Conflict

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

Intractable conflict can occur at any scale — between two people, or involving the entire world, as occurred during the two world wars. Although some of the material on Beyond Intractability is relevant to interpersonal conflict, most of our attention and writing is focused on societal level conflicts, such as identity conflicts between different racial, class, or political groups. Such conflicts impact interpersonal relations, but also play out across the society as a whole. While many factors contribute to their intractability, scale alone is one difficulty factor.

To understand why, it helps to have a gut-level understanding of orders of magnitude (factors of ten). The difference between a person walking at a slow stroll (1.7 miles or 2.7 km per hour) is four orders of magnitude slower than the speed at which the international space station buzzes around the earth (17,000 miles or 27,000 km per hour). The difference between what we call a "standard mediation triad," two parties and a mediator, is roughly seven orders of magnitude smaller than a moderately-sized international conflict, for instance the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which involves roughly 15,000,000 people (not counting the outsiders involved, such as the Iranians and their proxies such as Hezbollah). The population of the United States is 332,000,000. So that is eight orders of magnitude larger than the standard mediation triad. Is it any wonder that the conflict resolution strategies that work for two people and a mediator do not easily work for the hyper-polarized political conflict in the United States or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? Just by size alone, the difference is immense!

One of the big challenges to people trying to ameliorate conflict at the societal level is to figure out how to deal with this scale. Some conflict professionals have turned to mass media — either traditional media or social media to try to reach out to many people at once. Others have tried to reach wide audiences through opinion leaders, such as Governor Spencer Cox who started the National Governors Association Disagree Better Campaign. Articles in this section explain the challenge of scale more completely, and also explain the various ways people and organizations are trying to "scale up" their conflict resolution or democracy-building efforts to work "at scale."