Ideas for Addressing Scale and Complexity to Build Upon

4. The Massively Parallel Strategy for Dealing with Scale and Complexity

The most important thing to keep in mind when addressing large scale and complex conflicts is that the response will almost undoubtably need to be large scale and complex. The simple approaches that work with interpersonal conflict (such as negotiation, mediation, and arbitration of a limited number of issues with a small number of people) seldom work in these kinds of conflicts. They almost always need to be supplemented, at least, with additional processes to bring along the grassroots disputants, for instance, after the leadership has negotiated an end to hostilities. That is the difference between peacemaking (which generally refers to the negotiation of peace agreements) and peacebuilding, which is a society-wide effort to remedy the harms done by the conflict, improve relationships, and get the disputants closer to stable, prosperous society(ies).

Although most conflict resolution practice and literature still focuses on small-scale practices, an increasing number of practitioners and theorists are looking at these society-wide conflicts "at scale." For example, Louise Diamond and John McDonald developed the notion of "multi-track diplomacy," going beyond the two tracks that most peacebuilders talk about to ten tracks, all of which are necessary to bring about long-term peace. Similarly, Bill Ury developed the notion of ten "third side roles" in his book The Third Side. Ever the optimist, he has often asserted that if all ten roles were brought to bear on even the most difficult conflicts simultaneously, peace (or at least significant movement in that direction) could likely be obtained.

Other scholars and practitioners have contributed rubrics for addressing large-scale complex conflicts in large scale ways. One is John Paul Lederach who long ago suggested a three-tiered triangle of actors and approaches to peacebuilding with Level One being top-level leadership, who focus on high-level negotiations; Level Two being middle-range leadership (respected leaders in particular societal sectors: religious leaders, academics, humanitarian leaders, etc.) who engage activities such as problem-solving workshops, conflict resolution training, peace commissions, and insider-partial teams, and finally Level Three, grassroots leaders (local leaders of indigenous groups, community leaders, local health officials, and refugee camp leaders) who engage in local peace commissions, grassroots training, predjudice reduction, psychosocial work and trauma healing work, among other activities. (Building Peace, p. 39) While Lederach agrees with Ury, Diamond, and McDonald that all of these activities are necessary to obtain peace, he stressed the outsized importance of the Level two, mid-range leaders, as they have connections to both the top and the bottom. So, in addition to working horizontally, with equivalent leaders on the other side, they can also work vertically, trying to bring grassroots concerns up to the top-level leaders, and proposals from the top-level leaders down to the grassroots so they aren't blindsided when a peace agreement is proposed.

Another approach of note is Robert Ricigliano's SAT model for peacebuilding in large-scale complex conflict situations. S stands for Structure, A for Attitudes, and T for transactions. Structural elements are systems of institutions that are put in place to meet basic human needs. They include governance structures, organizational structures, business structures, social structures, the way that people are linked together according to rules and laws, and policies that determine, in part ,what citizens do and what can and cannot be done. Complex conflicts almost always involve disputes over various aspects of such structural elements, and often structural changes are necessary to bring about conflict resolution.

Attitudes are norms, beliefs, values,and relationships. They influence what people think, what they believe, and how they interact with each other. As we have pointed out in numerous other places, in intractable conflicts, people tend to have very simple us-verus-them narratives that polarize their beliefs and values, and gravely harm (or even completely destroy) their relationships with "the other." For that reason, much peacebuilding work must address these overly simple narratives and toxic polarization that keeps people fighting against each other, even after structural corrections have been made..

Lastly transactional elements are the ways people interact with each other. They can involve the exchange of threats — or even coercive actions implementing those threats, or they can involve competition, where people approach their problems as zero-sum situations in which a win for them is a loss for us, so we cannot allow them to win, to cooperation in which people understand that they can come up with win-win solutions that meet the interests and needs of both sides at once. Such approaches can result from effective conflict resolution, collaboration, and relationship-building processes and skills that allow people to alter their adversarial attiltudes and develop transactional, attitudinal, and structural solutions to the various aspects of their conflict.