Us-vs-Them Framing, Enemy Images, and Into-the-Sea Framing

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

All people try to simplify complex stories into something they can more easily understand and categorize—some things are "good," others are "bad." When there is a question of who is right and who is wrong, or who is good and who is bad, most people will automatically put themselves and people like them on the "good side," while they will put people who are different from them (and especially those who are opposed to things they want or believe) on the "bad" side.

These very different world views then drive the sense that the other side in a conflict is all sorts of bad things: "selfish," "self-serving," "stupid," "duplicitous," "hateful," or even "evil." We tend to assume that it is their choices and their behavior that is causing our own problems, not our own choices and our own behavior. Not only is that usually false (on both sides), but such over-simplification is problematic for other reasons.

First, it tends to spiral. If we blame "them" for everything that goes wrong, they will likewise respond by blaming "us." If we lash out about that, they will lash back—sometimes escalating the rhetoric, perhaps even adding in a negative behavior. These tit-for-tat exchanges can continue, sometimes escalating to full-blown violence, even war.

A long time ago Former President of the Palestinian National Authority, Yasser Arafat was said to have claimed that his goal was to drive Israelis "into the sea." (The chant "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free" is saying, in essence the same thing.) Guy extrapolated from that idea to coin the term "into-the-sea framing" which defines a conflict as one in which the other side has to be entirely eliminated in some way. It might be by driving them away, it might be by walling them off, it might be by killing them. But into-the-sea framing leaves no room for compromise, no room for finding ways to live together. It seeks to eliminate the other.

Pretty obviously, this kind of framing is extremely dangerous, because people on the other side will likely not agree to be eliminated. Rather, in response, they even might try to eliminate the perpetrators. So peacebuilders, in our view, must take a strong stance against into-the-sea framing and work to get disputants to redefine their conflict in less adversarial, zero-sum terms.