The Complex Factors That Make Intractable Conflict So Difficult

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

In Brief

This page presents a quick overview of the many factors that make intractable conflict so difficult. Some factors are what we call the "core issues," for instance unmet human needs (particularly identity and security), moral issues, very high stakes distributional issues, status issues, and power issues, all of which tend to be non-negotiable.

In addition to such core issues, intractable conflicts are usually complicated by what we call conflict "overlay" factors. These are problems, such as conflicting visions or frames, communication failures, factual disputes, procedural disputes, escalation, and hyper-polarization that make the conflict much more difficult, and often, completely obscure the core issue.

Societal level intractable conflicts also tend to be very complex and the sheer scale of the number of people, organizations, and issues involved adds to the difficulty of resolution.

And lastly a large number of "bad-faith actors" are working to exacerbate conflicts for their own gain, so figuring out how to block those destructive efforts is also necessary.

This could be a very long essay, as there are myriad factors that make intractable conflicts so difficult. But we will just introduce them here, and flesh them out in later essays. The first factor is that they usually involve one or more deep-rooted, non-negotiable "core" issues. These include, for example, unmet human needs (particularly identity and security), moral issues, very high stakes distributional issues, status issues, and power issues. People don't negotiate their identity — it is what it is, and they want it respected and treated fairly. They don't give up security — they fight until they have it. They don't compromise on their fundamental values or morals. And so on.

In addition to non-negotiable core issues, intractable conflicts are usually complicated by what we call conflict "overlay" problems. These are problems, such as conflicting visions or frames, communication failures, factual disputes, procedural disputes, and escalation that make the conflict much more difficult, and often, completely obscure the core issue. One of the most common overlay problems that is making us unable to transform political polarization, for example, is us-versus-them and win-lose framing, which causes us to paint very complex conflicts in simple black and white terms: my problems are all "their fault," and if they win, I lose. So my goal is to get rid of them, or force them to lose. It doesn't even matter what the issue is; the goal becomes to beat or even destroy the other side. We will flesh out each of these core and overlay factors in subsequent essays.

Two additional things that make the societal level intractable conflicts so difficult are their enormous scale and complexity. Conflict resolution strategies that work in interpersonal disputes do not easily "scale up" to work at the level of communities, let alone whole societies or international conflicts. And scale leads to immense complexity, which not only means that conflicts are difficult to understand, but they are constantly changing with causes and effects interacting to make the conflict trajectory very difficult to control or even predict. This we will also be discussing in much more depth in the "Scale and Complexity Overview" essays, and then subsidiary essays after that.

The last factor that makes intractable societal level conflicts so difficult is bad-faith actors who try to increase conflict for their own "divide-and-conquer" strategy for gaining power, profit, or both. In addition to using good-faith strategies to overcome the overlay factors and constructively address the core conflict elements, good faith actors also need to figure out how to block the efforts of and de-legitimize bad-faith actors who are working to undo or prevent de-escalation, depolarization, conflict resolution, and other constructive problem-solving processes