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Conflict Strategists
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Complexifiers

BI Article
Complex Adaptive Systems
Societal-level conflicts are "complex adaptive systems" similar, in many ways, to ecosystems and the human body.

BI Article
Developing a Systems/Complexity Paradigm
Introduction to key literature including Lederach, Dugan, Boulding, Coleman, Ricigliano, McDonald/Diamond and others.

BI Article
Maire Dugan's "Nested Theory of Conflict"
If you intervene at the wrong level, your effectiveness is greatly reduced--understanding conflict levels is essential for good outcomes.

BI Article
John Paul Lederach's "Big Picture of Conflict Transformation"
Another of Lederach's seminal systems ideas. This wasn't identified as systems thinking at the time, yet was a stellar example of such.

BI Article
John Paul Lederach's Peacebuilding Pyramid
Although it wasn't thought of as "systems thinking" at the time, Lederach's pyramid was an early utilization of systems concepts.

BI Article
William Ury's Third Side
While Ury's Getting to Yes was very linear in its approach, his later book The Third Side illustrates a much more systemic/complex approach.

BI Article
Peter Coleman's "Five Percent" -- Part 1
One of the most important concepts in Coleman's book The Five Percent--one of the first books to look explicitly at complexity science and conflict.

BI Article
Peter Coleman's Five Percent -- Part 2
Coleman advises 1) complicate to simplify, 2) build up and tear down and 3) change to stabilize intractable conflict systems.

BI Article
Robert Ricigliano: Making Peace Last
SAT= Structures, Attitudes, and Transactions; PAL = Planning, Acting, Learning. This is another new systems approach to peacebuilding.

BI Article
Louise Diamond & John McDonald's Multi-Track Diplomacy
These nine tracks together create a synergy that constitutes another early "systems approach to peace."

BI Article
Jay Rothman and Daniela Cohen on the Aria Group School Intervention in Yellow Springs, Ohio
Highly polarized conflicts are typically systems problems, and they need system-based solutions to be successfully addressed. Here's an example where that was done very well.

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Behavioral Thinkers
Behavioral Thinkers focus on the ways people tend to behave in conflict situations, and help us understand why conflicts escalate (and can be de-escalated) the way they do and can.

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Psychological Thinkers
Psychological Thinkers focus on finding better ways of adapting democracy to the realities of human neuropsychology by applying the science about how people think and make decisions to democratic processes.

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Communication Thinkers
Communication Thinkers look for ways to strengthen democracy by correcting distortions in the flow of information and preventing and/or exposing destructive , hateful, or misleading communication (keeping in mind that "hateful and misleading doesn't simply mean something one side disagrees with).

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Social Thinkers
Social Thinkers look for better ways of understanding and managing tensions and synergies between ideologically, racially, and socially diverse elements of society.

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Political and Democracy Thinkers
Political and Democracy Thinkers nurture the democratic idea and try to figure out how to better adapt it to continually changing realities.

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Economic Thinkers
Economic Thinkers help us cultivate market dynamics that promote the general welfare, while limiting those that foster inequities and inefficiencies. 

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Technological Thinkers
Technology Thinkers help us understand the complex relationship between the rapid and accelerating technological change and human prosperity, social equity, and human quality of life. 

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System Thinkers
System Thinkers help us understand the complexity of the social, political, and economic system and  figure out how to meet challenges at the full scale and complexity that is needed to have systemic impact.

Related Folders
Pursue a Complexity-Oriented Approach
It is not enough to abandon simplistic, us-vs-them thinking. We need to develop and embrace realistic strategies for working at the daunting scale and complexity of modern society.

Related Folders
The Additional (and Even Bigger) Challenge of Societal Complexity
It isn't just scale, the intractability of society-wide conflict is also attributable to the complexities of human psychology, social interactions, high-tech communication systems, modern economies, environmental constraints, and other factors.

Colleague Activities
CSU Center for Public Deliberation
Our aim is to improve the way our community is able to talk through complex issues so that we can arrive at better decisions. CPD provides the space, good information, and skilled facilitation to facilitate such collaborative decision making.

Colleague Activities
Political Polarization: Map the System
By mapping the complex web of political polarization in the United States. The authors of this report hope to identify levers for change.

News and Opinion
Five Strategies to Support U.S. Democracy
A really first-rate article that, from a different perspective and in a different way, is trying to do what Beyond Intractability is trying to do with our Hyper- Polarization Discussion.

miscoded older colleagues
The Sustainable Peace Project of AC4: The Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity at Columbia University
Introducing the many resources on complexity, conflict, and peace from the Sustainable Peace Project of AC4, Columbia University