By
Heidi Burgess
Guy M. Burgess

March, 2021

Full Transcript:

Slide 1:  Hi! This is Heidi Burgess.  Today I want to talk about large scale, (which is usually top-down) reconciliation. Let’s start by talking about the meaning of the title.

Slide 2:  When I talk about “large scale reconciliation” I mean reconciling entire societies, or at least large parts of society.  This slide, that Guy made years ago, shows how daunting this problem is.  He tell the story of being on a panel with a prominent physicist who said that “one of the privileges of being a scientist, is understanding orders of magnitude (by which he meant orders of ten).  We don’t really have a good gut-level understanding of this.  He went on to explain that the difference between a small “blockbuster” bomb and the Hiroshima atomic bomb was 4 orders of magnitude.  That’s the same difference between the speed of a person who is walking, and the space shuttle! That’s an enormous difference, right?

Slide 3:  Well, the difference between reconciling two people (here shown sitting with a mediator around a table) is five orders of magnitude smaller than a small city. It’s six orders of magnitude smaller than a large (3 million person) city. It’s seven orders of magnitude smaller than a medium sized country, and eight orders of magnitude smaller than a large country such as the United States! Is it any wonder that the strategies that we use to reconcile those two people sitting at the table are not enough to deal with 5,6,7, or 8 more orders of magnitude?  Just doing more dialogues isn’t going to work!  We need to do qualitatively different things!

Slide 4:  Why is that so?  Why can’t we just do more of the same?  Consider Israel and Palestine.  The current population of Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank) is a little over 5 million.  The population of Israel is a little over 9 million (including Jews, Muslims, and Christians).  So, together that’s 14 million.  Typically about 10-20 people take place in a dialogue, though 20 is pretty large.  But let’s assume all dialogues are done with 20 people.  14 million divided by 20 equals 700,000 dialogues! Obviously, that’s not going to happen.

Slide 5:  But, the assumption is commonly made that new attitudes about “the other” developed during dialogues will diffuse. The 20 people involved will go home and share the stories of their experiences with the family and friends. Who will then share their experiences with family and friends? Does this really happen? 

Slide 6:  After considerable searching I could find no literature that documented such diffusion.  Indeed, there is not very much literature evaluating dialogues at all, but the two most useful, which I should have assigned for Unit 4, but didn’t have room, were meta-analyses of primary evaluations of dialogues done from 1997-2006 the article shown on the left by Dessel and Rogge and 2006-2017 on the right by Frantell, Miles, and Ruwe.

Almost all of the outcomes documented in these articles were personal outcomes: changes in knowledge about “the other,” and about societal conditions (such as systemic racism, power differences, etc.)  changes in attitudes towards “the other,” and changes in personal behaviors (more emotionally open, better listeners, improved conflict resolution skills, etc.). There was only passing mention in a couple of the original studies about planning for actions after the dialogue and no indication whether or not those actions happened.

Slide 7:  After considerable searching I could find no literature that documented such diffusion.  Indeed, there is not very much literature evaluating dialogues at all, but the two most useful, which I should have assigned for Unit 4, but didn’t have room, were meta-analyses of primary evaluations of dialogues done from 1997-2006 the article shown on the left by Dessel and Rogge and 2006-2017 on the right by Frantell, Miles, and Ruwe.

Almost all of the outcomes documented in these articles were personal outcomes: changes in knowledge about “the other,” and about societal conditions (such as systemic racism, power differences, etc.)  changes in attitudes towards “the other,” and changes in personal behaviors (more emotionally open, better listeners, improved conflict resolution skills, etc.). There was only passing mention in a couple of the original studies about planning for actions after the dialogue and no indication whether or not those actions happened.

Slide 8:  The other common small group approach to reconciliation is what has been called “interactive problem solving,” which takes place in “problem solving workshops.”  This article by Herb Kelman reviews his own and other colleagues’ 40 years of work, using problem solving workshops, in Israel/Palestine.

Problem solving workshops differ from dialogues because they have the notion of scale-up (societal applicability) built into the structure.  They are what Kelman calls “micro-processes” in that they only involve a few (again 10-20 people) but they are designed (as the abstract says) “to produce changes in the macro-processes of conflict resolution through the joint development of new ideas and insights that can be fed into the political cultures of the two societies.” So the original intention is to transfer the outcomes of the small group process into the larger society. How is that done?

According to Kelman, the micro-process provides inputs into the macro-process by creating a setting in which participants (who are typically unofficial representatives of the disputing sides)  are free to come up with what might be considered “crazy ideas” if they were proposed by an official or public figure.  But they can be proposed and considered by unofficial representatives in private (which these processes always are).  Then, if the workshop is well designed, the best of these ideas—ones that were agreed to and honed by all the participants from all sides of the conflict) can be fed “upwards” to officials.  This is made easier if some of the unofficial representatives have personal relationships with officials—that is often one of the attributes workshop designers are looking for in participants.

Slide 9:  In another article, Kelman describes the micro to macro logic of the problem solving workshop more specifically .  The workshops steps constitute what he refers to as “links” in a chain, the success of each determines the potential macro impact of the workshop.  These steps are:

(1)  workshop participants are selected who are both prepared to engage in the process and in positions to influence political thinking within their own societies;

(2) the participants interact with each other according to the ground rules and agenda that govern workshops;

(3) over the course of the workshop, the nature of the interaction changes in the direction of an analytical, non-adversarial, problem-solving discourse;

(4) as a result of their interaction in a workshop or series of workshops, participants’ attitudes, mutual images, ideas for resolving the conflict, and expectations for the future change;

(5) these changes in attitude produce changes in participants’ political behavior once they return home;

(6) the participants’ political actions and statements have an impact on the political behavior of other members of the political elites in their respective societies;

(7) these changes, in turn, help to produce changes in the political atmosphere of the two societies, making it more conducive to a negotiated agreement;

(8) the changed atmosphere has an impact on the thinking and actions of policy makers; and

(9) these, in turn,  lead to a durable high-quality negotiated [society-wide]  agreement.

Slide 10:  Kelman admits in the article I was just quoting from that evaluation of such workshops’ impacts is very difficult because, he says “The most relevant criterion for evaluating the effectiveness of interactive problem solving is its contribution to changes in the political cultures of the parties that would make them more receptive to negotiation.” But these changes happen very slowly and in a wide variety of settings, making it both difficult to measure and to tie cause to affect.  Further, there are both practical and ethical reasons why the standard experimental model of evaluation is inappropriate (as well as impossible) to use for this kind of process.

Kelman suggests evaluating each link in the chain (just discussed) as an alternative to evaluating the full process, and says such efforts were beginning when he wrote this article 13 years ago.  I have not, unfortunately, been able to find reports of any of those studies—and would appreciate hearing from viewers if you know of any!

So I have to leave this discussion by saying that in theory this seems like a promising method.  But whether it really brings about lasting societal level change is still an open question.

References:

Slide 4: Population sources: Israel: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/population-of-israel-palestine-1553... Bank and Gaza: https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/palestine-population

Slide 6: Adrienne Dessel and Mary Rogge " Evaluation of Intergroup Dialogue: A review of the Empirical Literature" Conflict Resolution Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, Winter 2008. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/crq.230  and Keri A. Frantell, Joseph R. Miles and Anne M. Ruwe "Intergroup Dialogue: A Review of Rcent Empirical Research and Its Implications for Research and Practice. Small Group Research. Vol. 50, Issue 5. pp. 654-695. May 7, 2019. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1046496419835923

Slides 8 and 9: Herbert C. Kelman "Interactive Problem Solving: Changing Political Culture in the Pursuit of Conflict Resolution. Peace and Conflict 16: 389-413. 2010.

Slides 10:  Herbert C. Kelman "Evaluating the Contributions of Interactive Problem Solving:to the Resolution of Ethnonational Conflicts. Peace and Conflict 14:29-60. 2008.

Photo Credits:

Slides 2 and 3: Bomb: https://pixabay.com/photos/atomic-bomb-nuclear-weapons-2621291/. Free for commercial use. No attributions needed. .Walkers: https://unsplash.com/photos/gURKEoGsz7k Open source.   Space Shuttle: https://images.app.goo.gl/WWDgsnqj87bEWbMm9. public domain.

Slide 3:Triad:  Source: https://thenounproject.com/term/mediation/160374/; by Gilbert Bages from the Noun Project; Permission: Attribution 3.0 United States (CC BY 3.0 US)

Slide 4: Map: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Israel_(-non-integral_Palestinian_territories),_administrative_divisions_-_Nmbrs_-_colored.svg. Open source.

Slides 5 and 7: circle of people: Picture https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=people+sitting+in+a+circle&i=158473... By Gan Khoon Lay. The Noun Project. CC license. Rows of people Microsoft icons. 

Slide 10: Picture: https://pixabay.com/photos/chain-metal-iron-links-of-the-chain-722283/. Open source.