Frontiers Seminar Blog
Constructive Confrontation Initiative Spring 2018 Posts to Date
See Syllabus for additional background posts and planned, future posts (many of which are now accessible).
Other Blogs: MOOS Fundamentals | BI in Context | Colleague Activities
Posts ordered from most recent to earliest.
-
Though risky, escalation is riskier! Conciliatory gestures can turn escalation around.
-
If you collaborate with "your enemy" against escalation and "divide & conquerors"--you both can win!
-
Responding to hate with hate is like pouring gasoline on a fire...you are likely to get burned!
-
Hate, no matter how "justified" hurts us more than it helps us. Don't do it!
-
Social media is driving our conflicts--real HUMAN relationships can change that.
-
More ideas for spanning the left/right divide: the win-win pursuit of social equity, multi-multi-culturalism, and more.
-
How might the super-rich be persuaded to do the right thing? How might the cosmopolitan elite better earn the public's support and trust?
-
Find out about building a "conflict mirror" (so you can understand why you make others so mad) other constructive conflict strategies.
-
The first key to saving democracy is to understand how that differs from simply trying to advance partisan objectives.
-
A complexity-based approach to strengthening democracy and avoiding authoritarian populism
-
Today's most serious conflicts are, in large part, being engineered by those who seek power over the rest of the society.
-
Democracy depends on separating the authoritarian/plutocratic threat from left/right cultural and distributional conflicts.
-
The widely misunderstood complexity of "who gets what" distributional conflicts explains much of our inequality problem.
-
The evolutionary, neurobiological foundation of the cultural divide requires approaching it with mutual tolerance and respect.
-
Like the proverbial frog in hot water, democracies have been sliding toward authoritarianism with too few people recognizing the danger.
-
Find out what you can do to strengthen democracy while reducing the risk of authoritarianism.
-
How can populist revolts address the real failures of establishment elites without falling victim to authoritarian temptations?
-
Widespread, and overly simplistic, "us vs. them" ways of thinking about conflict underlies much of its destructiveness.
-
While there is no simple way to "resolve" intractable conflicts, a complexity-oriented approach can make them less destructive.
-
We need a new strategy tailored to intractable conflict's gigantic, tangled web of causes and consequences.
-
Nests, cycles, attractors, and paradigms -- new ways of thinking about conflict and its resolution.
-
More of the same isn't enough--we need new approaches to successfully address intractable conflicts.
-
Destructive dynamics associated with intractable conflict are as big a threat as climate change. Find out why!
-
Factual and procedural disputes, framing, miscommunication, and escalation are “overlay problems” that make intractable conflicts even harder to resolve.
-
Wonder why conflict mapping matters? This video shows how it can totally change your approach to a conflict.
