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.
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Harnessing the power of markets: a strategy for scaling up efforts to deal with complex, intractable conflict.
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Google traffic and other traffic control activities can teach us a lot about dealing with conflict.
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We need to stop thinking in terms of mediation triads, and scale up conflict work to societal levels.
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Complexity-oriented approaches to conflict are more like medicine and less like engineering.
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How can peacebuilders use a knowledge of neuroscience to do their jobs better? We are just beginning to learn.
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Neuroscience can explain why so many peacebuilding interventions don't work as hoped--and how to do better.
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Those who seek power-over others are dealing better with social and psychological complexity. This needs to change!
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We need to think about social problems as complex adaptive systems requiring massively parallel problem-solving.
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We need to resist "divide and conqueror's" efforts to control society by exacerbating left/right tensions.
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An explanation of why this may be our best/last chance to make democracy work (and avoid autocracy and anocracy).
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Speeding society's ability to rapidly adapt to changing conditions should be a key goal of the conflict field.
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An exploration of how understanding ecodynamics and evolution can help us deal with complex conflict.
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Simple models won't work! We must develop conflict intervention models for higher-level complex systems.
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Intractable conflicts are complex adaptive systems, so they need complex, adaptive responses.
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Understanding the difference between complicated and complex systems is key to understanding that no one is in charge in intractable conflicts.
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Complex conflicts require complex responses: the SAT and PAL models are linked approaches for doing just that.
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Different from linear approaches, Coleman says intractable conflicts can still be tamed by 3 steps.
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Peter Coleman says intractable conflicts are formed by powerful "attractors" or seemingly inescapable traps.
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Everyone can play at least one of Ury's 10 "Third Side" roles--even the disputants themselves.
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Diplomats are not just officials, but include 9 different types of people--all contributing towards peacebuilding.
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Lederach's circle of conflict transformation shows how to design change processes that work.
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Leaders at three levels of society all contribute to peace, but those at the middle-level are often the most effective.
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Conflicts exist in many levels at once - seeing these helps you see the entire conflict system.
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An introductory look at a developing new paradigm for peacebuilding: using systems thinking and complexity analysis
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Intractable conflicts are "wicked problems" that need an entirely new paradigm to deal with, says Chip Hauss.
