Recent Beyond Intractability Posts

Including Hyper-Polarization Posts

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Posts by BI Section

Lists of recent posts are also available separately for each BI Section:
Hyper-Polarization Discussion Posts | Earlier Constructive Conflict Initiative Blog
Things You Can Do To Help | Conflict Frontiers | Conflict Fundamentals
Beyond Intractability in Context | Colleague Activities

 

  • The Way Los Angeles Is Trying to Solve Homelessness Is ‘Absolutely Insane’ -- A detailed account of how one well-funded and well-intentioned policy initiative is failing with valuable insights into the complex challenges that real-world problem-solving must meet. -- Oct 28
  • How to Save Democracy -- From The Atlantic, a report on a massive, crowd-sourced effort to find and then test mass audience-based strategies for diffusing our hyper-polarized politics -- Oct 28
  • Let’s Say Gay -- With respect to LBGTQ issues, a look at the complex way in which the language we use to describe social problems evolves and the way in which that language drives conflict and determines policies. -- Oct 27
  • Future Population Growth -- Eye-opening, often surprising, and extremely important charts showing where populations are exploding, stable, and contracting and by how much. -- Oct 27
  • The Two-Party System is Failing Us -- A discussion between Duncan Audrey and Benjamin Life discussing why the U.S.'s two-party system doesn't work, and what might be done about that. -- Oct 27
  • The Boys Feminism Left Behind -- Reflections on the way in which the women's movement disrupted relationship patterns that existed between men and women for 1000s of years and thoughts about how to build new and better relationships. -- Oct 26
  • How Stewart Made Tucker -- A surprising and quite perceptive explanation of the role that Jon Stewart played in bringing about today's more divisive media environment. -- Oct 26
  • The Horizons Project: Sharing a United Front -- Social change agents need to build fosterning a united front by a shared understanding of the threat, collaborating across difference, and forming dense networks. -- Oct 25
  • The Sources of Russian Misconduct -- From a defecting Russian diplomat, an explanation of how anenvironment in which dissent was not tolerated led to the tragedy in Ukraine (with important lessons for those suppressing dissent in the US). -- Oct 25
  • Julia Roig: Rethinking 'Polarization' as the Problem -- Polarization is good when it pushes us to change. It is toxic when it causes us to dehumanize and push away "the other." We need to sit with our conflict, explore it, and move through it together. -- Oct 24
  • If You Don't Know Where You Are Going, it Is Going to Be Hard to Get There -- Newsletter 59 -- An argument that an improved and strengthened liberal democracy offers the most promising basis for imagining future in which those on both the left and the right would like to live. -- Oct 24
  • Colin Rule -- Positive Reframing in Political Conversations: Avoiding the Race to the Bottom -- What outcome do we want to achieve? When we lash out in anger, do these behaviors help or hinder our efforts to achieve that outcome? Are they making the problem worse? -- Oct 23
  • Don't Buy the Mitt Romney Martyr Theory  -- An examination of how the Republican Party that nominated Mitt Romney came to embrace Donald Trump in the style of politics we now call Trumpism. -- Oct 21
  • Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Midterm Candidates Peddle Russian Propaganda  -- Disturbing news for those who thought that the United States was united in its opposition to the kind of brutal aggression on display in Ukraine. -- Oct 21
  • Ethelo.com Case Studies -- Case studies illustrating the many ways that Etholo has been applied to reach consensus solutions to tricky problems. -- Oct 21
  • This Is What Happens When Race Is Everything -- Reflections on the far-reaching implications of a political philosophy that sees racism as the sole factor that determines the course of society. -- Oct 20
  • Tactical Nukes: A Primer -- An only slightly reassuring exploration of what everyone ought to know about the tactical nuclear weapons that now threaten to take us to the first nuclear war since 1945. -- Oct 20
  • America Talks Conversation Guide -- A guide for participants in the National Week of Conversation; this can also be used by others wanting to have a productive conversation with people across differences. -- Oct 20
  • Duncan Autrey: It's Time to Upgrade Our Democracy -- Our current democratic system is inherently flawed because it relies on elected officials to represent people without an effective means of listening to them. We must fix that! -- Oct 19
  • Ken Cloke: Hyper-Polarization -- Interest-based processes that allow us to capture the positive aspects of polarization while reframing, minimizing, and transforming the destructive aspects is essential for positive change. -- Oct 19
  • We Are Suddenly Taking On China and Russia at the Same Time -- As it fights its internal battles over racial and cultural issues, the world is sliding toward the kind of major confrontation that could make United States' internal battle seem trivial. -- Oct 18
  • Responses to Our Crane Brinton Essay -- Conrad and Camus also pointed out what we called the Crane Brinton Effect--revolutions tend to lead only to an exchange of regimes with an even more brutal regime likely to replace preceding one. -- Oct 18
  • Kevin Clements et al: The Toda Peace Institute's Conversations on the Subversion of Democracies in the 21st Century -- Democracy is backsliding around the world, driven by polarization, attacks on democratic fundamentals by duly-elected "democratic" leaders, and clandestine, insidious incremental changes. -- Oct 18
  • While Alaska votes, ranked-choice voting is gaining steam -- From the president of FairVote, a report on efforts to help defuse hyper-polarization and promote collaborative democracy by encouraging the switch to Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). -- Oct 18
  • Disagreement Isn’t Bigotry -- A thoughtful look at the miracle of religious pluralism and tolerance that we take for granted and reflections on why we can't seem to apply this to the "culture war." -- Oct 18

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