Beyond Intractability
Hyper-Polarization Blog
Includes BI/CRQ Discussion
Selected Recent Posts
You can subscribe to Selected Posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Or, if you prefer, you can subscribe to the more extensive series of All Posts, also on
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
In addition, lists of recent posts are available separately for each BI Section:
Things You Can Do To Help | Conflict Frontiers | Conflict Fundamentals
Beyond Intractability in Context | Colleague Activities
- Reprise: Planning a Constructive Confrontation Strategy: Understanding the Relationship between Negotiation and Power -- Constructive confrontation calls for resolving most disputes through interest-based negotiation; only if that fails should one try a contest of rights, reserving nonviolent power contests as a very last resort.
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of September 8, 2024 -- Readings on Israel, the U.S. political scene, and other intractable conflicts of note.
- Reprise: Constructive Confrontation: Applying Conflict Insights from a 1st Party (Not 3rd Party) Perspective -- A reprise of an old newsletter on constructive ways of engaging in conflict that is less likely to create backlash and more likely to achieve one's goals than typical adversarial approaches are likely to do.
- Guy and Heidi Burgess Talk with David Eisner about Threats to Democracy and How to Address Them -- The Burgesses talked with David Eisner about what he thinks the threats to democracy are, and how (and when) we might respond to them. We agreed, citizen involvement in governance is key.
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of September 1, 2024 -- More in our regular set of links from readers, about colleague's activities, and from outside news and opinion sources.
- Updating Our Impartiality Discussions - Part 1 -- The Burgesses update their 2-year old discussion of impartiality, adding to it Martin Carcasson's notion of "principled impartiality" which adds in quality information and "small-d" democracy.
- Updating Our Impartiality Discussions - Part 2 -- In part 2 of this 2-part series, we apply Martin Carcasson's notion of "principled impartiality" to the Israel/Gaza/Hezbollah/Iran war, and to the political conflict in the United States.
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of August 18, 2024 -- Reader suggested links, and the Burgesses selections of articles about colleague's activities and other news and opinion articles of interest.
- A Potpourri Newsletter -- Short pieces about new books, and new ideas about the challenges we currently face and ways beyond them from John Paul Lederach, Lou Kriesberg, Kenneth Boulding, Deborah Laufer, and Guy and Heidi Burgess.
- Susan Carpenter and Heidi Burgess Reflect on Susan's 40+ Years' Experience Doing Consensus -- Susan Carpenter has been working in the field of collaborative problem solving for over 40 years. She talked about the changes she's seen over those years, and the time-tested approaches she has come to rely on for success.
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of August 11, 2024 -- Our weekly collection of links from colleagues and outside news/opinion sources on the many predicaments we are now facing around the world. It's pretty daunting!
- Walt Roberts and Caleb Christian Talk about the Inter-Movement Impact Project -- Caleb Christen and Walt Roberts talk about the Inter-Movement Impact Project -- another example of massively parallel problem solving and democracy building "in the real world."
- Massively Parallel Partisanship Revisited -- Massively parallel social movements can strengthen democracy or tear it apart, and the dividers are currently much more visible (and successful) than the uniters. With effort, though, that can change!
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of August 4, 2024 -- Reader-suggested links, colleague activities, and news and opinion articles that caught our attention this week.
- Thinking about What Democracy's Winners and Losers Owe One Another -- As we think about how to heal US democracy following the upcoming, and undoubtedly divisive election, we propose asking ourselves whether we are willing to treat the other side as we would like to be treated.
- Daniel Stid: A Big Question I Have Is... -- Hope, vision, and place-based civic heath are key elements to our ability to navigate the turbulent times that have left so many of us in fear and despair.
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of July 14, 2024 -- Our regular reader-suggested links, colleague activities, news and opinion links and a new "highlighted links" for people who want some really good reads quickly.
- Mark Gerzon and Mesa Sebree -- Towards a Polycrisis Consciousness - Part 2 -- To address the polycrisis, it is necessary to "focus on part of the polycrisis but with an awareness of the whole." Among Gerzon and Sebree's several insightful suggestions: forget optimism and pessimism, focusing instead on "possibility."
- Mark Gerzon and Mesa Sebree -- Towards a Polycrisis Consciousness - Part 1 -- Gerzon and Sebree explain what the "polycrisis" is, and ten of the individual crises that interact to create it. In part 2, they will explain what can be done to constructively address this unprecedented challenge to human well being, even survival.
- More responses to Friends and Family + Democracy Subversion from Rosa Zubizarreta -- Rosa Zubizarreta's thoughts about better ways to talk across differences without destroying relationships, and also how we can stop a repeat of World War II before it is too late.
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of July 7, 2024 -- Reader suggested links, colleague activities, and our renamed "News and Opinion Section" that shared insightful views of the issues of the day from outside the conflict resolution & peacebuilding fields.
- Reflections on the 4th of July (U.S. Independence Day) -- Can the constitution brings us back together, as it was designed to do, or will it push us further apart? Should we, in the United States, be proud or ashamed this Independence Day -- and how can we build pride on the ashes of shame?
- Democracy Lighthouse + More on Communicating with Friends and Family -- Sharing several new ideas that have come to us recently on controlling affective polarization and threats to democracy from the family level on up.
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of June 23, 2024 -- More useful and interesting reading from colleagues and others in allied fields.
- Democratic Subversion - Part 2 -- Part 2 of 2 newsletters looking at an old, but eerily accurate, description of political events in the United States over the last ten-twenty years, explaining why we are well on our way to a destroyed democracy and what we can do about it.
