Beyond Intractability
Hyper-Polarization Blog
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- Fighting Hyper-Polarization for Our Children and Grand Children -- This newsletter focuses on the importance of continuing our efforts to strengthen democracy, and considers one obstacle to doing that: being too sure of oneselves (the QED trap).
- Guy Burgess: The QED Trap -- The QED trap locks people into a win-lose struggle for power that eliminates any chance of learning, compromise, or collaboration.
- How Do We Get What We Want and Need? Through Polarization or Bridge-building, Reframing, and "Omni-Win" Approaches? -- Julia Roig, Lisa Schirch, Colin Rule and Duncan Autrey examine the meaning of, and the benefits and costs of polarization, and what could be done to limit the costs and improve our democracy.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- If You Don't Know Where You Are Going, It Is Going to Be Hard to Get There -- Elicitive approaches can help us visualize a democracy in which we all would want to live.
- Developing a Vision for a Society in Which We Would All Like to Live -- With this newsletter, we start imagining a less polarized future with lessons from South Africa from Ebrahim Rasool as well as observations from Neal Kohatsu, Ken Cloke, and Duncan Autrey.
- Duncan Autrey: We All Win, or We All Lose -- We all agree society is in grave trouble. We all have different notions of how to fix it. If we pool our knowledge and work together, we can create a better world for everyone.
- The Crane Brinton Effect — Why Revolutions Fail -- Amid calls for a political revolution to fight systemic oppression, a critical look at why revolutions fail with contributions from the Burgesses, Peter Adler, James Adams, William Donohue, and Mark Hamilton.
- On Oppression, Justice, Advocacy, Neutrality, and Peacebuilding -- Additional Perspectives -- More insight into the complex relationship between social justice advocacy and peacebuilding from Larry Susskind, Louis Kriesberg, Jay Rothman, Ken Cloke, Greg Bourne, Lisa Schirch, and Martin Carcasson.
- Summary of "A Framework for Understanding Polarizing Language" -- Polarizing language demonstrates features that are readily identifiable. Can such warnings can be heard and action taken to enable people to shift from violence to problem solving before it's too late?
- Summary of "The Case for Principled Impartiality in a Hyper-Partisan World" -- To abandon impartiality completely and simply join the fray as partisans will likely only further erode our political culture and exacerbate the problems of polarization, distrust, and misinformation.
- On Oppression, Justice, Advocacy, Neutrality, and Peacebuilding -- Part 2 -- Bernie Mayer and Jackie Font-Guzmán offer a critique of our focus on hyper-polarization based on their book, The Neutrality Trap.
- Neutrality, Omni-Partiality, and the Evolution of Political Conflict -- We must overcome the hostile, adversarial, authoritarian forces that separate “us” from “them;” and realize that there is no “them,” there is only us. Then we can face our conflicts and crises together, as a diverse and cohesive community of problem solvers.
- Summary of Lisa Schirch: Transforming the Colour of US Peacebuilding: Types of Dialogue to Protect and Advance Multi-racial Democracy -- A summary of an article focused on how peacebuilding dialogue and the movement for social justice should be complementary, not at odds with each other.
- On Oppression, Justice, Advocacy, Neutrality, and Peacebuilding -- Part 1 -- Do efforts to limit hyper-polarization undermine efforts to challenge oppression or does allowing hyper-polarization to flourish fuel the hatred that makes oppression possible?
- Ken Cloke: Mediation in a Time of Crisis -- The introduction to Ken Cloke's latest book focused on the many concurrent crises facing the United States and the world. It demonstrates compellingly how our only way out is through collaboration.
- Jack Williams: Reaching out Within and Beyond the Classroom -- The President of the Institute for Global Negotiation shares his thoughts on how the education system writ large can help entire societies learn and use better conflict resolution techniques.
- Neal Kohatsu: For Less Divisiveness, We Need More Humility -- Kohatsu suggests we follow Adam Grant's "rethinking cycle" -- a progression through humility, doubt, curiosity, and discovering, circling back to humility.
- We’re About to Find Out What Happens When Privacy Is All but Gone -- A look at the many implications of living in a post-privacy society.
