Basic Human Needs and the dilemma of power in conflict resolution

Abstract

Over the last several decades, as “conflict resolution” began to define itself as a distinct field of research and practice, that is, a discipline, certain gaps were discovered and addressed. Some were straightforward and arose from similar lacunae in the older disciplines that dominated conflict resolution at first, International Relations (IR) particularly. Attention had to be paid to culture and gender, for example. Other developments entailed broadening the field from an exclusive foundation in positivism to admit other epistemologies, such as phenomenology or Critical Theory. Yet another involved conceptualizing conflict as concerned with something more, and “deeper,” than clashes of interests, and therefore conflict resolution as a practice requiring more than negotiation or mediation as modeled on the utilitarian heuristic of the buyer-seller (Avruch 2006, 2012). What lies beneath interests, something perhaps less amenable to rational bargaining? Some in the new field responded: think about values, or identity, or something called basic human needs. There was one lacuna that the field long recognized but failed adequately to address (Scimecca 1991), “the dilemma of power.” The dilemma presents itself at two levels. The first is conceptual and foundational and the second is manifest at the level of practice and ethics. Conceptually, power is a dilemma for the field because there already exists a dominant and dominating “theory” (what some of us, seeking to de-authorize, would instead call a narrative) of power and conflict with roots in Thucydides, Hobbes and Machiavelli, thence to Morgenthau and the entire edifice of realist and neorealist IR. In an important sense power is a dilemma for conflict resolution in direct proportion to the extent that it is not a dilemma for those “realist” thinkers for whom it is a self-evident social and political fact. Peace and conflict studies seeks to establish its foundations in a conceptualization of the world that is alternative to Machtpolitik thinking (and practice!). At the level of practice, the dilemma presents itself to the individual mediator or other sort of third party who intervenes in a conflict between parties with obvious and undeniable differences ofpower, and seeks a solution that is not predicated on Thucydides’ prescription for the people of Melos “negotiating” with the powerful Athenians: “The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept that they have to accept.”1 Here is our dilemma: How to conceive of a “non-Melian” theory of power and conflict and having done so, how to design a conflict resolution practice that embodies it? In this chapter, while touching briefly on how others in the field have responded both conceptually and practically to the dilemma of power (cf. Avruch 2012), I want to focus on a particular response and practice: John Burton’s idea of basic human needs (BHN) as the drivers of deep-rooted conflict, and his original problem-solving workshop (PSW) as the practice that achieves their resolution. As Dunn’s (2004) portrayal of Burton’s career in the academy, after his meteoric rise and fall in Australian politics and public service, makes clear, from very early on he opposed most of the key tenets of traditional IR thinking, exemplified in his heated debates with British colleagues in the early 1960s (Sandole 2006). In those days a central point of contention was Burton’s challenge to the privileged position accorded to the state as the sole and autonomous “actor” in international politics, as well as the doctrinaire segregation, based on the presumed normless and amoral nature of the international system, of international from domestic politics. Burton was not alone in this critique of state-centric IR. But his challenge went deeper, to the whole structure of “power politics,” and the hegemony of power in neorealist international relations. He also proposed a conflict resolution methodology (from early “controlled communication” to the later “analytical problem-solving workshop”) to demonstrate why the power politics paradigm was the wrong way to understand, much less resolve, deep-rooted conflicts. While the critique of power politics and neorealist international relations came very early to Burton, it was not until his “discovery” of basic human needs (BHN) – what Dunn (2004: 95) called the “ontological break” – that all the pieces necessary for the formulation of a conflict resolution practice fell for him into place. Postulating basic human needs, Burton argued, obviated the problem of power imbalance between parties, while the problem-solving workshop functioned to neutralize whatever imbalance remained. He claimed, in short, to offer a solution to the dilemma of power. This chapter seeks critically to examine this claim.