Overview: Conflict in Human Experience

Abstract

This is a book about conflict. But it is also a book about essential features of human nature that are expressed in every type of human interaction. In an even broader sense, this is a book about the basic processes that link conflict to a vast array of phenomena in the physical world. These seem like incompatible agendas. Conflict is not the only way humans interact, after all, and the conflicts that define human interactions would seem to have little in common with things like weather patterns, landslides, or bacterial growth. But as we shall see, science in recent years has exposed a set of basic operating rules that connect processes of all kinds in physical and social reality. This synthetic view is more than an abstraction; to the contrary, breakthroughs in mathematics, empirical methodology, and computer simulations have enabled scientists to identify the ways in which common processes and properties are manifest in very different phenomena. Our aim is to describe this new perspective and shine its concepts, methods, and tools on the recurrent and all-important issue of conflict in interpersonal, intergroup, and international relations.