Rethinking Conflict: Perspectives from the Insight Approach

Abstract

In this article, the authors present the “insight approach” to conflict as an analytical and methodological framework that addresses the dynamic interactions between conflicting parties. According to the insight approach, conflict is relational, dynamic, and adaptive, generated from the responsive interpretive frameworks that parties use to construct meaning. Conflict arises as a result of parties' experience of what insight theorists call “threat-to-cares,” which generates defend–attack patterns of interaction between them. The authors suggest that rethinking the nature of conflict so that it is seen as an interaction embedded in meaning making enables conflict interveners to help parties gain insight into, and articulate, the values that are being generated, advanced, threatened, and realigned within the complex interactions that define us as social beings. In doing so, parties develop abilities to generate new patterns and solutions that can limit and even eliminate the experiences of threat that generate conflict between them.