The Culture Challenge

Abstract

The most renowned cross-cultural encounter in the conflict resolution literature is Meron Benvenisti’s account of his objection to a workshop in which he participated for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At a formal dinner attached to the workshop, Benvenisti stood up after “one glass too many” and “said to the organizer…, ‘I wonder if you know who we are at all. For all you care, we can be Zimbabweans, Basques, Arabs, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Greeks, Turks. To you we are just guinea pigs to be tested, or at best to be engineered.’”1 The culture challenge suggested by Benvenisti’s complaint is clear: cultural difference brings into question the often-universalist knowledge and methods assumed by conflict resolution scholars and practitioners. But this also raises a more fundamental challenge: How can conflict resolution succeed if it cannot work across difference? Difference, after all, animates much if not most conflict. The culture challenge evinced by Benvenisti is particularly urgent in the context of “new wars,” increased politico-cultural identity claims, so-called clashes of civilizations, and the alleged global clash between Western secularism and Islamic fundamentalism. Conflict resolution must be able to deal with culture and with difference. The culture challenge also has implications for conflict resolution itself: if cultural issues cannot be satisfactorily addressed, the Western dominance of conflict resolution threatens to undermine its credentials and become a source of tension when attempting to work across cultural difference.KeywordsCultural DifferenceConflict ResolutionSocial Science DisciplineCulture ChallengeHuman DifferenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.