Intractable Conflict Research Articles

Factors affecting local attitudes to mineral exploration: What's within the company's control?

This study explores factors affecting local actors' and citizens’ attitudes to mineral exploration, and how attitudes to exploration relates to those of mining. The concept Social License to Explore (SLE), originating from Social License to Operate (SLO), is used to address the relationship between exploration companies and affected local communities. The study focuses on attitudes in three municipalities in northern Sweden and Finland and combines qualitative and quantitative methods. The results show that local attitudes to mineral exploration and mining correlate strongly and are intimately linked. Perceptions of impacts, the permit process, and trust in government and company affect local attitudes, but company performance seems to be most important where trust was not established. We argue that values about nature, economy, and value-based development preferences, are central as they shape local attitudes and perceptions of impacts and process. While company conduct and community engagement are within the control of companies, local values and development preferences are largely outside of their control. However, insights about contextual conditions shaping attitudes and values can be generalized and help companies make more informed decisions. Responsible target selection is a strategy within the control of the company which can help avoid intractable and costly conflicts.

Managing Intractable Natural Resource Conflicts: Exploring Possibilities and Conditions for Reframing in a Mine Establishment Conflict in Northern Sweden

Natural resource management (NRM) increasingly relies on communicative measures to enable reframing in intractable conflicts. Reframing occurs when disputants change their perceptions of a conflict situation, and/or their preferences for dealing with it. However, the types of reframing possible, and the conditions under which they can occur, remain unclear. Through an inductive and longitudinal analysis of a mine establishment conflict in northern Sweden this paper explores to what extent, how, and under what conditions reframing can occur in intractable NRM conflicts. The findings reveal the difficulty in achieving consensus-oriented reframing. Despite multiple dispute resolution efforts, the disputants’ perceptions and preferences became increasingly polarized. Nonetheless, the results suggest that it is possible to enable reframing to the extent that all disputants can understand and accept each other’s different perceptions and positions, i.e., meta-consensus. Meta-consensus hinges on neutral, inclusive, equal, and deliberative intergroup communication. However, the results show that intergroup communication and reframing are significantly informed by institutional and other contextual factors. For example, when implemented within the formal governance system in the investigated case, intergroup communication lagged in quality and did not contribute to meta-consensus. Moreover, the results show that reframing is strongly influenced by the nature of the disputed issues, actors’ group commitments, and the governance system’s distribution of power to the actors. Based on these findings, it is argued that more efforts should focus on how governance systems can be configurated so that high-quality intergroup communication and meta-consensus can be enabled and inform decision making in intractable NRM conflicts.

Restarting Track II Diplomacy in Intractable Conflicts: How Psychoanalytic Concepts May Be Relevant.

Since the 1980s, psychiatrists, psychologists, and diplomats have proposed psychoanalytic theories to inform peacemaking in international relations through Track II negotiations, defined as unofficial meetings among influential stakeholders with access to government policymakers. These contributions have focused on initiating or maintaining Track II negotiations (Aggarwal et al., 2023). In this article, we apply psychoanalytic concepts to the problem of restarting negotiations that have previously failed. This study introduces theories based on a dialogue that a cultural psychiatrist trained in South Asian Studies moderated with the past directors of India's and Pakistan's foreign intelligence agencies to consider how both countries could recommence negotiations. The two former directors have participated together in five Track II initiatives between India and Pakistan. All three authors reviewed best practices for addressing impediments to Track II negotiations and how Track II negotiations may be reinstituted once stalled. We did this in a far-reaching discussion devoted to the psychology of peacemaking. We introduce the theories of trust as interpersonal authenticity, the normalization of conflicts, the back channel as a process to work through diplomatic resistance, and negotiator selection criteria. Our theories and method present new ways to apply psychoanalytic concepts to diplomacy.

I'm Hopeless but I Still Have Hope

Abstract Mannheim observed that generational memory is shaped by the prominent public events an age cohort experienced for the first time as young adults. For Jewish-Israeli millennials, born 1980–1995, their political coming of age was shaped by the failure of Oslo, cyclical violence, and Israel's pursuit of policies of population separation from Palestinians. This article draws on a wider, phenomenological study (2014–20) of post-Oslo generational memory of self-described hiloni (‘secular’ in Hebrew) millennials across the political spectrum from left to right. More richly theorizing and nuancing what is popularly assumed about this demographic, it argues that Oslo's legacy is hope-as-waiting behavior. It introduces Rengger's concept of the anti-Pelagian imaginary to discussions of attitudes to Occupation, making a case for more carefully specifying this sensibility by Jewish-Israeli demographic subgroup. To comparatively research hope amid intractable conflict calls for deeper analysis of hope-as-waiting as a category of action.

Israeli‐Palestinian conflict: The archaic fraternal complex

AbstractThe Israeli–Palestinian conflict is one of the world's most persistent and intractable conflicts. Despite extensive and in‐depth analyses to help understand and transform it, the parties have failed to reach sustainable peace. In this article, I extend group and family psychoanalytic theories to analyze the unconscious dynamics that potentially underlie this relationship, interpreting it in light of the biblical narrative of Abraham, his wives—Sarah and Hagar, and sons—Isaac and Ishmael. Using the above‐mentioned framework, I interpret the Israeli–Palestinian conflict over land as an enactment of the archaic fraternal complex, whereby each sibling unconsciously entertains the fantasy of returning to the maternal womb and aspires to be the exclusive owner of maternal space and the mother's phallus. Consideration of the archaic fraternal complex dynamics offers psychoanalytically oriented mediators an additional tool to understand conflicts, especially land‐related disputes. To work through intractable conflict, these mediators can help the belligerent parties perform the psychic work of trauma and primal mourning to stop enacting the fantasy of returning to the maternal womb and to accept symbolic castration. This work could contribute to the warring parties' ability to renounce their rigid ideological positions and seal new fraternal pacts under the aegis of the law of reason. Their fraternal complex would thus be transformed from archaic and talionic to symbolic and Oedipal.

Inferentialism and social delusion

AbstractThis work sets out to present how the notion of delusion may be understood (and extended) within the semantic framework of Robert Brandom's inferentialism. The mechanisms of reliability and community‐oriented proprieties, among others, provide inferentialists with effective tools for understanding commitments (and so beliefs) in communities. These tools may be used to describe and assess both commitments that we might consider sound and commitments that we might consider delusional, both in terms of how they arise and in terms of how they may be reinforced. Delusions are accordingly rendered in perspectival and normative terms, which is elaborated through a number of examples. The picture of how a delusional commitment may be understood, how it may be reinforced, and its character as community internal or external provide some interesting perspectives on delusions in shared social contexts, as well as how they may originate intractable conflicts and disconnects between sub‐groups within a broader linguistic community.

The Construction of EU Normative Power and the Middle East ‘Conflict’ … 16 Years on

AbstractIn this article, I revisit my 2007 piece on The Construction of EU Normative Power (NP) and the Middle East ‘conflict’ and bring in Manners' Arrival of NP in Planetary Politics' (NPA) frame to shed light on how the EU's southern neighbourhood and its social and political fragility becomes amplified by the ‘force multiplier’ of climate mitigation. For example, in 2018, Gaza sewage led to the closure of Israeli beaches and the shutdown of the desalination plant in Ashkelon, which supplies Israel with 15% of its drinking water. This is but one example of how Israel and Palestine are not only inter‐dependent but, perhaps more importantly, co‐dependent. This article therefore draws attention to the urgent need of thinking on the co‐constitution of all life on earth, particularly in a climate‐conflict scenario such as that of Israel and Palestine. Water scarcity, rising temperatures and electricity interruptions contribute to the region's instability. If policy‐makers from the region and beyond are to co‐ordinate policy interventions around water and food insecurity for instance, they cannot ignore intractable conflicts such as the Israeli–Palestinian issue and their ensuing implications for planetary politics. Such enduring ‘conflicts’ represent a microcosmic image of the planet as a whole. Along with the other contributions in this symposium, this piece invokes planetary politics as the space where we need – out of necessity – to think differently: Otherwise, others will be writing the script for us.

Wartime’s “Undeniable Linkages”: Feminist Studies of Everyday Militarisms across Time and Space

Feminist scholars and social movements have long been important voices against war and empire. Yet the era of global “endless wars” stretches behind and before us, challenging both our longstanding intellectual theories of violence and our political strategies for combating entrenched imperialism. This essay reviews three monographs in the emergent field of “everyday militarisms,” a new direction forward for understanding and criticizing global war in the past, present, and future. Threading connections between feminist science studies, cultural studies, and women of color and transnational feminisms, these texts ask us to more closely consider how elements of war show up in ordinary formations. I highlight how these books and the field of everyday militarisms more broadly makes us question what is understood as feminist work in both theory and method, through their shared and novel feminist theories of temporality. Together they open new understandings of ongoing systemic and state violence in the world today and different political paths forward in the face of seemingly intractable conflict.

Ethno-Religious Conflicts, Residential Patterns and the Role of Women in Conflict Resolution: The Plateau and Bauchi States Experience

The central thesis of this study is ethno-religious conflicts, residential patterns and the role of women in conflict resolution. The study was limited to Jos North, Jos South, Toro and Tafawa Balewa Local Government Areas of Plateau and Bauchi States, Nigeria. Survey design was adopted for this study. Using the multi stage and purposive sampling techniques, 382 respondents emerged as the study sample. Intractable conflict theory was employed to further a better comprehension of the problem. The study adopted both quantitative and qualitative data. Regression and ANOVA statistical techniques were employed to test the hypotheses using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS Version 26). The study among others revealed that: a major cause of the ethno-religious conflicts in the study areas that influenced residential segregations, is religion intolerance. The study also revealed the role of women in peace building and conflict resolution in the mixed residential areas of the study. The study recommends resourceful and revitalizing ways through which the protracted ethno-religious conflicts in Plateau and Bauchi States in particular and Nigeria in general, can be stemmed in order to allow for the emergence of peaceful mixed residential patterns.

Young generations’ hopelessness perpetuates long-term conflicts

Transforming long-term conflicts into peaceful intergroup relations is one of the most difficult challenges for humanity. Such meaningful social changes are often driven by young people. But do young people living in contexts of long-term conflicts believe that change is even possible? In a series of six studies (Ntotal = 119,671) over two decades and across two unrelated intractable conflicts in Israel/Palestine and Cyprus, we found that younger (compared to older) generations from both respective rival groups have less hope for peace, and consequently less conciliatory attitudes. We also show that this gradual improvement of peace-promoting emotions and attitudes with increasing age can be experimentally accelerated in young people through a virtual reality-based aging simulation. These findings provide a new perspective on the fundamental question of why long-term conflicts are so difficult to resolve and highlight the importance of instilling hope in young generations to advance peace processes.

NGOs for a Shared Society in Israel

Abstract In societies experiencing intractable conflicts, civil society may seek conflict-management solutions that are not necessarily political or institutional. Israel, with a century-old conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, has various NGOs trying to bring both sides together in different ways. The present study focuses on four such NGOs: Merchavim, Hand in Hand, Abraham Initiatives, and Sikkuy-Aufoq. Drawing on their websites and publications as well as interviews with their Jewish and Palestinian directors, it offers a comparative analysis of their goals, strategies, collaborations, evaluation methods, difficulties, and aspirations. The findings point to similarities and differences between the organizations’ agendas, painting a picture of the key issues confronting efforts to build a shared society in Israel.

“Head in the clouds”: Global citizenship education in conflict-affected South Korea

ABSTRACT Framed by critical global citizenship education (GCE), the study focused on secondary school teachers’ practices of GCE and explored the position of GCE in conflict-affected South Korea. The findings demonstrate the nexus of constraint and possibility of GCE in South Korea, highlighting how the country’s history of division and ongoing, intractable conflict and its geopolitical and ideological rhetoric influence and complicate teachers’ attempts to implement GCE. The study calls for a deeper, more contextualized, and sustained consideration of the conditions of GCE, especially in fragile and vulnerable societies that continue to experience conflict, war, and hostility.

The Role of Religion in Transforming Ghanaian Society: A Christian Perspective

Globally, while some scholars assert that religion is anachronistic and inhibits the human rights of people and frustrates the social progress of society, others are of the opinion that religion can be a catalyst for the transformation and development of individuals and groups. In Ghana, the role of religion in society is very much ambivalent. On the one hand, religion is a force for change and transformation in the lives of individuals and society. On the other hand, religion has also been the basis of intractable violence, conflict and turbulent divisions within families and among groups. This article, which is based on archival materials, seeks to investigate the role of religion in Ghanaian society and to determine what extent it can be a force for change and transformation. The article argues that, religion has the potential to bring about change and transformation in society, but this can only happen when the different creedal persuasions, especially Christians bring their faith to bear on their actions in the practice of everyday life. The article concludes that, the power of religion to occasion change and transformation in the different sectors of society depends on how Christians surmount the challenges of everyday life and synergize faith and works in the private and public spheres of life. Keywords: Religion, Christians, Change, Transformation, Ghana

The neurobiology of hatred: Tools of Dialogue© intervention for youth reared amidst intractable conflict impacts brain, behaviour, and peacebuilding attitudes.

Myths, drama, and sacred texts have warned against the fragile nature of human love; the closer the affiliative bond, the quicker it can turn into hatred, suggesting similarities in the neurobiological underpinnings of love and hatred. Here, I offer a theoretical account on the neurobiology of hatred based on our model on the biology of human attachments and its three foundations; the oxytocin system, the "affiliative brain", comprising the neural network sustaining attachment, and biobehavioural synchrony, the process by which humans create a coupled biology through coordinated action. These systems mature in mammals in the context of the mother-infant bond and then transfer to support life within social groups. During this transition, they partition to support affiliation and solidarity to one's group and fear and hatred towards out-group based on minor variations in social behaviour. I present the Tools of Dialogue© intervention for outgroup members based on social synchrony. Applied to Israeli and Palestinian youth and implementing RCT, we measured social behaviour, attitudes, hormones, and social brain response before and after the 8-session intervention. Youth receiving the intervention increased reciprocity and reduced hostile behaviour towards outgroup, attenuated the neural marker of prejudice and increased neural empathic response, reduced cortisol and elevated oxytocin, and adapted attitudes of compromise. These neural changes predicted peacebuilding support 7 years later, when young adults can engage in civil responsibilities. Our intervention, the first to show long-term effects of inter-group intervention on brain and behaviour, demonstrateshow social synchrony can tilt the neurobiology of hatred towards the pole of affiliation.

Perceived respect from the adversary group can improve intergroup attitudes in a context of intractable conflict.

Respect has been found to play a crucial role in human relationships including intergroup relations. Its presence has a significant positive influence in shaping the character of all relationship interactions. In intractable violent conflicts, there is almost no space for gestures of respect between adversarial parties, and the prevailing phenomenon is a mutual disrespect that fuels the conflict. This study examines a novel and challenging intervention that aims to induce in laboratory experiments, for the first time, perceptions of respect from adversary group members in the context of intractable intergroup conflict. In addition, this research examines the effect of perceived respect from the adversary on attitudes and perceptions towards the adversary group and the conflict. In three experimental studies (N=1261) in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we manipulated expressions of respect from the Palestinian adversary group members and presented them to Jewish Israelis. Results revealed that, a group involved in a prolonged violent conflict may perceive respect from its adversary outgroup, and the perceived respect from the adversary in turn predicts improvement in attitudes and perceptions towards the adversary group and the conflict. These findings underline the important role of respect in intergroup conflict and its role in mitigating the conflict.

«Преодолевшая символизм»: ирония в лирике А. Ахматовой первой половины 1910-х гг.

The article proposes ways to solve the problem of the specifics of acmeistic irony based on the material of Anna Akhmatova's early lyrics. In the early 1910s acmeists entered into an open dialogue with symbolists, offering a new artistic attitude and forms of its implementation in a poetic word. The acmeists opposed the "hopeless" irony of their predecessors, who realized the intractable conflict between the individual and the "collective". For Akhmatova, a dialogue with I. F. Annensky was important, in whose poetry the subject plan creates a symbolic paradigm and is a symbol of the tragic clutch of I and the Other. The irony in Akhmatova's work was initially due to such a basic feature of the poet's artistic thinking as a constant feeling of the possibility and even the need for a different view, a different point of view. The nature of this poetic phenomenon is thus dialogic and intersubject. Self-irony as an internal and external device of sharpening allows the poet to speak in a new way about a woman, her creative potential and the drama of her personal fate. Forms of irony are revealed through analysis of male and female masks of lyrical self, through images and motifs, complex subject organization of poems. The intersubject and dialogic nature of the heroine's experience opens the reader up the possibility of perceiving a lyrical event in several semantic perspectives (dramatic/tragic and ironic). Hidden irony is revealed by a holistic analysis of individual works.

“The very breath of life”: The Conversational Rhetoric of Elizabeth Gaskell’sNorth and South

AbstractIn her novel North and South (1854–55), the nineteenth-century British writer Elizabeth Gaskell suggests an innovative practice of conversational rhetoric involving diverse stakeholders. Through the story of Margaret Hale and her efforts to help mill workers and millowners negotiate their seemingly intractable conflicts in the fictional city of Milton, she sets forth a dialogic process in which both male and female interlocutors bring their reasoning and experience to the table, recognize the value of other interlocutors, and establish bonds of sympathy beyond their individual interests, thus breathing new life into the art of conversational rhetoric. Exploring this art of conversation—which both aligns with and diverges from the work of the eighteenth-century Scots theorists (such as Hugh Blair and George Campbell), Richard Whately, and Thomas De Quincey as well as the women’s conduct book tradition and the fiction of female writers of the era such as Almira Phelps, Louisa Tuthill, and Harriet Martineau—is the focus of this study. Both extending and complicating Enlightenment and Romantic rhetorical thinking, Gaskell’s contribution to the rhetorical tradition deserves recognition and further investigation.

Learning about dialogue and partnership between rival groups during an intractable conflict.

Learning about dialogue and partnership between rival groups during an intractable conflict.

Dialogue intervention for youth amidst intractable conflict attenuates neural prejudice response and promotes adults' peacemaking.

Humans' dependence on group living has led to the formation of tenacious, often nonconscious negative perceptions of other social groups, a phenomenon termed "intergroup bias" that sustains one of the world's most imminent problem: intergroup conflicts. Adolescents' participation in intergroup conflicts has been continuously on the rise, rendering the need to devise interventions that can mitigate some of their deleterious effects on youth an urgent societal priority. Framed within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and targeting youth, we implemented a dialogue-enhancing intervention for adolescents (16 to 18 years) reared amidst intractable conflict that builds on social synchrony and the neurobiology of affiliation. Implementing a randomized controlled trial design, before and after the 8-week intervention adolescents underwent magnetoencephalography to assess a neural marker of implicit prejudice and interviewed on their attitudes toward the conflict. Adolescents who received the intervention showed attenuation of the neural prejudice response, as indexed by sustained occipital alpha that was significantly reduced at post-intervention and adopted attitudes of peacemaking. Change in the neural prejudice response predicted attitudes of compromise and support in peacebuilding 7 years later, when young adults can already engage in active civil duties and responsibilities. These results underscore adolescence as a window of opportunity for enhancing inter-group dialogue and demonstrate the long-term associations between the neural evaluation of prejudice and self-reported measures of proclivity for compromise and peace in the context of an intractable century-long conflict.

Stokvels and Intra-Community Ethnic Associations in (Yaoundé) -Cameroon: Harbingers of Stability, Nation-Building and Development

This article counters the assertion that ethnicization and ethnophobia is a cause of conflict with insights from how ethnic groupings around stokvels and cultural associations help entrench political stability and accelerate rural development where governments and service delivery is in short supply. Drawing from the current geopolitical and regional conflicts splitting former English and French trust territories that have since 1972 united to become one Cameroon, the article argues that, while at its inception the government’s revision of the federal system established in the negotiated 1961 constitution, the former British trust territories of the North and South West regions of present Cameroon have remained glued around ethnic groups and co-existed until the evident and admitted attempts by the government to erode the English Common Law and Anglo-Saxon educational systems. As such a cursory of literature which suggests that ethnicization is a trigger of intractable conflicts is examined with the view of demonstrating that in present-day Cameroon, the ethnicization which has kept a fragile nation together for years is once again the harbingers upon which the country’s stability, nation-building and development is reliant. Using ‘Social Cohesion’ as a reflexive praxis upon which societies are believed to stay together, the article confronts the notion that social cohesion has to be large societal demographics and with the aid of quantitative data sourced from assessing the impact of certain stokvels and intra-community ethnic associations, concludes that, ethnicization is a potent vehicle of stability and development.