Kinds Of Conflicts Research Articles

Third Parties in Conflict Management: The Structure and Conditions of Effective Mediation in International Relations

Students of social behaviour cannot venture far without being reminded of the importance of one kind of conflict or another. Conflicts between individuals, groups, and nations are inherent in the human condition. Conflicts are all around us. They are part of the very interdependence which brings actors together. Whenever social actors are joined together in a relationship of interdependence and resource scarcity, the seeds of conflict are present. Some of these conflicts may have a positive effect, others may precipitate a violent confrontation with consequences too horrendous to contemplate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of international conflict. Although in everyday language, conflict denotes overt coercive interactions between two adversaries, each seeking to impose its will on the other, this concept is unnecessarily restrictive. Conflict relationships may refer to inconsistencies, games, and debates and may embrace opinions, as well as situations, and a wide range of behaviour. This is why conflict relationships, as such, are neither intrinsically bad nor intrinsically good. They are not autonomous, self-exacerbating processes leading, inevitably, to violence and destruction, nor can they be described as invariably entailing beneficial consequences. Whether a conflict relationship is expressed through acts of violence and hostility, or whether it produces a more fruitful form of interaction depends, inter alia, on the way it is managed. The proper concern of conflict management is thus with devising a range of

Conflict and stress in nontraditional families: impact on children.

Particular stresses and certain kinds of conflict appear to be associated with each of the different family styles under study. Responses to stressful events also differ distinctly by family style. Aspects of children's intellectual performance and social-emotional behavior are negatively affected by stress, but in some types of families children are found to be more buffered than in others.

Gunpowder Altered the Physician's Wartime Role

The media are particularly attentive to the potential for destruction from nuclear war.<i>The New York Times, Newsweek</i>, the bulletins of the Federation of American Scientists and the Federation of Atomic Scientists, television documentaries, and the essays of Jonathan Schell and others have provided authoritative, knowledgeable, and articulate sources of information and opinion on that topic. It is enough to remind you of what you already know of the threat and to ask that you consider the concept that thermonuclear warfare is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from the kinds of conflicts that preceded it. The quantitative changes include vast, almost unimaginable destructiveness in small, easily delivered, precisely targeted packages. The qualitative differences from conventional warfare include long-term effects on the habitability of land, alteration of the atmosphere, and the likelihood of producing genetic aberrations. Not only is the threat well defined in terms that most can understand, but the

Race, Class, and the Perception of Criminal Injustice in America

The results of two research literatures, one dealing with criminal sentencing and the other with public ranking of crime seriousness, have raised doubts that conflict exists in American society about issues of criminal justice. This paper offers a different and more direct approach to this issue by analyzing public perceptions of criminal injustice and by assessing the capacity of conflict theory to explain them. Our analysis is based on a national survey, and it focuses on the race, class, and status positions of the respondents, with class position measured in neo-Marxian terms. Three major findings are (i) that black Americans are considerably more likely than white Americans to perceive criminal injustice; (ii) that regardless of race, members of the surplus population are significantly more likely than members of other classes to perceive criminal injustice; and (iii) that class position conditions the relationship of race to the perception of criminal injustice, with the division between the races in these perceptions being most acute in the professional managerial class. These findings constitute substantial evidence that race and class conflict exist with regard to issues of criminal injustice, and that neither kind of conflict can properly be understood without consideration of the other. Implications for Marxist and non-Marxist criminologies are indicated.

Tragic Vision in Kawabata's "The Master of Go"

At first glance the application of the thoroughly Western dramatic concept of tragedy to an Oriental novel may seem to be critical madness. Both the genres and the traditions are jarringly incongruous: the process may seem a bit like trying to examine a flower with a sword. Yet, unlike most Japanese novels, The Master of Go1 seems to invite examination from the perspective of Western concepts. At its most accessible symbolic level the novel presents the Go match between the old Master, Shusai, and the young challenger, Otake, as the objectification of a conflict between tradition and change in Japanese culture, a change intimately associated with Western ideas. Beyond that, the most fundamental level of that conflict is the confrontation of two completely different ways of understanding the nature of human existence at the moment when one is giving way to the other and while both are still vital enough to sustain the conflict's intensity: on the one hand, the traditional Japanese culture's organic view of human beings as emotional and subjective participants in the integrative process of experiencing a complex universe of which they are a functioning element; on the other hand, a systematic view of human beings as objective observers of the universe, categorizing, systematizing, and controlling their experience of a world from which they try to stand apart. The most obvious precedent for such a confrontation is to be found in the classical Greece of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., where the same kind of conflict took place between an organic, mythological view of humanity as part of the great cosmic cycle and the systematic view of humanity attempting rational control of its own destiny with the beginnings of theoretical science and the reflexive humanism of the Sophists. There, too, a transition occurred

Creativity and Commitment in Trevor Griffiths's Comedians

Creativity and Commitment in Trevor Griffiths's Comedians AUSTIN E. QUIGLEY Trevor Griffiths began writing plays in the mid nineteen-sixties, had a play performed for the first time on stage in 1969, and became a full-time writer in 1972. He lost the first three plays he wrote, but does recall their general concerns: "one about the anny, one about ahomosexual, one about me and our kid.'" A fourth play, Love Maniac, "about a guy who really tries to love kids in the teaching of them ... ,'" was written for television in 1967, but was performed, instead, on radio. His fifth play, The Wages of Thin, staged in Manchester in [969, was set in a public lavatory, partly as a result of a challenge Griffiths offered himselfto see whether he could, indeed, write a play set in such a location. Subsequent plays for the theatre, television, and radio (The Big House [1969] , Occupations [1970], Apricots [197[]' Thermidor [1971], Sam Sam [1972], The Party [1973], All Good Men [1974], Absolute Beginners [1974], Comedians [1975], Through the Night [1975])3 have established Griffiths's reputation as an important playwright. The degree and nature of that importance remain, at this point, a matter for conjecture and debate. In Griffiths's case, the issue is made more complicated by his extensive interest in dramatising political issues. Such an interest can invite, in England, premature judgement on political grounds alone, and, in the United States, a degree of incomprehension. The risk of conflict between political and aesthetic criteria, which political plays prompt audiences simultaneously to apply, is not easily avoided. Such conflict emerges intermittently in Itzin's Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968. Her major claim is that "the significant British theatre of 1968- 78 was primarily theatre of political change."4 She readily acknowledges that this claim puts the work of David Storey, Peter Shaffer, John Osborne, Peter Nichols, Simon Gray, and Harold Pinter outside of her terms of reference, and that it gives only marginal recognition to the work of Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton, and David 405 Rudkin. If the work of such dramatists is not to be included in the category of "significant British theatre of 1968-78," we may well begin to wonder about the criteria, political or aesthetic, by which "significance" is assigned to plays. Itzin is nevertheless right to acknowledge, and right to seek to help us understand and appreciate, "the growth of the socialist theatre movement in Britain.'" She is also right to ask whether political theatre is primarily political or primarily theatre, and whether there are appropriate means ofreconciling the two. Griffiths has spoken at some length in interviews about the dilemma he has confronted in his personal life in trying to reconcile his left-wing politics with his seemingly bourgeois professional career. This kind of conflict is explored repeatedly in such plays as Occupations, Sam Sam, The Party, and All Good Men, and it has surfaced with some regularity in left-wing criticism ofhis plays: " ... I get tons of shit lowered on the plays quite regularly by Workers Press or Socialist Worker or Tribune or whatever.... What was it Corin Redgrave said? Oh yes he described me as 'paddling in the shallows of revolutionary practice' .,,6 To the revolutionary left, Griffiths's plays either promote the revolution or they do not, and there is little more to be said about the writing of successful plays. In such a context, the creation ofenduring works oftheatrical art becomes decidedly problematic in nature, and Griffiths is committed enough to left-wing politics to worry about becoming a creature of the theatre: '" don't feel proud of the fact that I get enjoyment out of writing for the theatre and yet I can't lock into what is particularly efficacious about it. And I don't at all. Because I'm Northern, working-class and puritan by origin anyway, and development to some extent,' feel rather guilty... . "7 Griffiths has sought to resolve the dilemma, in part, by writing for television (the medium of the masses) and not just for the theatre (the medium of the middle and upper classes). He argues that this is the...

America's Lafayette and Lafayette's America: A European and the American Revolution

HE marquis de Lafayette's participation in the American Revolution was an extraordinary success. Americans took to him more warmly than they did to any other foreigner during the war, and he remained their favorite European throughout long life and for the remainder of the nineteenth century.1 Few outsiders have ever achieved such popularity or played such a vital role in the revolution of another country. Lafayette recognized that the American War for Independence was a new kind of conflict, different from the politics and wars of Europe. An eager student of American affairs, he quickly learned that in America politics and military strategy were connected in ways that most other Europeans, even most other Frenchmen in America, did not understand. Lafayette accepted the new style of republican warfare, mastered its political techniques, praised its Revolutionary practitioners, and was rewarded as the outsider made insider. This essay investigates how the relationship between America amd Lafayette was established, how it developed, and why Lafayette-aristocrat, Frenchman, cosmopolitan-was so successful in the new nation. American leaders first showed interest in the young nobleman because they assumed that family connections might be useful in securing French support for their cause. Silas Deane's promise of a military commission for Lafayette, signed in Paris in December I776, stressed his high Birth, Alliances, the great Dignities which Family holds at this

The Farmers, the Consumers and the State: Redistribution and Conflicts in Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom*

ABSTRACTIn most Western communities redistribution to agriculture seems to have enjoyed a special position. The article focuses this policy during the post‐war period in three countries, and asks which effects other interest groups and relationships between farmers and the state have had on redistributional policies. It is often assumed that redistribution produces conflictual political processes. The material suggests that the way conflicts are socialized influences both the level and kind of conflict, and in the long run the pay off to the farmers.

Mirror for Americans: A Century of Reconstruction History

PERHAPS NO HUMAN EXPERIENCE is more searing or more likely to have a longrange adverse effect on the participants than violent conflict among peoples of the same national, racial, or ethnic group. During the conflict itself the stresses and strains brought on by confrontations ranging from name-calling to pitched battles move people to the brink of mutual destruction. The resulting human casualties as well as the physical destruction serve to exacerbate the situation to such a degree that reconciliation becomes virtually impossible. The warring participants, meanwhile, have done irreparable damage to their common heritage and to their shared government and territory through excessive claims and counterclaims designed to make their opponents' position appear both untenable and ludicrous. Situations such as these have occurred throughout history; they are merely the most extreme and most tragic of numerous kinds of conflicts that beset mankind. As civil conflicts-among brothers, compatriots, coreligionists, and the like-they present a special problem not only in the prosecution of the conflict itself but in the peculiar problems related to reconciliation once the conflict has been resolved. One can well imagine, for example, the utter bitterness and sense of alienation that both sides felt in the conflict that marked the struggle for power between the death in 1493 of Sonni Ali, the ruler of the Songhay empire, and the succession of Askia Muhammad some months later. The struggle was not only between the legitimate heir and an army commander but also between the traditional religion and the relatively new, aggressive religion of Islam, a struggle in which the military man and his new religion emerged victorious.' Historians have learned a great deal about these events, although they are wrapped in the obscurity and, indeed, the evasive strategies of the late Middle Ages. Despite the bitterness of the participants in the struggle and the dissipating competition of scholars in the field, we have learned much more about the internal conflicts of the Songhay empire of West Africa and about the details of Askia Muhammad's program of reconstruction than we could possibly

The Trapped Female Breaking Loose: William Faulkner's "Elly" (1934)

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Conflict, ritual, and social structure on Yanuyanu Island, Fiji

Conflict management on Yanuyanu island in the Southern Lau Group of Fiji is accomplished by a variety of means, some traditional and others of recent introduction (Arno 1978).1 In general, however, traditional methods are dominant, and whatever procedures might be used in the course of a conflict, a final resolution almost always involves reference to the principle of hierarchy ? usually, although not always, expressed in a ritual of apology and reconciliation called the i soro (Arno 1976b). Hierarchy is also a central principle of Fijian social organization; because hierarchy operates, by definition, to minimize competition and to deny at the normative level the very possibility of conflict within the group, conflict management is very closely related to social structure, and traditional rituals serve to emphasize the con nection. A more precise understanding of the way conflict, ritual, and social structure may be related in Fijian culture requires an analysis of the particular kinds of conflict that arise within the group and the specific techniques that are employed to deal with them. Victor Turner, in his classic analysis of Ndembu society, distinguished between two species of conflict, each requiring its own mode of manage ment (1957). Certain conflicts are built into the social organization

Toward a Practical Philosophy of Pronunciation: Another View

I will set out my own philosophy of under four headings. I. Pronunciation is the primary medium through which we bring our use of language to the attention of other people. Therefore, (A) it is potentially useful, and in many situations indispensable; but (B) it also makes the speaker vulnerable to his hearers either (1) on account of the social inferences that they may draw concerning him, or (2) on account of the opinions that they may form concerning his proficiency as a student, or both. The preceding paragraph contains the seeds for two kinds of conflict within the student. Most obviously, I.A tells him Speak! while l.B tells him Keep quiet! The urge to communication is balanced against the risks of disapproval. The second conflict is between I.B.1 and I,B.2: If the student pronounces the language well, people may get the impression that he loves the foreign culture and is willing to become more like its members. (In recent years, we have learned to say that such a student shows an integrative motivation to language study.) This may violate his own feelings, and/or the demands of the social group on which he depends for support. Excellent pronunciation may also alarm or offend classmates who feel that they look bad by comparison. On the other hand, if he pronounces the language poorly, he will have to bear the social and

New directions in divorce research

Abstract Despite a multitude of descriptive accounts on the impact of divorce on families, research has generally neglected how change in residence, income, employment, and social relationships relates to the kinds of conflict which families of divorce experience. A partial model of post‐divorce income prediction for females with custody of children is offered as well as suggestions for preventative measures which focus on social skills acquisition prior to marriage.

Structural conflict and the Farmworker: Norfolk, 1900–1920

In Britain the farm labourer has presented a severe organisational problem to the trade union organiser and the socialist agitator: a phenomenon which has been explained, conventionally, by different versions of the ‘idiocy of rural life” theory. A general orthodoxy has emerged to the effect that the farmworker is acquiescent in his bondage. In the following article this orthodoxy is questioned. It is shown that in Norfolk, between 1900 and 1920, there was a certain kind of conflict on the farm which went on beneath the apparently calm and ordered relationships of what has been categorised as a paternal and deferential society. Behind the show of deference lay a world in which conflict was potentially endemic: conflict which derived from the simple fact, clouded by much modern sociology, that the relationship between master and man was one of exploitation. Those tensions which exist in any work relationship were present and manifested themselves in struggle: over, for example, wages, hours and job definit...

An Interactive Optimization Method for a Water Resource Problem with Multiple Objectives

Some class of multiobjective optimization problems may be effectively solved by interactive programming methods. First, in this paper, a new type of interactive optimization technique is suggested. The most prominent feature of the method is in the fact that the method requires only the partial informations about the preference attitude of the decision maker which is most easily extracted from him. Next, the method is applied to a water quality problem in the Yodo River basin in Japan. The stated problem includes several kinds of conflicts and may be formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem. The obtained numerical results prove the effectiveness of the method.

The "Work-Situation Play" and the Literary Hero of the Seventies

The plot of I. Dvoretskii's The Man from Outside is simple. A young engineer, Cheshkov, is recruited from a new and exemplary enterprise to go to an old one with long-established traditions to bail out its most troublesome department. His former place of employment doesn't want to let him go, and at the new one he is given a hostile reception. The most acute kind of conflict arises. Things reach a point at which the executives over whom he has been given authority offer resignations en masse, and the department's Party organization expresses lack of confidence in him. The question is settled in the statewide committee of the Party. Nonetheless, this concentration upon what might be called personal drama around the hero cannot overshadow the simple fact that the conflict between Cheshkov and the factory management is a conflict of a work situation in form only; in reality, it is a conflict between two sets of ethics, two styles of life.

Conflict Resolution in Criminal Justice

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on treating police, courts, and corrections as part of a unified system of criminal justice. While this total system concept has important values, it can oversimplify a complex structure of persons and agencies in interaction with one another. And in the process of that interaction, conflicts arise. Although conflicts can serve positive ends, many of those in criminal justice tend to defeat the achievement of goals of the total system and of its parts. In order to better understand such conflicts, a conference was held at the School of Criminal Justice at Albany in which probation and police officials were asked to identify types of conflict existing between their agencies. The four types studied were: (1) conflict based on dissensus reflecting differences in values among groups within a system; (2) conflict arising from status and esteem differentials between indivi duals ; (3) operational conflict which is centered in the differences which occur when interrelated agencies seek to serve their own organi zational requirements; and (4) perceptual conflict, the result of distor tions which prevent a clear image of the duties, functions, and purposes of others in the system from being transmitted effectively. A variety, of resolution techniques are suggested which are specific to kinds of conflict. Alternative methods of a conflict resolution which might be pursued in criminal justice are discussed.