Multiparty Conflicts Research Articles

‘COVID-19 is just another way to die…’: a qualitative longitudinal study of frontline COVID-19 response governance across Syria

IntroductionGovernance of COVID-19 responses has been challenging for all countries. Syria has been particularly challenged due to protracted multiparty conflict and debilitated health systems fragmented across different areas of control....

Changing responses to a frozen conflict: The Republic of Cyprus soft balancing vis-à-vis Turkey

Tensions are on the rise in the Eastern Mediterranean, calling for a careful understanding of the motivations behind the foreign policies of small and large states in the region. This article explores the motivations behind the Republic of Cyprus and Turkey’s foreign policies and their implications for conflict dynamics, illustrating the complex relationship between soft balancing and the prospects for conflict resolution, considering the spatial dynamics of multi-party conflicts. It argues that the Republic of Cyprus’ and Turkey’s changing responses influenced the very conflict itself, by pulling in more actors and thereby expanding its spatial scope. This topic has implications for the study of frozen conflicts, transatlantic security, and peace and stability in the Eastern Mediterranean region and beyond.

Who Shot the Bullets? Exposure to Violence and Attitudes Toward Peace: Evidence from the 2016 Colombian Referendum

ABSTRACTDoes exposure to violence affect attitudes toward peace? Civilians living in war zones see peace agreements as an opportunity to improve their security prospects. However, in multiparty conflicts, this does not automatically translate into support for peace. Support hinges on the interplay between which faction has victimized civilians in the past and which faction is sitting at the negotiation table. If civilians have been victimized by the group that is involved in the peace agreement, they will be likely to support peace. On the contrary, if they have been victimized by another faction, they will be likely to refrain from supporting peace if they believe that this can trigger retaliatory violence against them. This article explores this argument empirically in the context of the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC; both quantitative and qualitative data yield support to the study’s theoretical expectations.

One Dyadic Peace Leads to Another? Conflict Systems, Terminations, and Net Reduction in Fighting Groups

AbstractGovernments often fight multiple civil conflicts simultaneously and each conflict can have multiple groups. Prior research on civil war termination and recurrence has been conducted at either the conflict level, once all the groups have been terminated, or the dyadic level, which examines group terminations in a conflict separately as more or less independent processes. Hence, conflict-level studies mostly tell us how to preserve peace once a civil war has already ended, while dyadic studies mostly tell us about the durability of specific group-level terminations within the larger process that led to that ending. As a result, our understanding of how ongoing civil wars are brought to a close is limited, particularly, with respect to multiparty conflicts. In this study, we put forth a systems approach that treats dyadic terminations as connected processes where group terminations influence the future behavior of other groups, incentivizing the system toward greater aggregate peace or conflict. Analyzing 264 dyadic terminations, the findings suggest that the most effective strategy for governments to reduce systemic conflict is to demonstrate to other groups that they have the political will and capacity to implement security, political, and social reforms as part of a larger reform-oriented peace process. Viable implementation can be followed by the concomitant use of military victories against remaining groups with great success. However, military victories achieved in isolation, that is, outside of a reform-process, do not reduce future levels of conflict even if they themselves are durable.

Adaptive Conflict Resolution Mechanism for Multi-party Privacy Conflicts Resolving in Social Media

Adaptive Conflict Resolution Mechanism for Multi-party Privacy Conflicts Resolving in Social Media

Negotiations in the public sector: Applying negotiation theory to multiparty conflicts

Les processus de collaboration dans le secteur public impliquent plusieurs parties, à des échelles allant du très local, à l’échelle de la ville et à la région. Alors que la facilitation / médiation de ces processus repose fortement sur la théorie de la négociation, une grande partie de la littérature est focalisée sur les interactions à deux parties (dyadiques). Nous proposons que les processus multipartites méritent une attention théorique/pratique particulière. A cette fin, nous analysons trois cas dans des endroits et à des échelles différentes: un conflit d’aménagement territorial dans une petite localité d’Israël; un conflit de transport / aménagement territorial dans une ville de l’etat d’Oregon ; et une initiative de planification régionale dans le nord-est de l’état d’Ohio. Nous concluons que certains éléments de la théorie des négociations s’appliquent dans des situations multipartites. Cependant, d’importantes différences qualitatives exigent une attention accrue de la part des chercheurs. Les cas éclairent sept domaines typiques du multipartisme qui méritent une étude plus approfondie: les « BATNA » interdépendantes, les processus se déroulant pendant des périodes prolongées dans des contextes politiques changeants, les multiples processus séquentiels et parallèles, les défis de la représentation, les alliances et les coalitions, les flux d’information et de communication, les types d’accords et les règles de décision.

Conflict Fragmentation Index

AbstractIt is widely accepted that fragmentation influences conflict processes in a profound way. Multi-party conflicts with several fronts are notoriously hard to resolve. However, there is no easily computable measure to approximate conflict fragmentation. In this article, we introduce the conflict fragmentation index (CFI), which is computed by adapting the Herfindahl–Hirschman index. The CFI considers the relative prominence of each dyadic-level conflict-fronts nested in the entire civil war. The relative prominence is approximated by using available information on conflict casualties. The CFI is time-variant and highly sensitive to battlefield dynamics. The flexibility of CFI can bring several advantages. Most notably, it is possible to calculate monthly or even daily measures of conflict fragmentation by taking state-based (government vs. NSA) as well as non-state based (NSA vs. NSA) conflicts into account. Overall, the CFI provides a theoretically-informed and easy to compute measure to approximate conflict fragmentation.

White capital: Corporate social responsibility and the limits of transformation in South Africa

Since the 2012 Marikana killings there has been a boom in scholarship about labour relations in the South African mining sector, focused primarily on the ability of workers to organise and the role of state violence in policing strikes. Quality of life issues in mining communities are usually explored only insofar as they affect these labour relations. This article argues that this focus is incomplete, because it ignores the way that services and infrastructure in mining communities affect local residents who have no formal links to the mine. Local residents engage in resistance to the mine’s operations quite separately from labour activists. Scholarship that treats these local residents simply as a potential labour force subject to stabilisation overlooks their political agency. Indeed, local residents and labour groups come into conflict with one another, and with the state, even as all three groups come into conflict with the mine. The article situates the 2012 violence within an ongoing multi-party conflict over the post-apartheid social settlement. It finds that the logic of transformation, with its emphasis on companies’ contributions to social welfare, places white-owned mining companies in a position of political authority, and strengthens their position against demands for reform.

Murphy, James G. War’s Ends: Human Rights, International Order, and the Ethics of Peace. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014. 232 pp. $29.95 (paper).

Murphy, James G. <i>War’s Ends: Human Rights, International Order, and the Ethics of Peace</i>. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014. 232 pp. $29.95 (paper).

How Civilian Perceptions Affect Patterns of Violence and Competition in Multi-Party Insurgencies

This article offers a nuanced argument for how and when public opinion constrains insurgent violence in multi-party contexts by further unpacking the causal mechanisms of outbidding theory. First, I argue that insurgent groups will only be responsive to civilian perceptions of violence when multiple groups are viewed as substitutable with one another. Second, whereas most studies fail to distinguish whose opinion matters most to insurgent groups, this paper explicitly argues that groups competing for public support are most concerned with the opinions of political independents – i.e. non-exclusive supporters – and not the opinions of their own or other groups’ exclusive supporters. Third, this paper employs a more theoretically anchored operationalization of public support for violence, based on whether civilians view armed confrontation as strategically effective. In sum, I predict that the intensity of competitive violence in multi-party conflicts is a function of: 1) Whether insurgent groups are perceived by the non-combatant public as substitutable, and 2) Whether the public perceives violence to be a positive indicator of a group’s propensity for success. Using polling data on Palestinian public opinion, I provide an empirical test of this argument through a case study of Palestinian insurgent violence and public opinion during the Second Intifada (2000-2004).

Boundary and alignment in multiparty conflict talk

This paper examines multiparty conflict talk in a pharmacy patient consultation involving a patient, a novice pharmacist, and later, an experienced pharmacist. Using conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974) and Goffman's (1981) notion of participation framework, I describe conflict emergence and resolution while also paying attention to issues of alignment (Maynard, 1986). I show that conflict talk initiation is incipient and gradual, and the participants continue to orient to the conflict long after it is resolved. During this multiparty conflict talk episode, participants performed alignment in delicate ways: they may align with one participant without simultaneously distancing from the other directly, and they may invoke the authority of a non-present party in order to avoid contesting a present party explicitly.

Making Sense of Intractable Multiparty Conflict: A Study of Framing in Four Environmental Disputes

Intractable multiparty conflict is omnipresent in social life, but how do individuals in this type of dispute make sense of their situation and therefore enact it in a particular way? The current study investigated this question by examining how disputants from different stakeholder groups framed conflict situations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Texas that revolved around environmental issues. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of interview transcripts and archival data suggested that, based on their framing similarities, disputants could be grouped together in four clusters, each implying a different framing repertoire. In turn, the analyses indicated that the repertoire differences between these clusters fueled the intractability of each dispute.

Conflict and the Organization-in-the-Making: A Relational View of Perspective-taking, Practice, Social Reproduction and Change

Building on the concept of organizations as conflictual systems characterized by the production of negotiated order, this paper considers the role of everyday conflict within organizations. Conflict is commonly viewed as disruptive to social and organizational order. In contrast, the practice theories of Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and others indicate the dynamic mechanisms by which social systems reproduce order. These mechanisms involve the recursive relationship of social structure and social process through the development of habituated practice, but they have been challenged as providing little explanation for social change. In response, the argument made here is that conflict is a necessary element to explain human agency and changes in practices in organizational contexts. This argument is explored through examination of a case of multi-party conflict in a bookstore cooperative. In this case conflict is seen as stemming from the relational clash of differing perspectives, reflecting the multiple perspectives taken toward any set of organizational events. The interaction of perspectives stimulates the production of mutations in knowledge and practice, with the organization always in-the-making. Some terms of a conflict vocabulary - re-minding, re-membering, and re-acting - are proposed as one means to communicate the conflict's functionality in contemporary, pluralistic organizations.

Low‐Power Contributions in Multilateral Negotiations: A Framework Analysis

How do low‐power parties contribute to the resolution of complex, multiparty conflicts? The research reported here uses content analysis to capture evidence of the strategies used by small island nations in climate change negotiations. A conflict resolution systems framework facilitates research and practice by mapping the integratie and distributive interests of multiple parties. The framework demonstrates that in climate change negotiations, small island states, representing low‐power parties, contribute to conflict resolution by proposing flexible alternatives. They proactively advance the resolution of conflicts by emphasizing cooperative approaches to common ecological concerns