From Conflict Resolution to Social Justice: The Work and Legacy of Wallace Warfield 9781501300981, 9781780935720, 9781780936086

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Proceeds from the sale of this book will go to the Wallace Warfield Scholarship Fund at S-CAR, George Mason University

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Note from the Editor T

his book contains a selection of Wallace Warfield’s writings and statements on two subjects he was passionate about: the importance of the social context in conflicts (Part I), and the future and potential of the field of Conflict Resolution (Part II). The chapters are “bookended” with a Foreword by Kevin Avruch and an Afterword by Sandra Cheldelin. Both were Wallace’s good friends, colleagues, and close collaborators. The Foreword focuses on Wallace’s background and how he developed his social thinking through his work experience. The Afterword describes a recent, complex project which ties together the concepts of both parts of the book. Both pieces illustrate how justice can be achieved through conflict resolution. The Introduction contains excerpts from a long interview conducted in 1990. It details Wallace’s earlier engagement in a federal agency that had just started conflict resolution work. It provides a sound introduction to his thinking and the grounds upon which he developed his outlook on the field. Part I of the book highlights the importance of the social context in which conflicts take place, in particular issues of race, ethnicity and culture. It includes specific cases, presenting step-by-step methods of dealing with issues. This part also addresses theoretical issues and its relevance in policymaking. The last chapter of Part I contains Wallace’s “ruminations” on the subjects covered so far. Part II presents the other side of the coin: the role of conflict resolution in society, and its potential for the future, and how it could become key to building just societies. The last chapter, “Farewell, My Friends,” reproduces Wallace’s keynote speech at the 2009 Association for Conflict Resolution Conference. When he delivered that speech, neither he nor anyone else suspected that it was to be his farewell. In it, he outlined a road map for the future of the field, and a challenge to practitioners and students. I believe that the content of this book will not be outdated anytime soon. The subjects that mattered so much to Wallace are becoming more and more relevant in today’s world. World conflicts are less between countries and more within communities confronted with clashes of race, ethnicity, and culture, as well as issues related to class and economic deprivation.

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Individuals who have been victimized by oppressors or oppressive systems are becoming aware of their rights, and dreaming of being part of more just societies. Globalization and the ease of communication in the electronic age are showing members of these societies the unfolding of structural changes—pacific or otherwise—taking place around the world. Wallace passed away suddenly in August 2010, but has left his legacy behind in his work and in his writings. Even though he had retired from his professorship at George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) two months before his death, his spirit and mind were as alive and fired up as always. This book is a tribute to him, the person and the professional. Alicia Pfund

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Foreword Kevin Avruch1

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allace Warfield entered university life professionally relatively late, in his fifties, after more than thirty years in municipal and federal civil service. He had held the rank of assistant US Attorney General as acting head of the Community Relations Service (CRS) in the Department of Justice, a rank from which many are content to retire and consider themselves well accomplished. Wallace came to George Mason University in 1990 as part of the Conflict Clinic at The Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR, now formally a School). In law or medical school parlance, his position would be considered a clinical one. But he had briefly encountered ICAR before this, when Professor Dennis Sandole asked him to guest lecture in one of his classes. Wallace was, as they say, a natural, and pretty soon the consultancy and project-based work he did for the Clinic was augmented by time in the classroom. When the Clinic folded it made sense for Wallace simply to transition into a full-time instructional faculty appointment. While teaching, he completed his Ph.D. in George Mason’s School of Public Policy under the great American sociologist and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset. With the Ph.D. now in hand he was able to join the medieval guild of the professoriate as a full member. We were lucky he did so. For the next two decades Wallace wrote and taught a variety of courses focused on different aspects of conflict resolution practice but also an introduction to the field encompassing research and theory—and, as always, ethics. Several generations of students took from Wallace’s classroom what some considered the transformative experience of their education in the field. This is their possession, although thankfully many have gone on to share the fruits of this experience through their own teaching and practice. What Wallace wrote, on the other hand, can now be shared more widely as the twelve chapters of this book. As Alicia Pfund, Wallace’s editor, notes in her Note, the chapters fall roughly into two parts, reflecting his major and consistent concerns: the importance of social context in understanding conflict, and the future of the field of Conflict Resolution. But in another sense these concerns penetrate

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all the chapters, and the chapters themselves circle and interweave around a larger set of themes that Wallace approaches from different angles conceptually and through different case studies empirically. These include race and the social costs of racial inequality, power and its maldistribution, the importance of community and identity, the limitations of neutrality and the ethics of reflective practice, and (on the margins of Grand Theory where Wallace treads lightly but with confidence) democracy and the meaning of social justice. The other thing that shines through, tying all the chapters together, is the spirit of Wallace’s biography, particularly his work with CRS. His case studies are drawn mainly from CRS interventions in the aftermath of racial violence through the long, hot summers of the 1960s and 1970s—and on into the 1980s (Miami, 1982) and 1990s (Los Angeles, 1992). But Black–White conflicts are not the whole story. As a “conciliator” in the CRS his own experience (or that of colleagues from whom he drew) also included Anglo–Native American conflict in the Pacific Northwest, or KKK–Vietnamese confrontations on the Gulf Coast. And true to the mission of CRS, this experience reflected an institutional concern with conflict mitigation or prevention, as much as it did peacemaking as “clean-up” in the aftermath of violence.2 Christopher Honeyman once remarked on the near-uniqueness of Wallace in our field. There are, he said, many scholars and researchers who “do” some practice “on the side,” and a few practitioners who at some point in their career turn to teaching (as opposed to just “training”), often with real dedication and excellence. But very few have split a career almost neatly down the middle between work as an activist or mediator/conciliator with full-time research, writing, and teaching.3 This foundation in practice is telling. It imbues Wallace’s voice in these chapters with a sort of quiet, modest authority that stems from his long experience on the ground and in the field. This is authority of a rare sort, characterized not by the commanding prescriptions of a “third party intervener” (brandishing Federal credentials, at that) but by a sense of essential humility that comes from recognizing the complexities (moral as well as political) of deep-rooted conflicts, the not-so-hidden injuries (spiritual as well as material) to people they inevitably provoke, and the enormous burdens assumed by outsiders who materialize to intercede in other peoples’ troubles. Wallace conveys much of the complexity by having us look to the myriad social and cultural contexts in which conflicts are embedded. He critiques the “one size fits all classical model” of mediation on several grounds, including the once critical assumption of mediator neutrality, but mainly because it tends to mistakenly assimilate conflict to discrete dispute. Disputes are events isolated in time and social structure, requiring only a technical-rational, interest-based, and process-focused approach that leads (“trusting the

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process,” inexorably) toward a settlement. But disputes are rarely isolated. They are manifestations of dramas replete with personae that are nested in past and ongoing social relationships, ensconced in social structures and caught up in systems of (often unequal) exchange and dependency. At the broadest contextual level of “system,” Wallace has this to say about an overriding concern of his life and work, American racism: “Racism is not a Black problem, or a White problem, but rather an interactive dynamic, woven onto a tapestry of history and events that envelop the two groups.” It is, in other words, an American problem. But here, as always, Wallace seeks nuance and complexity. The conflictual part of the racial dynamic, he explains, “[i]s not all there is to the relationship between Blacks and Whites. Despite the rather Hobbesian view of race relations, Americans frequently overlook the fact that racial interaction in the United States (mainly with Blacks and Whites) is made up of consensus as well as conflict.” This is not formal consensus reached at the level of political elites only. Wallace the fieldworker, the CRS conciliator working in the midst of communities in crisis with real persons and not with racial role-enactors, knows it goes deeper than this. As he put it, “Consensus refers to the kinds of agreements reached by ordinary people, wrought out of a daily pattern of coexistence … To those small, intimate interactions, invisible to social reporters, that represent the shared values of a civil society.” Underlying these remarks is a profound “faith in human nature—that people ultimately come more out of a Lockeian perspective than a Hobbesian one.” Believing this to be so, he added: “You have to find ways of tapping into that.” As a practical matter, this means the intervener approaches a conflict not as merely a dispute, a disembodied “case,” but as a living, often very troubled community. The intervener is both a social geographer and an interpretive anthropologist. The geographer “maps” the conflict in ways the field has long recognized, parsing the “presenting issues,” identifying stakeholders and other parties, and delineating the various roles they have assumed in the conflict. But Wallace goes further. First, he looks beyond the triggering event to the community, and then beyond the immediate community to assess both its boundaries and the potential linkages to forces outside the boundaries. For example, he looks not just to the role the Atlanta office of the NAACP played in conflicts with police and over bussing, but at the tension their positions on these matters created with the NAACP’s national office. Second, he understands “stakeholders” not simply as actors playing roles that reflect their interests but as social persons who struggle to craft identities on the basis of core values and needs. These viewpoints mean the intervener is never simply a technician or “process-virtuoso” uncovering shared interests as shortcuts to resolution. Neoclassical economics aside, what constitutes persons goes deeper than interests. Here the task of interpretation comes. Echoing Clifford

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Geertz (1973) on culture, Wallace sees the parties as persons suspended in “webs of significance,” bearers of social meaning. Geertz alludes to the self-spun quality of the webs. Wallace, in contrast, recognizes the realities of power, inequality, and diminished life-chances, and thus understands that many people are literally “caught” in webs spun by others over which they have little or no control. Wallace tells Julian Portilla (Introduction) of an intervention in upstate New York in a conflict between Indians and White property owners and local authorities over land ownership and tribal sovereignty claims. The conflict escalated, threatening violence, and CRS was called in. “In the first mediation session,” Wallace recounts, “the White townspeople were trying to approach the issues from a very rational, interest-based level … The tribespeople in the negotiations were responding by telling stories. They would tell stories about the seven-nation confederation, about the fact there was a great law that was the basis for the United States Constitution, which was something that most of the Whites didn’t know.” The “negotiation” was failing, of course, since one group spoke from a basis in interests and the other “from a values-based standpoint.” And now the interpretive anthropologist emerges. The intervener team stopped the process to hold separate caucuses. Wallace says: I sat down with the White negotiating team and I said: “Let me tell you what I hear them saying. They’re saying you are getting impatient with storytelling, that you think it’s a waste of time, but that they have to tell their stories because their storytelling is a part of them. You have lots of other things around on which to build your identity. Look at their reservation.” Their reservation was the size of the parking lot area outside … “So where do they draw their identity from? From their history. So if you want this to be a successful negotiation, then you need to actually hear this.” So they did. Now, this was a kind of cultural interpretation role that a third party plays between a values-based level of discourse and an interestbased level of discourse. Complexity resurfaces. For even in deep-rooted conflicts over values or identity, interests matter—for Wallace a critical divergence from the narrativeüber-alles school of mediation. He elaborates: “[U]ltimately, at some point, people have to come to a point of negotiations at an interest-based level … You may not be able to use it at the very beginning … you start with a values-based perspective … At some point, in the problem-solving transition, you get to the point of interest-based mediation or a classic form of interestbased negotiation.” What Wallace means is that having convinced the Whites to listen and understand what the “stories” mean to the Indians, having for

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the moment suppressed the potentially Hobbesian nature of Indian–White relations, and having restarted the negotiation on the basis of some mutual recognition and (implicitly) some respect from the more powerful party toward the less powerful, “issues” had to be addressed: Indian access through White-owned property to their fishing grounds, for example, or the condition in which the Indians left that property as they passed through. Without addressing these issues the initial relational gains at the level of identity and recognition would have been squandered, the dispute would relapse perhaps toward violence. Interests matter—but one needs to know when, in the process, they are evocable, that is to say, negotiable. To the metaphor of geographer and ethnographer is added that of archeologist. The mediator excavates from surface positions to interests, and then toward values, identity, and needs. But unlike the archeologist (that is, like the “analyst” of conflict’s causes), who seeks to explicate, the practitioner needs to “refill” the hole, returning at some point to address the seemingly opposing but potentially shared interests that “presenting issues” always overlay. More complexity to follow. Whites have “stories” too. They matter and also deserve recognition. This is one way Wallace importantly differentiates “neutrality” from “impartiality”—they are often conflated. Interveners delude themselves if they think they can be neutral, that the “the process” can insulate them. Nor, indeed, should they be neutral. Who can be “neutral” about Apartheid or genocide? Wallace never claimed neutrality and thought the whole idea rendered “classical mediation” irrelevant or worse. Besides, as he reminds us, when Wallace as an African American came to intervene in a minority citizen–police dispute, the “proverbial [White] police chief” was smart enough to know that “you weren’t going to be neutral.” But impartiality implies something else, “a sense of equidistance between the parties,” and a willingness to engage the question the police chief might well ask: “Can you help us? Can you actually play a role and get us out of this messy situation we’ve found ourselves involved in, and can you be impartial enough to do that?” At the same time, impartiality orients one toward relating to the “low-power” group without paternalism. It means, for example, that “when the representatives of the negotiators on the low-power minority side began to screw up, that you would have the courage to tell them, ‘Listen, you’re not really negotiating in good faith. If you really want to get something out of this issue, then you need to sort of change your pattern of negotiation.’” That, Wallace explains, “is the essence of impartiality.” Geographer mapping the conflict and its contexts; ethnographer translating disparate meanings to the different parties; archeologist excavating interests, values, and needs; and, finally, practitioner bringing this all together in an intercession aimed at just resolution. Add to this the crucial element

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of self-analysis that Wallace regards as the prerequisite for an intervention (“What can I bring to this conflict; how can I materially help; how might I make things worse?”), and we have here a near-complete technic of conflict intervention parsed modestly, as usual, within the example of a specific case. I want to underline the idea of a just resolution. Like others in CRS, Wallace sometimes referred to the “Two Tap Roots and a Triggering Incident” conception of racial or ethnic conflicts. Tap Root One “is the general perception by low-power members of society that the system, as shaped by more powerful and dominant members, is inherently oppressive and discriminatory.” This he connects to Galtung’s (1969) idea of structural violence. Tap Root Two, resting on this foundation, refers to the “lack of confidence by low-power groups in the interests and capabilities of public and private institutions to provide adequate redress for their grievances.” All that is needed is some sort of trigger—often a case of alleged police abuse—and the underlying latent conflict suddenly becomes a manifest dispute. Naturally enough, the third party is called in—at least by those in “high power” positions—to deal only with the dispute. Wallace never mistook the settlement of a dispute for the resolution of a conflict. Wallace thought that, for the intervener from a Tap Root perspective, the challenge is to avoid getting into a conciliation mode that reduces the practice to the treatment of symptoms. Here Wallace engages one of the oldest and most frequent critiques of mediation and Alternative Dispute Resolution generally: that it functions mainly as a form of social control, designed as inferior “informal justice” to pacify potentially unruly racial, ethnic, gender, or class actors who threaten to seriously disrupt or challenge “the system.”4 Declaiming themselves to be the true defenders of social justice, the critics deride the mediators—or the conflict resolution practice generally—as at best “pragmatists” seeking the most efficient, cost-effective way to bring the noisome dispute to a close and get back to business as usual. Wallace recognizes that third parties (he refers particularly to the CRS type, with Civil Rights backgrounds and commitments) “often find themselves in paradoxical situations where they feel compelled to balance social justice inclinations to intervention pragmatism.” By accepting paradox he refuses to cede ground to the “social justice” critics for two simple reasons. First, striving to attain social justice is at the core of Wallace’s conception of his own role and the potential of conflict resolution as a practice. Second, he argues that the social justice absolutists simplify the world and mistakenly turn an admitted paradox into an implacable binary opposition. In what many in the field regard as Wallace’s most important contribution, presented here as Chapter 7 (written with Mara Schoeny), Wallace establishes the necessary connection between what he calls “system maintenance” and

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social justice. The two are mutually dependent, inextricably entwined in a means-ends relationship, one in which procedural justice, championed by conflict resolution regimes and institutions that come to support them, is the eventual necessary guarantor of “substantive outcomes” around social justice. Working once again from particular cases—a racial-ethnic dispute in Brooklyn over the allocation of public housing, an Anglo–Indian dispute over fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest, the 1992 Los Angeles riots—and citing Hannah Arendt’s (1970: 4) argument that given the unpredictability of ends, “the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals,” Wallace shows that true conflict resolution “must not only help parties … reach a consensus on just ends, but serve as a means to get there as well.” Without just means just ends will forever remain inchoate and out of reach: rhetorical or theoretical in the worst sense of that term. Thus, for Wallace, conflict resolution is a critical form of praxis—to be distinguished from revolutionary violence to be sure: the perhaps more fashionable sort of praxis to some, one that ties system maintenance to “social justice outcomes where the purpose of institutions is to create shared values and integrative opportunities within their environments.” Establishing a regime of procedural justice, guaranteeing the “low-power” groups a voice in the disposition of critical issues, is cumulatively both educative of individuals and reformist of institutions. It is, in fact, central to Wallace’s conception of civil society and democratic process. He has no illusions as to the swiftness or incipience of this transformative outcome. “The reflective practitioner,” he writes, “understands intervention as a long-term and collaborative process where operating in the mode of a public steward, she or he seeks to bring together institutional actors, individuals, and groups to determine just outcomes and the processes used to get there.” Nor does he think that social justice is an event-state to be finally achieved; even in the best of (democratic) polities we will always find ourselves to be “in transition.” * * * In addition to the “big themes”—the importance of context, of community, and identity; attention to race, power, and ethical practice—there are to be found a number of other ideas engaged in these essays: dispute and conflict, interests and values/needs, neutrality and impartiality, system maintenance and system change. They are not quite antimonies. In each case Wallace is not so much interested in posing them in opposition, or of reducing one to the other, as in showing how, for example, when a dispute is contextualized or understood as “tap rooted” it reveals the deeper conflict; how

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persons are not the sum of their bundled interests but are motivated by core values and needs—although interests matter! He argues that while third-party neutrality is a chimera, impartiality, a different thing, is a sine qua non of effective practice; and that social change toward social justice is not separable from the means utilized to achieve it, and these necessitate and depend largely upon the system already in place. Among these ideas perhaps the most striking is Wallace’s discussion of the considerable and everyday consensus that complements the racial conflict most of us attend to. In several of the essays Wallace poses this (being a student of Seymour Martin Lipset) as a distinction between “Hobbes” and “Locke.” In the Introduction, interviewer Julian Portilla asks him to reflect on the skills a CRS mediator needed to possess. Wallace answers first with a not-atypical skills-set, but soon turns from this to a reflection on the kind of society the mediator needs to imagine: Empathy, compassion, the ability to see the complexity of Civil Rights issues and to understand that they are not—no pun intended—blackand-white kinds of issues. They are very complex issues. Within that complexity, the realization that there is goodness in people on both the soft sides of an issue, and that people are essentially trying to live their lives in ways that are not threatening for them … And, a vision. I think if you have no vision, you can’t ask good questions in a mediation process … You have to have a vision of a just society in order to be able to position yourself. At key times in that process someone has to say, “What kind of world do you want to live in?” If you aren’t clear about that yourself, the parties will certainly discern that fairly quickly, and I think that you will not be effective. I think a Civil Rights mediator, perhaps more so than other kinds, requires a willingness to be an advocate for a certain kind of society that we live in. You have to speak to that. I don’t think you could establish a position of neutrality about that. I think that would be heresy. More than fifty years ago C. Wright Mills wrote that the “sociological imagination” required of social scientists is that they make the connection between “biography and history” or, more sociologically, that they uncover the ways in which “personal troubles are connected with public issues” (Mills 1959: 185). Wallace would put it differently: Our task is uncovering the conflict underlying the dispute. And then, as Mills also argued but less concretely than Wallace as to process, having made the connection, to do something about it. Mills, of course, was much less confident than Wallace of the “goodness” of individuals or the possibilities for a Lockeian society. As an African American and throughout his life, doubtless before work with street gangs in New

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York’s Spanish Harlem, Wallace recognized Hobbes: It was often right there in front of him. But in connecting his own biography to the larger stream of (Civil Rights) history, and in understanding the larger public issues that always lay behind the personal (or community) troubles he was called in to remediate, he strove to uncover and somehow to “activate” Locke. The essays in this book all bear witness to this simple fact. Whether acting as a third party or later in the classroom, Wallace Warfield was never a neutral in these matters, but a passionate and unconditional advocate.

References Abel, R. (1982). The Politics of Informal Justice. Vols. 1 and 2. New York: Academic Press. Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Avruch, K. (2009). “What is Training All About?” Negotiation Journal 25(2):161–9. Galanter, M. (1974). “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change.” Law and Society Review 9:95–160. Galtung, J. (1969). “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 3:167–91. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Grillo, T. (1991). “The Mediation Alternative: Process Dangers for Women.” Yale Law Review 100:1545–610. Levine, B. (2005). Resolving Racial Conflict: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, 1964–1989. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Nader, L. (1991). “Harmony Models and the Construction of Law.” In K. Avruch, P. W. Black, and J. Scimecca (eds), Conflict Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. New York: Greenwood Press. Scimecca, J. (1991). “Conflict Resolution and a Critique of Alternative Dispute Resolution.” In H. Pepinsky and R. Quinney (eds), Criminology as Peacemaking. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Notes 1 Dr. Kevin Avruch is Henry Hart Rice Professor of Conflict Resolution and Professor of Anthropology in The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University. 2 Beyond “peacemaking” through interventions, the goal of conflict prevention through training, capacity building, and other “proactive measures” are outlined in the mission statement of the CRS (see http://www.justice.gov/crs). See Levine (2005), a longtime insider, for the role of the CRS in addressing

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racial conflict from its founding as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through its activities into the late 1980s. 3 Honeyman’s remarks can be found in a “mini-festschrift” that celebrated Wallace’s retirement from active teaching; unfortunately it appeared after Wallace’s death in August 2010 (see http://icar.gmu.edu/publication/10250). On the difference between teaching and training, see Avruch (2009). 4 See, for example, Abel (1982), Galanter (1974), Grillo (1991), Nader (1991), Scimecca (1991).

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Introduction Wallace Warfield and his Work Excerpts from a 2003 interview1

[The original focus of this interview was Civil Rights mediation. These excerpts focus on Wallace’s ideas and descriptions of his work, mainly at the Community Relations Service (CRS), as well as his subsequent work when he moved to George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR). It excludes organizational information about CRS.]

Introduction Question: How did you start your career? Answer: I worked for an anti-poverty agency in New York, one of the first of the 26 “community corporations” as they were called, on the lower west side of New York. Before that, I worked with street gangs. Question: Tell me a little bit about your poverty work. Working with poverty and with gangs. Answer: Okay. I came in as the coordinator—this is kind of a paraphrasing of the title, but I was the coordinator of a block working group. The anti-poverty agency actually was an umbrella agency that passed funds through to smaller neighborhood groups, but reserved a certain amount of program activity unto itself. One of those activities was training and working with block workers, who were people that were hired from the community to do various kinds of work, like welfare rights organizing, and a lot of the elementary and secondary school education. The program put people to work, bringing community people into the school system so that they could have their voices heard about elementary school policy. So a lot of it was advocacy work. And then I later became the deputy director of the community corporation.

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Question: Tell me more about the gang work. Answer: Ah, the gang work. That was my first work coming out of college, out of undergrad school. I actually worked for an organization called the New York City Youth Board, which was then the seminal agency in the world, as far as the work being done with street gangs. It was built on the old kind of case worker model, except that we were called street club workers. We didn’t like to consider ourselves case workers—that was kind of an anathema to us. I began by working with a gang on the upper west side of Manhattan, which is all a very chic area now, actually. What you did in those days, and the basis for the New York City Youth Board, was to prevent and mitigate gang fighting, because the gangs in those days were what were called fighting gangs. They fought over turf, as opposed to drug gangs or more entrepreneurial gangs. These were pretty much turf-oriented kinds of gangs. Most of the time was spent just sort of hanging out on the street corner with these kids, and trying to create these changes, individually or if you were lucky, with maybe four or five of them in your length of time there. So much of your time was spent working and counseling with these young people. Occasionally, you’d get yourself in the midst of a serious fight, but that didn’t happen too often. The whole idea was to sort of change anti-social behavior into something that was more socially acceptable.

Work at the Community Relations Service (CRS) Question: Good. So then what got you to CRS? When was that? Answer: July 1968. There’s actually a story about that. An old friend of mine by the name of Jim Norton used to work for the Community Relations Service. Jim was a New Yorker and a friend. In fact, Jim used to work for the New York City Youth Board, so we knew each other in those days. Jim was always traveling someplace, and he would come home from time to time. In those days, CRS did not have regional field offices; everyone worked out of Washington [DC]. Jim would come home and he would tell these incredible stories, stories that we always thought were apocryphal. He would tell stories about being one step ahead of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, and about the nation’s Civil Rights movement … incredibly exciting work. I said, “God, that sounds really exciting!” and he said, “You know, you ought to come work for us.” I said, “Well, I’ve got a good job, and I enjoy what I’m doing, working here in this community.” I’ll never forget this—it was April of 1968, and I was running a meeting of parents in the community. Then this young Black kid burst into the meeting

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breathlessly, to say that Dr. Martin Luther King had just been shot and killed. Two months later I was working for the Community Relations Service. It had just changed my life. A fellow by the name of Victor Risso and I opened the New York office. At this time, CRS was just beginning to spread out, because Congress and the White House were becoming increasingly concerned about the series of riots that were taking place after the death of Dr. King. They recognized the fact that service could not be provided much beyond the fireengine model working out of Washington, DC. The logic was that being closer to the action with field offices would provide better access, and therefore better service. So, Vic and I opened up the New York regional office, which was supposed to respond to disputes and conflicts everywhere within what’s now designated as Region 1, consisting of all of the New England region, Region 2, New York, New Jersey, and then also at that time Region 3, which included Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, DC, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands—they just sort of threw those last ones in as well, you know … Question: What do you think are the most important skills for a Civil Rights mediator? Answer: Empathy, compassion, the ability to see the complexity of Civil Rights issues, and to understand that they really are not—no pun intended— black-and-white kinds of issues. They are very complex issues. Within that complexity, the realization that there is goodness in people on both sides of an issue, and that people are essentially trying to live their lives in ways that are not threatening for them. I think these are some of the—if you want to call them skills or forms of insights—that I think a Civil Rights mediator has to have. And, a vision. I think if you have no vision, you can’t ask good questions in a mediation process, or in a dispute-resolution process. You have to have a vision of a just society in order to be able to position yourself. At key times in that process, someone has to say, “What kind of world do you want to live in?” If you aren’t clear about that yourself, the parties will certainly discern that fairly quickly, and I think that you will not be effective. I think Civil Rights mediation, perhaps more so than other kinds, requires a willingness to be an advocate for a certain kind of society that we live in. You have to speak to that. I don’t think you could establish a position of neutrality about that. I think that would be heresy. Question: After your work in the New York regional office, what was your next career move? Answer: From 1979 until 1986 I came to Washington [DC] as Associate Director for Field Coordination, and in 1986 the Attorney General asked me

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to take the position of the Acting Director of CRS, where I remained until 1988.

Work at the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) At that point I left CRS and joined the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), which is no longer in existence. ACUS became interested in Conflict Resolution as a mechanism to make administrative disputes less litigious and less costly. I became involved in the very beginnings of the Regulatory Negotiation process, and also helped to write the first 1990 Omnibus Dispute Resolution Act. While this was happening, I was also doing these kinds of casual little moonlightings at this new program, then called the Center of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, at George Mason University. I found that I enjoyed teaching, and that I had something to offer.

Transitioning to George Mason University Question: The first thing that I’m interested in talking about is what I see as the key theoretical question that got us [the Conflict Information Consortium at the University of Colorado] interested in this project. We have been quite influenced by the theory development that was going on here at George Mason and the whole human needs approach. Human needs theory suggests that conflicts about human needs, such as identity, cannot and should not be mediated because they’re needs-based; they’re not interestsbased. However, CRS has been mediating racial conflicts (which are one kind of identity conflict) for years. So I was curious to have you reflect on that, and tell me what you think is different about what CRS does, and how it reflects on human needs theory. Answer: Okay. Actually, this is in an article I wrote for the book, Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice.2 In that article, what I do is to take what was originally Jim Laue’s theory, which is this notion that there is a hierarchy of conflict responses, and that the hierarchy begins with the notion that people approach a conflict from a positional standpoint. We all know this from Fisher and Ury. They tell us that their big breakthrough was teaching people to identify their interests, not just their positions. And that’s where they stopped. But this is insufficient when it comes down to dealing with social conflicts that involve very complex social issues and values that lie beneath

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the interests. Then, arguably, in a much more theoretical way, you could even say there are basic human needs. And so these are nonrational. The first two layers are affective and cognitive; the latter two layers are nonrational layers.

Needs-Based and Interests-Based Approaches People can make rational decisions on both positions and interests; they can’t do that on values and needs. But often these conflicts were approached, at least initially, with an interests-based approach, which is why intervention often was not successful. Not that the CRS people were doing it that way necessarily, but the concept of approaching these disputes was generally based on interests. So even before the intervention took place, at the point of negotiation, you would have a situation where the parties were focusing, unsuccessfully, on interests. In one case that I was involved in on an Indian reservation in upstate New York, there was a problem because the Indians claimed they actually owned the entire nearby town, and therefore everything in it. This claim was, as you can imagine, contested by the townspeople and the officials, who were mainly White. There was a series of conflicts that flowed from that initial causal factor there. They involved disputes over services and police response (i.e. did the police have the right to respond to a conflict on the reservation?). Then there was further factioning within the tribe itself. In the first mediation session that I was involved in, the discourse was such that the White townspeople were trying to approach the issues from a very rational, interest-based level. I mean, they’d start out oppositionally, but quickly would try to identify—at least from their point of view—what their interests were. The tribespeople in the negotiations were responding by telling stories. They would tell stories about the seven-nation confederation, and about the fact that there was a great law that was the basis for the United States Constitution, which was something that most of the Whites did not know. So you had, in fact, a discourse that was not meeting and not connecting. One group was speaking from an interestsbased standpoint, while another group was speaking from a values-based standpoint. My colleague and I quickly recognized that if it continued this way, this was going to break up and it was not going to be successful. So we stopped it and held separate caucuses. I sat down with the White negotiating team, and I said, “Let me tell you what I hear them saying. They’re saying that you’re getting very impatient with the storytelling, that you think it’s a waste of time, but that they have to tell their stories, because their storytelling is a part of

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them. You have lots of other things around which to build your identity. Look at their reservation.” Their reservation was the size of the parking lot area outside. Theirs wasn’t a reservation in any kind of classic sense that we think of reservations. Impoverished, high unemployment—this was before the gambling casino came in. “So where do they draw their identity from? From their history. So if you want this to be a successful negotiation, then you need to actually hear this.” So they did. Now, this was a kind of cultural interpretation role that a third party plays between a values-based level of discourse and an interests-based level of discourse. However, having said that, the argument that I make is that ultimately, at some point, people have to come to a point of negotiations at an interestsbased level. I mean, you can’t have a value-based outcome—what would that look like? Any outcome, in any dispute, even if it is values-based or human needs-based, is manifested in some way through an interests-based outcome. People have to have a construct for this. So ultimately, at some point, where I differ with the theorists in the field who say that you cannot use mediation in identity conflicts, is that at some point you necessarily do. You just may not be able to use it at the very beginning. At the beginning, you start out with a values-based perspective, because it is nonrational. At some point, in the problem-solving transition, you get to the point of an interestsbased mediation or a classic form of an interests-based negotiation. That’s the distinction I would make.

About Neutrality and Impartiality There’s a difference between neutrality and impartiality. If you think about neutrality as being neutral about issues, well then arguably I would say that many CRS people, myself included, were not neutral about the issues. But what was more important and more relevant was impartiality, a sense of equidistance between parties. Now what was more important to that proverbial police chief, or whomever was the power elite in that particular community, was not your neutrality. They were smart enough to know that you weren’t going to be neutral. They were more concerned with questions like, “Can you help us? Can you actually play a role and get us out of this messy situation we’ve found ourselves involved in, and can you be impartial enough to be able to do that?” So that meant when the representatives of the negotiators on the low-power minority side began to screw up, that you would have the courage to tell them, “Listen, you’re not really negotiating in good faith. If you really want to get something out of this issue, then you

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need to sort of change your pattern of negotiation.” That’s the essence of impartiality in my mind.

About Power Balance Question: So how do you deal with the notion that in order to be successful in mediation, the parties have to be of relatively equal power. So what’s commonly done is mediators will work to empower the low-power group, and I’m hearing you say that you do that to a degree, but that can then cause problems with the other side. Answer: Well, it happens in the very beginning. Typically the way that happens in mediation where there’s this huge dis-equilibrium of power—and the same thing can happen in organizations, for example—is that you do your power-balancing in the beginning of the process. Let’s sort of walk through a typical process: You come into a community, you meet with the leadership in the community, then you meet with the so-called establishment side, the local officials, the business people, and the first thing they say to you is, “So who have you met with on the community side?” and so you say, “Well, I’ve met with so and so.” They say, “Ah. A, B, and C is fine, but D and E … those guys or those people—known troublemakers, can’t have them involved in the process.” So right from the very beginning, there’s an attempt, even before you’ve gotten into the formal sessions, to discredit people who, in fact, could be the people who could redress the balance of power in a setting, because they know they don’t want those people there. They don’t want the balance of power. So I think the job of the conciliator or the intervener, just to think of a more neutral term, speaking of neutrality, is to convince the powers-thatbe that if they really want this to be a successful outcome, without defining what success is at this point—because you don’t want to do that—then they need to be here. “You need to allow us to do our work, to make sure that the discussions stay on an even keel. We can’t promise you that there won’t be some explosions from time to time, but you know, you’re going to have to be prepared to deal with some of this if it happens.” So, there is that aspect of it, right from the very beginning. And then, running throughout most interventions, you could say that at the beginning, but there would be these kinds of recidivist fall-backs to the same kind of attempt to slowly disempower people that they didn’t want to be at the table. Either in this particular forum, or others. Something that we don’t give enough credit to in general is that parties in disputes or conflicts are pretty sophisticated. We think they look

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only at these particular issues, but in many cases, people in communities are thinking about, “What are the implications of this as an outcome for future relationships?” And read into that, “future power relationships.” So if they’re successful in this issue, we know that coming up next year there’ll be a bond issue about such-and-such. So they’re looking way down the line, in some cases much further than the mediator is. They’re looking at externalities that the mediator is not even seeing. So I think that the mediator then has to be able to constantly work to be able to do that. There are several techniques that the mediator, or the intervener, has with which to empower the low-power party. The very fact that parties were being brought to the table, metaphorically and literally, is in fact a kind of equalizing of the power. Jim Laue had an expression, as a tap-dance around this issue of advocacy, by saying that he was “an advocate for the process,” remember that? Well, if you strip away the veneer, you see what he’s really saying. He’s an advocate for social change. If the process is going to bring about social change, then there’s the connection … Question: How did this play with the White communities? Did it generally work? Answer: It really depended. Then again, in the social science field there’s a tendency to sort of demonize White communities. You know, “They’re all one thing or the other.” Well, the truth of the matter is that so-called White communities are fairly diverse in and of themselves. So the fact that you have a White leadership in a community, probably Republican, is supposed to mean, in the popular conception, that these are people who adhere to all the kinds of things that are an anathema to your perspective. You know, they’re right-wing people, they’re conservatives, they’re against affirmative action, so you just name a litany of things and that’s where they are. Well, if you got into these communities, what you began to discover was that when people live their lives in these communities, they articulate a different kind of perspective. It becomes a matter of, “We have to get through this particular situation.” So in some instances, you find some White leadership adhering to that kind of popular line, but you also find Whites who say, “You know, we know this change is coming. It’s going to be inevitable; we have to face up to this. We may not like it, but our children are going to grow up in this town, and we need to find a way of dealing with it.” It didn’t necessarily mean that they were ready to give away the proverbial shop; it’s just that these realizations and recognitions were there, and a good intervener would find a way to capitalize on that.

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The North American Mediation Model and the Role of Class Question: Good. Going back to another theoretical mediation model, it’s been asserted that most of what mediators do here in the States is what’s called the North American model. Answer: What is the North American model? I mean, so what version of the North American model …? Question: Well, the model that’s based on Fisher and Ury, Chris Moore— standard interest-based mediation. Answer: Oh, I see, that’s the classic North American model. Well, I have a couple of perspectives about this. First of all, there’s very little research about what model works in what kind of dispute. It’s mainly anecdotal, heuristic kinds of perspectives. Is it true that the so-called North American model does not work in some cultural settings? Yes, it is true. But, what I think people are ignoring in the midst of the popularization of this notion, is the issue of class as an intervening variable. What they assume, is that any group—except for the North American group—for whom the model works, is necessarily some kind of romanticized culture … it’s like, people running around in the forest someplace, anyone who has a traditional culture. But the fact of the matter is, class is a much more dominant intervening variable than traditional culture is. The work we were doing in Rwanda— and just transpose Rwanda into even domestic settings and I’ll do that in a moment—so we were doing a project in Rwanda with Viskias Asetas and I, and Larissa Fast, the doctoral student who was working with us. We had this week-long skills activity that we were doing in Kigali, and the question was: “Should we do some basic mediation training?” We said, “Oh, we can’t do mediation training, because we all know what’s said about doing this kind of training with traditional cultural groups. On the other hand, this could be important, because they’re going to need to know how to do this in some form …” We agonized over this for days, right up until the night before. We had an alternative agenda, if we decided not to do it. We said, “It’s a skill, we think it’s worthwhile learning, and let’s do it,” so we began the session by saying, “We’re going to do some mediation skills training.” We gave a description of mediation, and said, “This may not fit exactly with your culture, but tell us how you resolve disputes in your culture,” and got some information about that. We looked for parallels, there weren’t any, and so we said, “Here’s what the mediation process is like.” We did a presentation on the mediation process, and then we did

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some simulations and some role-plays. Well, they got it. The reason why they got it is because the Rwandan leaders were all middle-class people— college-educated, middle-class people. Could we have done this back in the bushes? Absolutely not. So one has to look at class as a much more dominant variable than traditional culture. I have a good story about that here in the United States. It happened in the mid-’70s at the height of the school desegregation policies— when the federal courts were issuing school desegregation orders—in Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta was being looked at and there was an order for the Atlanta schools to desegregate. Now, the history of relationships between Blacks and Whites in Atlanta was such that the Atlanta NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] was incredibly sophisticated, probably the most sophisticated branch of the NAACP in the country. At that time, Atlanta had more Black middle-class people—possibly with the exception of Detroit—than anywhere else in the country. The Atlanta NAACP decided that bussing should not be the defining issue in the negotiations. First of all, in most bussing situations, it was supposed to be two-way bussing, but it was really one-way. So it meant that Black schools were the ones being primarily closed, so that Black kids were being bussed at all kinds of hours of the morning to White schools, only to be re-tracked once they got to those schools. What the NAACP recognized was that in the Black communities not only was there fairly decent education going on—they may have been underresourced, but they were doing well with what they had—but there were some powerful icons that had been built up in those communities by those schools. Somebody’s father and grandfather had gone to those schools, had been valedictorians in those schools, had run track, and so the sense of identity that was taken for granted in White communities was under threat of being destroyed in these Black communities. So the Atlanta NAACP decided that bussing wasn’t the issue—the more important thing for them was superintendents, school principals, and resources. “And if you give us that, we’ll educate our own children, thank you very much.” The national NAACP got wind of this, and threatened to take away the charter of the Atlanta NAACP, until they began to think about it. Do you really take away the charter of the Atlanta NAACP? I don’t think you really do that. It was an interesting juxtaposition of conflict resolution values and approaches that we used—and the Atlanta NAACP had already gotten to a point where they were looking at this much more from an interest-based perspective. I mean there were values there, but by now they were quite prepared to deal with this on an interestbased kind of mediation. So I think we, in the field, need to look at that a lot more carefully.

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Question: In terms of what model you use, you said that class really matters … Answer: Yeah, well I think that class matters from the standpoint of conceptualization of process. It may mean that you have to use some kind of a hybrid in a sense. Another case was a prison mediation I did many years ago in Monroe prison, which was, and still is, a medium-security prison right outside of Seattle. Conflict was over minority inmates feeling that they weren’t getting their fair share of resources in comparison to White inmates who had done the same crime, and were serving the same kind of sentences. There were a couple of riots there. So, my recognition was that we were dealing with a very sophisticated warden—White warden—and his staff, who had been to the table in various kinds of fora and were used to the patterns of negotiation. And an inmate community, mainly inmates of color, who had not had that experience. So what I did was, I said to him, “We can’t go into mediation with this kind of imbalance. Just my few questions and meeting with the inmates’ side tells me that they know very little about negotiations, and I think if you’re really interested in this being successful, you’ll let me do at least a day of negotiations skills training with them first,” which is what I did. So one way that you can do this is to create a distinction in the process at the beginning, by being very transparent on what needs to be done, and with the White side say, “Look, if you’re concerned that I’m going to be involved in some sort of sedition-like sort of behavior, or that I’m going to be instructing them in terms of what to do, that’ll become clear enough in the actual process, and you can always end it if you don’t care for it.” So that’s one way of dealing with it, to recognize the disparities and address them up-front, which is what I would prefer to do, rather than to simply go into it, then figure out once you’re into it how you’re going to redress the balance.

Transformative Mediation and Problem-Solving Mediation Question: I’m curious about how do you weigh in on the debate over transformative mediation versus problem-solving mediation? Answer: Oh, well you know the brouhaha that went around about that. You know, first of all let me say this for Baruch and for Joe [Baruch Bush and Joseph P. Foger, authors of The Promise of Mediation], that what I thought they really did was to take a huge risk and speak to the kind of icons of power in the field in ways that they needed to be spoken to. To say that there is more to this business than simply just getting an agreement. Now, the problems I

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have with the book: For example, without getting into labeling—some people have described their approach as being elitist—and I’ve also done so. Well, that might be too harsh a term. I don’t think of Baruch or Bob as being elitist at all. I know the work that Baruch does in Brooklyn, and he’s not an elitist. But I do fault them in a sense that they criticize what they call the “problem-solving approach.” I wish they would stop using that term, but—for want of a better phrase right now, they talk about their concerns with the problem-solving process and then they raise the Rodney King–Los Angeles riots of ’91–’92 as an example of where the problem-solving process didn’t work. They don’t tell us, though, how their approach of empowerment and recognition would work any better. I fault the book in that sense. In that same vein, my concern is that they lead one to believe—and if you speak to them conversationally they don’t say this or necessarily support this—but the book leads you to believe that empowerment and recognition are paramount in getting an agreement. Well, try telling that to underprivileged, disempowered groups of people. Minorities, and women that, you know, all you need to have happen from this is that your boss, or the powers-that-be say, “I feel your pain, and boy, I’m glad this process has empowered you to speak to this issue! In the meanwhile we aren’t going to change a damn thing.” Big problem for me. Now, unfortunately, what happens is that people immediately look to the demographics of the writers and say, “Well, what to do you expect from two White men?” I think that’s a little unfair in that sense, because I don’t know them that way personally, but that’s how it sounds. Now, if you talk to them, they don’t really feel that way when you actually talk to them, but it comes out that way in the book. Question: I heard you implying that you do a transformative kind of thing at the beginning—where you’re working with the values, and then you transition into an interest-based process. In the book, it says you can’t have both. Answer: I disagree. I mean, ultimately, you have to deal with the presenting issue. So what’s the point—how are value-based needs expressed, and what are they expressed about? They’re expressed about the fact that you are disenfranchised, you are disempowered … well, how? Because you can’t get into the schools, because you can’t get employment, because of the whole nature of the structural disempowerment of our society—but what does that really mean? It has to be articulated in real terms. Well, the moment you do that, at some point you’re going to have to say, “Okay, now how are we actually going to do the changes?” The moment you do that, you’re involved in an interest-based mediation. Mara Schoeny, who’s a doctoral student here, and I are writing an article for Negotiation Journal.3 What Mara and I are doing, is that we’re making

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an argument that there’s been too much “baby with the bath water” in this field. There is this kind of social justice, sticking-your-nose-up-in-the-air concern about people who do interests-based forms of intervention, which is considered a kind of maintenance of the status quo. The people who do that kind of work say that the “starry-eyed, peacekeeping people”—with visions of sticking dandelions in gun barrels—are off in some sort of outer-space unreality. We argue that there’s been a miscommunication, and that both are needed in some form or fashion. So it’ll be interesting to get your response to that article when it comes out.

Conflict Assessment Question: Once you got in [to a group in conflict as part of a CRS intervention], how did you conduct your assessment? Answer: Well, several ways. There are two types of assessments. The first level of assessment should be deciding whether you’re even going to intervene. And that’s mainly a content-analysis kind of approach; you know, you’re doing some reading of articles, reading papers, trying to see if you can get a sense of the issues. “Is this amenable to a CRS intervention?” At one point, CRS had a fairly sophisticated—for want of a better term—crisisresponse analysis mechanism that ranked disputes and conflicts on levels of intensity. That was supposed to act as a guide for your intervention, but I think if a CRS person wanted to get involved in something, he/she would manipulate the data so that it would meet the appropriate level of intensity. But … Question: What were the criteria? Answer: I don’t remember … one of them would be, “Is there violence taking place?” for example. “Are more militant groups in the community involved?” “Is there at least a preliminary assessment that some level of damage has happened?” A lot of the intervention mechanisms were sort of built around a crisis-response situation. One of the problems with that mechanism was that it did not retune itself to capture measurements for the more sophisticated kinds of disputes and conflicts, so that was discarded fairly quickly as I recall. So you would do an initial assessment, and then you would determine— based upon the level of conflict—the accessibility of it. Some determination was based upon an economic scale (were there enough resources to get involved?). If the conflict was a thousand miles from the regional office, did it make sense to actually get involved in that particular issue when you could do something else?

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So you do that level of assessment, and then the second level of assessment would be on-site. On-site assessment was tantamount to intervention. It’s pretty difficult to go into a town to do an on-site assessment and then not get involved, so it’s tantamount to the intervention. So over time, on-site assessments really became assessments to determine what you would do, not whether or not you would do it. And then there would be the intervention. Of course, the typical CRS method would be to decide who to interview, and then who to interview first, and then explore whether or not the sides were amenable to any kind of a process for coming together for a way of negotiating out their issues. Sometimes you wouldn’t use the term “negotiation”; you might call it “talk,” or whatever. Question: So when you were making that initial telephone assessment as to whether CRS should get involved, was one of your criteria whether or not you thought they’d be amenable to talks, or was that something that was left for later? Answer: Well, you’d get some of that. If you got into a conversation with people on the phone, you might ask, “Is this something that you think you’d like to get resolved? What do you see happening? What do you want to do with this?” You may not ask them about whether or not they want to get it resolved; you might ask, “What do you see as an outcome? What would you like to see happen in this particular situation?” Depending upon what they would say, that would give you some clues as to their willingness to sit down and talk. Question: And if you had the feeling that they probably wouldn’t, would that be a reason for you not to get involved? Answer: Not necessarily. It certainly would make your job a lot harder, but what CRS would do is that they would change the nature of the intervention. So if the intervention was initially thought of as being a conciliation or a mediation that would bring both sides together, and one side or the other (particularly the establishment side) decided that they didn’t want that to happen, you could still go in, but you wouldn’t be doing that; you’d be doing something else. Maybe trying to reduce the level of violence, or doing some kind of evaluative work with the minority … it tended to get CRS people in trouble when they did that, because the other side always knew when you were in town, and you’d have to sort of answer to the question: “I thought we told you we weren’t interested.” “Yeah, but I’m here doing something else.” And you don’t want to push it to the point where you’re saying, “I’m the federal government, and I can go anywhere I want.” You don’t want to do that.

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Question: So once you got on-site, you did your assessment. How did you establish what your plan was going to be? Answer: Well, I don’t know. No CRS person is a tabula rasa. You only have kind of an imprint, and part of that comes from having done a number of cases like this in the past. Whatever it is that you’re going to do, you’ve probably done, unless you’re a complete novice. You’ve done something like that in the past, and you already have in your mind—you’ve got a kind of a tableau. And then the question is, you want to see, “Well, does this fit?” If it fits, you might decide to simply use it. If it doesn’t fit, then the question is: “Something else?” And so there’s this degree of interpretation and categorization that you had to sort of try to do. “How can I then change what I do so that it meets this particular need?” This is a process—and I should know—that can be expanded over some time, and it never stops. So an assessment is ongoing. Sometimes, in a kind of showman-like practice in the moment, you kind of have to make those adjustments right in the middle of a situation. Everybody has to do that; I don’t think that’s different from what anybody else does. Question: How did you decide when it was appropriate for the parties to get together and when not? Answer: Again, I think it would depend upon the conflict. For example, in a particularly violent conflict, where there’s a riot—first things first. And again, even this is somewhat controversial from a social theory standpoint—there’s the notion that conflict intervention is designed to simply maintain the status quo and cool people out. So riot prevention cools people out, and removes the justification of anger that can really give grit to the complaints that people have. On the other hand, people are dying. So, the people who are espousing that belief are not the mothers, locked cell-like in their apartments, who can’t go out at night to get milk for their babies because people will be shooting machine guns in the area. You’re not responsible for that, but somebody has to be. You’re not always pulling people together; you’re simply doing a very hands-on conciliation approach to violence prevention. Then, before it gets to the point where people can fairly quickly become reconciled to the fact that we’ve stopped the violence, and then it’s back to business as usual, we say, “Now that we’ve got your attention, and we have some moments of respite here, are you willing to sit down and talk?” And then that’s the time to begin the process of pulling people together. Question: What about short of violence, though? If there was a demonstration? Answer: Well, I think why you were there was to try to make sure that the demonstration was peaceful. It could still be loud—the question would be

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balancing out what the demonstrators needed to do to present a forceful portrait of the issue they were dealing with against the city’s wishes to end the demonstration entirely. And that would oftentimes become a conciliation point before you got into the actual agenda. So, the city would say, “This demonstration has got to end. If it doesn’t end, we’re going to enforce a temporary restraining order [TRO],” which means calling the police in and the possibility of violence. And so you’d have to negotiate that. “Okay, we won’t enforce the TRO, but we don’t want the demonstrators blocking the entrance to whatever-the-building.” “Well, they are blocking the entrance.” That was just a matter of some skill, of how to work with both sides to allow for the symbolic aspect of the demonstration to go forward, without compromising the protest movement—not only what they were doing, but the implications for negotiations later on. Question: How did you diminish tension between very hostile parties? Answer: I don’t know. I guess there were a number of different techniques. One way would be to actually bring people into a forum where they could hear what the other person was saying, absent of the kind of rhetorical flourishes that would oftentimes take place in the other forum approach—the whole way you build trust …

Impasse Question: What do you do when you get to an impasse? Answer: I have a technique I use oftentimes in that kind of setting—I don’t know that everyone can do that, but this is what I like to do: I just stop in the middle of a situation, and I say, “Stop. What’s going on here? What’s going on?” “Well, what is going on? We’re not talking to each other.” So parties begin to stop and reflect. You get them to actually identify what’s happening and why it’s happening. That’s one way that I break an impasse. Obviously, forums and caucuses are another way to correcting an impasse—getting people away from the table, metaphorically speaking. Then you can really beat them up, in the caucus, in an evaluative way, that you wouldn’t dare do at the table. Question: Would you try to push them in a direction that looks to you like it would be profitable to move? Answer: I think you don’t worry about that, because you don’t know what’s profitable for them, always. You may have some ideas about that, but the

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most that I’m comfortable doing, usually, is to say, “Have you thought about these issues?” I’m strongly tempted sometimes to say, “Hey, I live on this planet too. I’ve been around for a whole lot of years, and I think I know.” But you never really know, and you take a risk when you tell someone with some degree of evaluative certitude, “You need to be doing this.” That’s not a good idea. So, if I can simply say, “Gee, have you thought about this? What would this look like? If you do this, what are the consequences of this?” Question: Would you say, “I think I heard some consensus around x”? Answer: Yeah.

About Building Trust Question: Tell me a little bit about how you go about building trust, especially with the White community. Answer: Well, one way that it happens is that many of the cities in which CRS intervenes—or has interventions—are repeats. So, you know, [CRS employee] Silke has probably been into wherever—Aurora, let’s say—thousands of times over the last fifteen years that she’s been in Denver. After a while, people get to know you, and so trust gets built up over what you did in the past. People trust you from that standpoint, and that’s one way that it happens. Another way it happens is to go in and suggest to the establishment, gee whiz, Police Chief Jones, why don’t you call Chief Johnson in so-and-so city. You’re all members of the Association of Chiefs of Police. Give him a call and talk to him about what we did.” Oftentimes, that would even happen without your having to suggest that. So you make your phone calls, that you’re going to intervene, so there’s usually a lapse time of a day or two. By the time you get there, that police chief may have already checked you out …

Mistakes and Humility Question: Any other lessons that you learned from your experiences that you think are valuable, either to you now, or to other people? Answer: There’s one that I convey to students all that time, and that is, “You will make mistakes.” The question is not whether or not you make a mistake, it’s can you recover from it, because you are going to make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes in this business. You’re dealing with human nature and uncontrollables. So, that’s one that I drew from my

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CRS experience. The other is a kind of faith in human nature—that people ultimately come more out of a Lockeian perspective then a Hobbesian one. I believe that. You have to find ways of tapping into that. Some of the experiences that some of us had at CRS were just undeniably transformative, transformative because they brought you into a context of people that most people in our society never encounter. Question: So when you say transformative, for you or for the parties? Answer: Well sometimes it was for both, but I’m speaking now primarily about myself. The ability to be in a community with a colleague—we speak of trust, but we didn’t speak about trust between interveners themselves. There is no time in situations like that to doubt whether or not you trust the person you are intervening with, in those situations. It was just tremendous. But I’ve been blessed. I have been very, very fortunate, in a forty-year career, to have had those kinds of jobs. I mean, working with street gangs there yielded these kinds of transformative moments, as well as with the community corporation. So I think [for myself, in] CRS more so because I was there the longest. I was in CRS for 20 years. Question: Is it something about the nature of that work that makes it more transformative than other kinds of mediation? Answer: I think so, because it’s not gilded—if you want to use the model that we were discussing earlier when we first began this conversation. It’s not your kind of relatively dry, interests-based issues. You’re dealing with really deeply rooted values and human needs, and it’s incredibly humbling. Another thing that’s not a skill, but a virtue, I think a Civil Rights mediator needs to have humility. The fact that people have allowed you into their lives. I’m always amazed by that. Even in the work that I do now, that isn’t it amazing that someone, some group of people, have let us come into their lives to leave our fingerprints on what they’re doing in their lives. As I’ve oftentimes said, it’s sort of like putting your finger into a swiftly moving stream, because once you put your finger in that stream it will never flow quite the same way again. That’s the kind of feeling that gets you up in the morning, all these years, to do that kind of work. It’s terrific. Question: Anything else you want to add? Answer: No. I’m exhausted! I’m surprised at how there’s still that lingering emotionalism about CRS, because I don’t think about the agency in a very specific kind of way much, in recent years. But I forget how foundational that experience was for me.

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Note 1 Julian Portilla, interviewer. He is Program Director, Masters in Mediation and Applied Conflict Studies, Woodbury Institute of Champlain College in Burlington, VT. The full text of interview is posted on BeyondIntractability. org: The Beyond Intractability Knowledge Base Project (eds) Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/wallace_warfield/ Accessed 15 November, 2010. 2 That article is Chapter 4 of this book. 3 The article is Chapter 7 in this book.

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1 What We Need to Know Factors of Race, Culture, and Ethnicity in Dispute Resolution Wallace Warfield, 1990

Introduction

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ace, culture, and ethnicity have been a part of the fabric of disputes and conflict since humankind took on distinctive societal groupings. In classical history, one need only reflect on the wars between Sparta and Athens as an example of how the interests and values of different cultures drive conflict. In more recent times, the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the struggle for social and political justice in South Africa bear testimony to how one culture, drawing heavily from a shaping racial history, conflicts with a dominant, controlling culture. Breakaway movements for independence in the Soviet Union provide a graphic illustration of how the values of culture and ethnicity can conflict with the manipulative interests of politics and power.

Status in the Dispute Resolution Field1 Clearly, research and practice in matters pertaining to race, culture, and ethnicity as factors in disputing are still evolving. The literature on race and

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culture is deep and extensive and the study of disputing and dispute resolution has grown considerably in the last ten years. It has only been fairly recently, however, that researchers and academicians have turned their attention to the relationship between the two. Although dispute resolution practitioners (such as the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service) have responded to racial and intercultural disputes for more than twenty years, their work has been largely overlooked. As a result, a rich, ethnographic mine has gone unexplored. Racial and ethnic conflict in the United States has often come about as a result of major shifts in demographic patterns generated by internal migration from one part of the country to another, or immigration into the United States. Thus, immigration waves from Ireland and Northern Europe between 1840 and 1880, and Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the century and into the early 1900s, brought with it a collision of cultures of working-class Irish, Italians, Jews, and people of a varied Eastern European mix. These movements were accompanied by episodic conflict, mainly in urban areas. After the Civil War, emancipated Blacks moved in large numbers from the rural South to the urban North and Midwest, engendering virulent discrimination and violent conflict. Similarly, between 1975 and 1986, nearly 700,000 Southeast Asians emigrated to the United States augmented by sizeable numbers of Koreans. Here, too, conflict has occurred as newly arrived immigrants have clashed with indigenous African American and Hispanic minorities around distributive services and perceptions of economic encroachment. This amalgam of cultures coexists within a framework of interactions guided by each culture’s epistemology and paradigms.

Continuum of Racial/Intercultural Responses Studies have revealed that when different racial or cultural groups interact, the dominant group displays a predictable set of responses to the minority group (Delgado et al. 1985). These responses are: (1) denial— of prejudicial beliefs, or attributing these beliefs to other factors; (2) rationalization—by devaluing the minority member, or group, in question, thereby making acceptable ordinarily unacceptable forms of behavior and attitudes; (3) situational specificity—changing the positive/negative valuations of a culture depending on certain circumstances; (4) integration—the dominant culture member, or group, has fully integrated the perceptions and beliefs about the minority culture into the most positive values of

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both cultures, or at least relegated negative perceptions, beliefs, and myths to a level that will not interfere with ongoing transactions with that minority culture. It would be easy to assume that these responses only occurred within the classic context of White resistance to African Americans, Hispanics, and other so-called Third World minority cultures. (As an example of denial, local White authorities responding to complaints about attacks by gangs of White youth on African Americans by describing it as “youthful exuberance.”) Reflecting on racial and intercultural conflict in the United States for almost a century, it would appear that some of the above responses are not sui generis to one type of dominant-minority intercultural conflict, but are most likely transcultural. For example, rationalization was a response used by the Irish to devalue newly arrived Southern Europeans who began to compete for jobs in the industrial northern cities of the US. Denial may have functioned as a lower level response, since it is doubtful that the American Creed (Delgado et al. 1985) was fully formed at that time. It would also appear that one minority culture can function at the levels of denial, rationalization, and situational specificity towards another minority culture. This would appear to be most visible when the minority culture with the greater historical claim feels that its status on the Maslow Hierarchy is threatened by the incoming minority culture. For example, some inner-city African Americans and Hispanics will disparage and attack Southeast Asian, Korean, and Arab immigrant merchants in their communities while proclaiming their kinship with all Third World peoples. The response that is most intriguing and requires further study is situational specificity. A proposition simply stated is that a dominant culture will hold positive or ambivalent values of a minority culture and can control conflictual behavior so long as that minority culture does not threaten the dominant group’s status. This can be described as a low demand response. As the minority culture becomes more intrusive in the span of control of the dominant culture, positive values shift to negative ones and conflictual behavior becomes more open. This can be described as a high demand response. Within the context of community disputes, the Laue/Cormick continuum (Laue and Cormick 1978), which describes a range of escalating interactions (cooperation—competition—conflict— crisis), provides an interesting illustration of this phenomenon. This is evident in the still-raging debate over the use of quotas to redress past wrongs directed at racial and ethnic minorities in the US. Public and private sector organizations can take on the same characterizations when disputed issues are structural in nature.

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What We Need to Know Third-party dispute resolvers need to be aware of what response, or combination of intercultural responses, are occurring if true conflict resolution is to take place. In some situations, a consensual process that results in merely behavioral change runs the risk that dichotomous values will be retained only to surface again at some later point. Further studies need to be undertaken to determine the causal relationships (if any) between the process that groups use to respond to conflict and sources of conflict (Moore 1984). If conflict can emerge from issues of interests, data, relationships, values, and structure, how does culture play a role in interpreting these sources and shape negotiating behavior? What kinds of dispute resolution processes can bring about true integration in intercultural disputes where one culture is more dominant than another? Is this the responsibility of the dispute resolution specialist?

Conceptions and Misconceptions of Culture and Cultural Conflict Motivated by the increased internationalism of business and flurry of Track II diplomacy, mavens of the new cultural diversity (a euphemism for that discomforting word “integration”) have developed quick and dirty axioms designed to guide the unwary traveler through the thicket of cultural complexity (Thayer and Weiss 1987; Harris and Moran 1987). Even more thoughtful and scholarly works (Nichols 1973; Hall 1976, 1983) tempt the casual intervener into prescriptive dos and don’ts. These usually take the form of anecdotal references to culture-specific behavior that will be displayed in a given situation. (How disconcerting to work with Hispanic and Haitian negotiators, who, in fact, do look you in the eye!) These thin oversimplifications ignore variables such as location (the setting of the dispute), source and type of dispute (what is the nature of the dispute), generational transition (younger v. older members of a culture), length of exposure to the dominant culture (newer immigrants v. older immigrants), and cross-ethnic distinctions (cultural variances within an ethnic group). Culture is much more the thinking, feeling, being fabric of a distinctive people than it is any taxonomy of behaviors or customs (Avruck and Black 1991), although these are components of culture. For interveners engaged in mediation, or a joint problem-solving process, such generalizations create dangerous assumptions about a disputing culture’s interests, values, and

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sense of satisfaction from a resolution. The cultural mindset of the intervener is a factor as well. Third-party interveners are not acultural deus ex machina, coolly appraising the needs and interests of parties in a dispute. They bring their own cultural baggage into a dispute, changing, for better or worse, the process and its outcome (Gulliver 1979; Warfield 1985). The notion of culture-as-consciousness (Avruck and Black 1991) takes the view that a particular culture has an epistemology drawn from spiritual and secular experiences that form that culture’s myths, beliefs, values, and realities of the world. Looking at culture from this perspective, one sees that culture is not a static thing, but rather an evolving, changing dynamic.

What We Need to Know How do the variables mentioned above influence how a culture conceptualizes a dispute, or conflict, styles of negotiation, and expectation of outcomes? If cultures have epistemologies, can it be said that these epistemologies have logic forms from which models can be constructed? How do potential third-party interveners learn about culture, and how do they assimilate their understanding into practice?

Cultural Responses to Conflict In order to have clearer understanding and dialogue about culture and conflict, it is important to draw distinctions between cross-cultural, transcultural, and intercultural (Avruck and Black 1991) forms of interaction. By cross-cultural is meant events or factors that take place within a given culture’s experience (the author finds this term confusing and wonders if intracultural might not be better). By transcultural is meant events or factors that echo uniformly across more than one culture (Gulliver 1988). Intercultural refers to events and factors that take place between cultures. Looking at culture from this vantage point, it can be said that a member of a particular cultural group interacts in more than one cultural dimension. Optimally, this person learns the rules of each cultural dimension and adapts her/his behavior in ways to minimize misunderstanding and conflict. Thus, in international negotiations, Eurocentric norms of behavior guide interactions between representatives of disputing governments in fora such as the UN, or the International Court of Justice at The Hague. This may work well for some interest-based disputes, but this bow to conformity can break down where disputes and conflict are

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based more on values or human needs (Avruck and Black 1990; Burton 1988). The current Persian Gulf and larger Middle East conflicts, ethnically oriented conflict in the Horn of Africa, the long-running Basque conflict in Northern Spain, and the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland provide examples of conflicts which are deeply embedded in culture-specific logic forms. Elaborating upon previously developed theories of conflict and conflict resolution that stress the importance of getting beyond initial bargaining positions (Fisher and Ury 1981), Laue (1986) and Avruck and Black (1990) go a step further and tell us that in some disputes it may be necessary to go beyond even commonly understood interests for resolution. From this theoretical niche, conflict takes on a layered perspective, much like an archaeological dig. At the top, where it is most visible, is the bargaining position which can be described as political and strategic. Below that are interests, which are what parties really want and are necessary to understand for most disputes to be successfully resolved. Negotiators can make rational choices in these two areas as they select between options individually or collaboratively developed, or encouraged by a third-party neutral. But in some issues, particularly those that are racial, ethnic, or cultural in nature, one has to dig deeper, below interests to values to understand motivations for the dispute. In fact, opposing actions taking place at this level are no longer disputes but conflicts and arguably nonrational. Finally, at the deepest level, lie human needs, where the most intractable conflict takes place. Human needs are biogenetic and therefore do not lend themselves to rational decision-making. The deeper one has to dig to understand the motivating factors, the more difficult the dispute will be to resolve. This theory may help to explain the contentiousness of disputes that are intercultural in nature. If different cultural groups reflect different paradigms, this could be a factor in how a member from a particular culture understands a dispute. Applying this to African Americans, the paradigm is often shaped by shared or historically identified experiences with racism. The particulars of the dispute may not be racial on its face, nonetheless, an African American disputant may view it that way because of the framing paradigm. In a workplace dispute where the supervisor is a member of the dominant White culture, he/she might see a grievance filed by an African American as simply one of competing interests that can be resolved through some form of rational choice bargaining. The African American might see the issue as the supervisor being insensitive to the values that shape the African American experience. It will be extremely difficult under these circumstances to find a common ground for resolution. Although this paper does not deal specifically with gender as a cultural manifestation, the layered theory of conflict would apply here as well. If relationship factors lie in the values area of conflict, women, who are more

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relationship oriented and are forced to frame their dispute through the male norm of positional bargaining, may undergo a great deal of stress (Riger 1990). Conversely, men, who are more oriented towards competitive forms of disputing, may have great difficulty getting in touch with underlying relationship factors driving the dispute. Suppression in the former and denial in the latter may explain the contentiousness in some disputes that involve males and females as opposing parties.

What We Need to Know If basic human needs (food, shelter, security, identity, self-expression) are transcultural, how does culture influence their expression in conflict? How does the dispute resolver “see” values and human needs in a conflict situation and what are the implications for preparation for the intervention and dispute resolution processes? In conflictual issues of race and ethnicity, are Whites responding to the subject issue or to their perceptions of the cultural paradigm?

Cultural Responses to Informal Dispute Resolution There is no need to detail for the readers of this paper the growing acceptance of informal dispute resolution procedures to resolve a wide range of disputes. What is less clear is how uniformly these processes have been embraced by minority racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Some studies (e.g. Merry and Silbey 1984) suggest that minorities or low-income people (in this case, working-class Portuguese immigrants) display a decided reluctance to participate in informal procedures as an option to adjudicated settlement. The author’s case practice and feedback from other practitioners indicate that willingness by some minority groups to participate in so-called informal dispute resolution procedures can vary depending upon the group’s assimilation within the dominant host culture, experience in using consensual dispute resolution, the source of the dispute, and the common sense realities for the group. Negotiators bring values to a dispute which can be described as claiming values and creating values (Lax and Sebenius 1986). Claiming values are closely linked to the familiar and traditional form of adversarial bargaining which take on the characteristics of zero-sum formulations. Creating values

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are the product of a more collaborative and consensual joint problem-solving process. The latter reflects the current belief among dispute resolution professionals that this is the desired form of negotiating. For African Americans, slavery provided little or no rewarding experience with informal negotiations since they had no control over the negotiating agenda. Every significant social advancement for African Americans from Emancipation to the 1964 Civil Rights Act has come about as a result of formal adjudicatory or legislative processes. The cultural logic form provides little data that suggests gains can be derived from the use of informal processes. This creates a dilemma for an African American negotiating group that has assimilated into the dominant culture. Groups such as the NAACP and the Urban League on the local level have gained experience and feedback with informal negotiations that alters the cultural logic form. Occasionally, this will put them at odds with the national parent body. Consider the dispute a number of years ago that pitted the Atlanta NAACP against the local school administration over the issue of furthering school desegregation. The Atlanta NAACP, contrary to the well-established legal device of bussing as a primary tool to achieve desegregation, negotiated to have more African American principals and district superintendents in African American school districts— even if this left those districts ostensibly more segregated. This creating values approach put them in opposition to the national body which, as a stakeholder and “shadow” negotiator, had a strong political, organizational, and historical commitment to a claiming value position. The national NAACP feared that hard-fought legal battles, that established precedent, would be unraveled by the negotiating stance of the Atlanta chapter. The Atlanta chapter found themselves in an uncomfortable horizontal bargaining (with school officials) and vertical bargaining position (with the national organization). The idea that a local advocate group will find itself at variance with the policies of a national organization that it is affiliated with is not necessarily unique. The point being made here is that a local minority organization, breaking away from the cultural epistemology of the national body, represents a paradigm shift that has broad implications for understanding the adaptability of culture and its relationship to disputing and dispute resolution. Although minorities have not been as active as Whites in the comparatively new area of environmental disputes, there is a suspicion that the environmental movement is geared primarily to the needs and interests of upper middle-class White organizations (Warfield 1989). It is yet to be seen if minority organizations will gravitate towards consensual approaches such as reg neg2 and facilitated dialogues for redress of grievances in this arena of disputing. For new immigrants, the cultural common sense does not

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support the notion that mere citizens of a locale can negotiate consensually or otherwise with public policy authorities. Many immigrant cultures come from countries with authoritarian forms of government where concepts of neutrality are unheard of and may not even be in the language. Again, gender as culture may possibly influence receptivity toward informal dispute resolution processes, but in the opposite direction. For example, the interpretation in some policies of what constitutes sexual harassment may not reflect women’s viewpoint. The procedures that are designed to resolve disputes in some policies may be uncomfortable for women because they are not compatible with the way women view conflict resolution (Riger 1990). Looking at this from a rights and standards perspective, the courts employ what is called the reasonable person rule— asking whether a reasonable person would be offended by the conduct in question. The problem in applying this standard is that what is reasonable for a man might be quite different from that of a woman. And if most judges are men … What Riger’s preliminary studies suggest is that women may be more comfortable with informal dispute resolution procedures that seek to end the offending behavior than formal ones that seek substantive, win/lose solutions in a rights and standards process.

What We Need to Know What is the process by which groups within a minority culture who have assimilated into the dominant culture learn dispute resolution processes and how is this communicated intraculturally? Is there a correlation between a minority culture’s assimilation and a shift from value-based disputing to interest-based disputing? Are minority cultures more accepting of court annexed dispute resolution programs than those that function independently of the court? Are cultures in transition more inclined than others to rely on unassisted negotiations to resolve disputes rather than to use third-party neutrals?

Conclusion: Where Are the Gaps? The gaps about what we know of the role of race, culture, and ethnicity in disputing and dispute resolution have been largely inferred by the questions posed after each section. In a general sense, we seem still not to know a great deal about culture as a dynamic. Culture itself may be a basic human

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need and therefore prone to the same kind of nonrational responses as the more familiar Maslow typology. If this is true, then a group’s culture must be adaptable, over time, to conflict that threatens that culture’s survival. Response to conflict can take the form of flight, accommodation, avoidance, fighting back, and collaborative problem-solving. It would be interesting to know more about how different racial, cultural, and ethnic groups used these responses and if there are distinct patterns to their use. The large, silent majority of practitioners need to be prodded into talking about and recording more of their experiences in this aspect of disputing. Here the research community could be of assistance by providing the practitioners with simple ethnographic skills so as to better record what is happening in racial, cultural, and ethnic disputes and negotiations. Ultimately, the praxis in both fields would be greatly enhanced by this synthesis.

References Avruck, K., and Black, P. (1990, July). “Ideas of Human Nature in Contemporary Conflict Theory.” Negotiation Journal 6 (3):249–55. —(1991, January). “The Culture Question and Conflict Resolution.” Peace and Change 16:22–45. Burton, J. W. (1988). “Conflict Resolution as a Political System.” Working Paper 1, Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, Fairfax, VA: George Mason University. Delgado, R., et al. (1985). “Fairness and Formality: Minimizing the Risk of Prejudice in Alternative Dispute Resolution.” Wisconsin Law Review 6:1–44. Fisher, R., and Ury, W. (1981). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Gulliver, P. H. (1979). Disputes and Negotiations: A Cross Cultural Perspective. New York: Academic Press. —(1988, July). “Anthropological Contributions to the Study of Negotiations.” Negotiation Journal 4 (3):247–55. Harris, P., and Moran, R. (1987). Managing Cultural Differences. Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing. Kochman, T. (1981). Black and White Styles of Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laue, J. (1986). “Levels of Conflict Content.” Remarks delivered at a conference on Guidelines for Newcomers to Track II, Washington, DC, December 1986. Laue, J., and Cormick, J. (1978). The Ethics of Intervention in Community Disputes. Washington, DC: Halsted Press. See also Warfield, W. (1985), “Triggering Incidents for Racial Conflict: Miami, FL Riots of 1980 and 1982.” Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference of Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution [SPIDR], October 1985. Lax, D. A., and Sebenius, J. K. (1986). The Manager as Negotiator. New York: The Free Press.

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Moore, C. (1984). Interest-Based Bargaining. Boulder, CO: Center for Dispute Resolution. Merry, S. E., and Silbey, S. S. (1984). “What Do Plaintiffs Want? Reexamining the Concepts of Dispute.” Justice System Journal 9:161–78. Riger, S. (1990). Women’s Voice in Dispute Resolution: An Examination of Sexual Harassment Policies and Procedures. A proposal submitted to the Fund for Research in Dispute Resolution, November 1990. Thayer, N., and Weiss, S. (1987). Japan: The Changing Logic of a Former Minor Power, National Negotiating Styles. Washington, DC: Foreign Service Institute. Warfield, W. (1989, October/November). “Siting of Hazardous Waste Becoming the New Civil Rights Battleground.” Guest column. Consensus Magazine:4.

Notes 1 This seems as good a time as any to note the reigning confusion regarding the difference between the words “dispute” and “conflict.” Some feel dispute suggests a somewhat superficial engagement between parties, whereas conflict connotes a more deep-rooted, protracted opposing action played out on a grander stage. This is no small matter for the subject of this paper, but for the sake of order and clarity, I will, wherever possible, use the term dispute to refer to all manner of opposing actions between parties. 2 Negotiated regulations, a process whereby proposed regulations (e.g. from the EPA) are opened up for stakeholders to negotiate with the agency over their final form.

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2 A Culture of Racism? Building Consensus for Racial Harmony in American Cities A Case Model Approach Wallace Warfield, 1996

Introduction: Consensus and Conflict

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acial conflict in America is widespread. No attempt to homogenize American political culture out of an amalgam of egalitarian values can mask its occasionally virulent manifestations. Despite the introduction of large numbers of new immigrant groups in the decades after 1965 (WGBH 1992)1 and the new profiles of intergroup conflict that have emerged, the dominant image of racial conflict in the United States remains the one that takes place between African Americans and Whites.2 For example, the Los Angeles riot of 1992 contained a rich subtext of conflict between Blacks and Koreans, Blacks and Hispanics, and Hispanics and Whites. These examples of the dark side of cultural diversity were obscured by the visceral images of Blacks beating a White truck driver senseless in the street. Thus, what Gadlin calls the culture of racism, “[the] constellation of commonality, conflict, and difference” (1994), is signatured by the persistent and sometimes violent interactions between Blacks and Whites. Racism is not a Black problem or a White problem, but rather an interactive dynamic, woven onto a tapestry of history and events that envelop the two groups.

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This interactive dynamic is not all there is to the relationship between Blacks and Whites. Despite the rather Hobbesian view of race relations, Americans frequently overlook the fact that racial interactions in the United States (mainly with Blacks and Whites) are made up of consensus as well as conflict. Persons who study race relations and those who practice conflict resolution in the wake of its disasters ignore the many and varied ways that interracial consensus is built in America’s changing communities. Consensus does not necessarily mean the kind brought about through negotiations by high-profile political elites.3 Rather, consensus refers to the kinds of agreements reached by ordinary people, wrought out of a daily pattern of coexistence.4 This consensus is not always arrived at through the formal convening of specific groups (although the process referred to later certainly depends on this). Consensus in this article refers more to those small, intimate interactions, invisible to social reporters, that represent the shared values of a civil society. Moreover, not understanding how consensus is arrived at in racially and ethnically diverse communities misses valuable opportunities to apply this knowledge for interventions in racial conflicts. This article uses an informal case model approach to discuss the importance of understanding the role of consensus in the resolution of interracial conflict. As well, the article offers an elaboration on the classic mediation model as a way of enriching the technology of intervention.

Institutional Constraints of the Classic Mediation Model The conflict resolution field,5 having its origins in the work of practitioners, has tended to place a greater emphasis on getting parties to reach specific agreements.6 The social context of the dispute, which might be a contributing factor to its prolongation and resistance, is often of secondary concern (Galanter 1974; Merry 1987). This downsizing of conflict misses opportunities to understand the texture of relationships that contain histories of consensus as well as conflict. There are several reasons that third parties miss such opportunities. For one, mediation in its several applications has become commercialized, replete with advertisements of success proclaimed in the literature and brochures of various dispute resolution organizations (Fisher and Ury 1981). This creates a market-driven approach to mediation where mediators, sometimes in concert with parties, focus on those aspects of the conflict that will produce the most immediate and measurable outcomes (Munger 1992). Second, understanding the sources of conflict embedded in the texture of relationships is a complex and

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time-consuming task. This can be a costly undertaking where, as in community disputes, public resources are often unavailable. Third, in connection with the first observation, probing the origins of conflict and consensus in a community creates difficulties in measuring what was accomplished. This is unappealing for institutionalized providers who feel they have to establish a track record of success in order to attract more resources. In short, mediation has all too often succumbed to case processing expediency under the pressure from funding sources and bureaucracies to quantify the achievements in an expanding new field.

A Concept of Deep-Rooted Racial/Ethnic Conflict In determining interventions in racial conflicts, particularly those that involve Blacks and Whites, it is essential to understand the connection between the specific event (or series of events) and the embracing social and political context. The concept offered as an analytical frame is really a rather simple theorem called “Two Tap Roots and a Triggering Incident.” The concept’s origins evolved out of the early work of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service,7 and it seeks to convey how subordinate groups see their lives in relationship to larger society. At the level of Tap Root 1, subordinate groups see society as inherently racist. In this level, dominant White society’s inner core values8 are structured to lodge Blacks firmly in a position of subservience (see, e.g., Delgado et al. 1985). Tap Root 2 charges that society’s public and private organizations operate to keep Blacks out of positions and circumstances where they could begin to have control over their own lives (see Chesler 1991; Bobo 1992). The triggering incident is always some climatic event: a firebombing of a Black home that leads to street protests and demonstrations, or a Rodney King incident where the blatant use of excessive force by police leads to the massive civil disturbance that took place in Los Angeles in 1992 and similar ones in Miami in 1980 and 1982 (see Warfield 1985). While the descriptive emphasis is on race rather than class, the Tap Root concept as an analytical approach to conceptualize Black–White relations is essentially Parsonian (Parsons 1954). Like Parsons, the concept seeks to explain a stratified and hierarchical relationship based on power and “a differentiation of attitude systems, of ideologies, and of definitions of the situation to a greater or less degree around the structure of the occupational system and of other components of the instrumental complex” (Parsons 1954: 330–1).

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The Tap Root concept compares favorably to other social theorists’ descriptions of power relationships where dominant groups control not only what gets on the agenda for discussion, but how subordinate groups think about the agenda (Gaventa 1980). During the heyday of the anti-poverty movement in New York City, officials were adept at keeping protest groups focused on competing over the ever-shrinking public grants rather than the policies that were really shaping outcomes. However, dominant political elites can only control the agenda for so long. Eventually, frustrations build up and subordinate groups ventilate their rage in response to the triggering incident. Looking at racial conflict writ large on the American landscape, it is possible to say that such conflict is the result of ascriptive realities functioning within a political culture whose ideology is egalitarian and universalistic.9 In effect, we have two realities in America that exist side by side. There is the one sustained by a culture of racism encoded with belief systems that stereotypes the behavior of both groups (Gadlin 1994). There is also the other reality that brings together individuals and groups across racial lines in an ideology of consensus (Lipset 1985). This article will describe this in more detail when discussing the intervention approaches used in the two case models referred to later. The culture of racism incorporated in the Tap Roots theory implies not merely different rationalities, as when Lipset (1985) discusses Weber and Mannheim’s social tensions constructed around substantive and functional reality, but opposing worldviews that go beyond economic consequences to permeate the very social fabric of American society.10 The Tap Root concept provides a framework for understanding the complexity of racial conflict and therefore provides clues to its resolution.

The Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach to Resolving Racial Conflict The Collaborative Problem-Solving Process (CPSP) is one version of a body of new approaches designed to assist parties in deep-rooted social conflict to reach outcomes that change the nature of their relationships. The CPSP intervenes in a number of community conflicts in the United States dealing with land use and environmental issues, police–community relations, the distribution of public resources, and an array of other public policy issues (Carpenter and Kennedy 1991; Crowfoot and Wondelleck 1990). Interveners also have experimented with collaborative problem-solving approaches in the international arena (see Banks and Mitchell 1990; Saunders and Slim 1994).

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These approaches have in common the knowledge that the origins of deep-rooted social conflicts are interwoven with the histories of relationships between conflicting parties (Canan 1992). These histories inform the worldview and guide the responses to the conflict and its anticipated outcomes. Problem-solving approaches also share a belief that mediation, with its formulaic procedures, does not have sufficient flexibility to resolve this form of conflict (Saunders and Slim 1994; Canan 1992). The CPSP differs from classic mediation in that it places a greater emphasis on analysis as a part of “getting to the table”,11 as well as a way of guiding what takes place at the bargaining table. The analysis is contained within various stages of the CPSP and begins before the interveners ever meet with the conflicting parties.12 This article elaborates on the stages by using as a framework a generalized reference to two social conflict interventions that took place within the last four years. Allegations of police use of excessive force against Black males triggered both interventions.

Intervener Self-Analysis The first stage of analysis is called intervener self-analysis. At some early point, an intervener is contacted, gathers essential background information, makes a tentative decision to intervene, but does not make a full commitment to the parties. In these reflective moments, the intervener (or interveners if it is a team) asks several questions. What do I/we offer parties to this conflict? How do I/we locate myself/ourselves in relation to the issues? What are my/ our beliefs about the values that appear to be driving this conflict? What resources will support the intervention and who will supply them? This is an early stage of role formation and how interveners respond to these questions will say a great deal about the strategies they will use to assist parties in reaching agreements. Their responses are described as mediator contingent behavior.13 As interveners prepare themselves introspectively, these questions frame a critical internal dialogue around what might loosely be described as the myth of mediator neutrality (see, e.g. Forester 1992; Cobb and Rifkin 1991; Warfield 1993). The myth emerges from the shaping paradigm of the field of dispute and conflict resolution that dictates the mediator as a neutral intervener (see Coulson 1984; Singer 1990). The mediator symbolizes a kind of “deus ex machina” unencumbered by the positions, interests, and values that bring parties into the dialogue (Kelman 1972). Cloaked in the garb of neutrality, mediators assume parties come to the table with equal strengths and resources; their responsibility is to simply

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assist parties in reaching an agreement (Carnevale et al. 1989; see also Forester 1992; Cobb and Rifken 1991; Warfield 1993). Of course, as the Carnevale et al. research suggests, there is much going on behind the scenes: pushing, prodding, cajoling, and the like, to get parties to reach an agreement. But this is mere process manipulation, devoid of contextual values that could contaminate the mediator’s neutrality (Coulson 1984; see also Kelman 1972; Moore 1986). While the intervener-as-neutral might be a desirable trait for industrial labor disputes or disputes emerging from the commercial arena, it is unworkable and untenable in deep-rooted social conflict (Burton 1985). Gulliver (1979) argues there is a three-way relationship between parties representing opposing sides and the mediator. In this construct, mediators bring their own cultural baggage to the intervention, influencing not only what takes place in the negotiations, but shaping the outcomes as well. Other commentators take the view that mediators, merely by advocating, cause the mediation process to no longer be neutral since the process itself acts as a power equalizer (see Laue and Cormick 1978). Researchers/practitioners in the field of conflict analysis and resolution chip away at the myth of neutrality by suggesting there are role and process characteristics inherent in third-party interventions that influence outcomes. With respect to racial conflict, I would go farther and argue that all of us, parties and would-be interveners alike, are caught up in the American context of the culture of racism. As I carry out the pre-intervention internal dialogue, I ponder the values that I will bring to the resolution of the conflict. Not just a case of getting agreements for agreements’ sake, but how will my intervention expedite the transformation of relationships? As an African American male contemplating an intervention in a racial conflict between subordinate and dominant groups in American society, particularly if it is one between Blacks and Whites, I must ask myself, “How do I understand my Blackness in relationship to values expressed and unexpressed, at the tap root levels?” For it is here that I make the critical determination that my intervention will help or hinder the progress of racial understanding. In both the aforementioned conflicts, one taking place in a small, Southeastern city and the other in a mid-sized Midwestern city, I acknowledge that my values have been informed and acculturated by two experiences. My experiences as a Black male allow me to identify with the risk of situational stereotypes. My values have also been shaped by having spent a long career in the Justice Department, working with law enforcement officers, having a father and other relatives in law enforcement, and knowing something about the risks they take and the ambiguities that penetrate the practice of their professional duties and responsibilities. These experiences coexist as a form

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of synergy between conflict and consensus and I feel that my perspective is useful to both Blacks and Whites.

Identifying the Stakeholders Community conflicts involve a complex interaction of stakeholders who play varying roles (Laue and Cormick 1978). There are, of course, the immediate parties to the conflict. In the Southeastern city, appointed city officials were the respondents in complaints lodged by local Black leadership that White police had a history of using unnecessary and excessive force against Black citizens. In particular, the alleged abuse directed against a popular Black high school coach proved to be the triggering incident. The CPSP recognizes that community conflict engages a complex interaction of players who may not be directly involved in the negotiations, but who nonetheless will play a significant role in the negotiations process and its outcome (Laue and Cormick 1978). Susskind and Ozawa (1983) refer to the necessity of adequate identification of parties to public disputes (which is another way of describing community conflicts), noting in particular that the very way parties are identified can, in and of itself, lead to conflict. The phenomenon of interaction of community players in conflict has relevance for certain kinds of game theory. Long (1958) sees local communities as places where players act out roles imprinted with the values of their institutions that are both self-determined and ascribed by others. The community becomes an interactive network of relationships that brings different players together situationally depending upon the issue being dealt with (Long 1958). In large communities, it is the rare event that will bring all players together in the game (Long 1958). In smaller communities, a limited number of players fill multiple roles because certain issues will not have a developed constituent base from which a separate leadership elite can emerge. Games are strategic activities engaged in by the elite of a community, whose purpose is to sustain their viability in the local ecology (Long 1958). Thus, in the Southeastern city we see the local NAACP calling for the immediate resignation of the police chief and a federal investigation of the police department not because this approach gets the best results, but because that is what the NAACP does. In the Midwestern city, a militant Black leader viewed as the historic firebrand, engages in the confrontational tactics expected of his role. The police chiefs in both cities immediately defend the offending officers not necessarily because they believe their innocence or guilt, but because this is the “game” of a police chief and how individuals sustain their roles in the local community. The CPSP intervener attempts to map this process as part of the identification of stakeholders.

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The intervener seeks to discover the internal links between stakeholders as well as external links, those that connect community actors in conflict with organizations and institutions outside the community that could sustain or disrupt an agreement (Carpenter and Kennedy 1991; see also Banks and Mitchell 1990; Saunders and Slim 1994). Understanding the internal linkages helps the intervener to see under what conditions consensus has been possible as well as those conditions that have created conflict. In the Midwestern city, Blacks and Whites have come together in times of natural disasters where values held in common are at risk. Many Blacks and Whites interviewed in this city took pride in noting the construction of a new public library on the fringes of the inner city as an example of how interracial collaboration and consensus could take place. In the Southeastern city, Blacks and Whites created a partnership to design and execute an innovative approach to urban renewal. With respect to external linkages, what would be the likely reaction of the national NAACP if a local branch decides to take a negotiating position different from national policy? What pressures might police chiefs be subject to from the International Association of Chiefs of Police or police benevolent associations if they were to adopt a negotiating position contrary to their policies? All these variables cannot be taken into full consideration for each and every conflict. There is not always time or resources to mount this kind of analysis. However, the effort must be made if the intervener has any hope of helping parties address tap root issues that underlie the triggering incident. A serious criticism of mediation is its tendency to focus on the presenting issues to the exclusion of causal factors driving the conflict. Reflective practitioners argue that even apparently superficial conflict calls for rigorous exploration of origins to determine if there are motivating factors that need to be considered as part of the resolution (Burton 1985; see also Gulliver 1979). In this respect, interveners should approach conflicts in much the same manner as one would observing an iceberg—knowing that what is visible is only the 10% above the surface of the water. Identification of parties or stakeholders is a precursor to the more intrusive third-party roles of interviewing stakeholders and participating in the decision about who will actually participate in the collaborative problem-solving discussions (see Crowfoot and Wondollack 1990; see also Banks and Mitchell 1990; Saunders and Slim 1994).

Interviewing Stakeholders In the interviewing stage of the CPSP, the objectives are to reach as representative a group as possible to gain their perspective of the conflict and, with

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the formal convening entity, determine who will actually participate in the discussions. The intervener also wants to use interviews as an opportunity to support and stimulate flexibility, build trust in the process, and create a basis for better communications. In a broader sense, it is an opportunity to hear people’s stories. “Stories” does not refer to the mere recounting of an event. Rather, the CPSP intervener seeks to hear the myths that lie embedded in the stories—what has been described as “mythic story telling” (see Blaustone 1994). Interveners seek this information because they want to understand those influences that lie at the tap root levels beyond the triggering incident. In the dispute and conflict resolution community, it is known through largely heuristic experience that parties to any conflict start at the beginning of negotiations from fixed positions which tend to be rigid and unyielding (Crowfoot and Wondolleck 1990; see also Banks and Mitchell 1990; Saunders and Slim 1994; Druckman and Mitchell 1995). These positional stances do not easily lend themselves to agreements because the negotiating platforms leave little room for maneuvering. It is now axiomatic that in traditional mediation, the mediator must help parties identify their interests if a conflict can be successfully resolved (Fisher and Ury 1981; see also Munger 1992). Interests are what parties really want and lie below positions that parties initially feel invested in. Since interests are rarely configured in the same zero-sum fashion as positions, they are thought to be more flexible (Fisher and Ury 1981). More options can be identified and agreements more easily reached, reflecting the true desires of the parties. Interest-based approaches function best in disputes and conflicts where there is equivalency of power between parties and potential substantive and procedural outcomes can be fairly easily distributed (Susskind and Ozawa 1983; see also Long 1958). Interest-based negotiations assume parties come to the table with something to trade. It is essentially a rational process. In racial conflict, core values that lie at the tap root level are often viewed by parties as nonrational and lie at an even deeper level than interests (Warfield 1993; see also Coulson 1984; Singer 1990). Viewing conflicts from this perspective is analogous to looking at an archaeological dig; the intervener-as-excavator has to peel back layers of conflictual stances to understand what is motivating the conflict. In both cities previously mentioned, the acts of police use of excessive force become a metaphor for dominant–subordinate relationships between Blacks and Whites,14 despite the reality that most Blacks do not encounter this with any systematic frequency. The myths persevere and the interviews with Blacks in the Southeastern city reveal that despite a patina of racial civility, Blacks feel excluded from decision making in the formation and execution of important public policies. Deals are made by a cadre of political elites and the public is informed (or sometimes not) of the intentions of the

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local regime. Similarly, in the Midwestern city, a political elite controlled by the business community makes most of the significant policy decisions. Despite this, or because of it, Blacks and Whites interviewed believed there was a leadership vacuum. The absence of effective leadership meant there were few people who could tap into the fears, aspirations, and hopes of low-income Blacks and Whites who shared lives of poverty. Consequently, few felt an ownership in the process of decision making and therefore had no stake in proposed outcomes. Blacks felt that while some things have gotten better for them, ultimately, not much has changed. Whites in both locales tell stories as well. Their stories contain myths exemplifying beliefs in having made racial progress, of having come a long way. Many view the instances of police abuse as anomalies that have no causal relationship with embedded tap roots, because in their worldview there are no tap roots. They fear “the fire next time” rhetoric emanating from more militant segments of the Black community and some want to exclude it from the problem-solving dialogue. It is as though Blacks and Whites look at a house and see it differently. One group sees the front of the house and believes that this is the whole house. The other group views the back and says no, “this is the whole house.” Of course, the interviews reveal that in both cities, there are Blacks and Whites who hold convergent worldviews; who see the same house and who have been instrumental in consensus-building efforts in the past. They should be part of the problem-solving dialogue because they will be valuable internal facilitators. The interviews describe fears, concerns, and desires that go beyond the triggering incidents and reach into the tap roots. Blacks and Whites express alarm at the growing drug problem. Blacks feel that housing is still inadequate in their community and that far too many Black youth are unemployed. Everyone is concerned about school failures and dropouts. The interviews also tell us that the political regime is struggling to come to grips with the notion that conflicting elements in the community respond to both perception and reality. There is a sense as well as a sincere desire for constructive change across racial lines, but different concepts as to what constructive change is. Ultimately, the intertwining of myth and metaphor become powerful symbols of how each group sees and understands the world around it. Hocker and Wilmot (1974) write that “producing creative metaphors for conflict may help participants produce creative moves in the interaction.” Thus, metaphor dialogue is not simply an academic reflection, but if used properly, becomes a strategic tool for resolving deep-rooted conflict. The task of the intervener is a formidable one. She or he must be the translator of disparate worldviews or the cultural role interpreter (Warfield

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1985; see also Coulson 1984; Singer 1990). Since worldviews like basic human needs are nonrational, interveners must help to create a discourse that will not necessarily result in Blacks and Whites seeing the same house, but constructing a new one they both have an investment in.

The Convening Sessions In the Southeastern city, a broadly representative group of twenty-six community residents and public officials were convened as a task force to initiate the problem-solving dialogue. The site was the basement of the church where the Black mayor was pastor. The location was comfortable and convenient, but more important, the mayor held a kind of stature in both the Black and White community. Therefore, there was no thought of bias. The facilitation team arrived early to find chairs arranged in typical classroom fashion. This setup was quickly undone with the necessary number of chairs arranged in a large circle to provide open and face-to-face communication. The team wanted to see if body language would complement the mythic story telling. In the opening introductions, participants were asked to identify themselves15 and to state briefly why they chose to be a part of the task force. The opening statements provided the facilitators with an opportunity to see how parties articulated conflict and consensus and how they told their stories. For reflective third-party practitioners, the CPSP is an opportunity to go beyond the role of process manager and to locate one’s self in relation to the values embedded in the conflict. Indeed, since facilitators are part of the circle, they commit themselves to doing so. In the opening moments of this particular dialogue, I spoke to my experience in responding to racial conflict and noted that as a Black man, I could make assumptions about my safety (from racial violence or mistaken identity) based on the appearance of being middle class. My experience told me that healing and consensus could take place in racially divisive communities and there was no reason that it could not take place again. As participants introduced themselves around the circle, a moment of sharing emerged when a Black participant revealed that he was a sergeant in the same army unit in Vietnam in which a White public official, also a participant, was the captain. The warmth between the two was brief, but unmistakable. Later, the facilitation team summarized the information extracted from the interviews.16 Prior to this summary, in analyzing the interview data the facilitators realized they faced a difficult task of how to portray the views articulated by Black participants about the police chief. The views calling

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for the chief’s dismissal were representative of some participants’ position but did not portray the real issues, or underlying values and needs that lay beneath. The facilitation team chose to present a composite characterization of the chief that reflected the essence of people’s concern. When the presentation of themes and issues drawn from the interviews had been completed, the facilitators asked for corrections and additions. With minor corrections, all agreed the information represented the views of participants. The team was relieved, but ambivalent about its decision. The team adroitly handled a touchy situation, but wondered if the power of the facilitation role quashed voices that needed to be heard. In a subsequent heated statement by a Black participant, the team realized it gave itself too much credit. The facilitation team encountered a similar dilemma in the Midwestern city where some conservative and liberal leadership expressed reservations about the participation in the proposed CPSP of a militant Black leader who has been vocal in his condemnation of the police department’s actions and of its chief. There was a fear that if the police chief participated, he would be disruptive, further polarizing racial relationships. In fact, the militant leader had not committed himself to participate, because he feared he would be co-opted. He was conscious of his role in the local game as an irritant that reminded people how far the city still has to go in order for there to be true racial equality. In the pre-CPSP interviews and meetings, the facilitation team used the metaphor of looking at an ocean from the shore and seeing a large wave coming toward them as a way of responding to concerns about the militant leader. The team observed that there were other waves in the ocean, but they were much smaller. As community leaders, they were inclined to dismiss the large wave as not being representative of the turbulence in the ocean or they would decide to contain it—to limit its impact so as to minimize the perceived damage. The facilitators felt this was a mistake. They argued that the wave represented the potential the ocean could become. The facilitators stressed (particularly with Whites) that while many Blacks were uncomfortable with the militant individual’s level of rhetoric, they knew that he spoke to the tap roots in ways that many could not. A few accepted this, but others remained uncomfortable. With the militant leader, the facilitators stressed the importance of his participation in the CPSP. They expressed their concern that his voice will become marginalized and untransferable in the transitional negotiations from values to interests. He agreed reluctantly to participate. In the CPSP retreat, the facilitators realized that the militant Black leader was seeking an opportunity to confront the police chief. The other fifty-odd participants were watching this development nervously. Because theirs was a particularly antagonistic relationship, facilitators placed them in different

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break-out groups hoping to mitigate the chance of an explosion that would end the CPSP prematurely. Although the day ended with a number of specific commitments for follow-through, I felt as if I had acted hypocritically, sacrificing the merits of an espoused metaphor to keep the overall group consensus alive. In the Southeastern city, the issue of representativeness of the Black community also was raised, with somewhat different implications. In between joint problem-solving sessions, facilitators met with city officials to assess commitment to the process and the additional resource burden that would be borne by the city to sustain it. In the meeting, a White police commander portrayed the Black community as divided, alleging that those who raised the charges against the police were middle-class Blacks who do not live in the low-income projects most beset by crime and violence. Those who did, appreciated the protection they received from police even if the fringes of civil liberty were trod upon occasionally. This was a difficult moment in the CPSP because as a Black person, I wanted to protest what appeared to be an unsubtle manipulation of one part of a community against another. I paused, however, when I realized that while conducting the earlier interviews with Black representatives, I did detect a slight, but unmistakable, difference of perspective between spokespersons from the low-income projects and the mainline Civil Rights organization. The view of the low-income Blacks seemed to say, “Try living in these projects for a few days and lay awake at night hearing the death rattle of automatic weapons fire. Then, ask yourself if concerns about police use of excessive force is a luxury you can afford.” It became clear that I was about to become trapped in a myth of a monolithic Black culture. In an intellectual sense, I knew better, but I wanted to believe we were one in the struggle. I likened it to beads strung out along an economic continuum, with some Blacks fortunate enough to have made more progress than others, but inextricably connected. As I passed a “brother” on the street from a lower economic station in life, we affirmed each other’s presence with a brief greeting. In effect, we acknowledged unity even though I knew that on a practical, day-to-day level, our lives are very different. That on a daily basis he incurred risks along a range of decisions that I would rarely have to encounter. In responding to the police commander, I decided to compromise, saying that I thought it would be a mistake for any city official to give the appearance of siding with one part of a community against another. The results could backfire, thereby undermining the process all had pledged to support. There was a silent assent, but I sensed resentment that I had stepped outside the bounds of an acceptable third-party role.

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Measuring Outcomes of the CPSP What impact can the CPSP have on changing race relationships in a community? Interveners feel the familiar temptation to defend the process against the challenge that consensus interventions merely change superficial feelings, but have no long-lasting impact. The other bottomless argument is whether such interventions should have objectives of changing behavior or changing attitudes. The easy response is to protest that this article is to be merely descriptive, to bring the reader inside a portion of the process and to portray it with all its warts; not in the textbook fashion that mediation is often presented in. As well, the CPSP is meant to encompass long-term involvement, both in terms of the actual intervention and the expected participant follow-through.17 I feel compelled to offer some examples of what I believe were measurable outcomes of the case models I participated in. Moore (1986) notes there are three aspects to the satisfactory resolution of a conflict. Most community conflicts, since they are also public conflicts, will involve some aspect of procedure, a protest around the way something is carried out. These conflicts require changes in formal and informal policy. Second, in community conflicts, people’s feelings on how they are being treated and their relationships will have to be addressed. Third, persons protest substantive and structural issues, specifying quantifiable changes that must take place. In the beginning of the joint session in the Southeastern city case model, participants set out criteria for a satisfactory outcome. These criteria appeared to be fully achieved. The first criterion was mutual respect for all people. From a relationship-building standpoint, this may have been a too ambitious undertaking for the task force, but it represented a worthy goal. Certainly, it was possible to see respect growing among the task force members and a sense of empowerment came with a publicly recognized role. The second criterion required accurate definitions of problems. This criterion was met as the task force went beyond the triggering incident to identify underlying concerns dealing with employment, housing, and drug abuse. The third criterion participants set out was to identify areas where immediate action could be taken. The focus was on bringing more Blacks into the police department, reducing incidences of crime, and changing the police complaint procedure. The task force efforts were partially successful in this regard. The method the city used to recruit for the police department was changed to reflect recommendations from the task force. A team policing program was put in place in the low-income project which reportedly was having an impact on reducing crime. In addition, a cadet program was created designed to identify Black youth who, after successful completion,

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could enter the police department in a probationary status. A year after the task force convened, the police academy was 50% minority, a significant improvement over the department’s record. However, the task force was not as successful in changing the police complaint procedure. Black participants requested a civilian review board to replace the current procedure of citizens writing anonymous letters to the chief, or coming directly to police headquarters. They felt this was necessary to deal more fairly with complaints, emanating from the Black community, against police. The resistance to this proposal proved to be stiff and the procedure had not been changed a year later. The fourth criterion was to identify areas where long-range action could be taken. The task force cited concerns with youth unemployment, housing, and the unacceptably high dropout rate as underlying issues that needed to be addressed. A year later, the group was still tackling police–community relations issues, almost as if there was a reluctance to let go of the one issue that bonded the group together and gave it a sense of identity—or because defining prescriptive outcomes for the underlying issues proved to be elusive. Collaborative problem solving, beyond the triggering incident level, is as much a matter of changed attitudes as it is a function of changed instrumentalities. Some city officials acknowledged that the task force, while it pressed the city into uncomfortable arenas of shared decision making, identified issues that the city probably would have ignored. The chief of police, who many felt was the most resistant to change, indicated that while trust relationships had not yet been built, a transition had taken place from adversarial statements to dialogue. More than fifty people engaged in the CPSP in the Midwestern city created break-out groups to deal with issues of housing, education, employment, public safety, and the cross-cutting issue of leadership. Many felt this was the first time such a diverse group of citizens had come together to address the underlying causes of racial tension. Several months after the initial intervention, the break-out groups were still meeting, establishing targets for the completion of designated items. As in the Southeastern city, there were unique moments of collaboration in between the seams of the formal process. In one such instance, a Hispanic community leader bemoaned the anticipated loss of office space because her organization would not be able to afford an increase in rent. Hearing this, a White business leader who was a member of her subgroup responded that he had excess office space that she could have for free. The conflict-solving process is not without criticism. One criticism is that the process was directed at only those who participated. While the citizens who did participate were racially and ethnically diverse, many felt that they

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were not (with perhaps one exception) representative of the target population for whom many of the efforts were intended. This raises important questions that require further research into the use of conflict-solving processes. Some persons argue that CPSP interveners have to work with leadership elites if an effective change is going to occur (Kelman 1972; see also Carnevale et al. 1989; Forester 1992; Cobb and Rifken 1991; Warfield 1993). Leadership elites are in control of decision making that affects the distribution of resources and are the ones who will be needed to engage in the inevitable negotiations in the governance of outcomes. Hopefully, new leadership can be drawn from communities to replenish those leaders who are in danger of burnout. The risk, of course, is that the reins of power will not be relinquished, thereby perpetuating or recreating new forms of dominance that will frustrate transformation objectives. Other persons feel that true collaborative problem solving should be geared towards identifying and bringing to the bargaining table precisely those who have no official voice in the creation of social policy (Kelman 1972; see also Carnevale et al. 1989; Forester 1992; Cobb and Rifken 1991; Warfield 1993). To do otherwise relegates the game to a process producing outcomes bent on preserving a status of harmony antithetical to the transformation change that needs to take place (Nader 1991). While this model has a certain Marxist appeal, it lacks prescriptive value since those who articulate this paradigm fail to specify the methodology. Moreover, it overlooks the obvious in that everyone cannot be at the table and some process has to be used to determine who will represent constituent interests. There is no guarantee that any emergent leadership will not succumb to the temptations that bedevil many people in these positions. It is important to identify and bring into the process people who have leadership skills and already occupy positions of leadership in their respective communities. Such individuals have garnered experience in conflict and consensus and are in a position to implement the complexities of problemsolving agreements. Besides, local communities have their own versions of realpolitik. To ignore existing leadership risks is to sabotage the objectives the CPSP is set up to achieve. At the same time, the CPSP should ideally be constructed as an empowering vehicle that ensures indigenous leadership is created to play roles in the feed-forward of information about objectives and the feedback as to how objectives are being carried out. Eventually, a new cadre is formed that can take the place of the more established leadership. Finally, although the CPSP that took place in the Midwestern city was not designed to be a vehicle for the resolution of individual conflict, the interveners failed to explore an opportunity to bring the police chief and the militant leader together. These leaders were two central figures who would

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play important roles in the outcomes of the agreements, particularly those that deal with police–community relations.

Conclusion Racial conflict in American cities, particularly conflicts between Blacks and Whites, can best be understood as the manifestation of the culture of racism. The culture of racism makes conflicts between Blacks and Whites seem more intractable because each group holds different and frequently oppositional worldviews. The culture of racism is the constellation of commonality, conflict, and difference that surrounds the attitudes, thinking, and behavior of the two groups. These views act as informational filters that each group uses to understand the behavior of the other. Conflict and consensus are the yin and yang of race relations, but the conflict resolution field focuses too exclusively on conflict. Most mediative interventions in racial conflict overlook the histories of relationships in communities which are sprinkled with examples of cross-racial consensus. Failing to note these occurrences impoverishes the methodology because the intervener is uninformed about the processes of negotiations that created agreements. The CPSP and similar processes stand a better chance of reaching longer-lasting resolutions than classic mediation because its exploratory nature seeks to probe the deep-rooted, underlying causes of conflict (the tap roots) that drive responses to the triggering incident. CPSP is not a panacea for racial conflict nor should it dismiss the usefulness of more traditional alternative dispute resolution technologies such as mediation. Mediation can be a useful contingency for dealing with individualized conflicts that are brought into the CPSP or that emerge while CPSP negotiations are underway and threaten consensus. As well, mediation will probably be in the toolkit of communities as one of a number of selfenforcing mechanisms designed to respond to conflicts that will emerge during the governance of agreements. Finally, those interveners who are in this “growth industry” of conflict resolution would do well to adopt a modicum of humility and remember that their interventions are but one in a sea of variables that influence the outcomes of any community conflict. Interveners are quick to claim credit when things work well and just as quick to deny responsibility when it does not. Ultimately, community conflicts take place within a larger dialectic of consensus and conflict. All interveners can hope to do is to play a small role in creating better social environments for the future generations that will inherit the legacy of their actions.

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References Banks, M., and Mitchell, C. (1990). “Collaborative Analytical Problem Solving” (in draft). Blaustone, B. (1994). “The Conflicts of Diversity, Justice, and Peace in the Theories of Dispute Resolution.” University of Toledo Law Review 25:253–70. Bobo, L. (1992). “Prejudice and Alternative Dispute Resolution.” Studies in Law, Politics and Society 12:147. Boukon, R. (1984). “Professional Mediation of Civil Disputes.” American Arbitration Association 10:16. Boulding, K. (1962). Conflict and Defense. New York: Harper. Burton, J. W. (1985). “Conflict Resolution as a Political System.” Working Paper #1, 6–9, George Mason University. Canan, P. (1992). “Environmental Disputes in Changing Urban Political Economies: A Dynamic Research Approach.” Studies in Law, Politics and Society 12:287–308. Carnevale, P. J. D., et al. (1989). “Contingent Mediator Behavior and its Effectiveness.” In K. Kressel and D. O. Pruitt (eds), Mediation Research. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Carpenter, S. L., and Kennedy, W. J. D. (1991). Managing Public Disputes. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Chesler, M. A. (1991, February). Racial/Ethical/Cultural Issues in Dispute Resolution. A Discussion Paper for National Institute for Dispute Resolution Conference on Dispute Resolution and Race, Ethnicity and Culture. Cobb, S., and Rifkin, J. (1991). The Social Construction of Neutrality in Mediation, a proposal submitted to the Fund for Research in Dispute Resolution. Washington, DC: National Institute for Dispute Resolution. Coulson, R. (1984). Professional Mediation of Civil Disputes. New York: American Arbitration Association. Crowfoot, J. E., and Wondelleck, J. M. (1990). Environmental Disputes: Community Involvement in Conflict Resolution. Washington, DC: Island Press. Delgado, R., et al. (1985). “Fairness and Formality: Minimizing the Risk of Prejudice in Alternative Dispute Resolution.” Wisconsin Law Review 6:359. Devita, C. J. (ed.) (1989, August). “America in the 21st Century: Human Resource Development.” Population Reference Bureau. Druckman, D., and Mitchell, C. (eds) (1995). Flexibility in International Negotiation and Mediation. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Fisher, R., and Ury, W. (1981). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Forester, J. (1992). “Envisioning the Politics of Public Sector Dispute Resolution.” Studies in Law, Politics and Society 12:247–86. Gadlin, H. (1994) “Conflict Resolution, Cultural Differences, and the Culture of Racism.” Negotiation Journal 10:34. Galanter, M. (1974). “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculation on the Limits of Social Change.” Law and Society Review 9:95–160.

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Gaventa, J. (1980). Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Chicago, Il: University of Illinois Press. Goldberg, S., et al. (1985). Dispute Resolution. Boston: Little, Brown. Gulliver, P. H. (1979). Disputes and Negotiations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Waltham, MA: Academic Press. Hocker, J. L., and Wilmot, W. W. (1974). Interpersonal Conflict. Madison, WI: Brown and Benchmark. Kelman, H. C. (1972). “The Problem-Solving Workshop in Conflict Resolution.” In R. L. Merritt (ed.), Communication in International Politics. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mannes, E., writer; Mannes E., and Taylor, K. J., directors (1992). “L.A. Is Burning: Five Reports from a Divided City.” Frontline [television series]. Brighton, MA: WGBH Educational Foundation [Television] Productions. Laue, J. H., and Cormick, G. (1978). “The Ethics of Intervention in Community Disputes.” In G. Berman, H. Kelman and D. Warwick (eds), The Ethics of Social Intervention (pp. 205–32). Washington, DC: Halsted Press. Lederach, J. P. (1986). “The Mediator’s Cultural Assumptions.” Conciliation Quarterly NewsIetter 5:1–6. Lipset, S. M. (1979). First New Nation. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. —(1985). Consensus and Conflict: Essays in Political Sociology. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Long, N. E. (1958). “The Local Community as an Ecology of Games.” American Journal of Sociology 64:253. Merry, S. (1987). “Disputing Without Culture.” Harvard Law Review 100:2057–73. Moore, C. W. (1986). The Mediation Process: Practical Strategies for Resolving Conflict. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons. Munger, F. (1992). “Making a Commitment to Social Change.” Studies in Law, Politics and Society 12:431–45. Nader, L. (1991). “Harmony Models and the Construction of Law.” In K. Avruch, P. W. Black, and J. Scimecca (eds), Conflict Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. New York: Greenwood Press. Nudler, O. (1993, Summer). “In Search of a Theory for Conflict Resolution: Taking a New Look at World Views Analysis.” ICAR Newsletter 1:4. Parsons, T. (1954). Essays in Sociological Theory. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Saunders, H., and Slim, R. (1994). “Dialogue to Change Conflictual Relationships.” Dayton, OH: Higher Education Exchange. Singer, L. R. (1990). Settling Disputers: Conflict Resolution in Business, Families, and the Legal System. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Susskind, L., and Ozawa, C. (1983). “Mediated Negotiations in the Public Sector: Mediator Accountability and the Public Interest Problem.” American Behavioral Scientist 27:274. Title X of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Publ. No. 88-352, § 1001-04, 78 Stat 267 (1964). Warfield, W. (1985). “Triggering Incidents of Racial Conflict: Miami, Florida Riots of 1980 and 1982.” Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference of the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution, Boston, MA. —(1993). “Public Policy Conflict Resolution: The Nexus Between Culture and

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Conflict.” In D. J. D. Sandole et al. (eds), Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice: Integration and Application (pp. 176–93). Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Wildavsky, A. (1991). “Resolved, That Individualism and Egalitarianism Be Made Compatible in America: Political-Cultural Roots of Exceptionalism.” In B. E. Shafer (ed.), Is America Different? (pp. 116–122). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Notes  1 From 1930 to 1960, roughly 80% of United States immigrants came from Europe or Canada. From the late 1970s on into the early 1980s, this figure was reversed with less than 20% of new immigrants coming from this area. Asian and Latin American countries accounted for 80% of the total immigration (DeVita 1989).  2 It is not the author’s intention to invite unnecessary controversy in the politically correct climate of the 1990s, but I want to signal my intention to switch from the arguably more acceptable term “African American” to the designation of more historical vintage, “Black.” I do so because I find that in writing about conflict between the two races, the term African American obscures the polarity of views that still exists between the two groups.  3 See former President Jimmy Carter’s much publicized activities in Haiti that brought about the reinstallation of Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency.  4 In communities as in organizations, people find creative ways to negotiate the conduct of social behavior. This may involve identity groups, but more often than not, it comprises the interaction of a myriad of interpersonal relations, reaching across diverse spectrums.  5 The field is made up of various third-party roles such as conciliator, mediator, and arbitrator that operate under the heading of alternative dispute resolution.  6 See Boukon (1984) and Goldberg et al. (1985).  7 The Community Relations Service (“CRS”) was created out of Title X of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The agency has the responsibility for responding to disputes, disagreements, and hostilities involving matters of race and national origin utilizing the techniques of conciliation and mediation. As such, it is the non-investigatory arm of the Department of Justice in matters of Civil Rights compliance. The author served with the agency in various capacities for more than twenty years.  8 Individuals have inner core values that form a bonding glue for that person’s identity (Boulding 1962). These values are nonrational, inflexible, and often viewed by the individual to be nonnegotiable.  9 Lipset (1979) discusses the cultural values of ascriptiveness and universalism to describe the differences in values that exist between nations (for example, Britain and the United States). Wildavsky (1991) “applies egalitarianism to the American values of equal opportunity”

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(pp. 116–22). But, it is these very values that appear ironic to subordinate groups from the Tap Roots perspective. 10 Nudler (1993) comments that “in a situation where world view differences play a role, as in many of the cases of ethnic, religious, environmental, generational, gender, and other kinds of disputes, such lack of awareness may become an insurmountable obstacle to understanding and dealing with conflicts” (pp. 1, 4). 11 This term of art is used liberally throughout the dispute and conflict resolution community and describes a range of activities that parties and the mediator engage in during preparation for negotiations. In the classic mediation model, the negotiations literally take place around a table. The CPSP and similar approaches are creative in the venue used to gather parties for discussion. In some cases a table around which parties sit is the format. But as often as not, parties will sit in a circle, or meet under open skies. The latter was the arrangement that John Paul Lederach used in his intervention in the conflict between the Nicaraguan Sandinista government and indigenous Indians (see Lederach 1986). 12 In the problem-solving process this is called the assessment phase. It is secondary research usually conducted away from the locus of conflict for the purposes of getting a better understanding of the conflict and to guide intervention technology. 13 Using a self-report technique, researchers asked forty-nine mediators about the various techniques they used to get parties in a dispute to reach an agreement. They identified some thirty-six different stratagems or contingent behaviors that mediators claimed to have used influenced primarily by parties’ intransigence at certain points in the negotiations (Carnevale et al. 1989). 14 Although, interestingly enough, we discover that there are White youth who also feel they are hassled by police. 15 Almost everyone knew everyone else. 16 The information was not for attribution since this was confidential. 17 The intervention in the Southeastern city took place over a period of a year and in the Midwestern city facilitators were involved over a five-month span of time.

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3 Managing Racial/Ethnic Conflict for Community Building Wallace Warfield, 2009

A

ny discussion of community conflict and its management begins with a number of recognitions. First, as Coleman (1957) noted, “Controversies within communities are as old as civilization itself” (p. 2). Interestingly, the early literature on the subject (see Coleman 1957; Laue and Cormick 1978; Whyte 1943) had a distinctly US American flavor. Now, however, modernization (Appadurai 1996; Black 1966) brings with it heightened patterns of social stratification and a post-Cold War rise in ethnic identity, and thus has placed community conflict on a worldwide landscape. A second consideration is the kind of community the conflict takes place in. Black (1974) argued there was an over-concentration of study and emphasis on large urban areas experiencing violent conflict, “ignoring important contributions that smaller communities can make to the understanding of community conflict” (p. 1245). This can be partially attributed to the proliferation of US urban riots from the late 1960s through early 1980s and the 1968 study conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (often referred to as the Kerner Commission), which tended to focus on large urban areas. A third consideration is that with the advent of the environmental movement, a certain amount of community conflict has lost its class flavor. The implications of this can be seen in two dimensions. First, while many environmental conflicts taking place around the world continue to pit a disenfranchised peasantry or indigenous group against a landed and wealth-holding

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“upper class” (in Latin America, for example), or people-of-color minorities versus industrialists and majority policy interests in the United States (raising the cry of environmental justice), a number of these conflicts see middleclass community groups confronting local policy regimes around some issue of public policy (Berry, Portney, and Thompson 1993). In fact, most public conflicts (at least in the US) are community conflicts in one form or another. Also, on the international level, but in the United States as well, many community conflicts seem to place less of an emphasis on class cleavages, and more on intraclass power struggles between identity groups (Roy 1994; Thom 2002). The ambiguity is further compounded when we see that a shift to a more international understanding of community conflict brings a recognition that the nature of statism and political culture in many countries outside the United States results in a blurring of the definitional boundaries between community and national conflicts. I will expand on this shortly. On the opposite end, there is the classic “barking dog” conflict; while admittedly salient for neighbor-toneighbor peace, is a bit too diminimis for this study. Having taken some pains to probe standard assumptions about community conflict, we could try on Coser’s (1956) definition to see if it retains a good fit. Coser described community conflict as “a struggle over values and claims to scarce status, power, and resources in which the aims of the opponents are to neutralize, injure or eliminate their rivals. Such conflict may take place between individuals, between collectivities or between individuals and collectivities” (p. 232). Coser’s definition continues to be relevant for many contemporary conflicts that involve competing community groups, but gives the impression that the conflict takes place between groups with rough symmetries of power. It tends to underexplain conflicts that involve entities of unequal strength, particularly where one of the parties is a low-power community group opposed by a more powerful local government. I want to examine a range of community conflicts to see how this may inform a more embracing definition. The purpose of this chapter1 is to throw light on the status of theory, practice, and research in community conflict. I attempt to determine the various ways that community conflict is managed (some might prefer mitigated 2) and how this management lends itself to actual or potential community capacity building. This chapter will take a closer look at where these conflicts are occurring and develop an informal typology. A description of these conflicts will address conflict roles and provide a descriptive overview of intervention practice such as conciliation, mediation, community dialogues, and problem-solving workshops. I examine the role of diversity in community building and explore processes that can manage diversity as a

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positive resource in a community. I conclude by examining and commenting on the status of theory and research in community conflicts and what gaps need to be filled.

Descriptions of Community Conflict Because the range of community conflicts is so broad, it would be impossible to do justice descriptively and analytically to a full complement within the constraints of this chapter. Rather, the focus is on conflicts generated by racial/ethnic hatred, friction between local law enforcement and minority groups, and ethnic identity. These conflicts tend to be marked by high levels of violence, reflect the dynamic changes taking place within societies, are potentially rich in theory application, and pose the greatest challenges for intervention practice and community capacity building. Despite earnest attempts to minimize ambiguity, there is not always a bright line between these conflicts. Some community conflicts may reflect elements of two or more of these characteristics. Further, it was decided not to include conflicts where the political boundaries between local and state overlapped, particularly where the state regime was an active participant. For example, Brazilian rain forest conflicts involve indigenous Indian communities and oligarchic land owners, where the state frequently intervenes in the form of legislation, policy, and physical force in support of landowners in what is perceived to be the national interest (Balduino 2001). Or in Bolivia and other parts of Latin America, indigenous Indian communities have staged protests in reaction to various governments’ intent to allow globalized industrial forces to exploit natural resources (Slack 2003). These conflicts and others like them could fit within Coser’s definition. Coleman (1957), however, offered three criteria for conflict to emerge in communities: (1) the issue must relate to important facets of community members’ lives; (2) the issue must have a differential impact on different members of the community; and (3) community members must feel they have sufficient agency to change a condition caused by the issue. Certainly, the first and the third could apply to a wide range of multiparty conflicts including the two just mentioned. The third condition in particular reflects a middle-class ideology that privileged a narrow stratum of civil society that was in existence at the time of Coleman’s writing. In fact, much of the civil unrest that produces violent community conflict is directly attributable to a segment of society that feels it does not have the agency to bring about demanded changes. It is the second condition—the issue must have a differential impact

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on different members of the community—that supplies a critical distinction between amorphously bounded conflicts that affect a particular demography but whose outcome is controlled by a national agenda, and those that tear at the fabric of community harmony. This explication suggests a fourth criterion: that while deep-rooted causal factors may lie outside the domain of the local community, the conflict responses and outcomes (where they are known) must reflect a dynamic that takes place within the community. Here, Lederach’s (1997) levels of leadership model is helpful in disentangling the aspects of a conflict that can be said to be “community” from those that are controlled (or significantly influenced) by external actors. Lederach’s model is derived from his extensive work as a scholar-practitioner at the international level and depicts leadership arrangements in severe intrastate conflict. Still, it lends analytical clarity to community conflicts that take place outside the United States. Lederach envisions three levels of leadership. At Level One we find the top leadership in a conflict setting. It would comprise the highest level of political, military, and religious leaders whose high-level negotiations take place under the bright lights of public scrutiny. Often the agreements reached (outcomes) are short-term and symbolic. Level Two is occupied by mid-range leadership that tends to be highly respected members of civil society such as academics, NGO [non-governmental organization] leaders, and religious leaders as well. These individuals have access to and often play key broker roles between the top-level leaders and the grass roots. Finally, at Level Three is where the grassroots leadership is located. Here we may find indigenous NGO leaders, political leaders who represent constituencies at the district level, religious figures, and even gang leaders may figure prominently at this level. In community conflicts that take place outside the United States, thin levels of constitutional arrangements will produce, at certain points, an intermingling of all three levels of leadership. Given this interdependency, it is still possible to discern conflict management dynamics occurring at Levels Two and Three that function independently of Level One and whose are outcomes are community based.

Organizing Model for Community Conflict Gwartney-Gibbs and Lach’s (1991) model provides an organizational framework for this chapter. They organize conflicts around three generic attributes: origins (alternatively described as sources), processes (which can be thought of as responses by affected parties singularly or in combination with intervention involving third parties), and outcomes. Origins are not the incidents that draw

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conflicting parties together in their confrontational stance and usually headlined in news stories. Rather, conflict origins are the deep-rooted causal factors, usually needs-driven, that stimulate responses in the form of confrontational actions undertaken by stakeholder parties who want to produce a certain outcome. Processes are a combination of unassisted forms of negotiations engaged in by parties and, when the opportunity presents itself, so-called third parties who are intervening between conflicting stakeholders to manage, mitigate, or help resolve the conflict. A confluence of processes, in turn, produces outcomes. Outcomes themselves can take many forms. For example, CDR Associates (2004) identified three aspects to the satisfactory resolution of a conflict. The resolution must provide parties with a measure of relational satisfaction. This would be an important factor in community conflict where there are ongoing relationships and where the potential for conflict renewal is always present. The agreement must reflect procedural satisfaction (sometimes thought of as procedural justice). This deals with how the agreement will be implemented and, where local policy is involved, can get quite complicated, particularly when the accustomed way of doing things has to be altered. There must be some form of substantive satisfaction in that the tangible or structural issues in the conflict have to reflect the needs of the conflicting parties. The outcomes of community conflict will rarely, if ever, reflect a balance between the three aspects of satisfactory resolution. In fact, there is much masking going on in the discourse of community conflict where the protesting party will initially articulate the issue in one form, for example, a change in procedure (because this is what is thought will gain the attention of the more powerful opposing party), but what is really wanted is a change in relationships. It is the task of the third-party intervener to be able to ferret out these distinctions. The framework assumes that most community conflicts are identity based and that these identities are based on race, ethnicity, gender, or other social constructions. Using this model, I review literature about three types of community conflicts: (1) local law enforcement and minorities; (2) racial/ethnic hatred conflicts; and (3) ethnic identity conflicts.

Local Law Enforcement and Minorities Origins This form of community conflict involves a pattern of hostile interactions between racial and/or ethnic minorities and law enforcement officers in a particular locale. These interactions have often produced a triggering incident

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involving an act of alleged police use of excessive force, resulting in injury and death to a minority member, that led to violent reactions (riots or severe public disorder) by a significant mass of the affected minority community. While the triggering incident ignites the violent response in a segment of the minority community, the origins of the conflict lie in a condition of needs deprivation, producing feelings of insecurity, lack of recognition, and political disenfranchisement. These factors were present in the racial disturbances in Miami, Dade County, Florida, in the early 1980s;3 the Los Angeles, California, riot of 1992 as a reaction to the beating of Rodney King and subsequent dismissal of charges against defendant police officers; and the more recent rioting in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 2000s.

Conflict Processes Racial conflict initiated by acts of police use of excessive force has produced responses ranging from agitated protest to physical violence including rioting. In these circumstances, conflict management or mitigation by third parties has varied. One exemplar of intervention in these kinds of conflicts has been the activity carried out by the US Justice Department’s Community Relations Service (CRS), an organization that was created out of Title X of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.4 The basic conflict management approach undertaken by CRS field staff responding to these conflicts is conciliation. The intervener goes into the affected community either by invitation or own volition and identifies relevant stakeholders who could be part of a process to reach an agreement to end violent confrontations. For example, in the mid-1970s, the author was a member of a CRS team that intervened in a conflict involving several days of racial disturbances in Jamaica, New York. The conflict was initiated over allegations that White police officers used excessive force in the shooting dead of an African American youth allegedly fleeing the scene of a crime. There was no “invitation” extended to CRS from either local officials or protest leadership. Rather, CRS staff made extensive contacts with relevant parties prior to entry and while on the ground established the basis for the conciliation work that was conducted. At this point, the epistemology of praxis for CRS interveners has been historically framed by a rather colloquial theorem called “Two Tap Roots and a Triggering Incident.”5 At its most foundational level, Tap Root (TR) One is a general perception by low-power members of society that the system, as shaped by more powerful and dominant members, is inherently oppressive and discriminatory. TR One, then, has seeds lodged firmly in Galtung’s (1969) notion of structural violence. Resting on this foundation is TR Two, a lack of

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confidence by low-power groups in the interests and capabilities of public and private institutions to provide adequate redress for their grievances. Finally, at the uppermost level, there is invariably a triggering incident involving an act of alleged police abuse. Partly because of limited resources and partly due to ideology, CRS intervention in this form of community conflict is, more often than not, reactive rather than preventive. Further, when a CRS intervener comes into a community on an own-volition basis, prudence dictates that the first people to be contacted are law enforcement and other high-ranking public officials: individuals who are primarily interested in quelling violence. This means that whatever recognition the CRS intervener may have of causal factors embedded in TR foundations such as structural violence or the unequal distribution of scarce public resources, choice strategies are constrained by the above factors. Intervention, therefore, is contingent, aimed at the triggering incident, which is usually symptomatic of deep-rooted causal factors. CRS is not sui generis in the likelihood that intervention will encounter factors that constrain the management of racial conflict to issues surrounding the triggering incident. Most conflict resolvers, poised to intervene, would be faced with the same situation. Given the organization and leadership culture of many locales, the attributions are not mysterious. While the conflict is in a stage of escalation, manifestations of tension are often ascribed to other factors, denied, or simply do not fit the cognitive schema of responsible public officials (Nagel 1990). Under these circumstances, it is difficult to bring all the necessary parties “to the table” to begin an intervention process. The incident that triggers the civil disturbance acts as a wake-up call, and it is at this point that public and private sector leaders are most amenable to an external third-party role. The challenge for the intervener acting from a TR perspective is to avoid being seduced into a conciliation mode that circumscribes the practice to the treatment of symptomatic issues. How can the intervention process be used to probe underlying causal factors that, if addressed in the appropriate forum, could lead to a more sustained resolution? Evidence of this can be seen in data reviewed for this chapter and in the author’s experience. In some interventions, experienced CRS field workers in meetings with local law enforcement have been able to use these occasions to convey that leadership in the minority community has an agenda pertaining to police–community relations of which police use of excessive force is only one of many interrelated issues (Walsh 2002). In Cincinnati, Ohio, a series of excessive force incidents taking place in the same minority community and stretching back over a period of five years, culminated in a shooting death of an African American male in 2000. The court-ordered intervention involved the

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ARIA Group Inc., a conflict resolution organization, as Special Master, facilitating a collaborative process involving a broad section of public and private leadership in a six-stage process over approximately a year (Rothman 2003). The workshops allowed participants to identify a number of issues pertaining to police–community friction that were relational, substantive, and procedural in nature. In Roanoke, Virginia, several years ago, a local chapter of the NAACP and other minority leaders protested an alleged incident of police use of excessive force involving a popular African American high school coach. The coach had sought to intervene in a fracas involving several African American youth outside of a convenience store. The alarmed store owner, meanwhile, called the police, who, when arriving on the scene, did not discern the role the coach was attempting to play and, in the process of arresting him, were accused by witnesses of using excessive force. While the incident was the precipitating event, the facilitated problem-solving workshops revealed that the minority-led community coalition was really concerned about inclusion in a range of public policy decision making (Warfield 1996). In summary, these interventions suggest at least two conflict management approaches designed to move the process beyond symptomatic issues. One is to devise the conflict management forums so that traditionally demotic voices can be heard with the same agency as those emanating from the more dominant community, essentially democratizing the discourse. Another, as in the case of the CRS and Cincinnati interventions, is to use the power of the intervener’s platform to effect a more activist (and less iconoclastically neutral) role.

Outcomes and Community Capacity Building I spoke earlier in this chapter of outcomes as a reflection of parties’ substantive, relational, and procedural needs and interests and noted that they are not necessarily balanced. For example, one or more parties may consider the nature of ongoing relationships more important than the substance of an agreement. Complicating satisfaction preferences is the realization that interests articulated as nonnegotiable positions often disguise underlying needs. In the case of Roanoke, Virginia, the positional demand was the firing of the police chief and more representation of minority police officers. These issues could be characterized as relational interests. The facilitated workshops revealed, however, that what the minority community really wanted was greater participation in policy decision making in many areas that had little to do with police–community relations (Warfield 1996). This spoke to underlying needs of development and participation, which share an association with all three outcome categories. Responding to

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underlying needs or sources of a conflict does not mean that the issues precipitating the conflict are ignored or unimportant. The argument is that it is the responsiveness to TR needs that lends itself to community capacity building and the emergence of a vibrant civil society. In Roanoke, seven years after the initial problem-solving workshops were conducted, the author learned that the leadership group was continuing to meet and consult with the mayor, city manager, and other local officials across a range of issues. What is possible to draw from these interventions is the importance of a critical mass of community leadership that has the capacity to go beyond protest to carry out proposed implementation resulting from an agreement; more than the critical mass in and of itself is the diversity of this body. While, undoubtedly, public policy is at the seat of changes that need to be undertaken to mitigate a repetition of excessive force incidents, in many communities the private sector (which tends to reflect a greater proportion of the majority White community) has points of intersection with the policy regime that are critical to implementation capacity. The key to implementation capacity is governmental responsiveness. Governmental responsiveness (or policy responsiveness) is twofold. First, the item of concern (police abuse) has to get on the policy agenda. The protest activity initiated by the affected minority community will frequently assure this will happen, but emergence on the policy agenda is no guarantee the regime will respond in accordance with the community’s interests or needs (Berry et al. 1993). If the issue is not deemed important to the interests and needs of the majority-dominated private sector, it will simply die on the vine, hardening the frustration-aggression of the minority community and setting the stage for more incidents and violent responses. In Gurr’s (1970) seminal work, the principal thesis is that for many groups in society, there is a gap between that group’s value expectations and value capabilities. If this is not relieved, it can lead to frustration, which can result in aggression—often in the form of violence. This may well have been the case with the succession of riots in the Miami-Dade area of Florida in the early 1980s. The second component of government responsiveness is that agenda setting (and from it, implementation) is biased in favor of those who have the most resources (Berry et al. 1993). While it is true that local governments have legislative and budgetary authority, it is the private sector that has access to responding public officials. In all but the largest urban communities, private sector individuals, government leaders, and legislators often live in the same neighborhoods and interact in the same social circles. In fact, in many small-to-medium-sized communities that have part-time legislators and business leaders, they are one and the same. Therefore, the

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more broadly inclusive the community coalition, the more likely that issues of concern will get on the agenda and will be implemented. In looking at these kinds of conflicts, what we see is a variety of intervention techniques designed to increase community capacity building (for the most part). “Successful” outcomes are linked to the ability of cross-sectional leadership to go beyond protest and, where possible, expand implementation resulting from an agreement.

Racial/Ethnic Hatred Conflicts Racial/ethnic hatred conflicts6 in the United States have a long history of antagonistic attitudes of Whites toward African Americans, with antecedents dating back to the era of Jim Crow. With increased immigration from Latin America and Southeast Asia from the mid-1970s to the present time, hate incidents have become no stranger to Hispanic and Asian identity groups as well. Nonetheless, community conflicts driven by race or ethnic hatred, arguably up to the late 1980s, were associated strongly with the United States. However, we now know this once uniquely American experience can be found throughout Eastern Europe, particularly in states that house a significant Roma population (e.g. the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania). Great Britain and other Western European countries like France and Germany, having experienced their own waves of immigration from the Caribbean, South Asia, and North Africa, have seen significant increases in these kinds of conflicts. In several instances, racial/ethnic hate acts never reach beyond the level of incidents to become community conflicts. They are often isolated attacks, like a graveyard desecration or a graffiti-scarred church associated with a particular racial or ethnic group. Here, the anonymity of the attacker, coupled with a vocal disassociation of the majority community from the incident, is sufficient to dampen mobilization of the victim’s identity group. Such incidents are not addressed in this study. I focus on this form of conflict where there is an appearance of majority community support (if not active engagement) for the hate behavior and where the minority community has gained a degree of political agency that allows it to mobilize and generate a response from within its own ranks conducive to an intercessional response by a third party. I elaborate with the aid of a few examples from the United States, Great Britain, and Eastern Europe. Each example includes origins and processes, and then outcomes are collectively discussed in a separate segment.

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The United States Origins Racial/ethnic hate activity that has stimulated community conflict has taken varied forms in recent years and has manifested regional patterns. In the Northwest, community unrest has been generated by White hate groups such as the Aryan Nation and affiliated organizations in the form of crossburning and sundry harassments directed at racial and ethnic minorities. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, several thousand Southeast Asians settled along the Texas Gulf Coast and took up shrimp fishing. Their entry into the market (which they eventually dominated) was resented by local, mostly White fishing people and their cause was articulated by the local KKK (Ku Klux Klan). In the Southeastern region of the United States, a spate of Black church burnings in the early to mid-1990s drew a vociferous response from local Civil Rights organizations. In Midwestern cities like Chicago and in Northeastern metropolitan areas like New York and Boston, hate incidents that matriculated into community conflicts have typically been triggered by minorities who have “trespassed” boundaries of traditional White ethnic neighborhoods either accidentally or as the result of public policies like school desegregation. More recently, attention has been given to hate incidents post the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (“9/11”), which has drawn responses from human rights and ethnic advocacy organizations representing Arab immigrant groups.

Conflict Response Processes Once again, the CRS role in responding to these kinds of conflicts is instructive. In a number of instances, the CRS conciliator, recognizing the limitations even a noninvestigatory federal representative could play, acted as a catalyst for community mobilization, and devolved the conciliation role to a local coalition. For example, in the Northwest, the CRS conciliator was instrumental in convening a fledging response group in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, composed of law enforcement chiefs, church leadership, a member of the bar association, and the state human rights commission. The group began to track hate group activity more formally and formed a Human Rights Observance Day to coincide with the hate groups’ annual get-togethers (Hughs 2002). Responding to Texas Gulf Coast conflict, a CRS conciliator played a catalytic role by consulting in the formation of anti-Klan protest group rallies,

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encouraging the use of self-marshalling techniques to reduce the potential for violence. There was a stratagem to his intervention as well, in that he sought to expand the anti-Klan “voice” in communities that were vulnerable to Klan agitation and propagandistic organizing (Martinez 2002). In Chicago in 1997 an African American youth riding a bicycle on the perimeter of the Bridgeport neighborhood, a White ethnic stronghold, was beaten into a coma by four White youth. The resultant local and national media attention mobilized the African American community, stripped the White community of its tacit support for racial hate activity, and shook the complacency of local officials (Walsh 1997). Perhaps because Chicago retains remnants of its political machine culture, the conflict management response was internally driven by the mayor, who played a “mediator-withclout” role (Moore 1996). The mayor created a strategic alliance with a major African American Civil Rights leader from that city (but who enjoys a national reputation) and together they forged a biracial coalition of interracial and interfaith religious leaders. This group then led a series of dialogues involving representation from both communities in an attempt to bridge differences. The post-9/11 hate incidents directed at Arab minorities required a period of self-reflection and adjustment for CRS staff. Outside of ethnic tensions that have existed between Arab Americans, Arab immigrants, and other racial and ethnic groups in the Dearborn, Michigan, area, there was not much experience working with what was for many conciliators an unfamiliar ethnic group. Staff underwent cultural awareness training before providing intervention service to these communities. Even so, conflict management appears to have been limited to arranging meetings between these groups and the US Attorney General’s office, creating conflict assessment instruments for local police chiefs and school superintendents to enhance conflict response, and providing on-site assessments and other forms of conciliation to hate crime incidents involving attacks on mosques and neighborhood stores owned by Arabs. The spate of church burnings received a fair amount of media attention, enough to cause CRS to organize a task force out of its headquarters in Washington, DC. The agency even hired temporary conciliators to augment the overstretched regional staff. Again, the role was largely catalytic— attempting to build coalitions of coherent voices that could demonstrate that affected communities would not accept these incidents passively. Interestingly, CRS conciliators often find themselves in paradoxical situations where they feel compelled to balance social justice inclinations with intervention pragmatism. Many agency field staff come from a Civil Rights background. It is that background, honed by TR theory, that operationalizes the paradigm of righting unjust circumstances for traditionally disempowered

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groups. At the same time, the conciliator recognizes that community conflicts are complex and ambiguous, that disempowerment is subjectively perceived across a spectrum of alienated groups. Regardless of the vantage point held by conciliators, they recognize that if the conflict is to be mitigated, they will have to understand how the other side sees the issue. For example, one conciliator arranged and facilitated a meeting between the Klan Grand Dragon and the head of a Vietnamese fishing group so they could air mutual grievances and, it was hoped, collaborate in contingency planning and implementation.

Great Britain Origins In Great Britain, racial and ethnic riots that took place in the Brixton section of London in 1980 and 1981 and the Tottenham section of London in 19837 seem to have sprung from a mixture of excessive force police practices and hate group activity in the form of attacks by White skinhead groups against Asian and African immigrants. The combination of precipitating factors demonstrates the elusiveness of developing neat typologies for community conflicts. The stimuli for many forms of conflict flow turbulently through a community like logs in a swiftly moving current. They can entwine and become the catalyst for an explosion. However, it appears that while the police abuse was a constant irritant, it was the skinhead attacks that became the triggering incident. The origins or sources of the conflict were not vastly dissimilar from those that existed for minorities in the US communities where high rates of unemployment, substandard housing, and other poverty factors (Marshall 1992) created a needs-driven relative deprivation. Further, these factors were aggravated by a political culture’s rhetoric of “we are all British” (Youngh 2002), but with practices that functionally isolated immigrant groups (Yassine 2001). Or as one Muslim put it in an article in the Guardian newspaper, “Even if we had desperately wanted to integrate—and a great many did—we could not have done it without a welcoming hand from our new compatriots” (Kabbani 2002: 1). Although no new racial and ethnic conflicts of this scale have taken place in Great Britain in the past ten years or so, if A. H. Richmond (as cited in Yassine 2001) is correct in proposing that social changes in the United States will appear about eight years later in Great Britain, the time is ripe for more upheavals along these lines. In fact, hate incidents against Muslim immigrants increased after the September 11th attacks, but it remains to be seen if a continuation of these incidents will eventuate into community conflicts in the fuller sense I am working with in this chapter.

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Conflict Response Processes As commented on above, the fact that the civil disturbances in Britain sprang from a confluence of factors (hate acts appearing to be the triggering incident) complicates the task of parsing the processes used to respond to the conflicts. Thus, while a hate incident involving skinheads against members of the minority population may have been the triggering incident, once police became involved attempting to quell the rioting, attention shifted to allegations of police use of excessive force and, to a certain extent, reshaped the problem definition. During the disturbances, the bulk of the response came from law enforcement, and third-party intervention was minimal and sidelined. Post-conflict reflection by police and community social workers created the opportunity for a more open dialogue between police and community residents in the form of a series of facilitated workshops designed to improve police–community relations (Craig 1992). There is no sense that TR issues, while understood, were dealt with in a prescriptive way.

Eastern Europe Origins Eastern Europe has been the locale for this kind of community conflict as well. In Slovakia and Hungary, the Roma population has been the target of attacks by skinheads and victimized by police use of excessive force. The Roma (more commonly known as gypsies) are believed to have emigrated to Europe from India sometime between the ninth and fourteenth centuries (Olson 2000). In Hungary, the Roma are divided into three distinct identity groups with their own culture and language and ability to assimilate into mainstream society. The Romungro, at about 75%, are by far the largest group of the Roma population and are the most assimilated, having forsaken Roma traditions. The Olah are the second largest Roma group, constituting approximately 20% of that population. As with the Romungro, the Olah are also an immigrant group, but of a more recent vintage, having arrived in Hungary about 250 years ago. The Olah tend to be a more close-knit subethnic community and live quite separately from the indigenous Hungarian community. At around 50,000, the Beash are the smallest of the three Roma communities and reflect a life pattern similar to the Olah (Olson 2000). The lack of cohesive lifestyles of the Roma ethnic communities has diluted their ability to mobilize and muted their responses to conflict. Observers note, however, that if national economic conditions do not improve in Hungary, a

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relatively passive Roma population could explode into more focused violence as the gap between value expectations and value capabilities increases (Olson 2000).

Conflict Response Processes Three conflict response processes are relevant for Eastern Europe: (1) mobilization; (2) third-party role shift; and (3) forecasting values. I commented earlier that for racial/ethnic hate incidents to become a community conflict, the victimized minority must gain a measure of political agency that stimulates mobilization. Similar to conflicts involving police use of excessive force, mobilization to counteract racial/ethnic hate activities has the potential to create an awareness of some level of interdependency in the majority community and its leadership. Mobilization, however, does not always spring forth innately from low-power minority communities, particularly when the minority community has been politically, economically, and socially disenfranchised. In these circumstances, external third-party advocates stimulate agency through conflict escalation. In Hungary, national human rights lawyers and international NGOs played this role through the use of national and international media, educating Roma about their rights and taking high-profile cases to court (Olson 2000). The conflict escalation role undertaken by advocates at the national level has the potential for creating a climate of ripeness (Pruitt and Kim 2004)8 for a more neutral third party to engage in conflict management in local communities. In Hungary this assistance was provided by Partners Hungary (PH), the forerunner of ten national centers established by the US-based Partners for Democratic Change (PDC). Focusing on the town of Nagykanizsa in Zala County, Hungarian PH facilitators worked with county authorities and the leadership of a Roma ethnic group to improve education, housing, and employment possibilities for the affected population (Olson 2000). Although PH interveners were trained in a range of intervention techniques, they soon discovered that the concept of mediation in a political culture was not fully free of the mind-set of the old Soviet cordon sanitaire; it implied an imposed solution from an external source and was, therefore, unacceptable. Moreover, mediation in circumstances of extreme power asymmetry can result in a problem-solving dependency, and PH was interested in building long-term capacity in the Roma leadership. For these reasons, PH changed its conflict management style to a form of facilitation called “cooperative planning” that engaged a wide range of local stakeholders to work on complex problems (Olson 2000), allowing for more control of the process by participants. However, PH found that mediation techniques used in contingent situations, and as a culturally relevant construct, were still useful.

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Still another learning process was that while the epistemological approach was normatively geared toward building better relations in a severely divided community, “it was the kiss of death to tell communities that you want to help improve their ethnic relations” (Olson 2000: 11). The better approach was to focus on the more pragmatic substantive or procedural issues. In addition to facilitation and mediation in specific situations, PH helped stakeholders to develop conflict diagnostic tools, provided training, and taught conflict management courses at local universities.

Outcomes and Community Capacity Building Much of the conflict management conducted by interveners in the United States and Great Britain in racial hate conflict was pragmatically focused. While some attention was paid to changing a pattern of negative interaction between opposing groups and one or more of these groups and law enforcement, outcomes were mainly procedural in that interventions frequently resulted in changing the way law enforcement personal conducted their activities in affected communities, or how opposing groups conducted protest behavior to minimize the opportunity for violence. On the other hand, Chicago offers an example of community capacity building that has the potential to go beyond conflict management to conflict resolution (if not transformation in outcome). This could be seen in reconciliatory behavior such as the cross visits between African American and White ethnic church congregations and mutual acknowledgement of pain and suffering by families of the victim and perpetrators. In these examples (Chicago notwithstanding), to the extent third-party intervention looked at relationships, it was primarily in the short term. For example, bringing the leader of the Vietnamese fishing delegation together with the Texas Gulf Coast Grand Dragon of the Klan was not in recognition of a need for an ongoing relationship, but rather a short-term mutual interest in avoiding further conflict; in other words, changing behavior to better manage the conflict and mitigate the possibility of further violence. Attitudinal change is not undertaken, either because interveners assumed there was no interest on the part of opposing groups to transform their relationship (there may not have been) or an ontological perspective was adopted that attitudes were unchangeable and segregated lifestyles was the normative relational status between groups. Similarly, the intervention work between minority Roma communities and majority populations conducted in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe produced procedural and to some extent substantive outcomes.

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Here, opposing groups were quite clear that they were interested in, at best, a minimalist approach to changing relationships; tolerating a shift in direction from a segregated state to a limited form of pluralism, but not going so far as integration (Schellenberg 1996). In some instances, it appears relationships were enhanced within anti-hate coalitions rather than between opposing groups, as was the case in the Northwestern part of the United States where, prior to the intervention, there were concerned individuals who, for the most part, were working alone.

Ethnic Group Conflict Ethnic group conflict enjoys a rich literature (e.g., Black 2003; Horowitz 1985; Kaufman 2001; Smith 1993), most of which focuses on competing ethnies (Smith 1993) attempting to shape or reshape a national landscape. Once again, I feel compelled to acknowledge the difficulty in parsing the difference between a community conflict and a national conflict that is being played out in a local community—a particularly ambiguous distinction in settings where constitutional democracy with devolved governmental responsibility is thin or nonexistent. To the degree that ethnic group conflict can be determined to be a community phenomenon, one wonders that it is not even more prolific. Ethnic divisions exist in every society even if only subtly. Further, where there are these divisions, there is always a degree of friction if not outright conflict. While most of the theory generation pertaining to ethnic group conflict deals with these relations at the nation-state level, many of the assumptions can be applied to local manifestations. For example, Smith (1993) identifies five traits such groups must share in common. First, the group has to have a name, one that has symbolic meaning members can rally around. Second, members must have a belief in a common descent; that they come from a certain lineage occupying a place in time and space. It matters little if this is true, only that group members believe it to be true. Third, the group typically shares common historical memories that get told and retold throughout the generations of the group. Fourth, group members would have a shared culture. Finally, group members share a specific territory; a neighborhood or site where most if not all the members live. If these traits (or characteristics) can be distinctively applied to two groups who share geographical space, social relations tend to become crystallized around “we/they” interpretations and form the basis for conflict. A sample of community ethnic conflict follows that hopefully lends descriptive and explanatory weight to how these

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conflicts originate, what processes are used to manage them, and how outcomes (to the extent that they can be determined) lend themselves to community capacity building. Specifically, the origins and processes from cases in the United States, South Africa, and Northern Ireland are introduced, and then outcomes from each of these cases are reviewed.

United States Origins Ethnic group conflict in its various manifestations has existed in the United States for quite some time. Certainly from the mid-1850s to arguably the early part of the twentieth century, conflict between White ethnic groups was rife in burgeoning urban areas as waves of Irish, Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants battled over the distribution of scarce resources and political power (Erie 1988; Rakove 1975). In a more contemporary period, new immigration patterns have sparked a renewal of ethnic conflict, but this time involving Asians, Hispanics from Mexico and Central America, Middle Easterners, and groups of Afro-Caribbean descent. There are times when these conflicts occur between one or more immigrant groups and indigenous African Americans. Finally, we should not overlook recurrent conflict between historically embedded ethnies, as is the case with American Blacks and Hassidic Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York.

Conflict Response Processes Where conflicts have involved Southeast Asians and African Americans, interveners like the CRS and Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service field staff have employed short-term conciliation techniques such as facilitating meetings between ethnic group leaders, arranging meetings between these groups and local law enforcement, and engaging in cross-cultural awareness training. Conciliators have used innovative approaches when going on-site was problematic. For example, one CRS conciliator guided a local high school principal through a conflict involving Samoan and African American youth via a week-long series of telephone conversations when he realized on-site intervention was not possible because of scheduling conflicts and budgetary concerns. This approach effectively reframed the principal’s role from enforcer-disciplinarian to process facilitator (Thom 2002). Not all intervention processes involving ethnic conflict have required (or even welcomed) assistance from external third-party sources. More often

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than not, a local politician’s response to ethnic conflict has been avoidance, but on occasion effective conflict management roles have been played by “insider partials”9 such as local politicians. In Crown Heights, the borough president and local city council members were effective in building interracial and interethnic coalitions because of their strong social network capabilities with Blacks and Hassidic Jewish groups who formed the basis of their political support.

South Africa Origins The apartheid system of governance in South Africa, which began in 1950 with the Population Registration Act and did not end until the Nationalist Party unbanned Black political parties in 1990 (Arnold 1994), established a legacy of particularly violent community conflict that took place primarily in ghetto townships surrounding the major metropolitan areas and in hostels that housed workers who labored in the gold and diamond mines. Complicating the analysis and resolution of these conflicts is the realization that in a number of instances, ethnic factions were (and still are, although to a lesser degree) stimulated by the major Black political parties vying for power. The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), whose core constituency is Zulu, and the African National Congress (ANC), which draws its strength from the Xhosa ethnic group, deserve mention in this regard. Hostel worker conflict generated by poor working conditions, inadequate pay, the removal of the male population from families, and frequently exacerbated by rival political parties, produced subsidiary conflicts. As noted above, hostels are located in townships that are themselves desperately poor. One secondary manifestation is between residents of these townships who are squatters and who view migrant workers as competition for jobs and other resources (Arnold 1994). Another ancillary conflict stems from rival taxicab companies that have sprung up to service the worker population. In some cases, these companies are backed by warring political factions and have been extremely violent, resulting in serious injuries and deaths to passengers and drivers (Barrow 1999; McIntyre 2000).

Conflict Response Processes A number of South Africa-based conflict management organizations have intervened in these conflicts over the years, utilizing a combination of mediation and conciliation techniques. These interventions have been mainly

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contingency focused and aimed at mitigation of further violence, but some initiatives have the potential for building more sustained collaborations. One such intervention in the taxicab conflict was undertaken by the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) located in Cape Town. Over a period of several months in the summer and fall of 2000, CCR mediators convened a series of facilitated negotiations in that city between several warring cab companies, public transportation officials, and police to assist parties to find ways to end the violence (Centre for Conflict Resolution 2000). Some of the key issues were the allocation of taxi permits, impoundment of taxis by local authorities, and the prosecution of bus drivers. CCR’s ideology of practice distinguishes between impartiality (maintaining equidistance between parties) and neutrality. Mediators make clear to parties that they are not neutral about violence and, therefore, will not be a part of negotiations that attempt to set conditions under which violence is permitted. In other words, CCR makes its ethics of intervention clear from the beginning. Even so, a level of violence continued while parties were in negotiations and threatened to wreck the process. Fortunately, the parties recommitted themselves to a peaceful resolution. While the mediation did not result in substantive agreement, CCR reports that there was some reduction in violence and parties reached a few agreements on procedure, principally that they would continue to use a dialogical forum to try to reach agreements on remaining issues.

Northern Ireland Origins The history of the Northern Ireland conflict, particularly in Belfast, has been detailed extensively (Fitzduff 2002) and will not be redocumented here. It is sufficient to recognize that it is a complex conflict, deeply embedded in sectarian identities that have been formed over centuries of chosen traumas and chosen glories (Volkan 1998), clung to by Protestant Loyalists who favor maintaining the current political relationship with Britain, and Catholic Nationalists who want the North to become a part of the Irish Republic: the former backed by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) loyalist paramilitaries and the latter by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Continuing the observations made about other forms of community conflicts that take place outside the United States, Northern Ireland community conflicts often are played out with devastating effects in ethnically entrenched neighborhoods, but their implications carry weight at the national and international level.

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Conflict Response Processes There has been an array of interventions woven into the history of “the Troubles” designed to manage that conflict. Employing Lederach’s (1997) model, we can see that some interventions have functioned at Level One for the purposes of engaging the formal political leadership. Former US Senator George Mitchell’s mediation that produced a tentative peace has been well publicized in news media and other forums. Other conflict management initiatives have taken place at Levels Two (mid-level) and Three (grass roots) and it is at these levels we will focus our attention. Fitzduff (2002) reported on a variety of conflict management interventions in the form of conciliation, mediation, problem-solving workshops, and training that have been employed at one point or another to end conflict in Northern Ireland. Much of this work has been undertaken by Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity (INCORE)10 and, as the former director, Fitzduff drew from this organization’s experience a number of principles of practice, some of which are reviewed here. One principle is the importance of integrating contingency responses of law enforcement to deal with triggering incidents with longer-term problem-solving initiatives. In highintensity conflict, the tendency (and the temptation) is to limit response to procedural issues designed to mitigate violence. The focus is on containment, ignoring the substantive and structural causes that lie beneath. The risk, of course, is that the conflict will resurface when the next triggering incident occurs. A second principle is the importance of carrying on talks at all levels of community and leadership, not concentrating negotiations and decision making in the ranks of the political leaders at Level One. Finally, talks must not be limited to gender stereotypes of conflict resolution, but reflect the important roles that women play in conflict management and peacebuilding. The literature about conflict resolution practice gives great attention to the roles and techniques of the external and professional mediator (Moore 1996; Pruitt and Kim 2004), but largely ignores the activities played by informal insider partials (for an exception, see Lederach 1997). Yet in many identitybased community conflicts, the external mediator is viewed with suspicion and mistrust. A unique initiative in conflict management was undertaken by the Community Development Centre (CDC), a multiservice NGO, to respond to the high scale of violence that took place in North Belfast in the mid-1990s. There were, of course, the ever-present TR conditions based on differentiation of needs fulfillment between Catholics and Protestants. The triggering incident was an amalgam of factors including police abuse, rumors, media hype, and a breakdown in communication between sectarian leadership and local authorities. At the height of the violence, 110 families abandoned their

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homes and neighborhoods that had painstakingly become dual identity, and now reverted back to single identity status. The CDC was instrumental in setting up an interagency task force to respond to increased levels of violence anticipated as a result of the upcoming marching season, when Protestant Loyalists march provocatively through selected Catholic neighborhoods to celebrate the victory of Protestant William of Orange over King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Rather than taking on all the conflict management roles themselves, the task force equipped a small, balanced contingent of Catholic and Protestant community leaders with mobile phones. This group went out in sectarian communities and used the phones as rumor control mechanisms and to hasten response by appropriate local authorities to emergent violence.

Outcomes and Community Capacity Building Certainly, one could reach a conclusion when looking at US-based conflict management processes that these were closely held roles carried out by mediators with clout (at least in the case of local politicians) for status-preserving ends or by well-meaning but socially astigmatic external third parties. Perhaps it would be more charitable to acknowledge a certain unfairness in this observation since I take an admittedly small slice of the ethnic community conflict landscape. A closer examination suggests that the telephone conciliation, for example, is a form of community capacity building in that the school principal discussed earlier now knows a process that can work and possibly be transferable to other conflict settings. The Crown Heights, Brooklyn, initiatives lend themselves to community capacity building because while it may be true that local politicians have an almost Darwinian need to survive, their efforts have resulted in a leadership network that is now functioning on its own. The Northern Ireland conflict and the South African taxi wars demonstrate the limitations of community capacity building in situations of extreme and protracted violence. Leadership at the mid- and grassroots level becomes traumatized and, in effect, leave communities rudderless. Both examples suggest that when community conflicts are nested within structural issues at the state level, external third parties are needed to jump-start the management process. It may be that the best that can be hoped for with respect to community capacity building is the ability to contain the violence until such time as a pathway toward resolution is constructed at the state level. Certainly, the South African taxi wars demonstrate the difficulty of managing (much less resolving) conflict that is embedded in a system of structural violence left in place by apartheid. The relative deprivation

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experienced by taxi drivers as a result of economic disparity results in a form of displacement (Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff 1990), turning frustrationaggression inward, away from a system that causes the condition toward a relatively “safe” target—other taxi drivers and their associations.

Theory, Practice, and Future Research Directions In this section, the intent is to bring into sharper focus the relationship between theory, practice, and research and how these disciplines inform interventions designed to build sustainable and conflict-mitigated communities. In doing so, I hope to tease out and make more explicit the synergy that exists between often competing bodies of knowledge— a synergy that can be the basis for a more reflective practice. To better understand this synergy, I will discuss ethical consideration and future research directions.

Theoretical Implications for Practice A number of theoretical concepts and principles (some more explicitly than others) have been woven throughout the discussion of community conflict and its management. The following are ones that I feel are notably important for intervention in community conflicts.

Worldviews I briefly looked at group identities with an emphasis on how these groups memorialize conflict through chosen traumas and chosen glories; those generational events that gives a group a sense of “weness”—a worldview of who they are in relation to others they may be in conflict with. This worldview, having its origins in TRs of structural violence, will often be ignited by some triggering event, such as an act of police abuse or a predatory attack undertaken by a more powerful opposing group.

Status Change Communities exist in a dynamic continuum ranging from cooperation to conflict and even crisis (Laue and Cormick 1978). As relationships between groups or between groups and local government move from a state of harmony to one that is unharmonious, the condition of relative deprivation becomes more

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stratified and, as we noted earlier, set the stage for pronounced frustration, leading to aggression, not infrequently in the form of violence.

The Utility of Conflict From the vantage point of practice, theorizing about the nature of groups in conflict would seem to give impetus to initiating an intervention before conflict emerges (i.e., taking a preventive approach). But Coser (1956) reminded us that (if we believe groups are integral components in a functioning society) a certain amount of conflict is necessary to maintain group boundaries and cohesiveness. Further, while postmodernists might consider Marx theoretically unfashionable, if community conflict is stimulated by an imbalance in the distribution of scarce resources, can real change take place without conflict?

The Interrelationship of Mobilization and Escalation Cormick (1992) underscored the importance of mobilization to low-power community groups for the purposes of articulating nested grievances and developing symmetries of negotiating power. In fact, the history of community conflict suggests that poorly mobilized groups have difficulty getting to the table or, once there, having their demands taken seriously. This brings us to awareness that there is a dynamic cause-and-effect relationship between mobilization and escalation. Pruitt and Kim (2004) observed that, “Escalation occurs when Party’s contentious tactics become heavier, putting more pressure on Other and often inflicting greater suffering” (p. 151). Mobilization acts to escalate conflict, but escalation in turn stimulates mobilization. The issue for conflict management is at what point does the escalation of conflict from a “healthy” state become one that is unhealthy and disruptive? It would seem to me that “healthy/unhealthy” are social constructions with contingent meaning depending on culture, degree, and interpretation of relative deprivation and the form the aggressiveness takes. As this applies to Cincinnati or Los Angeles civil disturbances, could there have been a form of mobilization that would have produced an “acceptable” level of disruption and confrontation?

Ethical Considerations Mobilization leading to the use of contentious conflict manager. If the the effect of stimulating

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conflict escalation, particularly where it involves tactics, raises troubling ethical dilemmas for the intervention initiated by the conflict manager has mobilization, does this violate professional icons of

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neutrality and impartiality? For example, the conflict manager in assessing the protest parties who should be “at the table” might conclude that more militant elements have not been given a voice and seek to include them in a resolution process. However, the inclusion, while energizing the mobilization, could also escalate the conflict. On the other hand, is there not a risk that encouraging parties to negotiate before a sufficient mobilization has been undertaken co-opts the negotiating equilibrium? An approach to dealing with this dilemma might begin with the conflict manager’s recognizing that if the purpose of the intervention is to help build healthy, more inclusive communities, then process cannot be divorced from outcome. That is, an intervention designed to create this kind of community is not a neutral process, but rather a form of advocacy for a conceptual outcome, one in which the particular dimensions will be shaped by all the affected parties. A critical task for the conflict manager is twofold. One is to convince the more powerful party to accept the full spectrum of potential parties affected by the conflict even if past behavior of some of those individuals or groups has not fallen within the norms of the more powerful party. Second, the intervener has to convince the insufficiently mobilized party that if it agrees to enter a negotiations process with the intention of having a viable role in the outcome, then some constraints will have to be placed on the “tools” of mobilization. Acts of extreme violence, for example, would not be acceptable. Accordingly, there is an acknowledgement by all that this may escalate the conflict, but in the end produce a more holistic and sustainable outcome. In community conflicts where there is a disenfranchised, low-power group confronting more powerful public and private entities, a prescriptive approach would be to diversify intervention roles, such as was the case with the Hungarian Roma conflict. International and national NGOs acted as advocates that escalated the conflict, creating a sense of ripeness, laying the foundation for more neutral third-party conflict management. Indeed, Mitchell (1993) argued that some conflicts call for as many as thirteen intervention roles. But as was noted when commenting on this example, some Roma rights activists were concerned that external and internal advocates focused on conflict escalation could worsen relations with the majority community, increasing the possibility of retaliation rather than negotiation. Responding to this kind of ethical dilemma through the diversification of conflict management roles is clearer in community conflicts where there are asymmetries of power. It is somewhat murkier when the conflict is driven by contesting groups of relatively equal power, as we have seen with the South African taxi wars and Northern Ireland. In these instances, on-theground violence is inextricably caught up with underlying structural sources.

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Diversified intervention roles are important here as well, but the likelihood that ongoing community violence could derail negotiations around structural issues requires that both levels be worked on simultaneously by multiple actors. Given the relational, procedural, and structural complexity of community conflict, how, then, to articulate the ethical dilemmas permeating intervention? One view invites the conflict resolver into a paradox. The Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution (SPIDR 1989) noted that it was the conflict resolver’s responsibility “as a disinterested third party” (p. 6) to be neutral in his or her conduct with the parties. Shortly thereafter, however, it instructs this individual that if he or she determines that one of the parties in a negotiation is at a functional disadvantage, the conflict resolver has a responsibility to address this. How one addresses this situation while at the same time maintaining a posture of disinterest is left up to the imagination. Another view draws the conflict resolver into a reflective mode in relationship to an ethical dilemma and can be assessed by potential interveners from two perspectives. In the first, an ethical dilemma can be construed as one in which the practitioner is faced with a doubt about how to act in relation to personal and professional values, norms, and obligations (Conrad 1988). This suggests a dual epistemology, the personal and professional, and represents a tension between them. The conflict resolver brings his or her own values and worldviews into a conflict, and whether this individual is conscious of them or not they imprint the dynamic of the conflict. This may clash with a professional code of ethics and take on added significance if we consider that these worldviews have cultural frames that carry a different logic about what is the rightness or wrongness of a practitioner’s behavior. The above duality clarifies the intrapersonal dilemma confronting the conflict resolver but leaves untouched another dilemma that is present in complex community conflicts; that is, the relationship between the conflict resolver and the parties and the relationship between the parties (the second perspective). Adding to the first perspective, I argue that a critical point is where the choice of action (of the conflict resolver) has consequences for the relationships between the conflict resolver and the parties, between the parties, and the objectives to which the intervention is being applied. This acknowledges the complex set of relationships in multiparty community conflicts and the recognition that these relationships are interdependent. When a conflict manager is engaged in a complex, multiparty community conflict where events on the ground are changing rapidly, this individual may not always have the luxury of determining ethical implications in advance. One technique an intervener can use to get out of the ethical maze is called

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model building: “Model building is the process of constructing frames of reference that will allow the conflict manager to develop multiple rationales for what is occurring or what could occur. The process encourages the conflict manager to move from an over-reliance on short-term, contingent observations to a deeper understanding of anticipated or unfolding events” (Warfield 2002: 218). In my model, I envision four stages where a conflict manager may contemplate and respond to an ethical dilemma—pause, reflect, share, and determine options and select—that mirror a sequence in conflict dynamics.

Stage 1: Pause Often when conflict managers are planning an intervention or are even in the midst of one, they experience a sense of discomfort; a feeling that something is not quite right. Rather than ignoring this “inner tug” and plunging ahead, conflict managers should find a quiet space to identify what they are feeling. They may have uncovered an ethical dilemma.

Stage 2: Reflect The intent of reflection is to give meaning to an observed act or pattern of activity. Here conflict managers try to determine the implications for their common sense ethics and whether these ethics have changed.

Stage 3: Share Teams conduct many community conflict interventions. Intervention teams form complex sets of relationships that, like any other relationship, are fraught with paradoxes of cooperation and competition. If during an intervention one or more members of the team encounter the first two stages of an ethical dilemma, they may not communicate their concerns to other team members out of fear of disrupting a delicate set of relationships. One of the team members has to have the courage to bring his or her concerns to colleagues for the greater good of the intervention and the outcomes.

Stage 4: Determine Options and Select Having carried out the first three stages, conflict managers are now engaged in a determination of what options are available to prevent the ethical dilemma from worsening. Choice is informed by three factors: (1) the core values conflict managers bring with them as implicit components of the intervention and how these values interact with the ethical dilemma; (2)

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how these values diverge from the values held by the profession the conflict managers associate themselves with; and (3) conflict managers’ understanding of what others have done in similar situations and the esteem in which these individuals are held.

Future Research Directions This modest review of community conflict management and community capacity building does yield a few areas for research to delve into. A first area to examine is understudied communities such as nonindustrial societies and Native American/First Nation communities. A few prior studies provide insights into the depth of issues for conflict resolution in these communities. Merry (1989) discussed methods used for dispute and conflict resolution in nonindustrial (traditional) societies. Merry reported on the studies conducted in four societies: the Nuer, pastoral nomads who inhabit areas of Ethiopia and Sudan; the Ifugao of the Philippines; the Waigali, a tribal society from the mountainous areas of Afghanistan; and the Zinacantecos, a Mayan Indian community that lives in the Chiapas area in southern Mexico. Conflicts in these societies tends to be intracommunal rather than intercommunal in that they involve factions or families living in close or overlapping physical arrangements rather than distinct and segregated geographies. While some conflicts can involve small groups engaged in activities such as cattle theft, by and large the conflicts were interpersonal and covered such acts as theft, adultery, assault, and homicide. There are significant implications for escalation into community conflicts because of the close-knit kinship patterns that exist in these societies. Third-party intervention, then, conducted by respected insider partials, has a larger purpose of maintaining a level of harmony in that community. In addition, a small but important body of research has begun to emerge that addresses conflicts involving Native American and (in Canada) First Nation peoples that brings emphasis to cultural differences. Often, these conflicts are intratribal, and even where they involve external, nonnative communities, they tend not to reflect the high level of violence manifested in the conflicts discussed earlier in this chapter. Nevertheless, these conflicts do involve deeply embedded cultural issues. For example, Chataway (1994) looked at a conflict involving two competing governing bodies in the Kahnawake Mohawk community in Canada: the traditional Longhouse system of governance and the band council system. The band council designed by nonaboriginal Canadians replaced the traditionalist form around the turn of the twentieth century and was designed to administer programs and policies of the

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state and surrounding jurisdictions. The traditionalists resurfaced in 1979, and the conflict was engaged when both systems of governance began to compete over which system could best represent the internal interests of the Kahnawake community. Chataway found, ironically, that while the community felt the traditional Longhouse provided the more authentic cultural image of inclusiveness, the leadership acted to exclude the community in many of its decision-making processes; whereas the band council, which many in the community were not disposed to accept ideologically, was actually more responsive to the community’s needs. Both systems of governance claimed the mantle of cultural legitimacy for the Kahnawake Mohawks. The conflict placed the community in a cognitive dilemma since it was felt that coherence concerning culture and its representation was of critical importance in the interface with the Canadian government. A second area where research is needed is in the application of relative deprivation and frustration-aggression theories to propensity toward violence in community conflict. For example, why is it that some communities embroiled in issues of police use of excessive force will translate frustrationaggression into violence while communities in another city with similar variables will not? This could be important because a better understanding of this might enable us to construct more focused conflict management interventions that could lend themselves to sustained conflict resolution outcomes. A third area for future research is examining the process of community conflict. Even a casual perusal of the conflicts discussed in this chapter would reveal that community conflicts are dynamic events subject to change. What, then, is the relationship between community conflict and change? For example, who defines the conflict and what events act to change how the conflict is defined? How does a change in conflict dynamics shift roles of stakeholders in conflict and the capacity to be cooperative or competitive? Another direction that research might take in relation to managing community conflict is role negotiation by the third-party intervener. In some of the interventions undertaken by CRS conciliators there are strong inferences of role negotiation. For example, a CRS conciliator I worked with noted that she considered a case in the initial assessment as ripe for formal table mediation, but realized once she was into conflict management that a more informal conciliation style was called for. We need to know more about shift points in community conflicts that signal to the intervener a need for a role change and what the actual negotiations look like. Finally, a meta-research question should inquire about the relationship of community conflict management to the development of civil society and participatory democracy. Assuming this is even a desirable goal for research,

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what conditions need to be in place for conflict management to become a catalyst for these outcomes? The work by PH with regards to the Roma– majority community conflict is informative but paradoxical. There does seem to be a relationship between the PH intervention and the indication that the Roma profile in municipal electoral politics has been raised somewhat. As well, there appears to have been increased participation of one Roma ethnic group in the community planning process. At the same time, there seems to be little change in attitudes by the majority community toward the Romas. In sum, a modest body of ethnographic research has emerged that examines inter- and intracommunity conflict engaged in by identity groups of one sort or another. However, little has been done that focuses on intervention roles either by external or internal third parties. We need to know more about how communities interpret triggering events and link them (or not) to causal factors that then determine a level of response. Finally, more research in this area should help us determine if a normative outcome of a community conflict intervention is coexistence (as appears to be the case with the Romas) or if a reconciliatory and transformative relationship is possible.

Conclusion I have attempted to examine a deliberately small variety of community conflicts that is underreported in theory development, research, and the popular literature. The idea was to bring an international perspective to community conflict and its management, and to learn to what extent intervention lent itself to community capacity building. Patterns of some forms of community conflict such as that generated by police use of excessive force, whether it takes place in the US or abroad, have similar dynamics. The work of conflict managers, not unexpectedly, is reactive, pointing to the difficulty of designing and conducting an intervention into the causal factors in which triggering incidents are nested. While interventions seem dependent on a triggering incident (or series of incidents) to initiate an intervention, in some instances conflict managers, using a variety of third-party consensual techniques, provided a catalyst for stakeholders to go deeper into causal factors. Where this occurred, a key element appeared to be the diversification of the stakeholder base. Broadening the stakeholder base beyond the original protest group to include individuals who could influence policy decisions provides some assurance that structural issues will be addressed and agreements will be sustained for longer periods.

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The work of PH highlights the importance of tandem third-party intervention roles; in this case, a complementarity between advocates who can stimulate mobilization and so-called neutrals who can follow in their wake to do the more balanced conflict management. Indeed, the notion of “complementarity” and “tandem” raises the question of whether there really is such a thing as neutrality in these kinds of community conflicts, suggesting ethical dilemmas not typically faced in other forms of conflict management. Finally, from what was sampled in this chapter we can see there is no small amount of theory that can be applied to the understanding of these forms of conflict. What we lack is empirical research that can help us better understand how these conflicts are formed and what conditions cause them to change. Given the apparently unrelenting march of globalization, we are likely to have more complex community conflicts than ever before. The more we know about them, the more likely conflict interveners will know how to manage them and transfer this capacity to communities in the true participatory model.

References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Balduino, D. T. (2001, March). Land Conflicts in Brazil. Paper presented at the Access to Land conference, Bonn, Germany. Barrow, G. (1999). World: African Opposition Shootings Continue in Cape Town. BBC News online network. From http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/ africa/newsid_293000/293932.stm [accessed 16 May 2004]. Berry, M. J., Portney, K. E., and Thompson, K. (1993). The Rebirth of Urban Democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Black, C. E. (1966). The Dynamics of Modernization. New York: Harper and Row. Black, G. S. (1974). “Conflicts in Community: A Theory of the Effects of Community Size.” American Political Science Review 68:1245–61. Black, P. W. (2003). “Identities.” In S. Cheldelin, D. Druckman, and L. Fast (eds), Conflict from Analysis to Intervention (pp. 120–139). New York: Continuum. CDR Associates (2004). The CDR Mediation Process Training Manual. Boulder, CO: Center for Dispute Resolution Associates. Centre for Conflict Resolution (2000). Western Cape Transport Conflict: Progress Report. From http://ccrweb.cct.uct.ac.za [accessed 16 May 2004]. Chataway, C. (1994). Challenges to Aboriginal Self-Government. From http:// www.kahonwes.com/iroquois/s94chata.htm [accessed 15 May 2004] Coleman, J. A. (1957). Community Conflict. New York: Free Press. Conrad, A. P. (1988). “Ethical Considerations in the Psychological Process.” Social Casework 69:603–10. Cormick, G. W. (1992). “Environmental Conflict, Community Mobilization, and the ‘Public Good.’” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 12:309–29.

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Coser, L. A. (1956). The Functions of Social Conflict. New York: Free Press. Craig, Y. (1992). “Policing the Poor: Conciliation or Confrontation?” In T. F. Marshall (ed.), Community Disorder and Policing: Conflict Management in Action (pp. 77–86). London: Whiting and Birch. Dougherty, J. E., and Pfaltzgraff, R. L., Jr. (1990). Contending Theories of International Relations (3rd edn). New York: Harper and Row. Dugan, M. A. (1996). “A Nested Theory of Conflict.” Women in Leadership: Sharing the Vision 1:9–20. Erie, S. P. (1988). Rainbow’s End: Irish Americans and the Dilemma of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Fitzduff, M. (2002). Conflict Resolution Processes in Northern Ireland. New York: United Nations Press. Galtung, J. (1969). “Violence, Peace and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6:167–91. Gurr, T. R. (1970). Why Men Rebel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gwartney-Gibbs. P. A., and Lach, D. H. (1991). “Research Report: Workplace Dispute Resolution and Gender Inequality.” Negotiation Journal 7:1–9. Horowitz, D. L. (1985). Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hughs, R. (2002). Interview for CRS Oral History Project. From the University of Colorado’s Conflict Research Consortium website: http://www.colorado.edu/ conflict/civil_rights/notes_med.html [accessed 15 May 2004] Kabbani, R. (2002). Dislocation and Neglect in Muslim Britain’s Ghettos. From the Guardian Unlimited website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/ Story/0,276 3,738861,00.html [accessed 15 May 2004] Kaufman, S. J. (2001). Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Laue, J., and Cormick, G. (1978). “The Ethics of Intervention in Community Disputes.” In G. Berman, H. C. Kelman, and D. P. Warwick (eds), The Ethics of Social Intervention (pp. 205–32). Washington, DC: Halsted Press. Lederach, J. P. (1995). Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. —(1997). Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press. Marshall, T. F. (ed.) (1992). Community Disorders and Policing: Conflict Management in Action. London: Whiting and Birch. Martinez, E. (2002). Interview for CRS Oral History Project. From the University of Colorado’s Conflict Research Consortium website: http://www.colorado. edu/conflict/civil_rights/notes_med.html [accessed 15 May 2004] McIntyre, J. (2000). Police Seal Off Taxi War Township. BBC News online network. From http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/ world/africa/newsid_864000/ 864116.stm [accessed 16 May 2004] Merry, S. E. (1989). “Mediation in Nonindustrial Societies.” In K. Kressel and D. G. Pruitt (eds), Mediation Research (pp. 68–90). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Mitchell, C. (1993). “The Process and Stages of Mediation: Two Sudanese Cases.” In D. R. Smock (ed.), Making War and Waging Peace: Foreign Intervention in Africa (pp. 139–59). Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press.

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Managing Racial/Ethnic Conflict for Community Building 69 Moore, C. W. (1996). The Mediation Process: Practical Strategies for Resolving Conflict (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Nagel, J. H. (1990). “Psychological Obstacles to Administrative Responsibility: Lessons of the MOVE Disaster.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 10:1–23. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968). The American Dream Does Not Yet Exist for All Our Citizens: Kerner Commission Members Discuss Civil Unrest. From History Matters website: http://history matters. gmu.edu/d/6465 [accessed 12 January 2005] Olson, L. (2000). Managing Conflict Through Cooperative Planning: Partners Hungary’s Work on Majority–Minority (Roma) Tensions. A Reflecting on Peace Practice Project Case Study. Cambridge, MA: Collaborative for Development Action. Pruitt, D. G., and Kim, S. H. (2004). Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate, and Settlement (3rd edn). New York: McGraw-Hill. Rakove, M. L. (1975). “Reflections on the Machine.” In M. G. Holli and P. M. Green (eds), The Making of the Mayor: Chicago, 1983 (pp. 127–143). Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. G. Erdsman. Rothman, J. (2003). The Cincinnati Collaborative Executive Summary. From the ARIA Group, Inc. website: http://www.ariagroup.com/cinti.html [accessed 15 May 2004] Schellenberg, J. A. (1996). Conflict Resolution: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York: State University of New York Press. Slack, K. (2003, October 19). “Poor vs. Profit in Bolivian Revolt.” Los Angeles Times, p. M5. Smith, A. D. (1993). “The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism.” Survival 35:48–62. Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution (1989). Making the Tough Calls: Ethical Exercises for Neutral Dispute Resolvers. Washington, DC: SPIDR. Thom, S. (2002). Interview for CRS Oral History Project. From the University of Colorado’s Conflict Research Consortium website: http://www.colorado.edu/ conflict/civil_rights/index.html [accessed 15 May 2004] Volkan, V. (1998). Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. Boulder, CO: Westview. Walsh, E. (1997, March 27). “Chicago Establishment Condemns Latest Episode in Ugly History of Race Relations.” Washington Post, p. A13. Walsh, M. (2002). Interview for CRS Oral History Project. Fom the University of Colorado’s Conflict Research Consortium website: http://www.colorado.edu/ conflict/civil_rights/index.html [accessed 15 May 2004] Warfield, W. (1993). “Public Policy Conflict Resolution: The Nexus Between Culture and Process.” (See Chapter 4 of this book.) —(1996). “Building Consensus for Racial Harmony in American Cities: A Case Model Approach.” (See Chapter 2 of this book.) —(2002). “Is This the Right Thing to Do? A Practical Framework for Ethical Decisions.” (See Chapter 9 of this book.) Whyte, W. F. (1943). Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yassine, H.-Q. (2001). Causes of Racism in Britain. From the Immigrant Institute website: http://www.Immi.se/ir/ir 2001/yassine.htm [accessed 15 May 2004]

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Youngh, G. (2002). No Place Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey Through the American South. London: Pickadore.

Notes  1 This statement refers to the original publication of this chapter as chapter 17 of editors Oetzel and Tin-Tomey’s 2006 The Sage Handbook of Conflict Communication: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.  2 Community conflicts, along with other multiparty, complex conflicts, engage the debate as to whether such events can be managed, mitigated, or resolved. The debate speaks to the ideological hubris between the realist camp that believes these kinds of conflicts can at best be kept at less destructive or less harsh levels and the resolutionists who believe that intervention must address underlying causes and lead ultimately to the ending of the conflict.  3 For a discussion of this conflict, see Warfield (1993).  4 I was a member of this agency, serving in a number of field and administrative positions.  5 The “Tap Root” theory, as it became commonly known, was first articulated by Bertram Levine, an associate director with CRS, as an ontological worldview of many disenfranchised minority communities in the United States and to suggest choice points for intervention. Moira Dugan (1996) developed a similar concept.  6 For the purposes of this chapter, a distinction is made between interethnic conflicts and conflicts driven by racial hatred. I acknowledge a certain artificiality in this distinction. For example, both forms of conflict are stimulated by social identity where individuals and groups use “cultural markers to claim, achieve, or ascribe group membership” (Black 2003: 121). However, ethnic conflict is inclined to be more episodic, where periods of tranquility can be shattered by bursts of violence. As well, ethnic conflict seems to take place between groups who share the same social space and have rough (although at times interchangeable) symmetries of power (see Horowitz, 1985, for an excellent treatment of features of ethnic conflict). Racial conflict as examined in this chapter is exemplified by social constructions based on beliefs about biological differences of skin color enhanced by historical circumstances built around the slave trade (Black 2003: 129). It is the latter I am dealing with in this section. The former will be explicated and treated as a separate category.  7 For a discussion and comparison of the Great Britain and US racial disturbances, see Marshall (1992).  8 There is a risk factor associated with this role if there is too great a lag time before a more neutral third party can become involved. Some Roma rights activists were concerned that advocacy conflict escalation would actually

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Managing Racial/Ethnic Conflict for Community Building 71 worsen relations with the majority community and leave them vulnerable to increased attacks (Olson 2000).  9 The term insider partial is associated with the intervention work conducted by John Paul Lederach in Latin America in the 1970s. He found that confianza (trust) was more important than external third-party neutrality and that this role could often be played by an individual who came from inside the culture. For a fuller description, see Lederach (1995). 10 INCORE is a United Nations University program within the University of Ulster to examine conflict resolution through research, training, and policy development.

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4 A Model for Policy Negotiations. Public Policy Conflict Resolution The Nexus Between Culture and Process Wallace Warfield, 1993

Introduction

V

arious efforts have been made to describe the manifestations of conflict when public policy runs counter to some element of the public interest (e.g. Susskind and Cruikshank 1987; Carpenter and Kennedy 1988). But not a lot has been said about the organizations which initiate the policy. What do we know, for instance, about the culture of these organizations and how it contributes to the generation and perpetuation of policy conflict? Are organizational client groups who function as stakeholders in policy conflict responding to the policy decision or the culture-driven process behind the decision? These questions are made more complex because different client groups and affected classes have their own cultural perspectives of the policy conflict. Culture provides an interpretational lens for the origins of conflict, shapes the contours of how conflict will be processed and the expectations concerning outcomes. As will be noted later in this chapter, culture,1 as a determinant of conflict resolution, confounds popular notions concerning the

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roles of parties in conflict, the role of the so-called neutral, and the concept of neutrality. There are, of course, many definitions of organizational culture (e.g. Schein 1985: 9). For the sake of simplicity, I describe it as the paradigm of behavior, knowledge, shared experiences, and decision-making styles of an organization. This chapter will examine how organizational culture frequently “conflicts” with the culture(s) of the organization’s clients and affected classes as that organization creates and attempts to implement policy. What I try to do is to create an awareness for practitioners that conflict interactions between public organizations and traditional low-power cultural groups (at least in the US) have elements of complexity that are not found in disputes of the same kind where these factors are not present. While I realize that practitioners may not have the time or inclination to study the nuances of all the cultures of an increasingly diverse society or the web of interactions that form the network of organizational relationships, they need to move beyond the cookbook processes of intervention to “thicker”2 understandings of the conflict dynamics.

Demographic Influences on Public Policy The influx of new immigrants into the United States is not only transforming the socioeconomic environment, but is beginning to impact the map of public policy disputing as well. Consider the following changes. From 1930 to 1960, roughly 80% of the country’s immigrants came from Europe or Canada. But from 1977 to 1979, this proportion fell to 16% and Asia and Latin America accounted for about 40% each. In 1979, the nine leading “source” countries for legal migration were Mexico, the Philippines, Korea, China and Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. The United Kingdom fell to 3% of the total (DeVita 1989). It is now a statistical “given” that by the year 2000 or shortly thereafter, California will become the first so-called “Third World” state in the nation. In many instances, this demographic transformation has brought about formal increases in power through a greater diversity in political representation, particularly at the local level. There are now twenty cities with populations over 100,000 that are headed up by African Americans (Joint Center for Political Studies 1990). As a parallel to this racial and ethnic diversity, the growth of an environmental consciousness and the women’s movement have added to the mosaic of policy respondents. Changing demographics, coupled with the awakening of new special-interest groups, have transformed the landscape of policy conflict from one in which relatively homogeneous

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stakeholder groups operated in parochially defined issue arenas, to one which is increasingly heterogeneous, encroaching upon sacred policy cows. For example, policy protestations around the discretionary use of police force and police–community relations, long the domain of African American and Hispanic groups, have seen new stakeholders come onto the scene. In cities such as Oakland, California, Houston, Texas, and Portland, Maine, Southeast Asian immigrant groups have become the newest entrants onto the negotiating plain. In communities afflicted by the now-commonplace scarce resources, the effect has been increased competition and sometimes conflict between native minority groups and new immigrants, each jockeying for negotiating advantage with police officials and other decision-making bodies.

Some Historical Background on Stakeholder Roles in Policy Conflict As alluded to earlier, there are innumerable special-interest groups which function as stakeholders in public policy conflict. One need only look at some of the regulatory negotiations engaged in by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to get a sense of proliferating stakeholder groups that can emerge to protest a new rule.3 But inclusive policy negotiations of this sort, designed to bring about consensual agreements (usually with the aid of third parties), are a relatively new and still not widely used process. Traditional paths to policy inclusion by US racial and ethnic minorities, women, and those of nontraditional sexual preference (hereafter referred to as “low-power cultural groups”) have tended to be narrowly defined and despite the Gandhian leanings of the Civil Rights movement, conflict-generating (Branch 1988: 195, 475). When settlement was reached, it was more often the result of hard-fought litigation. The Civil Rights movement, having struck down much of de jure segregation against racial minorities, moved on to de facto issues in housing, employment, welfare entitlement, and education. Prior to the Civil Rights movement and the 1964 Civil Rights Act itself, low-power cultural groups, to the extent they were clients of public-service organizations, had little visibility or impact. Moreover, these groups were not amply represented in these organizations, particularly in the street-level bureaucracies that most impacted their lives. Organizational polities such as police departments, welfare bureaus, and local departments of education were dominated by Whites. Where minorities were employed, they were most often seen as low-level functionaries.

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President Johnson’s Great Society programs were the logical extension of the Civil Rights movement and were designed to transform political and legal events into long-term programs. These efforts, better known as anti-poverty programs, were designed to bring about “maximum feasible participation”4 of those who were usually excluded from the policy formulation and implementation of traditional public organizations. Racial and ethnic minorities engaged in seminal efforts to develop and implement policy in areas such as fair housing, community control of schools, welfare rights reform, and job training. Anti-poverty activities became an early training ground in negotiations in that policy clients—frequently in competition for limited resources—learned interest-based techniques for negotiating desired outcomes. Moreover, it was not unusual for groups to form coalitions to increase bargaining power with impacting public agencies. There are a few reasons why the anti-poverty program as an experiment in public policy negotiations, was not as successful as it could have been: Although, here and there, efforts at interest-based negotiations could be noted, essentially these efforts were strong on protest and confrontation but weak on effective negotiations. Coming out of the Civil Rights movement, low-power cultural groups had ample experience with various forms of protest such as demonstrations and sit-ins, but little experience with knowing how to get to the table in negotiations and once there, sustain negotiations for desired outcomes. Many of the groups lacked the technical resources to negotiate effectively and reached agreements that were not broadly interest-based. Agreements often unraveled in a short period of time. Negotiations to reach decisions on projects were often compressed into artificially short time frames without adequate studies or evaluative mechanisms (Pressman and Wildavsky 1975: 126). Attempts at coalition building were fragile and internal group dissention often undercut negotiating leverage. As pluralistic systems designed to make inroads into traditional public policy forums, they had limited impact.5 Alternative conflict-resolution systems had not reached the comparative level of sophistication that exists today. The notion of professional dispute-resolution neutrals did not exist much beyond the labor field and the then-parochial conflict-resolution efforts of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service. Forms of joint problem-solving under the guidance of a third-party neutral could have made a qualitative difference in many of the outcomes. Despite these drawbacks, the anti-poverty programs provided valuable learning experiences in negotiations, opened up heretofore closed policy positions to low-power cultural groups, and created the first opportunities for formal community dispute-resolution programs.

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Comparative Roles in Policy Conflict: A Contemporary Perspective The momentum provided by the anti-poverty programs emerged most forcefully in the policy areas of education and law enforcement. Along with housing and welfare, education and law enforcement were the street-level bureaucracies that most often permeated the lives of low-power cultural groups. The civil disturbances of the mid- to late-1960s and early 1970s, with their triggering incidents embedded in instances of police use of excessive force, provided the catalyst for community groups (mainly African American and Hispanic) to confront law enforcement agencies with demands for policy change in the areas of recruitment, service, and professional behavior. Vocal and organized groups have had fragmentary success in negotiating incremental change in some areas of police service such as increases in beat patrolling and faster response times to calls for assistance. In education, the proliferation of school desegregation lawsuits in the 1970s emphasized the rights and standards approach to resolving major inequities. Because the remedial orders were court-issued, they contained no consensual negotiating clauses that anticipated difficulties in implementation and governance, which is where court orders frequently broke down.

A Theory of Community Conflict A useful device for examining roles in policy conflict is the Continuum of Community Relations (my term), first introduced by Laue and Cormick (1978) and later expanded by the author (1985). As shown in Figure 4-1, most communities exist somewhere along this continuum. But this is not a static situation; communities frequently move back and forth along the continuum, particularly between the positions of cooperation and competition, as they bargain for aggregative solutions to problems of resource distribution (Lax and Sebenius 1986: 118–20). Indeed, in larger jurisdictions, the likelihood is that several positions can be occupied simultaneously by different communities within that jurisdiction. Thus, marginal communities containing two power cultural groups may find themselves in protracted states of heightened tension and conflict, whereas more economically and socially stable communities may exist most often in a state of cooperation or, at worst, competition. The continuum can be viewed descriptively when posed against the backdrop of Miami, Florida, and the events leading up to the massive civil

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Competition

Heightened tension

Interest groups engage in:

Interest groups

Interest groups

Resource trade-offs

Challenge the status quo

View the status Angry exchanges in the media and quo as not other public forums representative

Creating values

Disagree over allocation of resources

Boisterous public meetings

Agreement on process

Test and stretch existing processes

Regard public Positional, claiming processes as stances unfair

Cooperation

Conflict Interest groups

Engage in demonstrations and law-suits

Crisis Interest groups

Attack the status quo Disrupt public order Provoke incidents and arrests Traumatize policy

Mutual respect

Challenge public processes

Regard public processes as illegitimate

Communities always moving along this continuum

Figure 4-1: A Continuum of Community Relationships

disturbance in May 1980. Tensions had been building in the African American communities of Overton and Liberty City for a number of months due to a confluence of events. The second exodus of Cuban exiles began with 10,000 “Marielistas”6 who joined an earlier immigration that came to the United States in the early 1960s after the fall of Batista. Resentment began to build in the African American community when it was perceived that a new low-power group was draining away the few available public resources. Around the same time, a high-ranking African American school official and an African American judge were indicted on separate charges, fueling resentment and a belief that African American leaders were being singled out for persecution. If competition with Cuban émigrés and the seemingly methodical destruction of African American role models were the tap roots of underlying tension, police– community relations provided the ammunition for the triggering incidents. Using the African American community’s relationship with city and county police as an example of positions along the continuum, it can be said that there was rarely a time when relationships between these two entities existed in a state of cooperation. Years of provocative behavior by police toward African Americans and “war-zone” antagonisms conducted by members of inner-city neighborhoods against police, coupled with the absence of effective dialogue, destroyed

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any sense of mutual respect. The fact that the African American community had virtually no political power meant that its leaders had very little clout to bring police and other city officials to the table to negotiate using resource trade-offs or a creating-values approach (Lax and Sebenius 1986). A series of publicized incidents of police use of excessive force culminating in the beating to death of Arthur MacDuffie, an African American businessman, were the events that sparked the May 1980 civil disturbance in Liberty City resulting in several deaths, numerous injuries, and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. We can assume that within the framework of the continuum, various forms of relations between stakeholders may be going on simultaneously. Thus, the African American community found itself in a state of political competition with a burgeoning Cuban community on the one hand and social service resource competition with newly arrived Haitian boat people on the other (US Commission on Civil Rights 1982). In a landscape of resource disputes, these newer low-power cultural groups challenged the African American community’s historical legitimacy to distributional justice (see Susskind and Cruikshank 1987: 16–20 for a discussion of distributional disputes). What made this scenario particularly complex in Miami was that the African American community’s grievance with local officials dealt not only with issues of fairness in the distribution of resources, but also with perceptions of guaranteed rights. Objectively, the former could be viewed as issues of competition within the social realm of ongoing relationships. On this basis, resource distribution should be resolvable by engaging in equitable trade-offs using some form of consensual negotiations. The latter moves it from an informal venue to one more formally structured around legal precedents for rights and standards. For African American groups, the distinction is often blurred since the contours of the disputing paradigm are shaped by memories of de jure segregation and persistent de facto discrimination where the courts, not consensual processes, have been the savior. As a result, the African American community had very little experience with consensus-building forms of negotiations at the cooperative stage, or even positional bargaining at the competition stage that could have been transformed into more desirable outcomes (Morin 1980). Instead, repeated acts of police use of excessive force against African American citizens in Liberty City and other African American neighborhoods drove the state of relations to one of heightened tensions, then conflict, and finally crisis. How a city and its policy units respond to conflict is really a study in organizational decision making. Communities that exist in a state of cooperation have public organizations that engage in a process of shared decision making with stakeholder groups. They use “we decide” inclusive styles ranging from a pre-decisional advisory role, to post-decision feedback, to various forms of inclusion in implementation. In communities where relationships between

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governmental units and citizens are in a state of competition or at the more deteriorated points of the continuum, public organizations engage in correspondingly “I decide” exclusive styles of decision making. Thus, in the state of competition, those organizations that find their status quo challenged by low-power stakeholder groups tend to marginalize pre-decisional input, retaining exclusivity over substantive and procedural decisions. As relationships deteriorate down through the various stages to crisis, decision making becomes increasingly exclusive. In Miami, the mayor and the county manager largely delegated procedural decisions involving police–community relations to the respective law enforcement heads. In turn, these individuals and their immediate commanders used highly exclusive styles of decision making that limited low-power stakeholder groups to mainly post-decisional reactive roles. Despite warning signs that the situation was rapidly escalating towards large-scale violence, no meaningful attempts were made to use more inclusive forms of decision making with representatives of the African American community. Susskind and Cruikshank (1987: 11) tell us that consensual processes should be considered supplemental to the authoritative decision making of government as opposed to co-opting normative roles of local polities. Ideally, constitutionally delegated authority to manage the affairs of government should not be usurped by situationally oriented informal procedures. But this presupposes that government’s trustee role within the social contract is viewed as legitimate by affected stakeholder groups. In the cooperative stage of the continuum, there is harmony between the executive and legislative branches of government, the decision making delegated to public agencies, and how decisions get implemented. The organizational cultures of the instrumental agencies accept and work within this framework. In the competition through crisis stages of the continuum, the government’s trustee role, or at least the interpretation of that role by the implementing agencies, is seen as increasingly illegitimate. Correspondingly, stakeholder groups demand increasingly intrusive levels of involvement in decision making. March and Olsen (1979) suggest that organizational cultures produce styles of decision making that run counter to processes described by Mitchell (1978). For example, in the “garbage can” style of decision making, any organization has a closed universe of problems, choices, and solutions that are continually matched (or mismatched) to make decisions. Regardless of the problem, the organization seldom goes beyond defined boundaries to develop innovative ways of resolving problems. In paramilitary organizations like law enforcement agencies, shared values create a paradigm that is isolationist by nature; that emphasizes a high-task, low-relationship style, making decisions that fit within the contours of the paradigm rather than the needs of stakeholders’ interests. As the situation in Miami deteriorated towards crisis,

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African American spokesperson demands for an increasing involvement in decision making in substantive (more African American police officers represented throughout the ranks of the police department) and procedural (changes in excessive force policies, methods of patrolling) issues were met with increasing resistance. Even if it were possible for negotiated resolutions to emerge from a highly conflictual state of affairs, conventional decision-making styles in public organizations will have to be recalibrated to a more consensual form if they are to satisfy the needs of culturally diverse stakeholders in the governance of an agreement. Thus, the ultimate goal of a joint problem-solving process that involves representatives of low-power stakeholder groups with public officials is not merely to arrive at a substantive agreement, but to change the decision-making process for purposes of governance and the conduct of future relationships. While it is agreed that those vested with the authority to preserve the public trust cannot and should not re-delegate this authority to stakeholder groups, it will mean that the way those decisions necessary to execute that policy are made will be more inclusive. Looking at this from the perspective of degrees of participation in decision making, more decisions will shift from “I decide” to “we decide,” altering the balance of power between street-level bureaucracies and community stakeholders. Negotiating procedural power through enhanced roles in decision making can result in a more equitable distribution of resources. Community-based public policy disputes tend not to reflect negotiations in the classic dispute model (Moore 1984; Murray 1986). In highly conflictual situations, interaction between community stakeholders and policy officials seldom takes the form of face-to-face negotiations except in spontaneous circumstances.7 Nonetheless, dialogue, fractious as it might be in deteriorating stages of the continuum, represents a form of negotiation.

A Model for Determining the Effectiveness of Policy Negotiations As the events in Miami demonstrate, there is a positive correlation between the status of relationships between public officials and stakeholders, degree of stakeholder inclusiveness in policy formulation, and negotiations posture. Figure 4-2 attempts to depict the status of organization–stakeholder relationships by comparing them to the degree of stakeholder inclusiveness in policy implementation. The model assumes that the degree of effectiveness of negotiations along the axis has a correspondingly positive impact on policy

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inclusiveness, which in turn improves the relationship of stakeholders to policy officials. Therefore, the opposite would hold in that less effective negotiations tend to be positional, which means less inclusiveness in policy implementation and a deteriorated state of relationships. It is important to recognize that there are many stakeholders in conflicts such as the one being described in Miami who would have a varying status of relationships with relevant organizations. The model attempts to reflect only those low-power cultural groups who occupy negative status roles with public policy officials. The Civil Rights movement effectively bypassed Miami. Consequently, a cadre of African Americans, schooled in the experience of transforming confrontational tactics into policy negotiations for a greater degree of distributional justice, never materialized as it did in cities like Atlanta, Georgia, and Durham, North Carolina. Absent a history of negotiations with White officials, relationships never really matured beyond event-focused strategies, attempting to influence fragmented policy. When face-to-face negotiations took place, they tended to be positional and antagonistic. Many observers would be quick to point out that Civil Rights lawsuits, as a product of positional negotiations, have achieved policy inclusion. I argue that public policy lawsuits may have changed policy orientation to some degree and enhanced inclusiveness, but the absence of a consensually facilitated process that takes into consideration the interests of all stakeholders has generated frequent challenges and countersuits. Rights-and-standards

High

Level of Policy Inclusiveness

More Effective (Consensual) Negotiations

Less Effective (Positional)

Low Negative

Positive

Figure 4-2: Government–Stakeholder Relationships

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awards or remedies based on decisional rulings tend to be weak on implementation and governance. Conflict over school desegregation, bilingual education, affirmative action, and the establishment of civilian review boards for police actions are dramatic examples of where decisional standards fail to take into consideration how agreements will be maintained and implemented. Of course, constitutionally derived rights and standards, based on universal principles of human dignity, are rightfully nonnegotiable, but not all value-based conflict necessarily falls into this category. The model in Figure 4-2 is not meant to imply a graph-like precisional correlation between negotiations’ effectiveness and policy inclusion, but rather approximate relationships. Secondly, intervening variables, such as changes in political administrations, can impact policy inclusiveness even where negotiations have been successful (Henton et al. 1981: 28). Thirdly, in the history of most public organization–stakeholder relationships, policy negotiations are ongoing and incremental. Degrees of inclusiveness vary from one set of negotiations to another, depending on how vested the organizational culture is in maintaining the status quo or the level of interest of stakeholder groups. Thus, the US military, which for a number of years maintained a discriminatory position against racial minorities, gays, and women in combat roles, remains resistant to women and gays fulfilling tasks that have traditionally reflected the male norm of virility and dominance.

Cultural Influences on Negotiations Susskind and Cruikshank (1987: 80) discuss the importance of understanding parties’ interests beyond positions. But that concept, drawn from empirical studies and observations of culture-bound Western negotiations (see, for example, Fisher and Ury 1981) can be misleading. Low-power stakeholder groups in public policy disputes bring powerful cultural-historical frames of reference to conflict which confound rationalistic approaches to reaching agreements. Using the layered model of conflict (Laue 1986; Avruch and Black 1991) depicted in Figure 4-3, values lie at an even deeper level of conflict manifestation than interests, with human needs such as identity (Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey 1988) and security representing the foundation of deep-rooted conflict. In this depiction of responses to conflict, reactions by parties at the positional and interest levels are inclined to be rational in that parties can use cognitive methods to sort out strategies and tactics. When conflict is perceived through the lens of cultural values, responses tend to be nonrational (Babbie 1992: 28). Individuals or groups are guided by affective

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POSITIONS

POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC

INTERESTS

DESIRES AND WANTS

VALUES

LEARNED AND SOCIALIZED

Non-Rational Choice Paradigm

NEEDS

BASIC AND HUMAN

Bio-Genetic Paradigm

Rational Choice Paradigm

Figure 4-3: A Theory of Conflict

histories that largely determine reactions to conflict. Actors tend not to engage in rational-choice forms of decision making that attempt to weigh and objectify bargaining alternatives to arrive at optimal solutions (Mitchell 1978). At the biogenetically driven level of human needs, one responds intuitively. It might be worthwhile explaining more carefully what is meant by “values.” There are really two types of values. There are “outer core” values that can be described as universal values. That is, no matter what our attributes (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and so on), most of us would share a common value response to the rescue of a baby from a burning building. According to Boulding (1962), however, there are what he calls “inner core” values: unique epistemologies shaped by experiences of who we are, how we identify ourselves in the social universe, and how others have responded to us in that universe. It is the latter that complicate understanding of conflict and its potential for resolution. Disputants who use value-based conflict-framings tend to be nonrational and “spiral” in their perception of the origins, processes, and outcomes of conflict: They loop back to include tangential history to inform their views of real-time events and future behavior of opposing parties. For low-power cultural groups such as racial or ethnic minorities, women, and persons of alternative sexual preference, the history of how others have dealt with them and their group is as much a part of the context of a policy conflict that impacts their personhood as are the conflict-specific issues. Dominant culture public policy managers who rely on an interest-based approach to

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negotiate with disputants from the aforementioned groups may find their overtures spurned when confronted with deeply held values and culturally defined human needs. For, in essence, you have opposing parties attempting the dialogue of negotiations who are speaking different languages. Triggering incidents such as the one that took place in Miami tend to elicit parochial, interest-based solutions from high-power policy actors such as suspending the police officers involved for a limited time or taking them off the streets and placing them on desk duty should they be found in violation of departmental regulations. Low-power stakeholder groups respond with demands that seek to transform the habitat in ways that will provide more security for their identity and the well-being of the group. This would be articulated in demands for hiring more police officers representative of the low-power group and means for controlling policy, including dismissal of the offending officers involved and frequently the law enforcement chief him/ herself.

The Role of Third Parties in Culturally Influenced Policy Conflict The 1980 civil disturbance in Miami and its sequel in 1982 can be described as a deep-rooted conflict (Burton 1988) in that the issues, as dramatized by the triggering incident and its underlying causes, were seen as nonresolvable using traditional means of dispute resolution. When low-power groups perceive that culturally understood norms of justice have been explicitly or implicitly violated by dominant power-individuals or groups, deep-rooted conflict is likely to be involved. In communities existing in the state of intense and sustained conflict and crisis, classic “table” mediation (see, for example, Goldberg, Green, and Sander 1985; Kressel and Pruitt 1989), with its presumptions of power equity and rational, interest-based equations for resolution, has no logical foundation. The intervention process starts from where the parties are, not where the intervener would like them to be. In situations of intense conflict or crisis, trust-building mechanisms need to be put in place. These will allow conflict participants to test forms of risk-taking that will minimize loss of face within their respective habitats should they fail. For example, the intervener may want to encourage officially recognized self-policing arrangements by community representatives in exchange for withdrawal of law enforcement to less intrusive boundaries. The understanding is that if violence escalates or specific emergencies have to be responded to, the police can carry out the

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necessary functions. This is important because in homogeneous, paramilitary organizations such as police departments, group norms of identity and ethos must be recognized and carefully negotiated. From the community perspective, in violent civil disturbances where police behavior is perceived to be causal, low-power-community combatants often demand the removal of police from the impacted area. Controlling police behavior is essential for establishing the credibility of low-power actors within their communities if they intend to play negotiating roles at some later date. In the Miami May 1980 disturbance, police withdrew to a predetermined perimeter in Liberty City, but without negotiating a contingency role with community activists. The prevailing wisdom seemed to be to keep the violence from spreading to other parts of the city and essentially let it burn itself out in the impacted area. This strategy alienated rank-and-file officers as well as community residents. Police officers felt they had “given up the streets to the criminals” and were being told to abandon sworn duties. Morale was seriously affected. Within the impacted area, mothers could not safely go to the store to get milk for infants and fires burned unchecked, further endangering lives. Yet at this stage of intervention the task has only begun. The challenge is to connect these experiments in risk-taking to transformational change at the causal level. But this cannot be accomplished by merely building sequential blocks of greater risk taking. The result will likely be a series of disaggregated agreements supporting a veneer of tranquility that will dissipate with the next incident. Parties to the conflict must jointly arrive at a vision of what a just relationship will look like. What principles must be in place? What substantive, procedural, and relational criteria have to be acknowledged? The role of the intervener at this stage is to help parties to the conflict build a contextual map of how the various and several agreements lend themselves to the vision. In this construct, how the intervener views his or her role philosophically is critical to the success of the intervention. Foremost is the need to deal with illusions of “neutrality.” The neutrality of the mediator’s role is frequently cited as the foundational canon upon which rests the raison d’être of the mediation process. It is as though the mediator were some clear vessel, a hovering deus ex machina, waiting to be called upon to lay an impartial hand on the fevered brow of the disputants. In the origins of labor dispute resolution in the US (particularly after World War II), where labor and management held rough parity in power and shared similar majoritarian cultural backgrounds, this concept of neutrality had more validity. Moreover, most labor mediators were from the same cultural background as the disputants, creating a triadic compatibility of roles where presentations of neutrality were more easily accepted. In reality, this

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was rarely as clear-cut as it is stated here. All mediators bring something of themselves to a dispute and have a sense of the contours of the resolution they would like parties to achieve. But compared to community-based public policy disputes where power imbalances are more common, this concept of neutrality in labor management disputes tends to be the rule rather than the exception. Outside of the labor field, practitioners and social scientists have begun to question the validity of the classic third-party neutral role. In public policy conflicts which have broad ramifications for social outcomes and a disequilibrium of power, pronouncements of neutrality would be suspect. Imagine an African American mediator presenting him- or herself as a neutral to either side in the Miami scenario. In conflicts of this kind, parties have acknowledged and accepted that the mediator has values that may contribute to the outcome of the conflict (Gulliver 1979: 215–16). For example, during the Camp David peace talks between Egypt and Israel mediated by President Carter, Anwar Sadat knew that the US was not neutral in its view of the role of Israel in the Middle East. This did not preclude the US from being accepted as a mediator by Sadat because the Egyptians knew that the US had a vital interest in a peaceful settlement. Even in the absence of a formal third party, mediative opportunities arise in dyadic negotiations where a member of a negotiating team will step out of his or her role as negotiator to act spontaneously as a mediator between disputing parties (see Colosi 1987 on “quasi-mediators”). For public policy conflicts that are culturally shaped, passive neutrality is a fiction best reserved for Pollyannaish treatises on alternative dispute resolution. The intervener is an activist and is as much a part of the social change as are parties to the conflict. Using the layered conflict model, issue formulation by policy officials is likely to emerge from the positional or, at best, the interest level. Negotiating strategies will be rational and incremental. Low-power cultural protagonists responding from a primarily values/human-needs perspective will use negotiation strategies that appear nonrational and holistic in scope. They appear nonrational because they seem not to be based on calculated measures of distributive trades, but on historical expectations of just outcomes. There can be no effective dialogue where parties are operating on different levels of response. In this form of conflict, in the pre-negotiations stage, the intervener has to be the cultural role interpreter for the more rational positional/interestoriented policy official. This is a form of reframing where the intervener takes the cultural response and tries to find a context that retains its essence and at the same time can be understood by the responding policy officials. One way

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this can be accomplished is by identifying outer-core values that both sides hold in common. What the intervener is attempting to do is to remove the demonizing images both sides tend to have of each other. By humanizing the responses of the parties to a conflict, the intervener provides rational perspectives for behaviors that can move the dialogue in a more positive direction. This should be considered a transitional role since it is assumed that relationships are badly strained or nonexistent and communications are traumatized. The intervener has to know when it is time to transfer the responsibility for role articulation to representatives of the groups themselves. Bringing the policy official(s) into the loop of awareness of a particular culture’s response to conflict is an early step in moving the negotiations from agreements in principle to the ultimate distributional agreement which will be interest-based and rational. There is greater risk in this form of third-party intervention because the intervener-activist gives voice to visions of a just society that identify him or her as a stakeholder in the outcome of the conflict, even though he or she may not live in the community in which the conflict is occurring. Thus perceived, policy officials may “invite you out” of the conflict-resolver role for reasons of bias. Alternatively, the intervener may overextend the role of interpreter and find that he or she has slipped into the role of negotiator. Once down this slippery slope of co-optation, it will be difficult to back out. Eventually, the intervener will lose his or her credibility and can do irreparable damage to the resolution of the conflict. On the other hand, there is a sense of reward in placing one’s hand in the stream of social change, knowing that the currents will never flow quite the same way again. What I have tried to do in this chapter is to develop an appreciation for the complexity of roles in public policy conflict. Low-power cultural groups, who have traditionally been kept away from the negotiating table, see the origins, processes, and outcomes of conflict through the lens of values that have historically shaped their relationships with the dominant culture. They bring different voices to the negotiating process that often do not fit the protocols of interest-based bargaining. At the same time, public organizations are complex entities that have cultures of a different kind, as was noted earlier in the chapter. When these forces are joined in conflict, the third-party intervener must find a way to bridge the cultural gap. Frequently, this means playing an interpreter role for one side or both, in a way that provides a context for the actions and language of the opposing side. Traditional concepts of third-party neutrality are often inapplicable in these kinds of conflicts because of power imbalances between parties. Moreover, the techniques that emerge from this role tend to result in reductionist outcomes that will lead to further conflict and a discrediting of the alternative

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conflict resolution approach. Clearly, there is greater risk in the interveneractivist approach, but there is also greater opportunity for agreements that work toward the transformation to a more just society.

References Avruch, K. and Black, P. (1991). “The Culture Question and Conflict Resolution.” Peace and Change 16:22–45. Babbie, E. (1992). The Practice of Social Research. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co. Boulding, K. E. (1962). Conflict and Defense: A General Theory. New York: Harper and Row. Branch, T. (1988). Parting the Waters. New York: Simon and Schuster. Burton, J. W. (1988). “Conflict Resolution as a Political System.” Working Paper 1, Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. Carpenter, S. L., and Kennedy, J. W. D. (1988). Managing Public Disputes. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc. Colosi, T. R. (1987). “A Model for Negotiation and Mediation.” In D. J. D. Sandole and I. Sandole-Staroste (eds), Conflict Management and Problem Solving: Interpersonal to International Applications. New York: New York University Press. DeVita, C. J. (1989). America in the 21st Century. Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau. Fisher, R., and Ury, W. (1981). Getting to Yes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Geertz, C. (1973). “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In C. Geertz (ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Goldberg, S. B., Green, E. D., and Sander, F. E. A. (1985). Dispute Resolution. Boston: Little, Brown. Gudykunst, W. B., and Ting-Toomey, S. (1988). Culture and Interpersonal Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Gulliver, P. H. (1979). Disputes and Negotiations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Academic Press. Henton, D. C., et al. (1981). Rethinking Urban Governance: An Assessment of the Negotiated Investment Strategy. Menlo Park, CA: Center for Policy Analysis, SRI International. Joint Center for Political Studies (1990). Black Elected Officials National Roster, 1990. Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political Studies. Kressel, K., and Pruitt, D. G. (1989). Mediation Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc. Laue, J. (1986). “Levels of Conflict Content.” Remarks delivered at a conference on Guidelines for Newcomers to Track II, Washington, DC. Laue, J. H., and Cormick, G. (1978). “The Ethics of Intervention in Community Disputes.” In G. Bermant, H. Kelman, and D. Warwick (eds), Ethics of Social Intervention. New York: Halsted Press.

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Lax, D. A., and Sebenius, J. K. (1986). The Manager as Negotiator. New York: The Free Press. March, J. G., and Olsen, J. P. (1979). Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Bergen, Norway: Bergen University Press. Mitchell, T. R. (1978). People in Organizations: Understanding Their Behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. Moore, C. (1984). Interest-Based Bargaining. Boulder, CO: Center for Dispute Resolution. Morin, R. (1980, 8 May). “Miami Rioters Don’t Feel Justice Exists.” The Washington Post. Murray, J. S. (1986), “Understanding Competing Theories of Negotiations.” Negotiation Journal 2:79–186. Pressman, J. L., and Wildavsky, A. (1975). Implementation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schein, E. (1985). Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc. Susskind, L., and Cruikshank, J. (1987). Breaking the Impasse: Consensual Approaches to Resolving Public Disputes. New York: Basic Books, Inc. US Commission on Civil Rights (1982). Special Report: Confronting Racial Isolationism in Miami. Washington, DC: US Commission on Civil Rights. Warfield, W. (1985). “Triggering Incidents for Racial Conflict: Miami, Florida Riots of 1980 and 1982.” Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference of the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution, SPIDR, Washington DC, October 1985.

Notes 1 For the purposes of this chapter, I am limiting my definition of client culture to those attributes that pertain to race, ethnicity, and gender. 2 I borrow the term “thicker” from Clifford Geertz, who in Interpretation of Cultures (1973) calls for thick descriptions of culture where the observer goes beyond casual understandings of what is happening to a deeper interpretation of events. 3 The EPA adopted a rule setting performance standards for residential wood burning stoves which limit emissions of particulate matter from newly manufactured units. The rule emerged from a consensus reached by a negotiating committee that included representatives of the wood heater industry, the environmental community, consumer groups, state air pollution control and energy agencies, and the EPA. 4 The term “maximum feasible participation” was built into the enabling legislation to underscore the expectation that low-power cultural groups would be given every opportunity to be included in the decision-making process for the development and implementation of programs. I was on the staff of an organization that had a higher percentage of residents voting for board members than participated in the local Democratic primary.

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5 Frustrated with the resistance and immobility of street-level bureaucracies, many anti-poverty agencies attempted to duplicate client services that were supposed to be provided by these agencies. For example, centers provided services for such things as tenant and welfare rights and even educational instruction at the secondary level. Ultimately, because these services operated outside the traditional policy milieu and were inadequately funded, they made little impact in changing fundamental policy. 6 So named because they departed from the Cuban port of Mariel. 7 Of course, there is conflict whenever any physical act of force is used by one person against another. The term is used in this context to describe a community-wide state of mind as much as a single act or series of acts of violence.

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rguably, all social conflict contains the seeds for consensus. Since the onset of violent conflict in any society, attempts have always been made at various levels to structure an end to the hostilities. Thus, the notion of local “zones of peace” is not new. For the most part, political elites have devised the processes undertaken to end violent conflict, particularly between nations. But the emergence of intrastate, interethnic, and intersectarian disputes in the last two decades has changed the nature of conflict. First, no predetermined battlefield necessarily designates where the conflict will take place. The theater of war is everywhere, making civilian populations particularly susceptible to the attendant violence. Second, the informality of the violence in these conflicts creates a randomness that makes the conduct of everyday life almost impossible. Third, many who carry out the violence (such as guerrillas, rebels, or terrorists) in these conflicts may not comprise a regular armed force. Institutionalized military leaders and political elites have little control over these forces. In the Liberian civil war, for example, those heading the Council of State’s warring factions have no influence over teenage subcommanders operating in the field. For these reasons, local leaders rather than national elites have often been better suited to create a consensus around commonly held values in a conflicted area. The foundation for developing a peace zone comes from the many people in each community who are willing, despite the risks, to establish a network for peace.

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Political elites often harbor misguided expectations about nations and smaller geographic jurisdictions engaged in violent intrastate, interethnic, intersectarian, and intercommunal conflicts. They assume those societies can make the transition from civil war to civil society in a single bound. But transitional mechanisms are needed to prepare civilians and former combatants for life in civil society. Ultimately, such a society should be democratic. It should nurture a political system that has what Dahl (1971) has called “the quality of being responsive or almost completely responsive to all its citizens” (p. 2). Peace zones allow residents to practice small-scale forms of democracy that can become the building blocks for a more sustained civil society. In civil war conditions, normative geographical and socio-political frames of reference yield to what Jowitt (1993) describes as a state of “territorial, ideological, and political confusion and uncertainty” (p. 248). When extreme violence prevails, force overrides the ability of citizens at all levels to conduct consensual negotiations for valued ends. Peace zones have been a way noncombatants have tried to return some rationality to their lives. Peace zones are usually geographical areas, varying in size, whose noncombatant residents, weary of war, declare as off-limits to further fighting or to war-related human rights abuses. A peace zone emanates from a basic human need for security and safety; as such, it exists as a state of mind before its physical dimensions take shape. Since residents cannot force military units to stop fighting, early steps to form a peace zone can help reaffirm common values. For example, if the area contains ethnic groups involved in the fighting, then the zone could be used to establish common values and interests, such as respecting the sanctity of life and providing equal access to needed resources. According to Burton (1990), this amounts to recognizing the ontological needs of individuals (and the groups to which they belong) for security, identity, and human development. This attempts to transcend ancient notions of ethnic or political affiliations that reinforce “we–they” identities. From this ontological affirmation, an intersectorial working group can be formed that cuts across the socially constructed roles of elders, religious leaders, NGO [non-governmental organization] members, and local political leaders. The group examines itself, assessing its knowledge, skills, and abilities. It can then pinpoint areas within the peace zone subject to greatest threat, and intervene to mitigate further conflict. For example, the West African nation of Liberia has been embroiled in a debilitating civil war for more than seven years. Its capital, Monrovia, has had—until recent fighting in the spring of 1996—many features of a peace zone. The city operates under the protection of ECOMOG, the West African

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peacekeeping force. But the citizens themselves and local leadership have played an equally significant role in maintaining the area’s stability. For example, in the summer of 1994, crime had become rampant as youthful guerrillas from various warring factions drifted back into the city. Unemployed and disillusioned, these youth committed crime sprees that terrorized local residents. But under the aegis of the Liberian Initiative for Peace and Conflict Resolution (LIPCORE), residents formed neighborhood watch groups that helped reduce crime. A peace zone seeks to mitigate and ultimately resolve conflict. It assumes characteristics identified by Christopher Moore as fundamental to solving disputes. First, parties must feel that substantive or structural concerns have been adequately met. This means ending the indiscriminate killings, property destruction, and other acts that traumatize the civilian population. Second, parties must feel that certain procedural needs have been met in the peace zone’s implementation. This involves things such as establishing collection points for storing combatant weapons outside the peace zone, and determining how food and other needed supplies will be allowed to enter. In Liberia, the leaders of the two largest political factions warned their fighters that peace zone violations would cause their arrest and imprisonment by the UN Observer Mission in Liberia (UNOMIL). Nevertheless, this peace zone remains fragile and risks collapse because rather than springing from the will of the people, it was created solely by the conflicting warlords. Third, Moore (1986) argues that parties must feel their psychological and relational needs have been met. They must consider themselves to be in a protected mental and emotional space where they can freely sustain those relationships that celebrate life in civil society. We usually associate peace zones with situations where opposing political forces are struggling to control the state. But increasingly the concept is being extended to places such as local American communities beset by gang conflict or civil strife. For example, in East Los Angeles, California, after years of drive-by shootings by rival street gangs struggling over turf and the illegal drug market, a truce was arranged by gang leaders. It established certain areas as off-limits to gang warfare, and even certain protocols to guide the behavior of rival gangs. Elsewhere, in some low-income housing developments in Washington, DC, local leaders and community residents have declared their buildings to be violence-free areas. Residents pursue neighborhood watch programs and other activities designed to promote safety in the building and surrounding area. Although local law enforcement supports these efforts, the people themselves initiated these peace zones.

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While these examples expand our notion of zones of peace, we should also carefully understand what peace zones are not. In recent years, mostly affluent American families have increasingly been buying homes in private enclaves surrounded by gates and patrolled by private security. In a recent Washington Post article, the author noted sardonically that, “We [Americans] are building a kind of medieval landscape in which defensible, walled and gated towns dot the countryside” (Lewis 1995). A similar New York Times article laments, “The worst scenario for America with this trend would be to have a nation of gated communities where each group chooses to live among people just like themselves and ignores everyone else” (Egan 1995). These areas would be more aptly described as “security” zones—to which people in distinctive homogenous groups flee. In these security zones, residents use power and status to exclude those they do not want. In contrast, in peace zones, residents take back or claim the area they occupy. Peace zones constitute open communities where residents may prize their heterogeneity, and control behavior by affirming their common values. Zones of peace seek security but mostly they attempt to link local activities to efforts for stabilizing and bringing peace to the state as a whole. De Tocqueville, reflecting on his travels through America, was one of the earliest writers to see the connection between robust, independent groups and a viable democracy. Collaborative, autonomous organizations, guided by a consensus over democratic principles, define civil society, which functions as an intermediate layer of governance between the individual and the state. As Schmitter and Karl (1993) point out, the skills, knowledge, and abilities of the individuals and groups that operate at this level give them the capacity to resolve conflicts and control behavior without public coercion. Thus, the seeds of civil society exist within genuine peace zones. An interesting irony emerges when we make linkages between civil society and American domestic peace zones. Americans often assume they have a democracy that automatically promotes civil society in its various communities. Yet reality challenges this assumption. The exigencies of life in American inner cities subordinates civil society to more pressing needs of daily existence. And the hegemony of street gangs, turf control, and random violence provides barriers to all but the most innocuous forms of associational life. Reconstructing the tenets of civil society constitutes as pressing a need in American inner cities as it is in intrastate conflicts. Peace zones are more than defensive strategies taken by leaders and residents to mitigate violence. Otherwise, they would differ little from the security enclaves that dot the American suburbs. Peace zones can help resurrect associational life that may have existed before the violent conflict arose. In this sense, the zones affirm the vibrancy and openness of such life

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and its attendant responsibilities. Whether this becomes a conscious effort of its architects or merely a natural by-product of associational life, peace zones—especially those sustained over time—create opportunities for what Diamond (1992) describes as a “pluralistic competition of interests” (p. 123). If the peace zone contains diverse ethnic or interest groups, associational life allows them to mount modest pluralistic initiatives that can become part of the transition to civil society. Voluntary associations, operating on a small scale, can socialize members into democratic procedures and prepare them for responsible governing roles. In American inner cities, the relative inactivity of formal political institutions may promote the formation of pluralistic groups. The work of Fuchs (1992) suggests, for example, that where political parties are strong, they do not tolerate competition, and thus interest groups tend to be weak. Yet political parties acting alone cannot sufficiently develop civil society. Making associational life flourish in a peace zone does not require extra-constitutional political organizations. Where they have been formed in response to intracommunal conflict in American cities, residents have undertaken beautification projects, informal childcare networks, and other capacity-building activities. Just because peace zones serve as sanctuaries from violent disputes does not mean these areas are enclaves of idyllic existence free of conflict. Over time, peace zones will take on the characteristic social interactions common to most societies. Residents will pursue economic enterprises, practice religion and politics at some level, and so forth. But conflict also inevitably emerges whenever people come together in a structured setting, and thus certain mechanisms must be in place to guide behavior. Peace zones will not likely have formal legal institutions. But if they aspire to be the progenitors of civil society, they must nevertheless have a governance system based on unambiguous norms. Those norms should be based, according to Selznick (1993), on a common sense ordering “of human associations, in the natural settings and adaptive outcomes of group life” (p. 16). Absent such norms, anarchy will fill the chaotic limbo between civil war and civil society. For example, Somalia today constitutes a crazy quilt arrangement of polities, reflecting the governing whims of local political elites. Political factions at war on the national level abandoned the need for governance in their local spheres of influence. Consequently, there was no system in place to provide day-to-day security and dispute settlement. But in Mogadishu, merchants who could not conduct commerce in this unsettled state formed a peace committee that devised an interclan control system to manage the sea and air ports. In one community, residents have a rudimentary neighborhood watch system, using whistles and, if need be, posses of citizens to deter criminals. Elsewhere in Somalia, militiamen and

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guerrillas have sought more consensual relations with local villagers, offering to protect them in exchange for food. While hardly a democratic model, this arrangement does allow some level of civil society to exist. Likewise, in KwaZulu-Natal, a South African province immersed in ethnic and political conflict between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (lFP), an effort has been underway for years to end the violence in the Mpumalanga community. Two local leaders, representing the two political factions, joined with other residents to form the Peace & Hope Foundation Trust. The Trust provided mediation and other conflict resolution services—such as forming a rumor control system. When I met with representatives in Washington, DC, in November 1995, they indicated that crime and violence had declined. Initiatives were underway to slowly expand the Mpumalanga peace zone to neighboring communities. These and other communities, in making the transition from peace zones to civil society, seek a system of informal controls that Schwartz (1973) has observed in Israeli kvutzas. The system has a set of unambiguous norms for applying widely publicized sanctions whose threat generates a preventative impact on those who might contemplate violating the rules. We can benefit from better understanding the connection between peace zone development and concepts of civil society. Peace zones, when they reflect the people’s will and local leadership, and when maintained over time, contain many experiences fundamental to civil society. In the long run, these experiences can blossom into a more sustained and full-fledged civil society. Those working in the fields of conflict resolution, political culture, public policy, and social and cultural anthropology should pay more attention to such initiatives. In these, we have the opportunity to make our work less reactive and episodic, and to engage in a proactive partnership for developing civil society.

References Burton, J. W. (1990). Conflict: Resolution and Prevention. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Dahl, R. A. (1971). Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. De Tocqueville, A. (1945). Democracy in America. New York: Vintage Books. Diamond, L. (1992). “Economic Development and Democracy Reconsidered.” In G. Marks and L. Diamond (eds), Reexamining Democracy. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications: 93–139. Egan, T. (1995, September 3). “Many Seek Security in Private Communities.” The New York Times: 3.

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Fisher, R. (1978). International Mediation: A Working Guide. New York: International Peace Academy. Fuchs, E. R. (1992). Mayors and Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horowitz, D. L. (1985). Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jowitt, K. (1993). “The New World Disorder.” In L. Diamond and M. F. Plattner, Eds., The Global Resurgence of Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press: 247–56. Lewis, R. K. (1995, September 9). “‘Gated’ Areas: Star of New Middle Age.” The Washington Post:5. Moore, C. W. (1986). The Mediation Process. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc. Schmitter, P. C., and Karl, T. L. (1993). “What Democracy Is … and Is Not.” In L. Diamond and M. F. Plattner (eds), The Global Resurgence of Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schwartz, R. D. (1973). “Social Control in Two Israeli Settlements.” In D. Black and M. Mileski (eds), The Social Organization of Law. New York: Seminar Press. Selznick, P. (1973). “Sociology and Natural Law.” In D. Black and M. Mileski (eds), The Social Organization of Law. New York: Seminar Press: 16–40. Smith, A. D. (1993). “The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism.” Survival 35 (1):48–62. Welsh, D. (1993, Spring). “Domestic Politics and Ethnic Conflict.” Survival 35 (1):63–80.

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6 Ruminations on Race, Culture, and Conflict Resolution Wallace Warfield, 2000

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lexis de Tocqueville, as an outsider visiting these shores in the 19th century, has been credited with having almost a visionary understanding of the sociopolitical dynamics of America. In his seminal work, Democracy in America, he constructed a simple continuum to describe how he viewed the dominant racial and ethnic positions of society. At one end of the continuum he placed “savages” (Native Americans), living in a condition characterized as an excess of freedom. At the other end he located Black slaves, who labored and died in conditions best described as a deficit of freedom. Located between these two extremes was the civil society—a realm of cultural moderation, where, presumably, most of White America lived and prospered. It was this middle area that de Tocqueville suggested all of America’s inhabitants should strive to be part of. What de Tocqueville did not foresee was that the definition of the civil society, with its emphasis on cultural moderation, has been the controlling agenda ever since, and it determines whose views and cultural norms will be accepted and whose will be pushed to the margins. The boundaries of a civil society also define the boundaries on the opposing ends of the continuum. The conditions that create a civil society for one group are a constraint or deficit of freedom for another. Indeed, the Civil Rights movement, through the use of the courts and extra-legal means, was an attempt to force the ruling agenda to redefine a civil society so as to include those things that would make life more bearable for African Americans and other minorities. The dispute over a new Civil Rights Act suggests that the boundaries between what constitutes a deficit of freedom and a civil society remain unsettled.

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On the opposing end of the continuum, the ongoing conflict on the Mohawk Reservation tells us that Native Americans are still fighting to retain what controlling institutions consider to be an “excess of freedom.” The right of some Indian tribes to conduct business without regard to what they consider to be superimposed political structures continues to create circumstances of extreme conflict and even crisis. So, too, the tribal desires to protect aboriginal burial grounds often conflict with the needs of the state and the often synonymous desires of commercial interest. The Woman’s Movement, struggling through its own period of emancipation and emerging into the 1980s with a range of contestable issues, has also challenged conventional definitions of the civil society. Using de Tocqueville’s framework, we can see that these definitions which have resulted in disputes and conflicts are cultural as well as racial.

The Role of Culture in Disputes As we move into the twenty-first century, it may well be that culture, rather than race per se, will become the landscape of conflict between groups as the definition of the civil society continues to be shaped and reshaped. Dr. Edwin J. Nichols, formerly chief of the Staff College for the National Institutes of Mental Health, has developed a fascinating matrix to describe how cultural differences affect various ethnic groups’ perspectives depending on the axiology and epistemology. In his axiology, he describes Euro-Americans as being Man to Object focused. The highest value lies in the object or the acquisition of the object. For Afro Americans it is Man to Man. The highest value lies in the interpersonal relationship between [individuals]. For Asians and Asian Americans, the emphasis is on Man to Group. The driving value lies in the cohesiveness of the group. Although this is not depicted in Dr. Nichols’ matrix, for Native Americans, one might say it is Man to Earth. The highest value is man’s relationship to the environment. These observations are, of course, generalizations, and there are many variables that create exceptions. However, a working hypothesis might say that these differences become conflictual at the break points between de Tocqueville’s boundaries. These concepts are helpful in framing questions that should guide further research in disputing and inform the ADR [alternative dispute resolution] community. At a recent Fund for Research in Dispute Resolution (FRDR) workshop held in Washington, DC, the following are illustrative of the kinds of questions raised regarding race/cultural conflicts:

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Do racial and ethnic conflicts constitute generic forms of conflict, or are they differences of the same kind? In conflictual issues of race and ethnicity, are Whites responding to the subject issue, or to perceptions of the cultural paradigm? What is the role of identity in generating disputes and shaping styles of disputants’ negotiating behavior? Do factors of race and culture in disputes influence expectations of outcomes and, if so, in what ways?

Implications for Systems Design These concepts are not only useful in providing ADR practitioners with an understanding of racial and cross-cultural disputes that has a reactive value. They also provide signposts for emerging disputes. With this capability, proactive systems can be designed that treat the cause rather than simply the effect. The 1990 SPIDR [Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution] conference, to be held in Dearborn, Michigan, has as its theme, “The Next Decade: Designing Dispute Resolution Systems.” This is a compelling topic that contains both promise and concern when applied to racial, ethnic, and cross-cultural disputes. As John Murray observed in his April 1998 Negotiations Journal article, dispute systems design seems to have two major goals: to reduce the cost of disputes; to take into consideration social justice and equity. I would suggest that the two are not necessarily compatible. A dispute systems design applied to the kinds of disputes discussed here may not be successful if it is perceived that social justice and equity are secondary to cost-effectiveness. In fact, moving racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities from rights-based perspectives to interest-based ones may be more resource intensive on the front end than litigation. In my view, it might be appropriate for the systems designer to play the “agent of reality” role and acquaint parties with the relevant cost considerations. Another factor in dispute systems design that becomes more problematic is the issue of neutrality. In reactive, effect-focused interventions, where relationships are a minor consideration, or where there is a parity of power, the intervener can more easily adopt the posture of neutrality. Parties understand the parameters of the dispute and the intervener’s role is more facilitative, guiding the process. In proactive, cause-focused interventions dealing with ethnicity or culture, where ongoing relationships are paramount and there is frequently an imbalance of power, neutrality, in the parlance of the dispute resolution community, is less well understood. The intervener-designer is not

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some deus ex machina descending from the heavens to lay hands on fevered brow and then ascend to await the next call. The intervener’s role becomes more consultative, more participatory. As Robert Percival (University of Maryland School of Law) so astutely observed at the FRDR [Fund for Research in Dispute Resolution] workshop, mediators may think they’re neutral, but their impact (in these kinds of disputes) is never neutral because they reconstitute the political process. Racial, ethnic, and cross-cultural disputes tend to be disputes about values, making them particularly difficult to resolve. It is critically important for the dispute systems designer to encourage parties to go beyond substantive and procedural issues to address those underlying values. In disputes involving Native Americans, deeply embedded values help shape the identity of these disputants. This identity frames both the language of the dispute and expectations of procedural and substantive outcomes. Dispute systems design has a certain seductive quality for dispute resolution providers who are often frustrated by limited process roles. But care must be taken that we do not become overly ambitious in applying it to some issues to the point of dispute suppression. For some groups, in certain situations, disputing is an important and necessary form of group identity and power formation. To encourage extending the design to suppress disputes, rather than building in capabilities to respond to their escalation, could ultimately result in rejection of the design. The promise of dispute systems design is its potential to offer holistic approaches to resolving systemic disputes and conflict. The more causeoriented the intervention, the more the solutions will lay in interwoven social, political, and economic factors. It may well be that dispute systems design, with its emphasis on what John Burton termed provention, will usher in an era of collaboration between dispute resolution specialists, ethnographers, cultural anthropologists, public administration theorists, and others; all contributing their piece to the resolution mosaic.

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7 Is Maintaining Peace Always Right? Reconnecting Systems Maintenance with Social Justice Wallace Warfield and Mara Schoeny, 20001

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ith roots in both the field of labor–management negotiation and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, practitioners and theorists of conflict resolution have been guided by two main theories concerning the objectives of alternative dispute resolution. On the one hand is the objective of systems maintenance, with an emphasis on stability and rational decision making. On the other hand is the objective of social justice, which emphasizes changing social institutions and organizations to support the protection of basic human rights and needs. This chapter analyzes the assumptions of both objectives and concludes with recommendations for how to make the goals of systems maintenance and social justice mutually supporting. In its comparatively fledgling existence as a field of social science and applied theory, conflict analysis and resolution has not escaped the seeming inevitability existing in other areas of study to square off into competing ideologies. For example, in recent years, the issue of intervener2 neutrality

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and impartiality—how a particular individual aligns himself or herself with respect to issues in conflict and the conflicting parties themselves—has been much discussed from the perspective of competing ideological paradigms.3 In this essay, we extend the discussion to explore more fundamental concerns dealing with the raison d’être for so-called third-party conflict resolution and the role of intervention. While this discussion can generalize to a number of societies and social groupings, we shall confine our examples to the United States. When the American alternative dispute resolution (ADR) movement ventured from its origins in labor disputes into the thicket of Civil Rights conflict and other major social movements of the 1960s, it brought along with it certain assumptions about parties in conflict and the relevance of the embracing political culture. One such assumption was the belief that an intervener (often functioning as a mediator) must, in all instances, remain neutral: that is, not to display a bias toward either party or the issues those parties brought to the “table.” Another assumption, though less well articulated, was that the techniques4 used to resolve conflict would reflect the American political ethos of free choice and the instrumentality of democratic decision making. Our use of “democratic decision making” here means that parties to a conflict were roughly symmetrical in power and, on that basis, freely able to make choices about processes and outcomes of conflict. Reflecting the tendency for American culture to be “low context,”5 these processes for the most part were utilitarian. The emphasis was on substantive (and to a lesser degree) procedural outcomes that were purposive in nature. The durability of the relationship between parties and those parties and the larger social network was de-emphasized. One example of this tendency would be labor agreements, which were the product of mediated negotiations between unions and management and were understood to last only as long as the duration of the contract period. There was little recognition of “the-part-to-the-whole” that Clark brought to his discussion of power when he noted, “individuals in a society are vitally connected to a functioning whole, the welfare of which depends on the harmony of interrelation between individual parts” (Clark 1969: 96). Whether freely acknowledged or not, the intent of these processes was to maintain a stable system of governance. Outcomes were event-focused. The mediator used his or her intervention skills to assist parties to resolve particular issues under dispute; any connection with overarching social justice concerns was coincidental and outside the parameter of the mediator’s responsibility. In some sectors of the field of conflict resolution, this view persists. The social conflict of the 1960s, and the reverberations that continue to the present, challenge a number of accepted beliefs about American political

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culture and the role conflict resolution plays in it. For one, the notion that civil society, a hallmark of democracy, exists uniformly throughout American communities bears closer examination. Secondly, social conflict, particularly when it includes civil rights and other basic human rights, raises serious questions about symmetries of power and legitimacy of authority. Social justice theorists6 directly or indirectly queried: If the purpose of conflict resolution is to stabilize the social order through forms of systems maintenance, how then does it serve social justice? By systems maintenance, we mean the apparatus of society designed to keep in place a certain order of relationships. Putting it even more bluntly, if conflict resolution processes are captive of the political culture within which they function, then they fail to serve those who do not enjoy the fruits of that culture. Social justice theorists, extending back perhaps as far as Rousseau, take as their basic thesis that the problems of inequality are inherent in the formation of society. But this inequality, in extremis, forces divisions and dissensions to emerge that in themselves create an environment for change. Society, therefore, engages in a perpetual struggle between competing forces leading to its inevitable improvement. The interdependency of this struggle and conflict must reach a critical level before change can occur; interventions that take place before this point frustrate the process of evolution. Thus, social justice theorists seek to distance themselves from the conflict resolution “pragmatists.” By doing so, however, they risk losing sight of the true nature of social conflict and its capability for resolution. In her exploration of violence and political power, Arendt (1970) cautions that “the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed to reach it. Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals” (p. 4). At the same time, attention only to the mechanisms for resolving conflict without attending to the larger social impact leaves interveners open to the critique that they may frustrate necessary efforts toward change. Conflict resolution processes today seem to be “encamped” in competing ideologies of rational problem solving (with its emphasis on systems maintenance) on the one hand and revolutionary social justice on the other. We propose to turn this conventional conversation on its head, arguing for a reconsideration of the relationship between systems maintenance and social justice. We see this relationship as a necessary symbiosis between means and ends, a connection that links procedural justice with substantive outcomes. Through the examination of social conflict taking place in American communities, we intend to explicate this connection and, in so doing,

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articulate the optimum relationship. In the following section, we outline the development of our understanding of conflict resolution, which may help to span the ideological differences just mentioned.

Conflict Resolution The term “conflict resolution” has come into such common usage that it risks losing all explanatory power. It has been used to describe school mediation and anger management programs, democracy education initiatives abroad, and internal alternatives to company grievance procedures. Yet another set of descriptions exists in academic works. The definitions contained within these works are generally more explicit and more self-conscious, though not necessarily consistent with one another. The definition of conflict resolution that we intend is drawn from the work of three scholars: Kenneth Boulding, John Burton, and Joseph Scimecca. The definitions offered by each author are briefly considered, followed by a synthesis of the most salient points of each definition. In an early work, Boulding (1962) uses “conflict resolution” to describe a point within a conflict cycle and identifies it as one “subset of ended conflicts” (p. 306). He lists three possible ends of a conflict cycle: avoidance, conquest, and procedural conflict conclusion or resolution. The first two both involve the elimination of conflict through the removal of one party or the nullification of its claims. The third occurs when avoidance and conquest are not feasible or achievable. Here, Boulding uses the terms “procedural resolution” and “procedural conclusion” interchangeably. He further identifies three subsets under procedural resolution options: reconciliation, compromise, and award. He describes conflict conclusion reached through award as “[when] a settlement is reached because both parties have agreed to accept the verdict of an outside person or agency rather than continue the conflict.” Compromise endings require that both parties “settle for something less than his ideal position.” Reconciliation occurs when “the value systems of the images of the parties so change that they now have common preferences in their joint field” (Boulding 1962: 310). Burton uses the term “conflict resolution” differently, moving from a definition of a stage within a conflict cycle to defining conflict resolution as a package of theories, processes, and goals with a particular focus on intentional intervention. Burton (1990) writes: “By the resolution of conflict we mean the transformation of relationships in a particular case by the solution of the problems which led to the conflictual behavior in the first place … We thus

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make a distinction between resolution, that is, treatment of the problems that are the sources of conflict, and the suppression or [sic] settlement of conflict by coercive means, or by bargaining and negotiation in which relative power determines the outcome” (p. 2). Like Boulding, Burton’s vision of conflict resolution places it at the end of a conflict cycle. However, unlike Boulding, Burton narrows the term to exclude such areas as compromise or adjudication, and broadens it to include “the analysis and solving of the problems, whether human, institutional, or both, that give rise to conflicts.” In some respects, Burton’s definition resembles Boulding’s concept of “reconciliation.” However, his inclusion of the necessity of treating the source of conflicts in order to define a process as “resolution” is significant. Scimecca explores the different strands which make up the new field of “conflict resolution.” Scimecca (1991) identifies four movements which fit under the rubric of conflict resolution: “(1) new developments in organizational relations; (2) the introduction of the ‘problem-solving workshop’ in international relations; (3) a redirection of religious figures from activist work in peace-related endeavors to an emphasis upon peacemaking; and (4) the criticism of lawyers and the court system by the general public that resulted in what is known as alternative dispute resolution (ADR)” (p. 19). He links the four movements leading to conflict resolution as all responding to increased bureaucratization and depersonalization within modern industrial society—resulting in increased questioning of the legitimacy of traditional forms of authority. In this manner, conflict resolution is placed within an historical train of events that encompasses the concepts of social and structural change over time and in response to pressures within the system. Scimecca accepts conflict resolution as an emergent field, though he notes that it lacks a specific, theoretical base; the focus of the essay from which this quotation is drawn is determining whether or not its practitioners are “professionals.” Answering that question is not essential to our purposes here; however, his identification of conflict resolution as encompassing a broad range of mechanisms and contexts of operation is useful. Each of these authors contributes to a working definition of conflict resolution. From Boulding comes the observation that conflict resolution is first, part of a conflict cycle, and second, procedural in nature. Procedural means that conflict resolution processes follow some set of rules and norms agreed upon or generated by the parties which form the framework within which solutions to their conflict can be pursued. From Burton we gain an insistence that conflict resolution processes must identify and address the root causes of conflict, thus distinguishing conflict resolution functions from other “procedural conclusion” mechanisms which are intended to ameliorate

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the symptoms of conflict through management or stop the pursuit of conflict through an adjudicated decision. From Scimecca comes the definition of conflict resolution as a field, emerging in response to broadly based social concerns, and the recognition that conflict resolution is interdisciplinary still, drawing theory, examples, and prescriptions from a wide variety of contexts. From these observations a rudimentary definition of conflict resolution emerges. Conflict resolution processes, in part, are alternatives to established, authoritative mechanisms for dispute processing. Yet they are procedural in nature, generating or following established norms and rules. Conflict resolution is participatory in nature, seeking to involve the parties involved directly in the generation of solutions. It seeks changes in the established social order and consists of mechanisms designed to bring closure to a conflict cycle. Conflict resolution thus refers to a broad variety of theoretical sources and inspiration, which, though not wholly congruent with each other and the above definition, nonetheless respond in a significant manner to these concerns.

Systems Maintenance “Systems maintenance” as it relates to the use of consensual forms of conflict resolution is a term that has taken on largely negative connotations. The thesis commonly advanced by critics is that if systems7 maintenance is the objective (or unintended result?) of conflict resolution and if the system has already been judged to be calibrated against certain members of society, then conflict resolution by definition becomes a handmaiden to suppression. For example, Chesler, in describing his work writes: “Most of my work would not fall under the rubric of alternative dispute resolution [He then goes on to use a series of descriptors to emphasize what he does do] … I have been less interested in problems of agreement-making or conflict resolution, per se, than in the creation of social change and movement towards social justice” (1991: 2). A clear example of the social justice theorist distancing himself from the taint of systems maintenance. Later, Chesler expresses his reservations about the ability of ADR to achieve long-term resolutions and significant social change (p. 3). Thus, for Chesler, there is a bright line that separates ADR from social justice. The constraints of institutionalized decision making encrypted on ADR make it nearly impossible for agreements reached through these processes to significantly change the status quo. In a more deliberate way, social justice theorists who concern themselves with how race, class, and sex bias become operative norms in American

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society view the informality of these consensual processes as problematic.8 The formality and structure of the law—whether emanating from the courts (for example, Brown v. Board of Education) or Congress (the series of landmark Civil Rights legislation beginning with the 1964 Civil Rights Act)— are seen as the only mechanisms that prevent the rights of minorities from being steamrolled. Of course, it is arguable if these structures alone are sufficient to guarantee the rights of an underprivileged class and wrong-headed to assume that elements of consensual forms of conflict resolution are alien to, or cannot exist within, the framework of the law. In other words, legal constructs designed to protect the rights of a minority need not fear that consensual approaches will unravel safeguarding precedents; in fact, ADR processes can strengthen legal precedents. Even less kindly, some ADR skeptics regard mediation and its related processes as instruments of social control.9 From a social justice perspective, protest and conflict are the only effective weapons that disadvantaged groups in our society have. Consensual forms of conflict resolution round off the rough edges necessary to articulate cumulative grievances. Along these same lines, Nader (1991) questions functionalists’ assumptions that “harmony law” models should be the norms of all societies. In fact, Nader cites examples where harmony models were strongly associated with pacification and paternalism, rather than a stimulus for social change. Actually, there seems little risk of this happening at-large in American culture with its idiosyncratic propensity for disputing. Rosenberg (1987–8) observes: “While many Westerners would not accept adversariality as the very embodiment of freedom, individual autonomy and liberty, there is no doubt that in [the US] the adversary process is a vital feature of the judicial method of resolving legal disputes” (p. 805).

Mechanisms of Systems Maintenance Not surprisingly, in a complex social system such as that which exists in the United States, a number of mechanisms have sprung up to respond to the plethora of disputes and conflicts taking place at all levels. In addition to the more garden-variety processes like mediation, conciliation, and facilitation, many other mechanisms have arisen, including negotiated legislation, administrative rulemaking, negotiated rulemaking, summary jury trial, court-annexed arbitration, private judging, med-arb, mini-trials, and neutral fact-finding. Each of these mechanisms has its own set of proscriptions that guide the intervention of the practitioner (Goldberg, Green, and Sander 1985: 7–10).

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It is not our intention to argue whether these processes are successful in the measured outcome of reaching finite agreements. Rather, it is to expose a filigree of systems maintenance woven throughout these mechanisms that builds upon and supports the rational-actor models common to privileged segments of American society. Indeed, many of these systems have begun to reflect a disturbing trend toward compulsory programs under the management of civil justice courts where the court’s interest is geared more to efficiency and effectiveness than social justice (Jaffe and Stamato 1996). It is no wonder then that some social justice theorists began to view the growing plethora of procedures as a “parade of horrors,” each one designed to perpetuate a status quo where power shifts within a finite game. Eventually, thinkers like Boulding and Burton began to insist that a distinction be made between interventions addressed to change dysfunctional relationships and social structures (the sources of conflict) and those that emphasized settlement or conclusion. The former began to be thought of and defined as conflict resolution, the latter as alternative dispute resolution (ADR). And it is within the latter corpus of practice that negative connotations of systems maintenance reside.

Reexamining Systems Maintenance When social justice theorists decry the worst-case scenarios of ADR-driven systems maintenance creeping inexorably into social conflict, they overlook an important reality. So-called new social movements (i.e., environmental, peace, antinuclear, feminist, gay and lesbian) coupled with “old” movements (i.e. racism and poverty) create complex conflicts. They inevitably involve multiple systems imbedded in organizations and institutions each with their own overlapping and frequently competing rules, roles, and responsibilities. For example, several years ago in Brooklyn, New York, a significant conflict emerged between Puerto Rican Hispanics and Hasidic Jews over proportional representation in a low-income housing development.10 Even though a waiting list to determine residency with democratically constructed, needs-based criteria was put in place, both groups claimed the other was being favored for tenancy. In other words, the procedural fairness of how the system was being managed was challenged. The eventual mediated agreement had to be attentive not only to issues of substance and structure (what ethnic group would receive what number of apartments of a particular size and location), but also the oversights that would be put in place to assure the system of selection would continue to represent the agreement. While Hispanic and

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Jewish housing applicants were primary parties in this conflict, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and New York State and City counterparts were critical stakeholders. Their policies had to be reconciled before the agreement could be consummated. Judicial rulings in environmental conflict present equally clear examples of the disengagement of systems maintenance from resolution. In 1988, Federal District Judge George H. Boldt handed down a decision in a complex issue involving the Squaxin Island (Washington) Native American tribe and a collectivity of nontribal fishermen “fishing in common” over the amount of salmon that could be caught (United States of America et al. 1978). Without going into a detailed history of this case, it is fair to say that nontribal fisherman were at odds with Native American tribes over the amount of fish that could be caught and the method used. The decision allowed tribal fishermen to catch up to 50% of the salmon using the traditional gill nets, long a part of tribal custom. The ruling, however, failed to take into consideration the tensions surrounding how tribal fisherman reached the river to fish. Tribal lodgings were situated some distance from the river, and to access the waters, tribal fishermen were required to cross the private property of non-Indian residents. The latter resented the perceived trespassing incursions and the resultant debris left by the nomadic fishermen. Several tense and armed confrontations occurred that threatened the fulfillment of the ruling. A mediation conducted by staff of the Community Relations Service from the US Department of Justice resulted in an agreement spelling out how tribal fisherman could reach the banks of the river and the condition the surrounding property should be left in. Beyond that, the mediation created a model for how similar conflicts between tribal and nontribal groups in the surrounding area could be resolved. These two examples show how systems maintenance can become an integral part of social justice outcomes and acknowledge its relevance to social stability. In public conflicts, where an array of actors with complex decision roles engage in a process of negotiations, systems maintenance (replete with democratic decision making) and just outcomes form a critical interdependency.

Social Justice Though we are primarily concerned with tracing and reconceptualizing the dichotomy that exists between conflict resolution and social justice theories,

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similar dichotomies exist between different social justice traditions, from theological to philosophical to economic theories. In addition, common typologies of justice encompass a seemingly endless variety of outcomes, including distributive, retributive, procedural, and substantive outcomes. Any conception of social justice contains within itself a microcosmic view of reality, defining not only the problems to be addressed, but also the possible solutions, appropriate vehicles for achieving social change, and the probable obstacles. How have social justice theories and practice informed conflict resolution theory and practice? Also, are there common themes that characterize the social justice discourse within the conflict resolution field? Our use of the term “social justice” refers to the constellation of theories and practices which are chiefly concerned with analyzing and addressing persistent social inequities. Recognizing that conceptions of justice emerge from particular historical and cultural contexts, the reader should note that the examples used and influences traced here are grounded in the United States and reflect a particular history and evolution of ideas. Within the field of conflict resolution, much of the discourse on social justice can be traced to the multiple social movements which shaped social concerns throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The struggle for Civil Rights highlighted systemic inequities and the failure of social and political institutions to live up to even their own idealized norms of fairness and justice. A new wave of consciousness regarding women’s roles in society and an antiwar movement which confronted political authority with popular sentiment converged and added new areas of social critique. The legacy of these social movements can be found in a number of theoretical areas but is most evident in social justice theorists’ concern for analyses that emphasize the structural nature of injustice. These analyses implicate, by association, institutions which pattern social life and control and distribute political power. For instance, while utilizing many existing “withinthe-system” mechanisms (for example, court cases and legislative initiatives), the Civil Rights movement also utilized such strategies as civil disobedience, which explicitly challenged the assumption that existing systems of redress were adequate or acceptable. This challenge to political authority has roots long established in the United States where the right of people to withdraw cooperation from the state is a core concept. One strand within conflict resolution theorizing reflects this “disconnect” with existing mechanisms for decision making, control, and resource distribution within a society. Concerns for social justice fueled the increased interest in conflict resolution and alternative strategies for dealing with conflict, resulting in what came to be known as alternative dispute resolution,

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or ADR. Great differences exist in the ideologies which inform different ADR models (Adler et al. 1987) yet those oriented toward community, grass roots efforts clearly reflect a concern for empowerment and a suspicion of established and authoritarian structures. Community justice centers and community mediation centers have at their core an explicitly justice-oriented ethos. In general, people involved with these programs believe that increased control over decision making at the individual and neighborhood level can mitigate the loss of control by helping to create a more informed and better prepared populace able to advocate and organize for change. This concern for popular control and social justice, interestingly, is often critiqued as misguided by other social justice theorists who argue that such attempts ignore the larger system of laws and social norms which should inform such decisions, in order to reveal system-wide inequities and provide cumulative pressure for change. That competing camps within the field of conflict resolution lay claim to the social justice path simply illustrates the dilemma inherent in this discussion. This critique reflects a view of social change heavily influenced by a “hydraulic” model of conflict and change. This model emphasized a build-up of critical mass or pressure and it is that pressure which becomes the instrument of social change. Almost half a century ago, Coser (1956) noted that “Conflict prevents the ossification of the social system by exerting pressure for innovation and creativity … The clash of values and interests, the tension between what is and what some groups feel ought to be, the conflict between vested interests and new strata and groups demanding their share of power, wealth and status, have been productive of vitality” (p. 80). In the eyes of social justice theorists, the causality between pressure and change is excepted: you cannot have one without the other. Any intervention that diverts or bleeds off the pressure does so at the expense of social change and should not be encouraged. The critical measurement of conflict resolution processes then is whether they interrupt, increase, or direct the pressure. Thus, some social justice theorists in the conflict resolution field seek to distance themselves from the “pragmatists,” as well as the grassroots empowerment and justice proponents. The discourse focuses on systemic impediments to justice and a suspicion that existing institutions are necessarily captive to the agenda of those already possessing political and social power. Conflict, in this view, becomes a necessary agent of change, countering attempts to suppress dissent and maintain asymmetrical distributions of power and resources. Social justice theories within the field of conflict resolution also reflect a concern for substantive, rather than simply procedural, justice. A belief that fair procedures necessarily result in fair outcomes requires a belief

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in process and those charged with administering such procedures that is inconsistent with an analysis which identifies such supposedly neutral institutions as part of the problem. For example, recent critiques of sentencing guidelines and political representation patterns (see Rusakoff 1993; Guinier 1994) demonstrate that the procedures established to enable fair outcomes may themselves perpetuate and institutionalize injustice. In grappling with the disenfranchised and disempowered, social justice theorists contribute a much needed recognition of the many structural obstacles to change and a concern for substantive and normative outcomes which provide some standard against which intervention efforts can be measured.

Integration In the real world of public conflicts, how is the interdependency between systems maintenance and social justice manifested? Examining the Los Angeles riot of 1992 and its aftermath, it is possible to argue that systems maintenance and social justice, in the minds of many caught up in the dynamics of that upheaval, were indivisible. With respect to conflict emergence, it was the steady erosion of the legislative, judicial, and administrative systems’ ability over time to control police behavior that created the climate and circumstances for the Rodney King incident to take place. Although the King incident was the most visible demonstration of the breakdown of the civil justice system, its antecedents can be traced to the triggering incidents between police and Black citizens that produced the Los Angeles riot of 1965. For a period of almost 30 years, whole chunks of systems maintenance had fallen away for Blacks and other disenfranchised groups. The system was not maintaining equality of work, education, and equal protection under the law necessary for people to live fully within the framework of civil society. Frustrations about lack of inclusiveness are vented in small and large ways, often internalized within the fabric of a community and frequently attracting the attention of street-level bureaucracies from which conflict can emerge. What then, is the role of conflict resolution as an agent of transformative change in society? Applying how conflict is processed using the Los Angeles scenario, it is understood that conflict resolution must pay attention to the historic patterns of systems maintenance if it intends to be transformative toward inclusive social justice. Conflict resolution must not only help parties (an inadequate term at this level of dialogue) reach a consensus on just ends, but serve as the means to get there as well. As distasteful as it may be for some social justice theorists, transformative conflict resolution (in the social

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justice sense) requires being attentive to the proletarian goings-on of systems maintenance, for it is here where the outcomes of a resolutionary agreement will be determined. In this regard, Arendt’s (1970) observation takes on added significance. Presumptively, transformative conflict resolution outcomes have generational manifestations that extend beyond the engagement cycle of any one set of parties involved in a conflict. Returning to the Los Angeles riot example, a conflict resolution agreement that calls for certain structural changes in decision making may have substantive outcomes which will not be visible while the current mayor, police chief, social activists, etc. are still on the scene. Therefore, “the means used to achieve political goals [will be of greater relevance] … than the intended goals” (p. 4). That is, how the system [of the agreement] will be maintained through its implementation and governance; the latter necessarily involving forms of democratic decision making. Integrating systems maintenance (and the instrumentality of democratic decision making) with social justice outcomes requires more than retrofitting the inputs and outputs of public institutions responsible for the implementation of agreements. Doing so will require new ways of thinking about both means and ends—resembling less a linear process where ends begin and where means leave off and more an interactive dynamic, the objective of which is to reduce the rhetorical contradiction between the two. We depict this dynamic in Figure 7-1, where means (process) is connected linearly to the ideological value choices of systems maintenance or social justice as outcomes. We suggest by this diagram that: (1) means can produce either ADR forms of systems maintenance or conflict resolutionary social justice; and (2) the intervener is at a classic ideological fork in the road, conscious of the value choices to be made. In Figure 7-2, we show a large section of systems maintenance lying outside the overlap with social justice to acknowledge the propensity for public institutions to be, as March and Olsen (1989:55) describe, self-preserving; the ability to be resistant to opportunities for change by developing their own

Figure 7-1: An Interactive Process of Ideological Choice

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criteria for success, the distribution of scarce resources, and constitutional rules. We would add to this the theoretical perspective adopted by some (Kolb and Putnam 1992: 1, 2) that the very structure of institutions is inherently conflictual, encumbering their ability to play effective roles in social justice outcomes. In part, this is due to the interlocking of three systems in institutions: the individual, the institution, and the ecology of relationships existing in the institution’s environment (March and Olsen 1989: 57). On the other side, there is a portion of social justice lying outside the overlap signifying the resistance by activists within to ironical juxtapositions with systems maintenance. If we define integration of means and ends in response to conflict as an interdependent union of systems maintenance and social justice, we acknowledge Burton’s (1988) observation that conflict resolution is a political process. It is political in the sense that in the United States, conflict outcomes shape the functional nature of democracy and its decision-making processes. Systems maintenance uninformed by a vision of social justice falls prey to practices of “thin democracy,” where citizenship is constructed around a series of self-interested bargains (Berry, Portney, and Thompson 1993). The recognition of interdependency sees systems maintenance as integral to social justice outcomes where the purpose of institutions is to create shared values and integrative opportunities within their environments. The question remains whether the reflective practitioner can stimulate integration in public and private institutions responsible for social change. In a conflict environment, institutions are habituated to aggregative processes (March and Olsen 1989: 118). In an aggregative process, institutions and

System Maintenance

Integration

Social Justice

Figure 7-2: Some Area of Overlap in Two Distinct Ideologies

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individuals are encouraged to bargain on the basis of rational self-interest within a political ethos of majority rule. Exchanges are rational and purposeful. Leaders of aggregative systems promote the brokerage of coalitions among interest groups where the allocation of resources is the sought-after outcome. In conflict settings, in order to move leadership away from habits of aggregation and towards integration, the reflective practitioner must first understand that this is a longitudinal process. The typical ADR approach sees intervention as a relatively short-term process designed to assist parties in conflict to reach specific agreements. The reflective practitioner understands intervention as a long-term and collaborative process where, operating in the mode of a public steward, she or he seeks to bring together institutional actors, individuals, and groups to determine just outcomes and the processes used to get there. It may be that complete integration of means and ends in social conflict is beyond the scope of practice of any individual or team of reflective practitioners operating within a finite time span. Rather, it can be seen as a process where “generations” of practitioners intervene, each attempting to push the process of integration forward a little further. In this sense, integration of systems maintenance with social justice is never fully achieved. It is a transitional as well as transformative process.

Conclusion In this essay, we have argued that ideological and philosophical differences between those who engage in traditional methods of intervening in conflicts (ADR practitioners) and social justice theorists have created artificial distinctions between those elements in the resolution of a conflict needed to maintain a stable society and political ends that seek to redress imbalances of power and decision making. We acknowledge that powerful forces who are stakeholders in conflict exist at all levels of conflict resolution interaction. They have an investment in the status quo. At the same time, critics of traditional methods of conflict resolution with their emphasis on just outcomes overlook the interdependency of systems maintenance and social justice outcomes particularly with respect to implementation and governance of agreements. In our perspective, the intervener is a public steward. She or he is not so much a mediator as a “social instrumentalist”—someone who avoids ironic decontextualizing of the intervention role and, instead, consciously seeks to integrate the democratic potential inherent in systems maintenance into shared visions of just outcomes. We recognize that this essay adds to the increasing ambiguity of so-called third-party roles in conflict resolution. Yet it

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is the unwillingness to relinquish rigid paradigms that will doom the practice of conflict resolution to the corridors of antiquity. It may not be the “end of history” that Fukuyama proclaims, but it is the end of social systems as we know them. Who better to respond to the challenges of the new millennium than those that labor and love in the analysis and resolution of conflict?

Note The authors would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of James H. Laue, a colleague, friend, mentor, and teacher, who was unswerving in his dedication to social justice and the use of conflict resolution to achieve it.

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Coser, L. A. (1956). The Functions of Social Conflict. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Goldberg, S., Green, E., and Sander, F. E. A. (1985). Dispute Resolution. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Gudykunst, W. B., and Ting-Toomey, S. (1988). Culture and Interpersonal Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Guinier, L. (1994). The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: The Free Press. Jaffe, S. M., and Stamato, L. (1996, August 12). “How to Make Mandatory Mediation Work.” New Jersey Law Journal: 1–9. Kolb, D. M., and Bartunek, J. M. (eds) (1992). Hidden Conflict in Organizations: Uncovering Behind-the-Scenes Disputes. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. March, J. G., and Olson, J. P. (1989). Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: The Free Press. Nader, L. (1991). “Harmony Models and the Construction of Law.” In K. Avruch, P. W. Black, and J. Scimecca (eds), Conflict Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Rifkin, J., Millen, J., and Cobb, S. (1991). “Toward a New Discourse for Mediation: A Critique of Neutrality.” Mediation Quarterly 9 (2):151–64. Rosenberg, M. (1987–1988). “Resolving Disputes Differently: Adieu to Adversarial Justice?” Creighton Law Review 21 (3):801–21. Russakof, D. (1993, December 12). “Lani Guinier is Still Alive and Talking.” The Washington Post Magazine: W14. Scimecca, J. A. (1991). “Conflict Resolution in the United States: The Emergence of a Profession?” In K. Avruch, P. W. Black, and J. Scimecca (eds), Conflict Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood. United States of America et al. v. State of Washington et al. Civ. No. 9213 Phase I, 1978.

Notes  1 Dr. Mara Shoeny is Director, Graduate Certificate Program, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University.  2 We prefer to use the term intervener rather than mediator in this essay because the latter is usually understood as a formulaic process for the resolution of conflict. Intervener allows for a broader interpretation of contingent behavior used to bring about resolution.  3 See Bush and Folger (1991); Rifkin, Millen, and Cobb (1991).  4 Here we speak of the range of techniques common to consensual forms of conflict resolution such as mediation, conciliation, and facilitation.  5 In their book, Culture and Interpersonal Communications, Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey (1988) make a distinction between “low” context cultures and “high” context cultures. The former is largely applicable to the American or more Western cultures, which value linear logic and direct, verbal communication.

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 6 See, for example, Cormick and Laue (1978).  7 System, as used in this context, refers to the dominant social system. Often characterized as being controlled by the “power elite,” it here refers to any established or institutionalized patterns of interaction.  8 For a discussion of this, see Bobo (1992).  9 See Abel (1982a, 1982b). 10 The issue of location of particular apartments was complicated by the Hasidim’s religious observation of the Sabbath. This meant they could not occupy apartments higher than the third or fourth floor since they were prohibited from using the elevators on the Sabbath. Current and prospective tenants of a different faith and culture viewed this as discriminatory and a form of preferential treatment.

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8 What Is an International Conflict? Response to Carrie MenkelMeadow’s “Correspondences and Contradictions in International and Domestic Conflict Resolution: Lessons from General Theory and Varied Contexts” Wallace Warfield, 2003

Introduction

I

n her article, Carrie Menkel-Meadow (2003) poses a question that has been the subject of debate in conferences, classrooms, and other fora, but never sufficiently elaborated.1 That is: “Does the field of conflict resolution have any generalizable theories that ‘work’ across different domains of international and domestic conflict? Or, are contexts, participants, and resources

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so ‘domain’ specific and variable that only ‘thick descriptions’2 of particular contexts will do?” The subject is yet another one of those quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) debates that tiptoes across the field of conflict resolution from time to time.3 While Menkel-Meadow is careful when she speaks of domains, to compare international with international as well as international with so-called “domestic” (read American) conflicts, one is inclined to see the argument largely framed as the exportation of Western-generated theories abroad. As such, it raises intriguing and provocative questions about the complementarities of so-called Western styles4 of conflict resolution with those that occur in the more exotic international realm. Or, as Menkel-Meadow states, “[O] ur field of conflict resolution has little in the way of generalizable propositions that work (explain, describe, predict, and prescribe) across all domains” (2003: 320). In this article, I would like to first spend a little time clarifying (or perhaps muddying) what is meant by “domestic” and “international” when people talk about conflicts and how they are resolved. Geographical and contentdefining terms tossed about cavalierly say more about competing hierarchies and elitism than functional geopolitical designations. Next, I will suggest that part of the problem is how we locate theory in this debate. What kinds of theories lend themselves to generalization and which ones do not? And does the problem lie with the theory or the theory interpreter?

What Is Meant by “Domestic” and “International” Conflicts? When Menkel-Meadow refers to domestic conflicts and their resolution, she links this body of occurrences and responses with “American.” Indeed, in the lingua franca of conflict resolution discourse, the two designations of “American” and “domestic” have become virtually synonymous. As has “international” with any form of conflict and its revolutionary approaches applied outside of the United States. Indisputably, this is a handy way to distinguish between forms of conflict and conflict resolution approaches, particularly if there is an interest in conducting comparative research. However, if one pays close attention to the discourse that has accompanied the political growth of the field, what is really heard is a resolute determination by the international relations community to distance themselves from those who theorize and practice in the United States. A fleeing, if you will, from yet another hegemonic export of those “Americans.”

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Now of course, stories abound of American practitioners intervening in a so-called international setting, either directly in a conflicted situation or through the modality of training, and applying techniques denuded of the culture they were functioning in—the result ranging from an embarrassing oversight to a snafu that could have serious repercussions for the lives and safety of participants. Yet it has come to the point where hearing about the “American style” (of conflict resolution) triggers visions of a parade of horrors trailing closely behind. Well, what is a domestic versus an international conflict? World War II, involving a number of countries on the Allied and Axis sides, was certainly an international conflict, as are both of the Persian Gulf conflicts. The current Central African quagmire and the turmoil in the Middle East would certainly take up residence in this international domain as well. But what about the Brixton riots that took place in London in 1985? Or recent conflicts between sectarian groups in India? Are these examples of international conflicts or simply parochial conflagrations taking place in somebody else’s backyard? The point is not that the latter group of conflicts are not international (they are not in a strictly definitional sense), but rather that the nomenclature gets conflated when these terms are used by practitioners to locate themselves in the professional field. When a practitioner describes him or herself as an international conflict resolver, very few of these individuals are doing international conflict resolution in the strict definitional sense. Rather, many are conducting conflict resolution training with specific groups that may or may not be in conflict with one another or some other form of intervention, but at best tangentially related to international conflict resolution. In short, the term and application have become a kind of shorthand for anyone who is doing anything outside of the United States (Menkel-Meadow 2003). It would be interesting to ascertain if practitioners of conflict resolution from other countries are engaged in a similar facileness when they do various forms of intervention outside of their home countries. For example, had a British practitioner sought to intervene in the gang conflict between Mexican American and recently arrived Mexican immigrants and Puerto Ricans that took place in Chicago’s west side in the mid-1990s, would that individual consider himself to have been doing international conflict resolution? Or is this a peculiarly American orientation? This geographic ambiguity is related to the similarities and/or differences of domain comparison. If an external intervener analyzes a conflict in another country, where all the actors are local, and determines this to be a domestic conflict, then will this individual be looking for similarities with nativist conflicts that she or he is familiar with, or will differences be the guiding analytical frame? In other words, should the domain designation drive the

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analytical frame in one direction as opposed to another? Or, should we be looking at other variables that have the potential to provide richer descriptions and explanations? As Menkel-Meadow (2003) points out in her discussion of the New York City Police Department hostage negotiations (pp. 327–9), context does matter. But it is not so much a geographical context or even a case typology context as it is a context of a situational dynamic that matters. What is the dynamic situation unfolding between conflicting parties that invites analytic comparison and becomes the basis for third-party action? For example, Menkel-Meadow is correct in suggesting that hostage negotiators are guided by contingency-driven hypotheses, and that there are contextual differences between that situation and a multiparty problemsolving workshop that explores deep-rooted causal factors (2003). But there are also relevant similarities. For example, she indicates that hostage negotiators noted the importance “of keeping parties talking” (2003). I would argue that in problem-solving workshops there are contingent moments when it is important to keep parties talking as well. The point of comparison is not the typology or location, but the dynamic interaction that is taking place between parties in a conflict situation. The important context in this comparison is how you “keep parties talking” rather than what you do. And it is here where both obvious and subtle differences emerge. By the way, I am not so sure that our police hostage negotiators were not using theory. Periodically, during the discussion, one or more of the academics would suggest a theory that the negotiators were using. Typically, they would respond with an example (see Cambria et al. 2002). This is an indication that they were using theory heuristically if not articulating it in the academic sense. One early work that looked at similarities and differences of conflict conditions and responses, compared the previously mentioned riots in Brixton and other surrounding districts of London with the riots (or community conflict) that occurred in Miami-Dade County, Florida, in 1980 and 1982 (Marshall 1982). Certainly there were differences between the two riots, but they existed symbiotically with similarities. I will mention just two of these similarities that were relevant to the understanding of conflict dynamics. Although both countries are democracies, the political culture of Great Britain, with its emphasis on value patterns of ascription and particularism, produces a kind of hierarchical tribalism based on class, region, and club affiliation (see Lipsett 1979). These behaviors are not conducive to a sense of inclusion, despite government policies designed to produce a view that “we are all British.”5 In the United States, value patterns of universalism and achievement (Lipset 1979; see also Susskind 1981; Stulberg 1981; Baruch Bush and Folger 1994) emphasize the worth of the individual and constitutionalize a belief that all are equal as Americans. There is no need for an

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exhaustive historical review of the Civil Rights struggle to erase this fiction. The irony of the Civil Rights struggle with respect to Miami-Dade is that judicial and legislative victories produced outcomes that reinforced social and economic deprivation rather than eradicated it (US Commission on Civil Rights 1982). Both locales were the recipients of significant immigration flows in the 1960s and 1970s, and in both cases, newly arrived immigrants tended to settle in impoverished neighborhoods. However, there were demographic differences that influenced participation in the conflict and the ideology of the protest groups that participated. While African Americans had historically lived in Miami-Dade, the region experienced a significant influx of Cuban immigrants after the revolution that brought Castro to power. These two groups had existed in Miami-Dade, living in separate communities with little intermixing. The riot was essentially racial and antiauthoritarian, pitting mostly poor African Americans against a predominantly White police force representing establishment hegemony. Brixton and other London districts affected by their riots reflected a polyglot of ethnicities with Asians, African Caribbeans, and Whites, often living in the same communities. Interestingly, these disturbances were not defined as race riots. The similarities between the conflicts are also important for the work of a comparative conflict analyst. Both riots lend themselves to a theoretical perspective rather colloquially called “Two Tap Roots and a Triggering Incident” (Marshall 1982: 169–73; see also Geertz 1973). This concept was formulated by the US Justice Department’s Community Relations Service in the 1970s to help guide field conciliators and mediators to develop conflict responses ranging from crisis management to more reconciliatory interventions.6 At the meta-theory level, Tap Root (TR) 1 is a general perception by a low-power segment of society that the system, as constructed by the more powerful and dominant members of that society, is inherently oppressive and discriminatory (US Department of Justice Community Relations Service [US DOJ CRS] 1991: 3).7 As such, TR 1 borrows liberally from Galtung’s (1969) theory of structural violence. At the meso-level, TR 2, there is a lack of confidence by this same oppressed group in the interests and capabilities of public and private institutions to provide adequate redress for their grievances (US DOJ CRS, 1991: 4).8 Finally, at the micro level, there is invariably some triggering incident.9 In the Miami-Dade riot, the triggering incident was perceived to be excessive use of police force against an African American male. In Brixton, a triggering event was an attack on Asian residents by White skinheads. The latter causal element, or triggering incident, generalizes to Horowitz’s work in his study of deadly ethnic riots in India (2003; see also Horowitz 2001).

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A Theory About Theory Generalization in Conflict Resolution If the reader is still with me, this person will have discerned that I am a cautious fan of generalizable theory. I see a danger of over-complexifying the uniqueness of conflicts as well as the risk of over-generalizing or seeking commonality. In either case, there is no need to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. To help us wrestle our way out of this semantic tangle, I offer a conceptual model that I take to be generalizable to all conflicts and that aids in giving direction to circumstances where other theories can be generalized and where differences should be paid attention to. In their fascinating study of gender and workplace disputes, GwartneyGibbs and Lach (1991) note that all disputes and conflicts have three components: origins, processes, and outcomes. This can also be depicted as a causal path model:

Origins Origins speak to how a conflict begins. Anyone who has familiarity with different forms of conflicts, ranging from the simplest10 dyadic interpersonal dispute to enormously complex entanglements such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, knows that the interpretation of origins is a social construction depending upon where an affected party stands in relation to the issues. The important thing about the origins component of the model is that it both affects how parties respond to a conflict (think sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, for example), as well as the choice of process modalities of the intervener, the third party at the metaphorical table (Gulliver 1979).

Processes Processes deal with how a conflict will be pursued. Such processes range from consensual settlement through negotiations by the parties themselves and various forms of third party-assisted modalities such as facilitation, mediation, and the proliferated variations that have evolved over the last Origins 01

Processes X

Outcomes 02

Figure 8-1

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decade or so (see Moore 1996), to more formal and decisional roles played by arbitrators, judges, and institutional managers.

Outcomes Outcomes relate to how a conflict “ends,” but the meaning of “outcome” can vary widely. Conflicts can “settle” in the sense that parties reach an agreement, unassisted or otherwise, that reflects their interests or ones imposed upon them by a formal decision maker. Outcomes can produce escalation of the conflict, usually in response to a precipitating event. We saw this in the Palestinian–Israeli conflagration when Sharon went to the Temple Mount in September 2000, producing the second Intifada. Outcomes can also be manifested in a “power over” fashion when one party defeats his or her adversary. We saw this when Britain defeated Argentina in the war over ownership of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands. Curiously, one author thinks of this kind of outcome as conflict de-escalation (Krisberg 2003). Where the field of conflict resolution has gone astray is in the creation of a professional dictum that conflates “agreement as outcome” with the “ending of the conflict.” I can remember the premature celebrations that took place after the Oslo agreement, which sought to determine the outcome of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Similarly, in the seemingly never-ending Liberian civil war, parties to that conflict signed fourteen peace agreements, and as of this writing, the conflict has not only not ended, but has actually reescalated (see Friends of Liberia 1997). Similarly, in studies of domestic relations disputes, these disputes were categorized as “resolved” when agreements were reached (see Wall and Dewhurst 1991), ignoring the relational implications of outcomes. Indeed, Northrup argues that despite the conflict resolution field’s claims that the focal point of practice is relationships, conflict resolution theory (and the practice it generates) is driven by identifying and resolving party self-interest (1991).

Locating Theory Generalization With these brief definitions in mind, I suggest that generalization resides most comfortably in the realm of theories about origins. And while the arena of processes requires more careful attention to differences as opposed to similarities, it is possible to replicate from one conflict domain to another. Length restrictions constrain me from indulging in an exhaustive treatment of conflict origins theories, but I would offer at least one for discussion.

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Basic Human Needs Theory Menkel-Meadow (2003) is right in her observation that a major evolution in the field of conflict analysis and resolution was understanding the importance of getting beyond parties’ positions to understand their interests as a way to broaden the possibilities for reaching agreements (see Fisher and Ury 1991). Going further, Basic Human Needs theory, arguably first offered by Maslow (1954) in his hierarchy of needs, and elaborated on by a number of theorists (particularly Burton (1993) for the conflict analysis and resolution field), urges the observer as intervener to probe beneath interests for an even deeper understanding of the conflict. This is an explanatory construction that Avruch and Black (1993) have likened to an archaeological dig (Warfield 1993: 176; see also Gwartney-Gibbs and Lach 1991). If we look closer at this evolutionary theory development, we see that the metaphor, and what it seeks to illuminate, comes close to Geertz’s (1973) call for “thick descriptions.”11 But is human needs theory generalizable across conflict domains? I think it is, up to a point. Returning to the London and Miami-Dade riots discussed earlier, it is possible to see similarities. In both settings, despite certain demographical differences, we see that the ontological needs of identity, recognition, and development (to use a trio associated with Burton) of low-power participants was frustrated. In Britain and the United States, the political culture institutionalized by the ruling regime never lived up to its promise of embracing participants into a national identity and all the associational rights that go along with it. Consequently, there was a sense of frustration felt by affected groups in not being able to fulfill their potential, creating a spiral of unmet needs which led to an explosive reaction. Stretching further across domains we may find similarity within a framework of human need, if we compare interpersonal conflict with the youth gang conflict we have been analyzing. Writing about interpersonal conflict, Wilmot and Hocker (2001) discuss the importance of parties establishing identity or face-saving goals to define who they are in relation to the other party and the interaction taking place. A key question here would be: “How may my selfidentity be protected or repaired in this particular conflict?” In street gangs, conflicts serve as identity-reinforcing mechanisms and expression of group values. Members want to “belong” (New York City Youth Board 1959) and group conflict is one way of satisfying this ontological need. As Burton goes on to say, “Whether we are dealing with interpersonal, community, ethnic, or international relations, we are dealing with the same ontological needs of people, requiring the same analytical processes of conflict resolution” (1993: 56, emphasis added).

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Now, while I find myself in consensus with the core of this observation, it also contains seeds for my departure. I agree with Burton that we are dealing with the same ontological needs across conflict domains, but I disagree rather strongly that they require the same analytical processes. As MenkelMeadow points out, context matters (2003: 328). The context of identity manifestation in an interpersonal conflict is likely to look very different than in the context of a street gang where the implications of that manifestation ricochet across a landscape of complex interactions. In addition to context, culture matters. Imagine identity manifestation in a female street gang as opposed to a male street gang. In either case, a conflict intervener would be led astray if he or she attempted to use the same analytical process leading to an intervention design in all conflict settings. After all, there is more to a wink than meets the eye.

Conflict Processes Next I would like to say a word or two about process in the context of similarities or differences. The previous discussion about the application of similarities or differences in one organic theory naturally leads us to consider the intervention processes a given theory is designed to guide. In the case of third-party roles, the causal path model suggests a normative relationship between conflict origins, processes, and outcomes. In a Burtonian sense, going beyond interests to plumb the depth of a conflict should produce a greater understanding of that conflict and the form of intervention (praxis) to be used. I share what I take to be Menkel-Meadow’s implicit concern about an inclination on the part of some of our colleagues to engage in a kind of “one size fits all” notion of conflict analysis and resolution—particularly with respect to mediation. The standard forty-hour mediation training, with its emphasis on neutrality and impartiality and near-dogmatic approach to how the process should be conducted, invites little tolerance for variables of culture, conflict conditions, and other phenomena that abound in varied domains. Professional practice has enshrined and codified mediation so that process is divorced from its origins to produce a preferred set of outcomes. Mediation has become stepdriven. If the mediator paints by the numbers, the picture should look like an agreement. We may remember Lederach’s wonderful self-reflection when he conducted conflict resolution training in Central America several years ago (1987: 23–5). In reflecting on his experience and the model he was about to introduce, he came away with a number of observations. For example, one was that the mediation process invites a structural formality (p. 23).

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Going from party introductions, story telling, caucusing, and other procedural steps, the mediator is a bureaucrat, essentially ignoring the context and cultural common sense of the participants. Lederach described mediation as an essentially linear process, one that fails to take into consideration the reality that most people live their lives nonlinearly. In a more recent iteration, a colleague, who is the manager for internal workplace disputes of a major international lending agency, shared with me the frustration of working with external contract mediators who were bent on using “the one best way” to mediate between parties who represented a wide variety of cultures. They were remarkably unsuccessful. What this tells us is that differences matter and we had best take them into consideration when thinking about designing intervention approaches. But remember the admonition of throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater? There are circumstances and situations in conflicts where contingent techniques can work across domains. A few years ago, I was a member of an intervention team that conducted training in conflict resolution and leadership with a number of national non-governmental organization leaders in Rwanda, post the 1994 genocide. We were sensitive to the cultural implications of our work and took great care in seeking advice from participants and others that would inform our process. At a certain point in the process, we felt that participants could benefit from an interest-based negotiation skills session. We agonized well into the night if this was culturally appropriate. Was this too rational-actor driven for people recently emerged from a horrific civil war? Would it be seen as the imposition of a Western technique with all of its colonizing implications? In the end, we decided to conduct the training and found that the participants not only understood the principles, but ardently engaged the role plays (drawn from their relevant experiences), and were able to critique their performances. Evaluating the experience, our team reflected on why this particular skills session seemed successful, despite its “Western orientation.” We felt there were a number of factors that contributed to the session’s success. First, we made it clear at the outset that we were not parachuting in to provide a few days worth of training and then returning to the safe ivory towers of academia. We intended this to be a multiyear commitment. Second, we offered the negotiation skills session on the third day of the workshop, after a level of trust was developed between the participants (Hutu and Tutsi ethnic group members) and between participants and trainers. Third, we offered ourselves not as experts, but individuals who had expertise. Participants were free to select or reject what they felt would be useful to them (which they did on more than one occasion). Fourth, this particular skills session was contextualized within a larger framework of reconciliation. Finally, we were

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working with mid-level leadership, many of whom were college educated. While participants reflected at various times the dominant ethnic, national, and traditionalist culture frames, they also had jobs and other responsibilities that contained the artifacts of middle-class life. Many of the disputes and conflicts they were dealing with (in organizations and institutional policies) fit the contours of modern organizational life, wherever it occurs. On the other hand, I doubt this particular training would have worked if we had attempted it in an upcountry village.

Conclusion I worry that whether we are devotees of similarities or differences in conflict domains or typologies, reflect so-called Western resolution models as opposed to non-Western models (What are they anyway?), favor elicitive versus prescriptive approaches, utilize problem-solving, reconciliational, or transformational approaches, in the end, say more about who we are than what we are trying to do. It seems to me, that as practitioners, we would be better served if we decontextualized process from its various (and competing) iconoclastic moorings and recontextualized approaches and techniques to the conflict setting, responding to participants’ needs, rather than satisfying our professional niche. We should shed the mantle of “expert” and consider that we are, after all, apprentices with a willingness to learn and change standardized paradigms of conflict resolution theorizing and practice.

References Avruch, K., and Black, P. W. (1993). “Conflict Resolution in Intercultural Settings: Problems and Prospects.” In D. J. D. Sandole and H. Van der Merwe (eds), Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Baruch Bush, R. A., and Folger, J. P. (1994). The Promise of Mediation: Responding to Conflict through Empowerment and Recognition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Burton, J. W. (1993). “Conflict Resolution as a Political Philosophy.” In D. J. D. Sandole and H. van der Merwe (eds), Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Cambria, J., et al. (2002). “Negotiation Under Extreme Pressure: The ‘Mouth Marines’ and the Hostage Takers.” Negotiation Journal 18 (4):331–43. Fisher, R., and Ury, W. (1991). Getting to Yes, (2nd edn) New York: Penguin Books.

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Friends of Liberia (1997, August 22). Observation of the 1997 Special Elections in the Republic of Liberia: Final Report and Evaluation. On file at the Burton Library, School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University. Galtung, J. (1969). “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6 (3). Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books Classics. Gulliver, P. H. (1979). Disputes and Negotiations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Salt Lake City, UT: Academic Press. Gwartney-Gibbs, P. A., and Lach, D. H. (1991). “Workplace Dispute Resolution and Gender Inequality.” Negotiation Journal 7 (2):187–200. Horowitz, D. L. (2001). The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Horowitz, D. L. (2003, February). Speech at the US Institute for Peace. Krisberg, L. (2003). Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution, (2nd edn) Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Lederach, J. P. (1987, December). “Cultural Assumptions of the North American Model of Mediation: From a Latin American Perspective.” Terre Haute, IN: Indiana State University. Conflict Resolution Notes: 23–5. Lipset, S. M. (1979). The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Transaction Publishers: 209–24. Marshall, T. F. (ed.) (1982). Community Disorders and Policing: Conflict Management in Action. London: Whiting and Birch. Maslow, A. H. (1954). Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper and Row Menkel-Meadow, C. (2003). “Correspondences and Contradictions in International and Domestic Conflict Resolution: Lessons from General Theory and Varied Contexts.” Journal of Dispute Resolution: 319–352. Moore, C. W. (1996). The Mediation Process; Practical Strategies for Resolving Conflicts, 2nd ed. Piscataway, NJ: Transactional Publishers. New York City Youth Board (1959). “Prevention-Treatment-Control of Juvenile Delinquency Through Group Work Services.” Unpublished paper from the Annual Spring Conference In-Service Training Department. Northrup, T. A. (1991). “Relationality and Self Interest: The Implications of Gender for Conflict Theory.” Unpublished paper from Conference in Gender Conflicts, George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, 18–19 January 1991. (On file at Burton Library, School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University.) Stulberg, J. B. (1981). “The Theory and Practice of Mediation: A Reply to Professor Susskind.” Vermont Law Review 85. Susskind, L. (1981). “Environmental Mediation and the Accountability Problem.” Vermont Law Review 6. US Commission on Civil Rights (1982). Confronting Racial Isolation in Miami. US Department of Justice Community Relations Service (1991). Avoiding Racial Conflict: A Guide for Municipalities. Wall, V. D., Jr., and Dewhurst, M. L. (1991). “Observations of Gender Related Differences in the Mediation of Conflict.” Unpublished paper from Conference in Gender Conflict at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, 18–19 January 1991.

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Warfield, W. See Chapter 4 of this book. Wilmot, W. W., and Hocker, J. L. (2001). Interpersonal Conflict, (5th edn) Boston: McGraw Hill. Younge, G. (2002). No Place Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey through the American South. Jackson, MS: The University Press of Mississippi.

Notes  1 Carrie Menkel-Meadow (2003), “Correspondences and Contradictions in International and Domestic Conflict Resolution: Lessons from General Theory and Varied Contexts,” Journal of Dispute Resolution, 319.  2 Geertz (1973). By “thick descriptions” Geertz means the importance for the observer to go beyond the immediate (and apparent) interpretation of an event that is unfolding to look for deeper meanings or create “a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures.”  3 One is reminded of the Susskind–Stulberg debate about the appropriate role of the mediator (see Susskind 1981; Stulberg 1981). See also Baruch Bush and Folger (1994) (taking exception to the so-called “problem solving approach” supposedly embraced by mediation traditionalists).  4 I find it curious that the term “Western” is customarily applied to the United States, Canada, and select European nations in the geopolitical sense, but is implicitly Americanized when it comes to the field of conflict resolution, as if anything emanating from America a priori carries a hegemonic taint.  5 For an interesting discussion of this, see Younge (2002).  6 For the most recent publication of this concept, see US Department of Justice Community Relations Service (1991). See also Marshall, 1982, 3–4.  7 The guide names the first community dynamic “Perceived Disparity of Treatment.”  8 The guide names the second community dynamic “Lack of Confidence in Redress Systems.”  9 “A triggering incident is a tension-heightening event that catalyzes discontent and turns it into civil disorder” (US DOJ CRS 1991). 10 I use this term advisedly, since experience has borne out that there is no such thing as a “simple” conflict. 11 See note 2 above for more on “thick descriptions.”

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9 Is This the Right Thing to Do? A Practical Framework for Ethical Decisions Wallace Warfield, 2000

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ll forms of conflict resolution, whether in the guise of training or a more direct form of intervention, present dilemmas for the practitioner at one time or another. The dilemma could be as straightforward and unadorned as when one party to a conflict does not show up for a mediation session or as impenetrable as two groups unable to free themselves from deeply embedded identities. Ethical dilemmas present a special problem because they deal with principles and values that defy simple solutions and remain ambiguous in an evolving field lacking well-defined boundaries. In this chapter, I define ethics and what constitutes an ethical dilemma, suggest a sample of ethical dilemmas that confront the individual conducting international peacebuilding, and, then, drawing from my own experience and those of colleagues who have done this work for a number of years, propose guidelines in the form of model building that practitioners new to this part of the field will find useful.1

Defining Ethics and Ethical Dilemmas In any professional endeavor where individuals are engaged in a practice that has the potential to harm others, a concern about ethics exists. In a very general

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sense, ethics can be considered a set of guiding moral principles that define the rightness or wrongs of a course of action. However, for this discussion, what is needed is a definition that speaks to the circumstances surrounding a form of professional practice. With this in mind, we can think of an ethical dilemma as a situation in which the practitioner is faced with a doubt about how to act in relation to personal and professional values, norms, and obligations. In the field of conflict resolution, various attempts have been made to define ethical parameters for a diverse field of practice. Following membership approval of ethical standards of responsibility for third-party practitioners in 1986, the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution2 later published a document that by using an array of exercises, sought to establish ethical parameters for the practitioner. Here, the emphasis was on impartiality (maintaining a nonbiased stance with all parties to the conflict) and confidentiality (upholding the private nature of mediated discussions). In another discussion, researchers asked to what extent it was ethical for a mediator to superimpose her or his sense of outcomes on what the parties desire in settlement (Peachey 1989). For example, in a conflict contextualized by a history of disempowerment for one or more of the parties, but where the presenting issues are framed in terms of monetary settlements, should the mediator push for a social justice outcome? An ethical dilemma that emerges in the conduct of a peacebuilding intervention is a conflict within a conflict. There is the conflict setting the practitioner seeks to intervene in, presumably involving opposing parties. This is conflict of an intergroup nature. However, an ethical dilemma is also a form of conflict because the practitioner may find that her or his contemplated actions are incompatible with criteria and standards established by the profession. And as noted above briefly, any field (in this case, the field of conflict analysis and resolution) attempts to establish ethical parameters that guide practitioners. The dilemma is created when a practitioner is about to engage in an activity that in some intuitive way he or she feels is right for the situation and is aligned with personal ethics, but contravenes one or more of the field’s ethical standards. Or perhaps a practitioner’s values and the more abstract values canonized by the profession are in alignment, but the activity the practitioner happens to be engaged in is divergent. In this sense, an ethical dilemma is very much an intrapersonal conflict. When an ethical dilemma of this sort is imposed on the subject matter conflict, it can become the dominant concern. Any number of factors acting in combination creates the potential for an ethical dilemma in international peacebuilding. Rather than attempt to create an exhaustive typology of these issues, I offer a few as illustrative examples. The point, after all, is to set the stage for a prescriptive model that can be used in a wide variety of circumstances.

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Culture Conducting peacebuilding in an international setting lends an added dimension to ethical dilemmas because it introduces factors that have a different significance from interventions that take place on the home turf of the practitioner. For example, more than likely, the initiative will be taking place in a locale with culture groups unfamiliar to the practitioner. Ethical perspectives are social constructions that vary across cultures. A certain behavior occurring in a conflict situation may seem inappropriate, even disturbing, to a practitioner. That same behavior or situation may be seen as quite appropriate and justifiable to individuals or groups who come from a different culture.

Exposing Users to Greater Risks International peacebuilding, whether in the form of training, problem-solving workshops, or some other intervention, often takes place in settings marked by significant power imbalances. Conflict resolution in the most celebrated democracy can be viewed as a threat to the regime. Threat escalation increases in states where the political culture is less than fully democratic. In these systems, the dominant regime may see itself as the mediating influence between competing groups within civil society. In this sense, the regime acts as a broker between such groups, rewarding, punishing, but ultimately controlling an exchange process between itself and these groups to serve its own political interests. An external intervention that affects this arrangement can be viewed as a threat to the regime. Should a practitioner who is aware of this do the intervention anyway? What if the intervention exposes the users to physical risk? Are ethical concerns satisfied as long as the practitioner knows the user accepts the risk?

Conflict Intervention Under the Guise of Training Much international peacebuilding takes place in the form of training nationals in various aspects of conflict analysis and resolution. In this field, training has become increasingly popular and taken on a dimension unto itself. Trainers may have some sense that users are facing a conflictual situation; however, the mechanistic nature of a lot of conflict resolution training has a tendency

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to make conflict abstract, divesting it of personal meaning. In many international scenarios, conflict is not an abstract; it is an all-too-tangible reality. In these settings, there is no bright line between training and a more direct form of intervention, particularly in an ongoing conflict situation. Is it ethical for external practitioners to portray themselves in one guise when in fact they are operating in another? An illustration to highlight the last two points might be useful here. Several years ago, I was a member of a team of conflict resolution specialists who traveled to Moscow to conduct a series of training workshops with Russian scientists, academics, and environmentalists on methods of responding to environmental conflict. None of us was Russian speaking, so virtually all interactions were handled through translation. One day, after the formal training sessions were over, a Russian participant asked us if we would like to visit a site in a community where the government was planning to construct a new power plant that would supplant a smaller and older one. The government’s rationale for building the plant was that additional power capacity was necessary to handle the energy needs of a growing immigrant workforce. Residents of a community on the outskirts of Moscow were protesting the construction on the grounds that the older plant was more than adequate to produce the needed energy. A larger plant would increase the risk of pollution, and there were no plans for necessary safeguards. We all hopped into a car thinking we were about to embark on an interesting but harmless field visit. Instead, we were driven to a home in the suburbs of Moscow where waiting for us were a half-dozen local activists, including a local political representative. We found ourselves drawn into a discussion about strategic options in the guise of interest-based negotiations. In reality, we were four foreigners on an intervention team who were engaging in a form of advocacy for one side in a conflict and, at worst, pursuing our own agenda—in a country not fully withdrawn from its Cold War discourse and possibly leaving community representatives to deal with negative externalities. In an attempt to extract ourselves from this uncomfortable situation, we indicated that we really wanted to see the plant before returning to Moscow. “But of course,” our hosts replied. “In fact, we’ll join you.” We hapless American trainers and our entourage then descended on not just the plant but the plant manager as well. Once we were there, the local residents confronted the plant manager with their protest, not too subtly indicating that they had American experts to back them up. We were now thinking we were one telephone call away from jail and probable expulsion from the country. Somehow, we managed to extract ourselves from this ever-thickening ethical dilemma and amid a flurry of anemic excuses fled back to Moscow, looking over our shoulder all the way.

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A Model for Responding to Ethical Dilemmas As unsettling as ethical dilemmas can be when conducting international peacebuilding, the distress can be significantly reduced through a form of reflective practice called model building. Model building is the process of constructing frames of reference that will allow the practitioner to develop multiple rationales for what is occurring or what could occur. The process encourages the practitioner to move from an over-reliance on short-term contingent observations to a deeper understanding of anticipated or unfolding events. As suggested by the examples, some ethical dilemmas are generic to the nature of the work and therefore have the capability to be anticipated and planned for. Many others, however, occur without much advanced warning. Consequently, building a model for ethical responses requires a two-track approach: deductive and reactive. The model envisions the practitioner’s responding to an ethical dilemma in four stages: pause, reflect, share, and determine options and select.

Stage 1: Pause Whether you are in the planning stages of an intervention or in the midst of it, pay attention to the inner tug of discomfort. Pause before plunging into the next set of activities. Take a time-out by calling for a break in the activity or simply shutting down your own participation momentarily and ask yourself what you are feeling. You may have identified an ethical dilemma. Obviously, it is easier to pause on the planning or pre-intervention end than it is when one is in the midst of a situation, but there are ways of accomplishing this on the ground as well.

Stage 2: Reflect This is more than a detached factual observation of a series of unfolding events; rather, it is a form of reflection that is intended to give meaning to an act or pattern of activity being observed. Here, the practitioner is trying to determine how the activity has meaning for his or her sense of ethics. Reflect on how your personal and professional values may have changed since the last time you examined them. Most of us spend more time honing our applied skills than we do thinking about our ethics. Yet as conflict resolution and peacebuilding venture into more complex social dynamics, new ethical

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concepts will continue to arise to challenge preconceived beliefs. For example, the arming of rebel groups in civil war zones to ensure the delivery of aid to entrapped civilian populations was not on the ethical landscape as recently as the mid-1990s.

Stage 3: Share You have paused and reflected, and think you have identified an ethical dilemma. Should you just sit on it? No. The longer the delay is, the more entrenched or complicated the dilemma becomes. Events gather momentum; new dimensions in the form of additional characters with accompanying agendas come into play; the legitimacy of the practitioner’s platform begins to deteriorate; and eventually, the practitioner is pulled further and further away from the intentional plan with the risk that it will be ultimately abandoned. Whether it is taking place in the relative luxury of the planning stage or on the ground, sharing is perhaps the most difficult part of the model-building process. Sharing means a process of externalization and assessment with more than one pair of eyes. More than likely, you will be conducting the intervention as part of a team. We know that teams are forms of small group relationships where individuals bring claiming and maximizing values to an endeavor. That is, individuals working in groups are torn between competing with others in pursuit of selfactualizing objectives and collaborating for the benefit of the group.3 If you are the junior member of a peacebuilding team, for example, your instinct for selfpreservation may instruct you to sit on it, rationalizing that you will raise it at a more convenient time, or the situation will simply go away. But share you must. The ethical concern is the higher value, and you owe it to yourself and your colleagues to put it on the table. Besides, others may have a similar concern and for one reason or another are hesitant to raise it. If the dilemma arises in the midst of an intervention, as awkward and unprofessional as it may seem to pause, reflect, and share, it does not begin to compare to how one feels when an ethical dilemma is left unattended and the situation inexorably deteriorates around you.

Stage 4: Determine Options and Select Model building is designed to strengthen the application of best practice. As with any other good construction, the purpose of each stage is to set a platform for the stage to follow. Obviously, it is possible to encounter an ethical dilemma and plunge directly into a response. However, if the

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practitioner is on the ground, this is likely to magnify the dilemma rather than resolve it. Most ethical dilemmas that emerge in international peacebuilding are seldom clearly delineated, and except in the most blatant scenarios, most of us are not instantaneously in touch with our ethical schema. Pausing, reflecting, and sharing allow practitioners to get in touch with their core values, which are often obscured behind the ego of applied skills. At stage 4, the practitioner is trying to determine what choices are available to prevent the situation from deteriorating further. The first three stages have enabled you to name the ethical dilemma. Choice is informed by three factors: (1) how strongly you hold the personal value at stake; (2) how sharply it diverges from the value held by the general profession; and (3) your knowledge of what others have done in similar situations. Your selection will be determined by how you scale the indexes of each factor and weigh them against each other. For example, if you hold a particular ethical value highly, as does the profession, and as far as you know, very few practitioners have departed from the norm, the selection of choice response will be relatively easy. On the other hand, if your personal value diverges significantly from the profession’s and (as far as you know) practitioners adhere to the professional ethic, then your selection of a response is going to be more difficult. How might this apply to the Moscow scenario? From the perspective of my personal value, while I recognize that the concept of neutrality has application in a range of conflict settings, I hold a higher value that the best negotiations are conducted between adversaries who have interdependent symmetries of power and opportunities to change conditions. From the vantage point of professional values, the practitioner team not only lacked neutrality; we were involved in an undeclared form of practice, engaging in advocacy consultation with one side in a conflict—a form of practice generally frowned on except in the most contingent of situations. This was a departure from our stated purpose for being in the country, which was to conduct training with a broad group of individuals focusing on no particular conflict. At this point, one might be persuaded by the inconsistencies of practice known to take place around this particular ethic to go with a narrow assessment of the personal value over the professional. However, our intervention activated a higher ethical value that resonates with all three choice factors, and that is to do no harm. As external actors, we put the township residents at increased risk of possible retaliation by the reigning political powers. They may in fact have been cognizant of the risk, but that did not remove our responsibility for acknowledging this sooner than we did. It seems there were at least three points where model building could have mitigated the ethical dilemma. When first informed of the opportunity to go on site, we could have paused by assessing the suggestion more carefully

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and pushing the interpreter for more detail. Second, finding ourselves at the residence and meeting with the protest group, what would have been the harm (absent some minor embarrassment) in the practitioner team’s asking to be excused to meet privately, allowing us the opportunity to discuss our concern and then in the spirit of transparency raise the concern with our hosts? Finally, in the same spirit of transparency, we could have avoided compounding the felony by demurring the field trip once we realized what it was going to entail.

Conclusion The difficulty in writing about ethics in professional practice is providing prescriptive guidelines that do not come across as neat, rational-actor formulas best applied in game theory rather than in the chaotic reality of an intervention. Yet to rely on the intuitive seat of one’s pants or divine intervention is not a preferable alternative. Model building will not guarantee that the international peacebuilder will invariably arrive at the right ethical decision. Ultimately, whatever the response, it will reflect the subjective judgment of the practitioner. Model building applies a disciplined cognitive approach that can mitigate the worst outcomes of an ethical dilemma.

References Lave, C., and March, J. (1979). An Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences. New York: HarperCollins. Lewicki, R. J. (1985). “Group Decision Making as a Problem Solving Negotiation.” In D. A. Lax (ed.), The Manager as a Negotiator and Dispute Resolver. Washington, DC: National Institute for Dispute Resolution. Peachey, D. E. (1989). “What People Want from Mediation.” In K. Kressel and D. J. Pruitt (eds), Mediation Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Notes 1 For an interesting example of this, see Lave and March (1979). 2 In 2000, the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution merged with two other prominent dispute resolution organizations and uses the transitional name Association for Conflict Resolution. 3 For a good discussion of this, see Lewicki (1985).

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10 Reflections on Reflective Practice Wallace Warfield and Sandra I. Cheldelin, 20041

Introduction

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e need not make a case for the importance of practice when we talk about human conflict and its structures, processes, and resolution. We embrace its importance and the field is burgeoning with new practitioners. What we explore in this chapter is what it means to be a professional practitioner and, more specifically, how effective practitioners engage in reflective practice, and why understanding reflective practice is important for our work at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. We begin with a brief account of what we mean by practice including a discussion of its current scope. We then introduce a model of reflective practice for consideration. We identify current uses of the concept in the professions, and then move to a critique of reflective practice. We conclude by raising several ethical, philosophical, and researchable questions for discussion and recommendations for our work in the field.

What is Practice?2 Simply put, when we talk about practice we refer to the work that professionals do in the field that involves their clients, the range of cases they

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are called upon to help, and their performance in professional—and, usually conflictual—situations. These include but are not limited to negotiators, facilitators, mediators, consultants, peacebuilders and other conflict resolvers. Professional practice requires a specialist who encounters certain types of situations again and again, whereby their knowing-in-practice, as Schön (1983) describes it, becomes tacit, spontaneous, and nearly automatic. Over time, professional practitioners gain an extraordinary knowledge base that we like to believe has at its roots both in theories derived from scientific research and the wisdom of practical experience. What we know is that at the heart of what it means to be a professional practitioner is the service provided to clients. Historically, traditional professional–client relationships were linked to a practice that could be described in a contract. These have shared norms that influence the behavior of each party. Most of our well-established professions have some codification of standards of professional and ethical behavior (e.g., the American Psychological Association’s code for psychologist/patient relationships, the American Bar Association’s code for attorney/client relationships, the (former) Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution’s (SPIDR)3 code for mediator/disputant relationships, or the International Alert Code of Conduct for NGOs). The standards are one way professionals maintain quality and distinguish their work from one another. Defining the scope and limits of our practice as conflict resolvers is not easy. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is one contributing factor. Senior practitioners are likely to have been trained originally in another discipline— law, psychology, anthropology, etc.—resulting in blurring of the boundaries with practitioners in those fields. The most obvious and well-known practitioners in our field are “third-party interveners” who are not part of the dispute, and traditionally neutral as possible to the outcome. However, as the field shifts its focus—for example, third-party “neutrals” are challenging the viability and at times the ethics of neutrality and advocacy—social justice themes emerge in our work and deep-rooted values inform choices we make. The field is giving increasing attention to cultural differences and issues of contextualization and inclusivity. Appropriate models for the global impact of our work are emerging, perhaps not at the same pace as the need, however. One distinguishing categorization of practice deals with the amount of control parties have or use in intervention processes. Third-party roles—mediators, facilitators, consultants, arbitrators, attorneys, legislators— increasingly demand skill sets of reflection and action and therefore we believe a reflective practice model is useful to embrace when shaping the outcome of an intervention.

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Historical Context for Reflective Practice We know what we mean by practice and where practitioners do their work. But what is the relationship between theory, research, and practice—which is at the heart of reflective practice? How do theories and research findings inform the work of professionals in the field? A historical perspective is useful here. One of the earliest studies from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching resulted in the famous Flexner Report on medical education (1910). It profoundly influenced the education and training of all professional practitioners in North America. Flexner was responsible for moving medical education into research universities, greatly increasing its prestige, but even more importantly, providing a new science-based component to medical practice. In the decades that followed nearly all of the professions did the same. As a result, “professionalism” meant the replacement of the artistry of their work— informed by tutorial apprenticeships—by a highly valued technical, scientific, and systematic understanding of the field. This technical, research-based connection got a second boost around World War II when the United States government began an unparalleled rate of funding research institutions with the belief that promoting the generation of new knowledge would serve to better humankind. Governmental support continued through the Sputnik era (late 1950s) and the Cold War, and the education and training of professionals became solidly grounded in the universities. What emerged was a disturbing tendency for research and practice to follow divergent paths as professionals made commitments to specialize and thereby pursued different enterprises. In addition to the divergent paths, a hierarchy of prestige developed with theory “on the top” and practice “on the bottom.” (A classic disconnect today is what we know from research and theory in cognitive psychology about how people learn, and what actually happens in most classrooms with children and youth.) It is clear that a better balance is needed, as the separation of knowledge from practice becomes greater and the fields of specialization grow farther apart.

Can Reflective Practice (re)Connect Theory, Research, and Practice? For decades, social scientists have tried to articulate the particular processes involved as theory, research, and practice join together, but struggle to find

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a useful language. Originally published in 1938, Banard made an important distinction between thinking processes and non-logical processes, referring the latter to those processes we are not capable of expressing into words and which are only made known by some manifestation of our behavior. Polanyi (1967) invented the phrase tacit knowing to explain this phenomenon. (An example is our ability to recognize someone we know in a crowd, but not be able to describe how we do that.) Can the tacit knowledge that senior practitioners bring to their work be made more explicit if we fully explore the connections of theory, research, and practice? Most curricula of traditional professional programs begin with a solid grounding in the relevant basic and applied sciences, and then move to skill building and the application of this knowledge to simulated or real cases. Some attention is given to attitudes, values, and ethics in this application process. Interestingly, medical education again has taken the lead. Originally there was a clear distinction between the first two years—the basic sciences—from the next few years—clinical applications. Innovative medical schools have since adopted problem-oriented approaches that require new medical students, the first year, to analyze complex case-based problems that integrate the scientific, biological hard data, and the expressed symptoms and concerns of the real patient (often soft data). Yet most professional programs still begin with the basics as “foundations” for practice that follows. Schön (1983) spent much of his professional life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology trying to understand the components of theory, research, and practice, how they relate, and what impedes greater integration. Following his extensive research of practitioners in multiple fields—architecture, psychology, medicine, and engineering—he rejected outright the unnecessary and artificial separation of the three. In fact, he believed they are essential for one another. These insights emerged from his research: “Research is an activity of practitioners. It is triggered by features of the practice situation, undertaken on the spot, and immediately linked to action. There is no question of an ‘exchange’ between research and practice or of the implementation of research results, when the frame—or theory testing experiments—of the practitioner at the same time transforms the practice situation. Here the exchange between research, theory, and practice is immediate, and reflection-in-action is its own implementation” (Schön 1983: 308–9). Schön provides us with valuable insights into what it takes to be an effective practitioner, and a new language to describe the process. Good practitioners develop the ability to think about what they are doing while they are doing it: an on-their-feet reflection-in-action.

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Experiential Learning Theory Grounds Reflective Practice The roots of reflection as the source of knowledge can at least be traced back to Socrates but the modern founder of reflective theory is Dewey the philosopher and educator who realized that the primary way we learn is to first experience an event and then reflect on what happened (Dewey 1933). Kolb (1984) and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve expand on Dewey’s insights. Kolb presents an experiential learning theory based on decades of research. He focuses on the basic dimensions of learning, how knowledge is perceived, and how it is processed. Figure 10-1 highlights his learning cycle, demonstrating how experience is translated into concepts that, in turn, are used as guides in the choices of new experiences, and how this relates to practice. Learning is conceived of as a four-stage cycle. Immediate concrete experience (top of the circle) is the basis for observation and reflection (moving clockwise around the circle). These observations are assimilated into a “theory” (bottom of the circle) in which new implications for action can be deduced (the “active practice” component). These hypotheses then serve as guides in acting to create new experiences. Practitioners grapple with the basic tensions between different approaches to knowing and their own development in the process. The first tension (the vertical axis) deals with how knowledge is perceived. At the bottom pole of the tension is the abstract, analytical approach to the acquisition of Concrete Experience

Concrete, Connected Knowledge

Active Experimentation

Reflective

Observation

Active Practice

Abstract, Analytic Knowing Abstract Conceptualization

Figure 10-1: Experiential Learning Cycle

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knowledge usually associated with theory and research. What is valued here is objectivity, distance, hard, quantitative evidence, and experimental rigor. At the top end is an orientation that begins with concrete experience, what is learned from contexts, relationships, and communities. This is a very different approach to learning, building on connections and relationships, where values reveal rather than mask what is worth knowing. The practitioner attends to context and relationships to understand and make meaning of what is happening (in the conflict situation). The second basic dimension of learning (horizontal in the diagram) deals with how knowledge is processed with the tension between intellectual reflection (right side) and active practice (left side). This allows us to think of theory and practice not standing in a hierarchical relationship, but rather the two mutually reinforce and enrich each other. For the study of conflict resolution—solidly embedded in universities—this model offers a viable way of thinking about the practitioner-scholars’ connection of theory, research, and practice, or the reflective practitioner.

Current Uses and Concerns In discussing how reflective practice is put to use in a variety of professional domains, it is perhaps helpful to dislodge it from incantations that seem determined to give it mythical proportions. In an elemental sense, most of us perform some form of reflective practice virtually every day. Often an experience you are about to be involved in will trigger some element of reflective practice. Mounting a bicycle after a hiatus of many years, one begins the act of balancing misleading declarations of weight on impossibly narrow wheels, executing knowing-in-action in a myriad of corrective ways. Or in the everydayness of workplace interaction, we will reconcile an espoused theory with a theory-in-use (Argyris and Schön 1974) to bring a degree of harmony to a threatening dispute. In this way and in a number of other executions, reflective practice is a form of “meaning making”—attempting to make sense of phenomena occurring around you. Regardless of how tempting to dally in generalized excursions on reflective practice, we want to draw the reader’s attention to its more commonly associated usage in professional practice. From there, as noted above, we seek to explore its dimensions in the field of conflict analysis and resolution. The following is not an exhaustive survey, but rather a sampling of where and how reflective practice is being used in professional fields.

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Perhaps not surprisingly—because medicine has historically taken the lead—the field of nursing has attempted to integrate reflective practice into aspects of work performed by these professionals. In one study that looked at how nurse teachers have used reflective practice in Ireland (O’Conner, Hyde, and Tracey 2003), the findings presented a mixed bag. While some participants found reflective practice useful as a problem-solving tool to create change, they also found there was a tendency to compartmentalize reflective practice around training events that occurred two to three times a year. Thus the experience of reflective practice was sequestered away from the main body of learning, missing the opportunity to inform the dominant orthodoxy. Another finding was that nursing teachers tended to place a greater emphasis on outcome, raising the concern that reflective practice would be driven by summative goals, overlooking the exploratory richness embedded in the understanding of process. This may well be associated with another finding that instructors tended to provide answers during the bi/triannual reviews, rather than utilizing the time as an opportunity for the nurses to engage in self-revelation. Perhaps most troubling was the suggestion that the aforementioned shortcoming on the use of reflective practice was connected to an overriding issue of trust. This would seem to be a problem where reflective practice is undertaken in hierarchical environments and would be generalizable across many professional domains. The field of nursing has also revealed that reflective practice is not immune from the dispensations of culture. In a Japanese cultural setting, Stockhausen and Kawashima (2002) found that trainers and nurses had difficulty finding the right linguistic fit for the term reflective practice. Early attempts resulted in a translation that turned reflective practice into a form of criticism rather than critique, which was alienating for the nurses. Reflective practice encourages cognition and engagement of issues that are problematic at their core. In looking at how reflective practice was used in the training and work of Japanese nurses, the researchers discovered that the concept clashed with the prevailing cultural paradigm of interconnectedness. The cultural norm encourages behavior guided by social sensitivity and avoidance of conflict. Yet another revelation that in hindsight should not be surprising is that gender proved to be a demonstrable variable. Japanese culture is male dominated, and nurses, who are largely female, are cast into culture roles as being dedicated to patient care and subservient to male doctors. (Only a difference in degree from the US medical environment!) As a result, nurses in the study experienced frustration and tension in being locked out of patient care, problem solving, and decision making. Reflective practice identified

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inconsistencies with prevailing social norms, but offered no prescriptive aid for how to deal with them. Clegg (1999), surveying the realm of professional education, raises a similar argument, noting that reflection-in-action, while recognizing there are external forces behind an event, ignores the reality that these forces lie outside the control of professionals. The tendency, then, is for reflective practice to focus on expertise and to ignore implications for power and difference. Having little agency to affect change, Clegg fears that reflective practice, rather than being an agent for social change, will become a tool for self-surveillance and managerial orthodoxy. Again on the gender front, in her article, “Professional Education, Reflective Practice and Feminism,” Clegg (1999) takes Schön to task for ignoring the gender implications of reflective practice. In this regard, Clegg charges Schön with gender blindness in his ignoring the inherent reflexivity in the gender literature of the 1980s. This is much in line with what Clegg, Tan, and Saeidi (2002) found in their study of how reflective practice was used in higher education in the UK. One female academic noted that reflexivity with its requirement for transparency is lodged deeply in the female ethos. Correspondingly, men may shy away from reflective practice because it is discursively identified with being female. Clegg, not satisfied with the acknowledgement that the relationship of gender to reflective practice is problematic, observes that, “If reflection is considered as a single, epistemological loop, reflexivity might be considered as a double, ontological loop whereby the knower’s social being in terms of gender, race, sexuality, and class form part of the knowing” (1999:175). Thus, she makes an argument for bringing a multidimensional intrapersonal perspective to reflective practice. We have evidence that reflective practice has begun to make inroads in the field of conflict analysis and resolution. Wallace (1994) offers an analytical model that he finds helpful as an ombudsman to deal with disputes that come to his attention. He divides the analysis into two parts: DeductiveTheory to Practice, which he envisions as a downward probing that begins with: MM

Philosophy (values, religion, ways of knowing, life meaning, professional ethics)

MM

Basic theory (disputants’ ontology of knowing and how they interact)

MM

Theory of practice (professional epistemology)

MM

Techniques (strategies)

MM

Moves (tactics)

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This component of the analysis presumably is used in the form of pre-entry assessment and is designed to be (perhaps unreasonably) predictive of the intervener’s decisions down to the micro level. Inductive-Practice to Theory becomes an upward exploration where the practitioner finds her/himself in a situational dilemma in the moment. The professional then attempts to move systematically upward as a form of meaning making. As such, Wallace’s model is not unlike Vayda and Bogo’s (1991) ITP Loop Model, Kolb’s (1989) Experiential Learning Model, and Warfield’s (Cheldelin and Warfield 2003) Reflective Practice Circle Model.

Challenges to Reflective Practice Reflective practice achieved its popularity as an alternative to technical rationality which confers greater value and, according to Schön (1987), higher academic status to knowledge based on how proximate its mode of generation is to basic science. The core premise of reflective practice is that knowledge generated by practitioners reflecting on their own experiences is of at least equal value to knowledge derived by academics from empirical research. On the question of which—or what type of—“evidence” one needs to base practice on, experiential data from reflection has not been popular despite increasing enthusiasm. Rolfe (2002) suggests that as conflict resolution practitioners, if we are to assert the importance of reflection on practice we must step outside the dominant paradigm of evidence-based practice. However, the very writing and design of this chapter highlight the difficulty of that endeavor. As you may have noticed, this paper is written in a quintessential “publishable” academic form. It begins with the context of the topic. A survey of literature on reflection—even by practitioners arguing that reflective practice should be (is) based on experiential knowledge of the practitioners themselves rather than on evidence of other researchers and writers—will encounter an abundance of “empirical evidence” by other writers and researchers. Our present work, billed as a reflection, neatly begins with an introduction, goes into definitions and a survey of literature, and concludes with a call for the need for further research. Consciously or subconsciously, we must have considered that a paper purely based on our own (practitioners’) subjective narration—central to reflective practice—without objective research-based “evidence” from others, would evoke questions about its scholarly suitability and white paper-worthiness, hence its credibility. Bleakley (1999) accuses Schön of the same: “Yet Schön’s model [of reflexivity], as previously noted, is still firmly rooted in personalistic humanism and

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its project of self-development, and, paradoxically, also invokes the technical in the midst of decrying its value. This ambiguity is embodied in Schön’s reading of ‘artistry’ which is equated to ‘good coaching’ (Schön 1991: 17) and tends more towards craft and design than fine art. Artistry is known by ‘studying the performance of unusually competent performers’ (Schön 1991: 13), which paradoxically smacks of the kind of technical mapping that Schön opposes in principle” (p. 4). At a point where we feel that we do not have to provide evidence for our reflections and where we stop feeling that the use—and the efficacy—of reflective practice have to be validated by evidence from technical rationalitybased research; basically when we stop justifying reflection to the criteria that it rejects, we would have succeeded in toppling a paradigm that refuses to accept reflection and reflective practice as valid ways of generating, defining, and maintaining knowledge. Before then, reflective practice will be seen as part of a dominant paradigm and, according to Rolfe (2002), “just another technical tool.” With this fate, its emancipatory and empowerment value—the reason for its popularity—will be gone. The ambiguity of the term reflective practice continues with its lack of standard definition. Other popular terms such as critical thinking, critical reflection, and reflection per se are overlappingly and interchangeably used with reflective practice. The resolution of its operational definition is key if we are to find its utility as conflict resolution researchers and practitioners. The lack of clear or universal definitions of reflection is at the heart of Mackintosh’s (1998) conclusion that reflection is a fundamentally flawed strategy that must be of limited benefit. He notes that definitions that reveal differing theoretical orientations about reflection have resulted in confusion about its meaning and its uses. As conflict resolution researchers and practitioners, should we not be concerned that the lack of conceptual clarity leading to its interchangeable use with other terms such as critical thinking may belie the different ideologies which can underpin reflective practice? In critiquing reflective practice we can go further to question the validity of introspective analysis. Verbal and self reports are an integral part of reflective practice. But can verbal reports of thought sequences be valid sources of data on thinking? How does one extract data on reflection? Are there some methodological and theoretical problems about verbal reports that cast doubt about our—as practitioners’—ability to recall our thought sequences? Indeed, these questions may plunge us into the realms of psychology and neurology, but before we embrace the exuberance over the concept of reflective practice do we need to seriously consider the implications of the answers? In an influential article titled “Telling More Than We Can Know,” social psychologists Nisbett and Wilson (1977) reported on many experimental

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demonstrations of the fact that accounts of our own behavior frequently reflect reconstructive and interpretative processes rather than genuine introspection. They argued that higher-order mental processes—those involved in judgments and decisions leading to voluntary actions—are nonconscious. In their study, subjects were tested under two or more stimulus conditions that were known to produce measurable differences in behavior, where they had to make inference-based responses. Afterward, they were asked to report why they responded the way they did. These reports were analyzed to determine whether the subjects reported the stimuli that the experimenters manipulated and knew to have causal influence on the subjects’ responses. Nisbett and Wilson noted that when people give introspective reports on what caused their behavior and action, what they are really doing is making reasonable inferences about what the causes must have been. Verbalization, crucial in publicizing reflection, is therefore an interpretive process that involves inference, transformation, and intrusion of implicit knowledge. From their study they derived several conclusions: (1) people do not have introspective access to the causal relationship between stimuli and their responses. They cannot accurately report from introspection which stimuli affected their responses, and/or they cannot report how the stimuli affected their responses; (2) rather, reports of effects of stimuli on responses are based on a priori theories (prior beliefs) about the causal connections between the stimuli and responses; and (3) when subjects’ reports on stimulus–response relationships are correct, it is because their a priori theories happen to be correct, not because of correct introspection. Nisbett and Wilson also suggested that people have an illusion of introspective access because they confuse awareness of mental contents with awareness of mental processes. Mental processes make various computations and judgments on pertinent information to produce particular decisions, which in turn guide behavior. They argued that we do not have introspective access to these mental processes. Rather, we have introspective access to the results (or products) of those processes, which are mental contents (e.g., decision outcomes). The implication of these findings for reflective practice, particularly in our field of conflict resolution, is to challenge whether or not we can learn very much from practitioners when they report to us on what went on during and after interventions. Indeed, if practitioners do not have access to the reasons why they make the decisions or judgments that they do, how can they learn from their reflection and, most importantly, how can we learn from their reflection? This raises other significant questions. Can knowledge be generated through reflection? How can reflective practice be possible?

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Clearly, several of us in our field are engaged in reflective practice. If we are to find no fault in Nisbett and Wilson’s study, with its conclusion that people cannot report their real reasons for making decisions and judgments— and if they have to they will make up reasons that seem plausible but may be wrong—then we not only have to worry about these practitioners but we also have to worry about the ethical implications of their work. As well, we have to re-evaluate our enthusiasm over the concept of reflective practice. Some critiques of the reflective practice are conjectural. Kinsella (2003) neatly classifies the critique of reflective practice into four simple categories: 1. The lack of conceptual clarity As we noted earlier, the concept of reflective practice “remains elusive, is open to multiple interpretations, and is applied in myriad of ways in educational and practice environments” (Kinsella 2003: 1). Earlier in this essay, we addressed the resultant effects of this problem. 2. The focus on the individual The question here is the exclusion of the “other” when we talk about reflection processes. Reflection seems to be conceived by many as the occupation of a solitary “meditator.” When we put an emphasis on individual reflection, we fail to consider the accounts of “others” within the community within which reflection occurs. This failure, it is noted, obscures “the client’s perspectives and freezes practitioners’ accounts as true representations of what happened” (Kinsella 2003: 1). When this happens, we find ourselves privileging the practitioner’s perspective, something that our field is extremely sensitive about. Indeed, even in the name reflective practice we talk about the practitioner. Implicitly, what we are saying here is that we are interested in the reflection of the practitioner. To be fair, some in the field do indeed conceive reflection as a global process and that it is only meaningful when it is democratic. Does this view need to be theoretically concretized in our field? 3. The use of language There are complaints that Schön “fails to acknowledge the problematic nature of language and discourse within practice environments” (Kinsella 2003: 2). In line with the above complaint on privileging the practitioner—by holding her or his accounts as “true” representations of what happened—in this case, the concern is the disregard of the power of the practitioner’s use of language, ignoring the fact that language is the means through which objects and experiences are named, described, and depicted, and that through its corruption, language can be used to manage our perceptions. In reflective

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practice, practitioner accounts are seldom problematized for their veracity and the practitioner reflection on the use of language is rarely talked about. Few conflict resolution practitioners are unaware of the power and influence of language in framing issues. Clearly, the “who” and the “how” in the framing of issues should be of our concern. Kinsella (2003) notes that “the potentiality of discursive systems to suppress certain accounts and to infuse others with power reveals an important dimension of practice that is not considered with Schön’s reflective practice” (p. 2). 4. The objectification of subjects. When we are engaged in reflective practice, are we not inherently treating clients, students, and co-workers-disputants as “objects” or “things” of practitioner reflection? Ours is a field dealing with real people with real problems affecting their lives one way or another and this notion presents ethical concerns. Reflective practice must promote ethical relationships between human beings and subordinate our epistemological needs.

What Have We Learned? We believe that conflict resolution practitioners who engage in reflective practice are courageous, for reflective practice involves some sort of risk taking. In some instances, with the assumption that there is complete honesty on the part of practitioners, reflection may involve admission of failure and incompetence. Consider this: What if the practitioner’s supervisor or the persons/clients who expected and were guaranteed competence—to whom the admission of failure on the part of a practitioner would imply betrayal and the feeling of being cheated—are present during this admission resulting from reflection? Who protects the practitioner in this instance? These questions require further study. (Or reflection?) It seems that tremendous effort by the proponents of reflective practice is directed toward making reflective practice a mainstream concept in different professions. That is easy to achieve but is it a misguided effort? Reflective practice was conceived as a radical alternative to technical rationality. It was supposed to revolutionalize the way in which knowledge was conceptualized, generated, taught, and applied in practice. It was supposed to challenge the existing dominant paradigm in knowledge and learning. However, in many professions, reflective practice has become immersed into mainstream practice. Has it ceased to offer an alternative to technical rationality? As we consider the increasing use of reflective practice in our field, should we

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reflect on where the status quo in our field stands and whether we should view reflective practice as dichotomous to the current dominant paradigm in our field? Although to a lesser degree than in other professions, our field has its fair share of supporters of technical rationality. The question remains whether we need to radicalize reflective practice and reinstate it as an alternative to technical rationality. If reflective practice is to be of any value should we not be timid and settle with making it an adjunct to the current status quo? Reflection, according to Rolfe (2002), must reclaim its paradigmatic status! The jury is out as to whether or not we can adequately explain how reflective practitioners really do their work—integrating theory and research in their practice—though we believe it happens. We clearly need greater insights about practice, including an understanding of the sustainability of our myths about practice, in spite of research that may demonstrate the contrary. Perhaps Milne (1928) frames it for us: “One day when Pooh Bear had nothing else to do, he thought he would do something, so he went round to Piglet’s house to see what Piglet was doing. It was still snowing as he stumped over the white forest track, and he expected to find Piglet warming his toes in front of the fire, but to his surprise he found that the door was open, and the more he looked inside the more Piglet wasn’t there” (p. 163). Effective reflective practice can seem like looking for Piglet. The more you look for it the more it seems not to be there; and afterwards it is hard to describe why it was so absorbing and life-changing—because the insights and inevitable changes they necessitate seem so obvious (Bolton 2001: 1). Kolb and Schön provide paradigms that do inform our thinking about reflective practice. We know there is a critical interdependence of theory and research with practice. We endorse the importance of making explicit our ethical frames within which these processes are being articulated. How should we proceed?

Recommendations It was that question and others that launched a two-day conference dialogue with a group of invited practitioners4 in the field in February 2004. The conversation about challenges of practice reflected shifts in our work and frameworks for considering these shifts. We need to examine “best practices” in terms of culture, context, community, inclusivity, power, and issues of social justice, to name a few. We thought new language that could

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be more affirmative, generative, expansive, and collaborative might help alleviate “baggage” that comes with reflective practice. However, we were unsuccessful and retreated back to reflective practice as it seemed to still capture what we believe to be important. In the end we identified two broad categories where we can initiate or continue the conversation: the academy and the profession/field. In the academy, we could address reflective practice in multiple ways. One common strategy is to offer a course on reflective practice. This would give focused attention to the topic and force us to consider the best pedagogical methods for such a course. Another is to pair traditional theoreticians or researchers with practitioners, asking them to develop ways to measure successes and failures in practice—broadening the definitions of each. In the field (the profession) we recommend considering parameters for universal and localized practice, broadening the definition of reflective practice to include research and change models. We also encourage appropriate ways to disseminate these reflections to a broad audience, considering ways to benchmark success and levels of risk, domain specificity, and stage of conflicts. Finally, we suggested pursuing partnerships and research opportunities with foundations, other academic programs, working groups at the Institute [George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR)], and seminars. In this way and in other approaches yet to be discovered, the opportunities for understanding how effective practice happens remain available.

References Argyris, C., and Schön, D. (1974). Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Banard, C. (1968). “Mind in Everyday Affairs.” In The Function of the Executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (First published in 1938.) Birkhoff, J., and Warfield, W. (1996). “The Development of Pedagogy and Practicum.” Mediation Quarterly 14 (2):93–110. Bleakley, A. (1999). “From Reflective Practice to Holistic Reflexivity.” Studies in Higher Education 24 (3):315–30. Bolton, G. (2001). Reflective Practice: Writing and Professional Development. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Paul Chapman Publishing and Sage Publications. Cheldelin, S., Druckman, D., and Fast, L. (eds) (2003). Conflict. New York: Continuum Press. Cheldelin, S., and Warfield, W. (2003). “Reflective Practice in Conflict Analysis and Resolution.” An Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) Faculty Brown Bag Presentation, May 8.

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Clegg, S. (1999). “Professional Education, Reflective Practice and Feminism.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 3 (2):167–79. Clegg, S., Tan, J., and Saeidi, S. (2002). “Reflecting or Acting? Reflective Practice and Continuing Professional Development in Higher Education.” Reflective Practice 3 (1):131–46. Dewey, J. (1933). How We Think. New York: Heath and Company. Kinsella, E. A. (2003). “Toward Understanding: Critiques of Reflective Practice and Possibilities for Dialogue.” A paper presented at the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education, 2003 Roundtable, Ontario, Canada. Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kolb, D. and Associates (1994). When Talk Works: Profiles of Mediators. New York: Jossey-Bass. Macintosh, C. (1998). “Reflection: A Flawed Strategy for the Nursing Profession.” Nurse Education Today 18:553–7. Milne, A. A. (1928/1958). The World of Pooh: The House at Pooh Corner. London: Methuen. Nisbett, R. E., and Wilson, T. D. (1977). “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” Psychological Review 84 (3):231–59. O’Connor, A., Hyde, A., and Treacy, M. (2003). “Nurse Teachers’ Constructions of Reflection and Reflective Practice.” Reflective Practice 4 (2):107–19. Polyani, K. (1980). The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Books. Rolfe, G. (2002). “Reflective Practice: Where Now?” Nurse Education in Practice 2 (1):21–9. Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. Stockhausen, L., and Kawashima, A. (2002). “The Introduction of Reflective Practice to Japanese Nurses.” Reflective Practice 3 (1):117–29. Vayda, E., and Bogo, M. (1991). “A Teaching Model to Unite Classroom and Field.” Journal of Social Work Education 27 (3):271–8. Wallace, G. (1994). “Reflective Inquiry on Ombuds Practice.” UCI Ombudsman: The Journal.

Notes 1 Dr. Sandra Cheldelin is Vernon M. and Minnie I. Lynch Professor, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University. 2 This section is adapted from the practice section of chapter 2, “Theory, Research, and Practice,” in Conflict (2003), Cheldelin, Druckman, and Fast (eds). 3 SPIDR is now one of the consortia associations that formed the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR). 4 Special appreciation is given to Ron Fisher, Chris Honeyman, Linda Johnston, Connie Ozawa, Dan Rothbart, Cynthia Sampson, and Zhang Wang for their expertise and time engaged in thoughtful reflection on this important topic.

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11 Community Leadership: What Can Be Taught? Enhancing Community Leadership Negotiation Skills to Build Civic Capacity Wallace Warfield, Deborah Shmueli, and Sanda Kaufman, 20091

M

ost intra- and inter-organizational decision making entails negotiations, and even naturally talented negotiators can improve with training. Executive trainings for managers and leadership programs for publicly elected officials, public managers, and non-governmental organizations frequently include negotiation modules. These efforts, however, have yet to reach community leaders who also need to develop their negotiation skills. We propose that members of disadvantaged low-income communities who lack educational and economic opportunities, and are less able to advocate for their own interest, need to build and strengthen their civic capacity, including their negotiation skills, to become more effective parties to decisions affecting them. While many professionals and executives have access to training, such opportunities are less accessible to the leaders of these disadvantaged communities. Although such leaders draw from their own heuristic knowledge, skills, and abilities, they could also benefit from sharpening their negotiation skills.

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We propose that the multidimensional understanding of their community that members accumulate through direct experience is indispensable, nontransferable to outsiders, and not teachable through in-class activities. Leaders with the ability to leverage knowledge and assets to connect effectively to community insiders as well as to outside people, institutions, and resources, however, possess some specific inherent personality traits as well an understanding of social structures, strategies, and agency, which can be taught and learned. Such skills as how to conduct negotiations around the table and away from it and how to identify community members who can help and how to rally them are also teachable. The cases were chosen to illustrate the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that make these leaders effective in and beyond their communities. We highlight those KSAs that we think are teachable in the framework of a negotiation module in community leadership training to enhance civic capacity for community betterment.

Introduction Negotiation pedagogy has evolved rapidly in recent years. Organizational scholars now recognize that most intra- and inter-organizational decision making entails negotiations and that even naturally talented negotiators can improve their performance with training. Students in business, planning, and law schools can expect to be exposed to a variety of negotiation materials including theoretical literature, case studies, and role plays. Executive trainings for managers that seek to help practicing professionals develop specific skills frequently include negotiation modules, as do leadership programs. Universities, organizations, and such public agencies as the Ohio Commission on Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management offer training for publicly elected officials, public managers, and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). A growing wealth of materials helps tailor the training to specific contexts. These efforts, however, have not reached many of those in community leadership capacities who also need to develop their negotiation skills. We argue in this article that disadvantaged communities whose members face poverty and lack educational, economic, and political opportunities need to build and strengthen their civic capacity to become more effective parties to decisions affecting them. The acquisition of negotiation skills can be a critical contributor to this goal.2 But while many professionals and executives have easy access to negotiation training, the leaders of disadvantaged communities typically do not.

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The men and women who function in community leadership roles draw from their own heuristic knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), but could benefit greatly from sharpening their skills.3 We propose that the knowledge component, a multidimensional understanding of their community that members accumulate through direct experience, is indispensable, nontransferable to outsiders, and not teachable through in-class activities. But to successfully develop the ability to leverage this kind of knowledge and the community’s assets to connect effectively to others in the community as well as to outside people, institutions, and resources in order to devise and implement needed change requires, beyond some specific personality traits, a (teachable) understanding of social structures, strategies, and agency. Such skills as how to conduct negotiations around the table and away from it, how to identify community members who can help, and how to rally them, are also teachable to some extent. Professionals participate in executive training to improve skills necessary to perform their work tasks; they benefit both personally and in their current organizational roles from knowledge and perspectives that are transferable to other situations and workplaces and from becoming reflective practitioners who can accumulate experience and apply it in novel ways to new work situations. Unlike such professionals, community members often become leaders in an ad hoc fashion in response to specific, sometimes unique, situations. Rather than a professional expectation, training of the kind we propose would be rather unusual for them. It would require participants to be willing to put themselves in the potentially uncomfortable situation of a student, to devote their scarce time to an activity mostly outside their experience, and to trust that the return on such an investment on their part is worth the time, effort, and inconvenience of going through it. Community leaders do not aim to become reflective practitioners and the skills they need seldom have to be transferable to other contexts. In fact, they mostly need tools tailored to their specific circumstances to enable them to make a difference quickly and respond to their communities’ crises, as well as to their longer-term needs. The difference in the needs of the typical executive enrolled in a training seminar and a community leader suggests that the many tools developed for the former will prove ineffective for the latter. Worse yet, training perceived as irrelevant may discredit any future attempts to assist community leaders in enhancing their effectiveness and their community’s civic capacity. Tailoring to specific needs is already a feature of executive training program design because even professionals relate more readily to role play situations that are similar to their own experiences. Those who teach negotiations as part of undergraduate curricula may also have noticed that students with no work experience find it more difficult to participate in role plays simulating

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work situations than in games depicting situations they may have already encountered in their young lives (such as buying a used car).4 More generally, training materials used in contexts that are culturally different—whether national or professional—may need to be adapted to the specific cultures. For example, some American-designed role plays may seem less relevant to European students, and lawyers may need different materials than managers. To design an executive-type training program for community leaders, as we propose, it may help to recognize that marginalized communities such as the ones featured in our following two cases can be culturally very different from the ones within which we typically conduct executive training. These cases were chosen to identify effective KSAs and then identify those that can be bolstered through training. They can also help us to develop our thinking in terms of the pedagogical approach, content design, and kinds of materials needed to deliver this kind of training. A set of questions guides this chapter: MM

What characteristics/traits are associated with community leadership?

MM

How do these characteristics relate to the leaders’ KSAs to negotiate community-based conflict?

MM

What KSAs do leaders bring to conflict situations, and what KSAs do they develop as a result of engagement in the conflicts?

MM

Which KSA components can be taught and how?

We begin by exploring through examples the KSAs of “natural” leaders, who have shown themselves able to rally their communities and act to benefit them in decisions involving public and private entities. We discuss which of these qualities might be related to negotiation effectiveness and might be enhanced through training. We conclude with some recommendations for curriculum components for the teachable negotiation skills that we think are instrumental for community leadership development. The cases from which we derive the KSAs of effective community leaders—a poverty-ridden neighborhood in Washington, DC, and Bedouin villages in Israel—are worlds apart, but their residents’ problems are similar: inadequate security, limited social acceptance by the outside world, narrow economic opportunities, loss of self-esteem, and barriers to change. They lack access to resources and are often excluded from decision making in the larger systems to which they belong. Any reduction in their marginalization stems in large part from the quality of their leadership. Far from offering conclusive evidence, these examples are nevertheless useful starting points for probing whether enhancing community leaders’

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negotiation skills can benefit their communities and whether successful leadership traits hinge solely upon specific personalities or share some characteristics that could guide the design of training programs for capacity building in marginalized communities. The stark cultural differences between the two communities may also constitute a starting point for addressing one of the more enduring training quandaries: whether and how models developed in one culture can be helpful to trainees working in other contexts ranging from mildly to drastically different.

Case One: Benning Terrace, Washington, DC Mediator-assisted negotiations that occur in communities affected by physical and psychological violence have not received the scholarly and policy attention paid to intervention in such other arenas as international or environmental conflicts for at least two reasons. The most obvious is that the immediate consequences of such conflicts mainly affect the community members on a local scale rather than the society at large, although long-term effects may be more broadly societal in scope. Second, in community-based conflict, intervention is shaped mainly by the objective of ending violence leading to the eventual reconciliation and transformation of the community (Bush and Folger 1994), rather than by the legal or precedent-setting procedural concerns typically present in other settings. The effects of violent community conflict can be devastating. Entire neighborhoods can be under practical “house arrest” as residents are unable to move about freely to attend to their basic human needs.5 Such sustained violence, much of which stems from other criminal activity, such as drug dealing, shrinks real estate values, weakens local businesses, and puts pressure on already overburdened public services. More broadly, violence disrupts the development of social capital, diverts public policy energies away from productive use, and deteriorates the quality of residents’ lives. In economically devastated minority communities with low social capital, efforts to secure and sustain the peace needed to foster development have often emerged from attempts to deal with violent conflict. For example, in some cases in which violence escalated to critical levels, local leadership has sought to turn the community into a “violence-free zone,” mobilizing the residents to cooperate with local authorities to turn the situation around. The leaders’ goal has been (at best) to transform or (at minimum) to contain violent individuals and groups by surrounding them with a framework of norms that seeks to corral the behavior of combatants and minimize their impact on the rest of the community. In the process, other projects have also

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emerged that benefit the community, and local businesses have begun to feel more secure making investments there. Building a community’s capacity for sustainable peace and development requires that leaders be skilled in negotiation and able to transfer these skills to groups engaged in conflict. In what follows, we describe the roles that current leaders play in the poor, mostly African American, Benning Terrace neighborhood in Washington, DC. We identify the KSAs that contributed to their success in negotiations to achieve community peace. In the mid-1990s, Benning Terrace was one of the most violent neighborhoods in the nation’s capital, plagued by anarchy and lawlessness (Smith and Ariadne 1999). Between 1987 and 1997, sixty-five people in the community were murdered, including seven people who were killed between 1995 and 1997 as a result of ongoing turf wars between two rival gangs. District of Columbia policing proved ineffective. Residents feared venturing out even to the neighborhood store. The crisis peaked in 1997 when Daryl Hall, a twelveyear-old boy, became national news after being abducted and killed by gang members. The story of community capacity building in Benning Terrace involves a small group of African American men, former gang members themselves, who grew up in this neighborhood. Tyrone Parker, whose 19-year-old son was murdered in this neighborhood, took the leadership initiative (Parker 2001). Alarmed by the unchecked violence, he and his friends felt it imperative to intervene and in 1998 formed the Alliance of Concerned Men (ACM). According to conflict ripeness theory, parties may reach a point when they realize that they are unable to make any appreciable progress toward desired ends by continuing the conflict and that conflict costs and risks have reached an unacceptable level exceeding expected gains. (See Pruitt and Kim 2004 for a fuller discussion of ripeness theory.) In the conflict management literature as well as in specific situations, ripeness—the readiness to negotiate— means that all parties have reached this stage. The Benning Terrace gangs did get to this point, but as in other situations, more was needed to overcome barriers to negotiations. The two crews (gangs) waging war on each other and on the Benning Terrace community were tiring of the ongoing conflict. But gang members’ fears of being identified as traitors to their group and the “enemy other” image rooted in retaliatory shootings blocked their ability to act on their own to resolve the conflict. The vocal outrage of “the mothers, aunts, and loving grandmothers” of Benning Terrace (Woodson 2001) provided a needed impetus for the ACM platform, enabling the organization to play the role of brokers on behalf of the women. ACM began an assessment process by reaching out to this group of outspoken, active women to

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obtain the names of gang members who would be willing to participate in negotiations. As former gang members in Benning Terrace, ACM interveners had credibility with the warring crews. Nonetheless, the latter were suspicious of the alliance’s intent at the initial stage of persuading them to accept the idea of negotiations. The gang members believed that their best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) was to continue to fight. If not compelling, this alternative was at least familiar in terms of rules, roles, and responsibilities that govern the paradigm of gang culture. ACM’s persistence in stating its intent to assist the gangs in reaching a negotiated agreement to reduce the immediate violence was instrumental. The alliance nested this intention within a larger framework of transforming values and behavior, an approach reminiscent of Lederach’s (1997) notion of sustainable reconciliation wherein guiding principles become the vehicle for a long-term intervention. ACM based its intervention on a set of core ideas: beliefs, values, images, and fears. They used beliefs to refer to the socialization process that minority youth undergo in communities suffused with physical violence (Parker 2001), whereby violence becomes an acceptable group norm. Values related to the need to transform antisocial values and behavior into accepted social norms. Images referred to assisting gang members in developing positive perceptions of themselves, leading to the construction of new identities supported by reshaped beliefs and values. Combating gang members’ fear of change follows from the other core ideas. In the opening mediation session, ACM members acted as advocates for the values underlying these core ideas, as well as for the conflict management process itself.6 Opposing gang members agreed to meet at a neutral community location, but at the outset of the negotiations they confronted the ACM interveners with positional gang rhetoric. Frozen into rival identities, gang members had different perspectives on the origins of the conflict, each accusing the other of provocations. In the back-and-forth of negotiations, gang members’ separate and conflicting identities began to weaken when the death of Daryl Hall was raised as an issue. The ACM interveners used reflection to skillfully bring about this change, evoking the memory of Daryl Hall, and asking “What would he say if he were in this room?” “Put down your guns …” was a typical answer (Smith and Ariadne 1999). ACM might well have failed to create mutuality between gang members absent a tangible sign of change that supported their behavioral shift. Fortunately, having read about the work of ACM, the chairman of the DC Housing Authority attended subsequent meetings and offered gang members such short-term job assignments as removing graffiti (a graphic record of youths who had been killed) and other tasks that made Benning

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Terrace a more attractive and secure environment for residents. A few gang members eventually received full-time employment with the housing authority. Reflecting the idea that “the intervention process starts from where the parties are, not [from] where the intervener would like them to be” (Warfield 1993), intervention began using the gangs’ cultural frame and guided them toward broader community norms by encouraging gang members to reflect on the destructiveness of their behavior. ACM helped participants reconsider their BATNA and no longer see continued warfare as a viable alternative to a negotiated agreement. Although the outcomes of the negotiation have not been formally evaluated, a few anecdotal examples suggest that epistemic or conflictlearning awareness has contributed to change in gang members’ behavior and has perhaps extended to the broader community. Following the negotiations, there were no gang-related killings and the truce held even after a shooting incident.7 Residents began to move more freely around the community. As fighting decreased, so did the deterioration of the public housing stock. People stopped abandoning their residences and began taking care of their property. This saved the city considerable rehabilitation costs. The ACM team displayed several leadership characteristics that seem to have been key in their successful intervention: authenticity rooted in knowledge of the community, insight into specific situations based on knowledge and skills, and agency to be a broker between the community and structures external to it. Authenticity entailed conveying that the interveners had “stood in the shoes” of those whose behavior they seek to change. The alliance members’ instrumental skill was in telling stories about time spent in similar circumstances, while exemplifying that alternative roles are possible. They did that at the beginning stage of negotiations, building third-party credibility to encourage a willingness to negotiate specific issues. Insight refers to the ACM members’ understanding of the circumstances that contributed to the conflict. They combined this understanding with their reframing skills to alter the parties’ perspectives so that they could see a particular issue in a different light and broaden their BATNA calculus. Agency entailed linking the community to external resources that could sustain agreement (e.g. the DC Housing Authority). The ACM team members successfully articulated a sense of interdependence that enabled them to bring into play the external resources necessary for closure and sustainability. While authenticity is inherent in the leaders’ position in the community, insight and agency are likely to pertain to teachable skills.

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Case Two: Negev Bedouins Israel comprises a land area of 20,330 square kilometers (less than 8,000 square miles), with a population of approximately seven million that is 80% Jewish and 20% Arab. In general, land disputes there feature intense competition for the very limited amount of land and water, the diversity of uses to which various contenders wish to apply them, and severe imbalances in their respective power positions. Contests between Israeli Arabs and Jews add complexity to already protracted disputes. The current discourses over allocation and use of land and water are further complicated by the fact that the two groups frame equity issues differently with narratives rooted in their respective identity frames (Shmueli 2008). Israeli Jews view Arab communities’ petitions for land expansion mostly within the context of national and local security needs, fearing a demographic threat and the potential for a “fifth column”8 within Israel. The need of Israeli Arabs for additional land, driven by demographic and socioeconomic pressures, is made more acute by feelings of injustice owing to their belief in their historic claims to lands that they once owned or used. They feel under siege, lacking the land they need for the kind of development that they see taking place in neighboring Jewish communities. The Israeli Arab narrative calls for separate but equal status within Israeli society. Policy makers, government officials, and Jewish stakeholders alike are reluctant to address the widespread land disputes for fear of spurring more intractable societal conflicts. For all these reasons, the stakeholders need conflict management skills to tackle land disputes. The land issues faced by the two hundred thousand Negev Bedouins, for example, have become pressing and are now high on the national agenda. This population is, by all measures, on the lowest rung of Israel’s socioeconomic ladder: They have an unemployment rate of more than 50% (compared to 8% nationally), a per capita income that is 20% of the country’s average, and an infant mortality rate of fourteen per one thousand, which far exceeds the national level (four per one thousand). With an annual growth of 5.6%, their population doubles every 13 years and two-thirds are under the age of 18. In 1948, the state relocated Bedouin nomadic tribes into a zone (the “seig”), which was administered militarily until 1966. In the 1950s, many Bedouin territories were declared state land according to governmentadopted early versions of the Ottoman Land Law. The Bedouin had to abandon their traditional livestock and dry farming and settled in small ad hoc hamlets within the seig (Ben-David 1982; Meir 1999). In the early 1960s, the

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government attempted to relocate the Bedouin into seven semi-urban towns, but only about 60% moved there. The towns, planned with little attention to Bedouin needs, lack cultural relevance (Meir 1990) and receive few public resources. The remaining 40% of the Bedouin live in about forty-five townships of six hundred to six thousand inhabitants that are unrecognized by the government. Most townships consist of tents and cinder-block shacks accessible via dirt tracks, often with no municipal water, sewage, or electricity. The Bedouin are demanding recognition for their settlements. Since 2003, the government has recognized eleven of the forty-five townships housing about 15% of the population, leaving a quarter of the total population in unrecognized settlements. The recognized townships organized administratively into the new Abu Basma Regional Council (ABRC), whose first steps were to develop and facilitate implementation of plans for services and infrastructure. Since then, schools and health facilities have been built in some communities. Very little progress has been made, however, in terms of infrastructure, permanent residences, employment opportunities, and reduction in crime. One of the authors (Deborah Shmueli) is part of a team working with leaders and residents of the newly recognized Bedouin villages to develop consensus-based plans acceptable to the villages, the ABRC, the Israeli Land Authority, and the district planning commissions. Contentious issues include land claims, boundary lines, internal land rights and access to water, splintered leadership and public infrastructure, inclusion of recently recognized villages, and exclusion of still unrecognized villages. Progress has been uneven at best. An analysis of the factors that account for the variability of results revealed that the quality of leadership in each village has played a key role. The Bedouin villages have qualities of a natural experiment in that their leaders differed in their characteristics and so have the outcomes to date (with all else rather similar). It is thus possible to relate outcome to leadership characteristics and to argue that, at least in these cases, civic capacity did make a difference in the degree to which marginalized communities managed to engage with external structures to reach their goals. The cases also suggest that leadership qualities are not sufficient in themselves; rather, their effectiveness hinges on opportunities and external catalysts for change. It seems, however, that given similar opportunities and catalysts, the difference between success and failure in pursuit of community goals depends largely on the quality of leadership. We describe below the leaders of four communities: one of the seven townships and three (out of eleven) of the Abu Basma villages. Two of these villages have been successful in achieving gains; the third, a “static” (less

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successful) Bedouin village is included for comparison purposes. “Gains” or “success” is construed here as engaging with the external administrative structures to bring about desired changes that benefit village residents. For example, the leader of a cohesive village with a population of 3,000 was a 55-year-old son of a sheik who became the first head of the unrecognized Bedouin villages’ council. He displayed ability to organize and to be organized, to facilitate civil discourse that recognized differences, and to collaborate without losing uniqueness. He took advantage of opportunities to build coalitions with change agents, to network, and to cooperate with the new ABRC based on a good understanding of others and use of “shadow” leaders. In this case, the external catalysts for change included civil rights groups, the ABRC, and consultants in various professional areas. A second successful leader was similar to the first in age and position and led a cohesive village of 850 inhabitants. An educated school principal who had been exposed to innovation, he was open to changes including the use of new technologies such as solar power. His strength seems to have derived in part from his communication strategy. He engaged in nonthreatening civil discourse with the government and outside non-governmental groups concerned with civic capacity, presenting his strengths rather than projecting an underdog image. Before requesting government aid, he began by showing an ability to achieve goals independently. He skillfully recognized the power of the media, formed coalitions with civil NGOs, and used advisers. He took advantage of opportunities to gain entrance such as the inclusion of Marit, a conglomeration of originally three (now two) encampments in the same general geographic area that were recognized together as one administrative entity, in the new ABRC, then separated and obtained recognition for his settlement as an independent village. As in the previous case, the external catalysts for change included civil rights groups, the ABRC, and consultants in various professional areas in addition to politicians and government ministry representatives. The third success story is that of a fifty-year-old member of a large tribe, with a Ph.D. in chemistry, who was a former candidate of the Islamic Movement9 in local elections. His was a structurally diverse, recognized township of 11,000 residents. Using his understanding of local tribal leaders and an ability to prevent internal conflicts, he brought together the various sub-tribes and communicated their needs in the language of the ruling administration. Acting autonomously, he had legitimacy in the eyes of all. He was able to offer creative suggestions for conflict management between the local community, the government’s administrative offices, and the police. For example, the township built a beautiful new school facility that, because it was in public space (not associated with any particular tribe),

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was continuously vandalized by youth. The township leader called a number of meetings with the youths as well as with the police. He reached an agreement with police that they arrest any young people caught vandalizing but that they be punished with community service rather than with imprisonment and that their arrests be expunged from their records. Within a year, the school had become a “vandal-free” zone. His track record of meeting commitments made to the government enabled him in turn to make demands of the government. In his quest, he took advantage of the positive governmental attitude toward the township, of regional development plans, and of the willingness of the young leaders, representing the different sub-tribes, to cooperate. The catalysts here were the Islamic Movement, support, and intratribal steering committees. In the fourth case, the 50-year-old leader of a recognized but not very cohesive village of 3,500 residents, son of a “second-order” sheik, has been less successful in securing gains for his constituents. His failure is as instructive as the others’ successes. Although a council member, he did not actively participate in the ABRC. His communication skills are modest and, acting in part out of fear of collaboration, he behaved more as a bureaucrat than as a leader, remaining locked into positions he thought acceptable to the majority of his constituents. He did not take advantage of opportunities such as the ABRC, or the possibility of learning from other ABRC member villages, or of catalysts for change such as the Council of Unrecognized Villages and outside decision makers and administrators. As in the Benning Terrace case, the Bedouin leaders had the authenticity inherent in their tribal positions, insight into their communities’ circumstances, and—for the successful ones—agency, defined here as the ability to act as brokers working with entities external to their communities to secure resources and agreements. Taken together, the efforts of these four leaders suggest that leadership success depends on helpful personal and positional characteristics (such as tribal position), as well as civic capacity and negotiation-related skills, which can be developed. In the next section of the article, we focus on the latter and begin to link them to training elements.

Community Leadership: What Can Be Taught? Despite their very different contexts, the two venues, Benning Terrace and Negev Bedouin villages, have leaders who have played pivotal roles with more or less success in turning around or at the very least improving the dire situations of their marginalized communities. They illustrate the centrality of

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civic capacity and of negotiation skills in effecting positive change, as well as the consequences of not having them. Gardner (1990: 1) proposed that “leadership is the process of persuasion or example by which an individual (or leadership team) induces a group to pursue objectives held by the leader or shared by the leader and his or her followers.” In this sense, leadership is situational, in terms of specific dynamics from which leaders emerge and create an impetus for change. The definition also suggests, however, that leadership is transactional. From a negotiation perspective, community leaders and followers10 have similar needs for security, identity, recognition, development, and self-actualization that shape the contours of negotiation for change.11 In the community context, leadership is also arguably transformational. Burns (1978: 20) notes that transformational leadership occurs “when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and reality.” The Benning Terrace case offered us the opportunity to identify the ACM members’ skills in bringing the community together to curb the gang violence and create space for the community to function. In the Bedouin examples, the different township dynamics and leaders, some of whom have managed to reassure their constituents that they will succeed in pursuing development while preserving their land claims, afforded the opportunity to compare among them to tease out what has made their leaders more or less able to push these marginal communities forward. What attributes of transformational leaders enable them to engage their communities in productive negotiation? Our case analyses sought to identify community leadership qualities that enable community members to collaborate to influence decisions that affect them. We explore which of these qualities are related to negotiation skills and are transferable (rather than

LEADERSHIP

Intra-group capacity to rally community

Civic capacity

Inter-group ability to negotiate with external system

Figure 11-1: Relationship between Leadership and Civic Capacity

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situational or innate individual characteristics), and we suggest how they might be taught in training workshops accessible to communities in order to enhance leadership skills and build community capacity. Elliott and Kaufman (2003) have argued that civic capacity, which can be enhanced, arises from a community’s individuals, organizations, and institutions; the knowledge and skills they can contribute; and their ability to collectively resolve problems affecting shared space or resources. To act effectively on their own behalf in transactions with the systems in which they are embedded and on which they often depend for resources, communities need both the ability to coalesce around issues of shared interest and the knowledge necessary to negotiate even with systems from which they may be excluded (see Figure 11-1). Both intra-community cohesion and interaction with external organizations are difficult for the members of marginalized communities such as those described in our examples. Internally, members often lack the skills, time, and attention to devote to issues not immediately related to day-to-day survival. With respect to external structures, such communities often lack the understanding of how the system works and where there might be openings for them to claim their due share of resources or get redress for grievances. From this perspective, those who become community leaders are in effect builders and enablers of their community’s civic capacity. While they have knowledge of their communities and often some ability to rally their peers around shared causes, they also need the skills necessary to put their constituents’ claims before outsiders who should or would help. For example, in both the Benning Terrace and the Bedouin cases, the leaders had a deep understanding of the history, norms, aspirations, interests, and relational needs of their communities. They were insiders who could get their peers to trust them, but they also understood what it takes to engage with the appropriate private organizations or public agencies outside the community and were able to play agent roles between their communities and the outside. In turn, agencies and organizations can become comfortable in dealing with these leaders in order to address community-related problems and they value the leaders’ role. We believe this agent-like duality, when translated into specific skills, is amenable to training. Consistent with the model proposed in Figure 11-1, on the intra-community side, personal strength, charisma, and capacity to become an agent for change translated into the leaders’ ability to lead, gain or retain legitimacy, and to form and support coalitions that promote change and the attainment of mutual gains in specific projects. The leaders’ skills in articulating goals, defining operational steps (often incremental) for achieving those goals, and negotiating with their own constituencies were pivotal in their ability to move

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their communities forward in the directions they set. On the extra-community side, the skills to negotiate with external stakeholders and decision-making bodies and to express their vision were key to the leaders’ ability to network with the world outside their communities to facilitate planning and implementation of projects and identification of resources. Table 11-1 summarizes desirable leadership qualities that we identified based on these cases and some of the corresponding teachable negotiation skills. It helps to illustrate the notion that while some community members are intuitive leaders, in many cases such personalities are absent. The remedy might then include identifying emerging or potential leaders whose community position can get them attention and whose experience commands peers’ trust. Such individuals positioned to influence their communities will, we believe, benefit from negotiation training to increase their effectiveness as catalysts for internal change and agents to the external structures. Table 11-1 differentiates the elements of the required leadership skills, matching them with tools that can contribute to their development for those who already have some of the KSAs that have enabled them to move into leadership positions in their communities. There are many executive-style training modules that address these skills in the context of the major professions, but none are tailored for the specific needs and circumstances of community leaders. To design and implement a training program of the kind proposed here, diagnostic tools would first have to be developed to identify specific needs in specific cases. Instead of the traditional role-playing games, for instance, training sessions for these groups may require different delivery approaches that are directly relevant to the interests and needs of community leaders. For example, once leader-participants are identified, they and other community members could be interviewed to elicit from them stories of the situations in their communities they would like or need to remedy. Materials could then be developed that incorporate these participants’ narratives. These context-sensitive training sessions would likely be resource-intensive at least at the development stage. They may require a concurrent formative evaluation process to closely track their effectiveness from the participants’ viewpoint, as well as summative evaluations after some period of time has elapsed. At the outset we envision constructing a template for developing a short one- to three-day community leadership enhancement training session. The template process would begin by identifying participants who are most likely to benefit from the training and who recognize the need for such assistance and are therefore interested in taking part in the program. Their “stories,” as well as the stories of community members willing to contribute, would be elicited in advance. These stories would then be used as narratives

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Table 11-1: Leadership Qualities and Related Teachable Skills Leadership Qualities

Negotiation-Related Teachable Skills

Understanding of issue and stakeholder diversity

Framing, interest and issue identification. Elicitation/identification of interests, goals of involved stakeholders. Recognizing interests behind positions.

Intervention initiation Identify reframing

Identifying/coalescing with champions of community wellbeing. Convening. Moving from conflicting identities/values to interdependent/mutual interests.

Organization Communication

Agenda setting: coalition building; relationship building; meeting and time management; reaching outside for resources and assistance.

Collaboration Vision/goal setting

Mutual commitments, mutual compromises. Understanding needs, processes, local abilities and barriers, external opportunities and threats.

Defining operative actions/processes design Incremental/ multidimensional

Learning by example (a). Teaching, drilling, and expanding the tool box. More in-depth understanding of the why. General versus specific, system-wide balancing. Learning to outline priorities and update them with new information. An active search for counter-arguments to a chosen strategy (rather than the supporting arguments that come naturally). Information validation: devising ways to test assumptions about others’ interests and moves. Knowledge, risk-taking, dealing with diversity.

Innovation/creativity in devising solutions

Brainstorming. Envisioning alternative outcomes. Willingness to risk making mistakes and the ability to fix them (b).

(a) Teaching by repetition and patterns often results in students having difficulty gaining the ability to design from scratch for the situation at hand. This will have to be balanced with the introduction of new situation challenges. (b) These skills are not directly teachable. What is teachable are skills that foster risk calculus and the means to adjust the course if a solution does not work as expected, resulting in the self-confidence that stems from adequate preparation. For example, exploring consequences of alternative strategies and preparing to fix problems predicted to crop up may increase one’s willingness to take the risks necessary for championing creative solutions. Thorough preparation includes exploring contingencies and figuring out how to respond to them. This level of preparation—which provides a net of sorts—may well encourage a community leader to take risks with high beneficial potential that he or she might otherwise avoid, favoring instead the (unsatisfactory) status quo. One teachable skill during preparation is exploring “what if” scenarios and devising fixes for unwanted consequences.

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and as a basis for developing simulations and other materials (such as checklists, or diagnostic tools) to be used during the training. Using the specific conflicts facing the community leader-participants to develop context-specific materials and training for community leaders would, we think, be challenging because the context—whether an inner-city neighborhood or a Bedouin village, as in our examples—may be rather alien to designers and trainers. Nevertheless, given the needs of disadvantaged communities and the likelihood of improving negotiated outcomes in what are otherwise socially costly conflict situations, we believe that testing executive training of the kind proposed here is worth the investment of effort and resources.

References Avruch, K. (2009). “What is Training All About?” Negotiation Journal 25 (2):161–9. Ben-David, Y. (1982). Stages in the Development of the Bedouin Spontaneous Settlement in the Negev. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Geography, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Hebrew). Bernard, P. (2009). “Bringing Soul to International Commercial ADR.” Negotiation Journal 25 (2):147–59. Bernard, P. (forthcoming). “Beyond Distributive and Integrative Bargaining to Principled Negotiation Based on Shared Cultural Values.” In C. Honeyman, J. Coben, and G. De Palo (eds), Rethinking Negotiation Teaching. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper and Row. Burton, J. (1990). Conflict Resolution and Provention. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Bush, R. A., and Folger, J. P. (1994). The Promise of Mediation: Responding to Conflict Through Empowerment and Recognition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Elliott, M., and Kaufman, S. (2003). “Building Civic Capacity to Resolve Environmental Conflicts.” Environmental Practice 5 (3):265–72. Fox, K. (forthcoming). “Negotiation as a Post-Modern Process.” In C. Honeyman, J. Coben, and G. De Palo (eds), Rethinking Negotiation Teaching. Gardner, J. W. (1990). On Leadership. New York: The Free Press. Lederach, J. P. (1997). Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington, DC: USIP Press. Maslow, A. H. (1943). “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review 50 (4):370–96. Meir, A. (1990). “Provision of Public Services to the Post-Nomadic Bedouin Society in Israel.” The Service Industries Journal 10 (4):768–85. —(1999). “Local Government Among Marginalized Ex-Nomads: The Israeli Bedouin and the State.” In H. Jussila, R. Majoral, and C. Mutambirwa (eds), Marginality in Space: Past, Present and Future. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nolan-Haley, J., and Gmurzynska, E. (forthcoming). “The Body/Soul Connector

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in Negotiation Ethics.” In C. Honeyman, J. Coben, and G. De Palo (eds), Rethinking Negotiation Teaching. Parker, T. (2001, September 26). Interview by W. Warfield, Washington, DC. Pruitt, D. G., and Kim, S. H. (2004). Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate, and Settlement. New York: McGraw-Hill. Shmueli, D. (2008). “Environmental Justice in the Israeli Context.” Environment and Planning A 40 (10):2384–401. Smith, H., and Ariadne, M. (1999). Teen Violence: Seeking Solutions. South Carolina Educational Television Network. Hedrick Smith Productions. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences. Volpe, M., and Cambria, J. (forthcoming). “Negotiation Nimbleness When Cultural Differences Are Unidentified and Unidentifiable.” In C. Honeyman, J. Coben, and G. De Palo (eds), Rethinking Negotiation Teaching. Warfield, W. (1993). “Public Policy Conflict Resolution: The Nexus Between Culture and Process. In J. D. Sandole and H. van der Merwe (eds), Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice: Integration and Application. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Woodson, R. (2001, October 3). President of the National Center for Neighborhood Alliance. Interviewed by W. Warfield, Washington, DC.

Notes  1 Deborah Shmueli is head of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Haifa in Haifa, Israel.. Sanda Kaufman is professor of Planning, Public Policy, and Administration at the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio.  2 We define civic capacity in this article as the ability to leverage knowledge and assets to connect effectively to, and rally, community members, as well as to connect to outside people, institutions, and resources.  3 We have adapted for our purpose the term KSAs, coined by the US Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration in their federal job application processes (see, e.g., http://www.cdc.gov/hrmo/ ksahowto.htm or http://www.doleta.gov/jobs/Federal_ Application_Process/ Knowledge_Skills_Abilities/).  4 This difference can be observed in the intensity and realism students inject in a role play about a used car sale compared to the sometimes surprising indifference they display toward the relatively higher stakes of role plays involving inter-organizational negotiations that are outside their experience.  5 For example, a young gang member in the Benning Terrace community in Washington, DC, was shot while coming out of his apartment building on Christmas Day. It signaled to the community that the violence was out of control.  6 Conflict interveners were advocates for the process, in which both parties are treated in the same way. However, as “insider-partials” (Lederach 1997),

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the interveners were also clear about advocating for certain relationship changes as well as changes in oppressive institutional structures.  7 To date, the truce between that generation of gang members may have held, but there has been gang-related violence resulting in deaths in recent years. ACM has arranged other gang truces since then.  8 A “fifth column” is defined as any “clandestine group or faction of subversive agents who attempt to undermine a nation’s solidarity” (http:// www.Britannica.com).  9 The Islamic Movement in Israel is a movement that advocates Islam among Israeli Arabs. It operates on three levels: religious (Islamic education, religious service), social (welfare services), and political. Politically the movement is split into two branches: the southern faction headed by Sheikh Abdallah Darwish, the founder of the movement, who opted for joining Israeli national politics (and the leader profiled is affiliated to this southern faction), and the extreme northern branch led by Sheikh Ra’id Salah, who has chosen opposition to the state of Israel and support for Hamas and Palestinian terrorism. 10 “Followers” seems an inadequate designation for those who responded to the ACM initiatives. Gang members, community residents, and public officials were not so much followers in a broad sense; rather, they were susceptible to being influenced by ACM. In the Bedouin communities, community members indeed “follow” the designated leader in a more general sense—more so when his internal and external negotiation skills are effective. 11 Several authors have overlapping definitions of human needs (e.g. Maslow 1943; Burton 1990).

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12 Farewell, My Friends: Keynote Speech at the 2009 ACR Conference Wallace Warfield

Convening the Whole of Conflict Communities in the 21st Century – Challenging Conventional Identities

W

hen I was mulling over what I was going to say, I was taken by the title of this conference, Convening the Whole of Community, and using it as an interpretative launching point for what I want to share with you today, I decided to add “conflict” to my title. My title is “Convening the Whole of Conflict Communities in the 21st Century: Challenging Conventional Identities.” Because I thought, actually conflicts are forms of communities, so a conflict can be a community in and of itself. And I don’t mean community in a demographic sense. For example, ACR [Association for Conflict Resolution] has done wonderful things with respect to communities of color. For example, the work that Homer LaRue, S. Y. Boland, Marvin Johnson, Susan Dearborn have done for ACR has brought the level of attention about the conditions that affect communities of color in conflict to a point where I think they put them on the map. When I speak of conflict as a community I speak from the standpoint that a conflict has presenting issues, but surrounding the presenting issue is a whole network of social conditions that affect that conflict. The cultures

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in the conflict, the relationships which are part of that conflict situation, the structures of that conflict, are all part of this notion of a community of conflict. This concept of a community of conflict has resonance with me because I believe that dispute resolution or conflict resolution is central to major social dynamics taking place in the United States and abroad. As Bernie Mayer notices in his book Beyond Neutrality, with a few exceptions ACR/DR [alternative conflict resolution/dispute resolution] is marginalized when it comes to complex social conflicts. Whether that be property, scarce resource distribution, interest-based conflicts persistent in all organic organizations and so on. It seems to me that ADR/CR [alternative dispute resolution/conflict resolution] initiatives are relegated to stay around the edges of these conflicts, sort of the iceberg metaphor: 15% of the iceberg is above the surface of the water and 85% beneath the surface and we tend to respond to the 15% which is above water, and the 85% below the water does not get treated. So we are responding to the part of the conflict which is most visible. I think that this is also true of conflicts which do not fall under the label of complex social conflicts. So, many dyadic organizations of conflict, many family disputes, have their roots in systems in culture that drive that particular dispute or conflict situation. This is not a new concern in the field of conflict analysis and resolution, and I remember watching Roger Fisher on the eve of the Gulf War I on television making an urgent plea for people to negotiate, and of course he was ignored. And I know it was a groundswell reaction from most of us in the community on the eve of the invasion of Iraq to hear our voices calling for more negotiations and they were uniformly ignored. Troy Duster, who was a sociologist at UCLA (I think Troy is now at NYU) was part of a conference that we had at UCLA when UCLA was becoming one of the new Hewlett centers, and Troy made a comment that when “real” conflict hits the ground, conflict resolution is nowhere on the scene. He was speaking soon after the Los Angeles riots and there was no visible role that was apparent that conflict resolution was there doing anything at all. It is possible to take exception to Troy’s notion of “real” conflict in the sense that to a family that is in dispute, to divorcing couples, to people who are in dispute between a manager and subordinate in an organization, the conflict is certainly real for them. I think that Troy makes a point and the problem I see is that practitioners have embraced a case-practice culture via the iconic image of “the mediator” and largely ignore the opportunities for developing innovative forms of praxis, demanded by the complexities of twenty-first century conflicts. And I think part of the issue is identity, and the culture of practice. So if we think of identity as being the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, we all have these identity stories. Now there are multiple identities. So I am a man, an

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African American man, raised in New York in a multicultural environment, part Puerto Rican part African American, I’m a professor, and so on. All these are different identities, but the professional identity that drives most of us in the field is this image of “the mediator,” and the story we tell ourselves about that. Brian Jared in a recent article in the Journal of Dispute Resolution said that actually there are two mediator identities going on simultaneously, they are in tension with one another; one deals with the generic mantra of the mediator as an external neutral and impartial third party, and the other is a fracturing of practice into competing subidentities: evaluative mediator, facilitative mediator, transformative mediator, narrative mediator, and on and on ad infinitum, and each of these identities is competing with one another for a little piece of the marketplace. And if you know who you are then you know who you are not. So the reason I know who I am is defined by who I am not, and almost invariably the definition takes on positive/negative connotations. So for example you can take this room and control for gender and age and put half in this side of the room and the other half in this other side of the room, and tell each other to make up stories about who you are, and make up stories about the other group. And almost invariably the stories you make up about the other group are negative. Each of these subidentities has the positive identities for themselves and negative identities for people who practice in some other kinds of ways. So in effect this becomes one’s espoused theory, as Donald Schön puts it. The theory is that what actually happens in the deep dark space of practice is what really happens, and that is, you do whatever you have to do to get an agreement with parties. This is the theory in use. There is a tension between the espoused theory and the theory in use. Now if we are confused about our identities, the public really is as well. Several years ago I was on a flight from Los Angeles back to Washington, DC. There were three rows of seats, and I was sitting in the aisle seat of the middle row and a man comes on and puts his bag up, he’s sitting on the left part of the seats, and puts his bag right in the middle of an empty space above his seat. Soon thereafter a woman and her husband get on board and she takes his bag and shoves it to one side and puts her bag in. And the man says, “How dare you shove my bag to one side?” and she says, “I put my bag any place I want.” Classic conflict escalation. Back and forth, back and forth, the flight attendant comes back and she truly is not impartial, she does not practice equidistance. She says to the woman, in effect this is your fault that this happens, and “if you don’t apologize to this gentleman I’m going to call the captain.” And we are all sitting here, in this overheating thing, and I say, Well Wallace, what are you doing sitting here? So I look at the woman and (the husband was terrified) I say, “Look, I know you don’t want to apologize to this man, but there’s over

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a hundred of us in this plane, and what about the idea of saying that you are sorry for the delay that this fight is causing, and you apologize for that.” We call that [asks the audience]: [audience responds: face-saving]. Thank you [to the audience]. So apparently this takes place, they come back and the flight attendant says things have worked out. So a gentleman who was watching this whole act play out said to me, “I don’t know what you said but it was really terrific what you did.” And when the flight attendant comes back to make sure the seat belts are buckled, the man who commented on what I did says to the flight attendant, “This gentleman”—pointing at me—“saved this inordinate delay, and he’s an arbitrator!” (Oh well … I take it.) But I’m saying in fact that a change in practice would require a change in identity. Changing the narrative and myths of practice. Robert Benjamin said last night during our dinner meeting to remember to say the fact that P. H. Gulliver said back in 1979 that really there are three parties at the table: the parties who are involved in the dispute or conflict, and the mediator. We forget that we are a party, and we tend to assume that all the irrationalities belong to the parties, and that we are these rational actors who follow these linear steps for the parties to reach an agreement. And we park—metaphorically speaking—our own irrationalities. We bring our irrationalities to the table, and we need to be honest about that. Whether they are issues of race, or gender, or you had a dispute with your spouse that morning, that gets on the table, and that creates that kind of dissonance that we tend not to acknowledge in this field. Now part of the problem of the iconic image of the mediator has come in the notion that we struggle for professionalization, and the way we see ourselves as professionals I think is this comparison to a legal view, so we talk about “legalization of mediation,” which becomes part of this iconic image. I don’t have a beef for lawyers but the concern I have about this is if the sparring third parties all are trying to climb in the same rabbit hole, we have a problem, it’s not going to be enough work for everybody on that basis, and it is ironic to me in many ways because those are problems in the field since Methuselah. Remember that ADR means “alternative dispute resolution,” and the alternative was over litigiousness in the field. The courts wanted to get away from judging increasingly social conflicts and we used to be the alternative to that, now I’m not so sure any more. There’s a need to create new images of practice. Away from the classic third-party neutral and embrace the notion that we are in fact change agents. Whether we like it or not that’s what we are, change agents. Now one way that I think about doing this is another colleague of ours, Maire Dugan. When Maire was at ICAR [George Mason University’s Institution for Conflict Analysis and Resolution], she developed the notion of the nested model of conflict.

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Now unfortunately we don’t have a PowerPoint here, so I have to air-sketch it for you. But Maire’s idea was like the Babushka dolls, the Russian dolls, there is the issue-specific situation in a conflict, but surrounding that there’re relational issues, and they are embedded in structural situations which are happening, and those three are embedded in meta-structure situations. There’s a story she tells about a Fairfax, VA, high school where there was a conflict between African American boys and White youth, and the fact that the White kids were wearing the confederate flag. The issue-specific level was to say, Look, we reached some agreement whereas the boys don’t wear the confederate flag within two blocks from the school, or something like that. But there’s a relational issue that surrounds the conflict. And how do you deal with the relational issues? And there are structural concerns. So structural, for example, the school was located on a street called Rebel Run, and the school mascot was Johnny Red. Well this is a whole social way of thinking that had to be dealt with, so if you just deal with the issue-specific situation you are not dealing with the cause of the problem. But it means changing the identity; you cannot have the image of the mediator laying hands on fevered brow. This is a different kind of a conflict, where are we at that level? Where are we for those who do family dispute resolution work, what we do with the sociology of what we do? We know something about conflicts but we don’t get it out there. We don’t talk with policy makers. Why are we not convening with social workers, judges, and say here’s what we know about conflicts in family disputes? We don’t do anything with our knowledge. It’s wasted. There are roles to play at that level of the conflict. I think this is also true at the international level, and Joyce Neu will be speaking to that. But I’m simply making a plea here to change the image, create a new image of ourselves, move more toward the preventative end of a situation, still doing intervention, but requiring different kinds of identities, and we need to create new narratives about that identity. What I am suggesting is finding ways of getting out of the box of the iconic mediator role, as powerful as that role may be, and think of other roles that we can create for ourselves in the field.

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Afterword Sandra Cheldelin1

W

allace Warfield was a colleague, co-teacher, co-consultant, co-conspirator, and dear friend. I offer this Afterword—while most books don’t have one—with a description of a case we co-facilitated. It is an attempt to ground the two parts of this book experientially. It is also to acknowledge his deep recognition of and passion for contextual and cultural understandings of conflict and his capacity to identify important ways conflict resolution can make the world a better place, especially through practice. The case was a multi-party facilitation we called Achieving Justice for Victims of Crime: Building a National Strategy. The Afterword ends with my reflections on our work. In the mid-2000s we were invited to help design and then lead a yearlong project, facilitating a series of police forums in various cities around the US, sponsored by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and the Office of Victim Support (OVS) of the US Justice Department. Based on our collective practice experiences specific to this project—especially Wallace’s public policy knowledge and my background facilitating large multi-stakeholder dialogues—we eagerly accepted the task. The purpose of the project was to create a cultural “sea change” within America’s law enforcement community, helping agencies move toward a philosophy and practice of victim-oriented policing. The IACP and OVS believed the best way to do that was to develop a national policing strategy to address the rights of victims of violent crimes.2 In this project, victims of crime included those targeted for violence or property loss, as well as their families, neighbors and community members in which they belong. Victims may have witnessed violence, or may have been fearful of being victimized. Police and other professionals involved in violent crimes, especially early on, are also included as victims. This particular project was born out of a national Victims Summit held in 1999 where the participants produced a Comprehensive 21st Century Agenda—including 13 guiding principles to be used to shape new policies

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and practices regarding victims of violent crimes. They identified thirty-eight recommendations in order to implement the principles. Fourteen of them called for a law enforcement action agenda.3 The IACP agreed to take on the task to implement this comprehensive agenda. The preface claimed the following rationale: Police are uniquely positioned to assume a leadership role in promoting victim rights and servicing their needs. Police 911 dispatchers and responding officers are the first justice system representatives that most victims of crime encounter. Accordingly, police have a special opportunity to begin to repair the harm done by crime. Through community policing, law enforcement agencies have developed consummate community and system collaboration skills. Police are the most visible and easily accessed justice agency (IACP 2000: ix). The IACP had a history of convening annual summits on critical issues prior to the 1999 Victims Summit.4 They agreed to serve as a resource to implement the Summit recommendations and, with a grant from the OVC, Office of Justice Programs, it launched a project to “guide policies, standards and training in state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies throughout the United States to substantially enhance the culture and practice of serving victims’ needs.”5 IACP took a year to plan the project that intended to change the way law enforcement interacted with victims of crime. They invited representatives from a variety of fields—law enforcement, military, victim services and prosecution—to inform their planning. The first step was the creation of a national advisory committee consisting of police leaders, victim advocates, professional service providers and victims to help focus the project.6 Convened in April 2004, this group helped shape the project’s strategy. With our input in the design (further discussed in my reflections) and in the role of facilitators, the IACP then hosted four national forums to 1) understand the needs of the stakeholders: police, victim service providers and victims; 2) understand current practices of police-based victim services; 3) determine necessary changes to create a new policing culture; and 4) seek advice as to how to implement the changes at the national, state and local levels. The first two forums were multidisciplinary—representatives of law enforcement, victim service professionals/advocates and victims/survivors of violent crimes—held in October 2004 in Denver and January 2005 in Miami. Two single-discipline forums followed. In March 2005 the forum in Memphis was held for law enforcement training professionals (police academy trainers, curriculum developers and the like) and the June 2005 forum in Charlotte was convened for police chiefs representing small, mid-sized and large departments. Forums were held around the country in order to get nationwide

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representation. They actively recruited tribal participation and sought gender balanced groups. The multidisciplinary forums in Denver and Miami had similar formats. Following a brief overview, the first of their two-day meetings began with participants separated into their respective stakeholder groups to identify their specific needs in response to a violent crime. After reviewing each group’s responses, participants were then divided into three mixed stakeholders groups (each group had representatives from law enforcement, victim service professionals/advocates and victim/survivors). At each forum these three groups were given a common scenario: a homicide in Denver and a robbery and assault in Miami. Group A was asked to identify actions, people and resources needed from the point of view of law enforcement. Group B was asked to identify actions, people and resources needed from the point of view of victim service professionals/advocates. Group C had the same assignment from the perspective of victims/survivors. On the second day, in mixed stakeholder groups, participants were asked to discuss two questions: 1) What must be the essential components of a national strategy to include victims’ needs in policing? and 2) What changes are required at the national, state and local levels to implement the strategy? At the end of each forum they agreed that their efforts would be forwarded to participants of upcoming forums. The two single discipline group forums that followed—law enforcement training professionals and the police chiefs—were similar in format. These two met for one day with large and small group discussions. The Memphis forum participants discussed current practices and changes that would need to occur to implement a victims policing strategy in the areas of recruit/ academy training, in-service training, and cross-training with other disciplines (e.g. advocates, victims, community groups, and the like). At the police chiefs’ forum in Charlotte, small groups discussed similar questions including: 1) What were the potential benefits of a strategy for law enforcement, victim service providers, victims, members of the community and members of the judicial system? 2) What were the promising practices in victim responses? 3) What were the roles and responsibilities for each group in the implementation of a national strategy? and 4) What was missing in the “toolkit” that IACP could or should develop? The final discussion focused on how to market the strategy and develop an outreach plan to ensure buy-in at the national, state and local levels. Several important outcomes occurred from the forums, including the following: 1) three groups who often were in conflict with one another—law enforcement, victim service professionals/advocates and victim/survivors— were able to take into account the needs of the other in helping create a

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national policing plan for victims of crime; 2) the plan reflected a developmental deepening, each forum expanding on the previous forum’s work; and 3) in collaboration with the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD), the IACP completed a working draft of a national policing strategy outline for victims. Our official work concluded at that point, but IACP and OVC continued piloting the draft, and the final product is extraordinarily impressive. On its webpage, the IACP makes available the full four volumes of Enhancing Law Enforcement Response to Victims. The first volume’s subtitle is A 21st Century Strategy 7 and begins with an overview of the project and identifies the core elements of best practices in responses to victims from law enforcement personnel and community partners. The second volume’s subtitle, Implementation Guide, has four sections outlining how to implement the strategy—with benchmarks to assess progress, and it “operationally bridges the gap between the concepts outlined in the Strategy and templates in the Resource Toolkit.”8 The Resource Toolkit is Volume 3, and it gives a wide range of materials for law enforcement agencies to make available to victims.9 It has materials on such crimes as identity theft, violence against women, gun violence, civil rights, hates crimes and terrorism, and offers external resources available from agencies such as the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA), as well as other web-based links and videos resources. The fourth volume’s subtitle, Training Supplement, provides materials that can be customized for individual agencies to adapt viable victim training programs for their personnel, field training officers and the new recruits.10

Reflections on our Work Wallace’s fingerprints were all over this elaborate policy formation process and the project became a fine reflection of the title of this book, From Conflict Resolution to Social Justice. What follows are my reflections on the case, our work together and the final product. The presentation of the case appears as if Wallace (and I) merely facilitated an elaborate project. That is intentional on my part because when working with Wallace it was never about him, or in this case, us; it was about creating the conditions necessary to develop a sustainable product or outcome. We put significantly more time into the overall design, and planning for and debriefing of each forum, than we did facilitating the forums. His extraordinary talent in design was immediately evident to the steering committee and they could envision a successful national strategy if the conditions worked.

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In this case, the elaborate design was an adaptation of a process we co-taught called Future Search. We formed a close partnership with the steering committee to select participants who reflected the breadth of personnel essential for the project’s success. We first identified the stakeholder groups (law enforcement, professionals and victims) and subgroups (policy, academy teachers and curriculum developers). We then identified regions and settings. To address possible power imbalances, we created intentional platforms for each stakeholder group using similar questions. As he predicted, the group needing the most attention was the victims/ survivors who felt the least empowered, compared to law enforcement and victim service professionals/advocates. The process allowed them to articulate their needs and they were given sufficient attention to make sure the issues were fully discussed. Wallace insisted we build on the knowledge created from forum to forum—that we not duplicate efforts since we had limited time at each. He wanted the outcomes from the previous group to inform the next group. This turned out to be an empowering experience for everyone. Those early on knew they were laying the foundations for a national strategy. Those near the end realized their task was to make sure whatever they created would and could be implemented. Each forum was tailor-made to get new participants informed of the previous groups’ work. Wallace’s knowledge of crime and his early work with gangs was an important asset. He pressed that we account for such issues as the context of the crime, the community surrounding it and identity-based differences when discussing crime scenarios. He also asked participants to consider other possible issues such as race and power. We were surprised at the quality of the conversations and the willingness for each stakeholder group to take into account the needs of others. The discussions reflected a high level of sophistication and civility, and this was an important contribution in the development of a national strategy. We were aware that the IACP was our client, a well-respected organization with an excellent track record. Wallace was very careful that we not offer empty promises. We were in constant conversation with members of the steering committee, knowing their expertise and commitment to the project was unusually high. We worked in partnership with them, with full realization that we each brought different skills to the table, expanding the possibility of success. As agreed upon, we entered late and left early in what became a multi-year project for IACP and OVC, but while we were part of the process we regularly monitored and adjusted our time, tasks and roles to assure ourselves that we were giving our best efforts towards the policing sea change project.

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While this is only one case, it is not particularly atypical of working with Wallace in the field. It is as if he had an internal checklist, regardless of the assignment, he consistently monitored: issues of legitimacy, empowerment, identity and ethics. He paid close attention to the “nested” theory of conflict, mentioned in Chapter 12, Farewell, My Friends. While he could focus on the specific issues presented as the problem (e.g., provide better policing support for victims of violent crimes), he knew this was insufficient. The presenting problem is nearly always embedded in a context, a culture, with structures and traditions that will need attention if a sustainable outcome is to emerge. This case surely reflected attention to his checklist and an elaborate design to take into account the embedded nature of the problem. As I observe the next generation of conflict resolution practitioners— his students—I am struck with evidence of his influence and mentorship, reflected in the quality of their work, the questions they ask and their capacities for self-reflection. Wallace’s core values were always present and often transparent. In planning and in debriefing we always discussed what would or did work, and why; what might not or did not work, and why not. Thank you, Wallace.

Notes  1 Dr. Sandra Cheldelin is the Vernon M. and Minnie I. Lynch Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University.  2 The FBI reports that a violent crime—murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault—occurs every 25.3 seconds (http://www.fbi.gov/ about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/offensesknown-to-law-enforcement/standard-links/national-data). In 2010, 1.25 million were reported (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/ crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/violent-crime).  3 The report is in a document: What do Victims Want? Effective Strategies to Achieve Justice for Victims of Crime (IACP 2000), Alexandria, Virginia  4 Examples include Violence in the US in 1994, Murder in America in 1995, Youth Violence in America in 1996, Family Violence in America: Breaking the Cycle for Children Who Witness in 1997, and Hate Crimes in America in 1998 (IACP 2000: 5–6)  5 This was stated in the IACP Mission Statement First Draft Strategy Outline used as part of the agenda for the Memphis dialogue on 31 March 2005.  6 The thirty-eight-member council included representatives of a diverse set of agencies such as, but not limited to, the National Children’s Alliance, the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, Community Shelter

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Services, Coalition Against Sexual Assault, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Accrediting Commissions, Community Policing, the Justice Department, National White Collar Crime Center, Health and Human Services, Foundation for Rape Information, Department of Corrections, National Sheriff’s Association, National Chaplain’s Association, Concerns of Police Services, and Parents of Murdered Children. Several Police Department representatives as well as victims of violent crimes were also part of the council.  7 http://www.theiacp.org/PublicationsGuides/Projects/VictimResponse/121STC ENTURYSTRATEGY/tabid/966/Default.aspx  8 http://www.theiacp.org/PublicationsGuides/Projects/VictimResponse/121ST CENTURYSTRATEGY/tabid/966/Default.aspx page 1.  9 http://www.theiacp.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=69hF2XlIM04%3d& tabid=87 10 http://www.theiacp.org/Portals/0/pdfs/responsetovictims/pdf/pdf/ Supplemental_pages_9_21C.pdf

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Acknowledgments T

his book is the editor’s first attempt at publishing. This means that without serious support and encouragement, it would have never happened. Dr. Andrea Bartoli, Director of George Mason University’s Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR)—now Dean of the School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR)—supported and encouraged me by immediately agreeing to my project, and trusting that I could do it. I received the same trust and encouragement from the faculty as well as the staff at S-CAR. Someone who held my hand and showed me the road ahead was Dr. Kevin Avruch, who also graciously agreed to write the Foreword. Dr. Sandra Cheldelin rose to the occasion by providing the perfect closing in the Afterword, with the description of a project that condenses Wallace’s experience. It was heartwarming to have the voice of two of his closest friends and colleagues present in the book. The conversion of the text from the original published formats to that of this book was only possible by the high skills of Paul Snodgrass. Molly Tepper, head of ICAR’s Library at the time, took it as a personal challenge to resolve the multiple conflicts presented by uncooperative footnotes and other trials, and persisted in finding the most elusive sources. Thank you both. I would like to thank the proof-reader and editor consultant Colleen Spears for the high quality of her work, and her enthusiasm for the content of the book. Lastly I’m deeply grateful to Marie-Claire Antoine from Bloomsbury Academic, whose encouragement and gentle suggestions clearly improved the final product and made it a pleasure to finish it. Except for Chapter 12—which contains a transcription of Wallace’s last speech—all of the other chapters had been published before. I want to gratefully acknowledge the following sources for their permission to reprint their copyrighted material. Introduction: The full text of the interview in the Introduction was posted in 2003 in BeyondIntractability.org. The Beyond Intractability Knowledge Base Project, editors Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Heidi Burgess agreed to let me republish the article. The interviewer, Julian Portilla, went along with the massive reduction and rearranging of the text.

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Chapter 1: “Factors of Race, Culture, and Ethnicity in Dispute Resolution” was an internal discussion paper presented in 1990 at the Conflict Clinic, predecessor of ICAR at George Mason University. Chapter 2: “Building Consensus for Racial Harmony in American Cities: A Case Model Approach.” Reprinted with permission of the author and the Journal of Dispute Resolution, University of Missouri, Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution, 206 Hulston Hall, Columbia, MO 65211. First published in the Journal’s issue 151 (1996). Chapter 3 “Managing Racial/Ethnic Conflict for Community Building,” first published in 2006 in Oetzel, J. G., Ting-Toomey, S. (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications:479–500. Chapter 4: “Public Policy Conflict Resolution: The Nexus between Culture and Process,” originally included in Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice: Integration and Application, edited by D. J. D. Sandole and H. Van der Merwe. Manchester University Press. Chapter 5: “Moving from Civil War to Civil Society,” first published in Peace Review Volume 9 (2), Summer 1997. Chapter 6: “Ruminations on Race, Culture and Conflict Resolution,” originally published in the 2000 Newsletter of the The Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) predecessor, the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution (SPIDR). Chapter 8: “Response to Carrie Menkel-Meadow’s ‘Correspondences and Contradictions in International and Domestic Conflict Resolution: Lessons from General Theory and Varied Contexts.’” Reprinted with permission of the Journal of Dispute Resolution, University of Missouri, Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution, 206 Hulston Hall, Columbia, MO 65211. First published in the Journal’s issue 417 (2003). Chapters 7 and 11: Negotiation Journal, two articles: “Reconnecting Systems Maintenance with Social Justice,” NJ 16 (3):253–268, 2000, co-authored by Mara Schoeny, and “Enhancing Community Leadership Negotiation Skills to build Civic Capacity,” NJ 25 (2):249–66, 2009, co-authored by Deborah Shmueli and Sanda Kauffman. All three co-authors have also agreed to the republishing. Chapter 9: “Is this the Right Thing to Do? A practical Framework for Ethical Decisions,” in Lederach, J. P., Moomaw Jenner, J (eds), A Handbook of International Peacebuilding: Into the Eye of the Storm. 2000. Josey-Bass Publishers. Chapter 10: “Reflections on Reflective Practice” was part of: “Research Frontiers in Conflict Analysis and Resolution,” 2004, ICAR internal publication.

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Index ABRC (Abu Basma Regional Council) 172 Abu Basma Regional Council (ABRC) 172 ACM (Alliance of Concerned Man) 168–70 ACUS (Administrative Conference of the United States) xxiii Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) xxiii ADR (alternative dispute resolution) 107–8, 111 112, 117–18, 121 Afghanistan 64 African National Congress (ANC) 55, 98 Alliance of Concerned Men (ACM) 168–70 alternative dispute resolution 107–8, 111, 112, 117–18, 121 ANC (African National Congress) 55, 98 anti-poverty programs xx, 75–7 apartheid 55 Argentina 131 Atlanta xxix, 10 Basic Human Needs theory 132–3 see also human needs Bedouin, the 171–4 Benning Terrace, Washington DC 167–70 Beyond Neutrality 184 Boldt, Federal District Judge George H. 115 Boulding, Kenneth 84, 110–11 Brixton 49, 128–9 Burton, John 110–12 Bush, Baruch xxx–xxxi

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Canada 64–5 CCR (Centre for Conflict Resolution) 56 CDC (Community Development Centre) 57–8 Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) 56 Chataway, C. 64–5 Chesler, M. A. 112 Chicago 48 Cincinnati 43–4 civic capacity 175–6, 180n2 Civil Rights mediators xvii, xxii, xxxvii, 37 movement 75–6, 101 civil society 96–8, 101–2 civil war 94 class xxviii–xxx 37–8 Clegg, S. 154 Coleman, J. A. 39–40 Collaborative Problem-Solving Process, The (CPSP) 18–19 and analysis 19–21 impact of 28–31 and practitioners 25 see also practitioners and stakeholders 21–5 community conflict definitions 37–8, and research 64–6 theories of 59–60, 77–8 Community Development Centre (CDC) 57–8 community leaders and negotiation training 163–7 case studies 167–74 and skills 176–8 and understanding 164

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Community Relations Service (CRS) xxi, xxxii–xxxiii, 34n7, 42–3, 47–9 Coeur d’Alene 47 conciliation 42, 54 conflict see also ethnic conflict assessment xxxii–xxxiv community 37–8, 59–60, 64–6, 77–8 domestic 126–9 international 126–9 models 8–9, 40–1, 83–4, 117, 130–1, 186–7 origins 39–40, 130, 132–3 outcomes 131 processes 130–1, 133–5 resolution 28, 110–12 theories 8–9, 59–60, 77–8, 83–4, 168, 186–7 conflict managers see interveners Continuum of Community Relations 77–81 see also Laue/Cormick continuum consensus xii, 22 and race 15–16 cooperative planning 51 Coser, L. A. 38, 117 CPSP (The Collaborative ProblemSolving Process) 18–19 and analysis 19–21 impact of 28–31 and practitioners 25 see also practitioners and stakeholders 21–5 CRS (Community Relations Service) xxi, xxxii–xxxiii, 34n7, 42–3, 47–9 culture 3–7, 141 see also race and ethnic conflict community 77–81, and conflict 7–8, 74–7, 85–9, 102–3 and dispute resolution 9–12 and group responses 4 Japanese 153 and negotiation 83–5 organizational 73–4, 80–3 and perspectives 102 demographics 4, 74–5, 129 dispute systems design 103–4

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Dugan, M. 186–7 Duster, T. 184 Eastern Europe 50–3 escalation 60, 131, 141 ethical dilemmas 60–4, 139–46 and culture 141 response model 143–6 and risk 142 ethics 60–4, 139–40 see also ethical dilemmas Ethiopia 64 ethnic conflict 17–18, 46–47, 52–4, 58 see also culture and race and minorities and Eastern Europe 50–2 and Great Britain 49–50 and law enforcement 41–5 and Northern Ireland 56–8 research 64–5 and South Africa 55–6 and United States 47–9, 54–5 Fairfax 187 Falkland/Malvinas Islands 131 Fitzduff, M 57 Flexner Report 149 Future Search 193 gender 8–9, 11, 153–4 George Mason University xxiii government decisions 80–1 and research 149 response 45–6 and stakeholders 81–3 Great Britain 49–50, 128–9 Great Society programs 76 see also anti-poverty programs Gwartney-Gibbs, P. A. 40–1, 130–1 Hall, Daryl 168–9 high demand response 5 hostage negotiators 128 human needs 83–4 and theory xxiii–xxv see also Basic Human Needs Theory Hungary 50–3

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Index IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police) 189–90, 192 identity 184–5 IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) 55, 98 immigration 4, 34n1, 46, 54, 74 impartiality xiv, xxv–xxvi, 56, 140 see also neutrality impasse xxxv–xxxvi INCORE (Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity) 57 Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity (INCORE) 57 Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) 55, 98 interactions cultural 7 and law enforcement 41–2 racial 16 interests-based approaches xxiv–xxv, xxix, xxxi–xxxii, 23 see also mediation International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) 189–90, 192 interveners xxxvi, 19–21, 24–5 see also ACM and mediators and practitioners and ethics 60–3 and neutrality 19–20, 62, 86–8, 103–4, 121 and self-analysis 19–21 intervention xxxii–xxxiii, 85–9, 121 see also mediation and ethics and ACM 169–70 and ethics 143–5 neutrality 20, 61 and training 141–2 IRA (Provisional Irish Republican Army) 56 Israel 171–2 Johnson, President L. B. 76 Kahnawake Mohawks 64–5 King, Rodney 17, 118 Kinsella, E. A. 158–9 Kolb, D. 151–2 KSA (knowledge, skills, and abilities) 164–7 see also leadership

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201

case studies 167–74 KwaZulu-Natal 98 labor dispute resolution 86–7 Lach, D. H. 40–1, 130–1 Laue/Cormick continuum 5, 77–81 law enforcement 41–6 see also police layered theory of conflict 8–9, 83–4 leadership 30, 170, 172–4 see also community leaders and civic capacity 175–7 definition 175 and KSA 164–6 case studies 167–74 model 40 qualities 177–8 training 163–7, 174–9 learning 151–2 see also reflective practice Lederach, J. P. 40, 133–4 Liberia 94–5 Liberty City 78–9, 86 London 49–50, 129 Long, N. E. 21 Los Angeles 15, 118–19 low demand response 5 MacDuffie, Arthur 79 Mayer, B. 184 mediation 133–4 and balance of power xxvi and class xxviii–xxx and constraints 16–17 criticism 22 interests-based approaches xxiv– xxv, xxix, xxxi–xxxii, 23 interest-based model xxviii needs-based approaches xxiii–xxv North American model xxviii problem-solving xxx–xxxi transformative xxx–xxxi mediator contingent behavior 19 see also mediators mediators 185–6 see also interveners, and practitioners and mediation skills of xxii and neutrality 19–21, 56, 86–7

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and impartiality 56 and CCR 56 Menkel-Meadow, C. 125–8 Merry, S. E. 64 Mexico 64 Miami 77–80, 85–6, 128–9, 132 Miami-Dade riots 128–9, 132 see also Miami minority groups 9, 41–6 see also race and culture and ethnic conflict mobilization 51, 60–1 model building 63–4, 143–6 see also ethics Mogadishu 97 Monroe prison xxx Monrovia 94–5 Moore, C. W. 28, 95 Moscow 142 Mpumalanga 98 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) xxix, 10 Nagykanizsa 51 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) xxix, 10 needs-based approaches xxiii–xxv Negev Bedouin, the 171–2 see also Bedouin, the negotiation training 163–7, 177–8 and community leaders 163–7 negotiators 9–10, 128 see also mediators and practitioners and interveners nested theory of conflict 186–7 neutrality xxv, 19–20, 56, 62, 86–7, 103–4 see also impartiality New York City 18, 42, 114–5 New York City Youth Board xxi New York State xxiv Nichols, Dr. E. J. 102 Nisbett, R. E. 156–8 North American Mediation Model xxviii Northern Ireland 56–8 Norton, J. xxi

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Nuer, the 64 nursing 153 organizational culture 73–4, 80–3 Overton 78 Parker, Tyrone 168 Partners Hungary (PH) 51–2 Peace & Hope Foundation Trust 98 peace zones 93–8 PH (Partners Hungary) 51–2 Philippines, the 64 police 190–2 see also IACP and law enforcement abuse 21, 42–5, 49–50, 78–9 behavior 86, 118 hostage negotiators 128 power balance xxvi–xxvii, xxx, 193 practice 147–52, 185–6 ideology of 56 principles of 57 reflective 143–6, 159–61 challenges to 155–9 and conflict analysis 154–5 critiques of 158–9 and culture 153–4 and gender 153–4 historical context of 149–52 and nursing 153–4 theories of 59–60 practitioners 148–50 see also mediators and interveners and negotiators and learning 151–2 and reflective practice 155–61 values 9–10, 20 problem-solving mediation xxx–xxxi see also mediation Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) 56 public policy and anti-poverty programs 76 changes in 77 community based 77–80 and cultural influences 83–9 and demographic influence 74–5 and lawsuits 82–3 and mediation 87

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Index and negotiations 76 and stakeholders 75 race 3–6, 20–1, 23–4, 101 see also immigration and culture and minorities and ethnic conflict and conflict 15–19, 23–4 42, 46–53, 128–9, 132 and Eastern Europe 50–2 and Great Britain 49–50 and the United States 47–9 and law enforcement 41–6 relations 15–16, 22, 28–31 riots 15, 42, 49, 118, 128–9 and Tocqueville, A. de 101–2 reflective practice 143–6, 159–61 challenges to 155–9 and conflict analysis 154–5 critiques of 158–9 and culture 153–4 and gender 153–4 historical context of 149–52 and nursing 153–4 reflective theory 151 research 64–6, 149—50 Risso, V. xxii Roanoke 44–5 role negotiation 65 Roma, the 50–3, 66 Russia 142 Rwanda xxviii–xxix, 134–5 Sadat, Anwar 87 Schön, D. 150, 154–6, 158–9 Scimecca, J. 111–12 security zones 96 see also peace zones Slovakia 50 Smith, A. D. 53 social justice 115–18 and integration 118–21 society 94, 101, 109 see also civil society traditional 64 Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution (SPIDR) 140 Somalia 97–8 South Africa 55–6, 58–9, 98

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SPIDR (Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution) 103, 140 Squaxin Island (Washington) Native American tribe 115 stakeholders 21–24, 75–6, 81–3 Sudan 64 systems maintenance 107–9, 112–15, 118–21 tacit knowing 150 Texas 47–8, 52 theory 149–50 conflict ripeness 168 layered 8–9, 83–4 learning 151–2 nested conflict 186–7 reflective 151 Tocqueville, A. de 96, 101–2 transformative mediation xxx–xxxi, xxxvii see also mediation trust xxxvi ‘Two Tap Roots and Triggering Incident” 17–18, 42–3, 129 UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) 184 UDA (Ulster Defence Association) 56 Ulster Defence Association (UDA) 56 UN Observer Mission in Liberia (UNOMIL) 95 United States 47–9, 54–5, 128–9 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 184 UNOMIL (UN Observer Mission in Liberia) 95 values 17, 84–5 see also ethics and interests-based approaches victims of crime achieving justice for: building a National Strategy 189–94 response to: enhancing Law Enforcement 192 Victims Summit 1999 189–90 violence xxxiv, 45, 65, 93, 167–9 and crime 189–94 Virginia 44–5, 187

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Waigali, the 64 Warfield, W. early career xxxi and CRS xxi–xxii and New York City Youth Board xxi

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and poverty groups xx Washington, DC 95, 167–70 Washington State 115 Wilson, T. D. 156–8 Zinacantecos, the 64

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