Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation

Changing the Focus from "Resolution" to "Conflict"

Deborah Hensler, David Holloway, Lee Ross, Brenna Powell, Byron Bland

Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, Stanford University

After focusing for many years on conflict resolution, SCCN has come increasingly to realize that understanding conflict itself – its etiology, evolution and consequences – is fundamental to the study of conflict resolution and to the development of strategies to overcome barriers to resolution. This insight arises most clearly from our recent work in Northern Ireland, which has provided us with a rare and invaluable opportunity to have face-to-face contact with people from a variety of backgrounds who are involved in the real work of conflict resolution. A second and equally important source are our recent activities concerning the role of government-supported victims’ compensation programs as a strategy for reconciling victims of conflict to their injuries and allowing them to move forward their lives.

The important lessons that we have gleaned from our activities so far can be summarized as follows:

The central role that personal relationships play in the dynamics of conflict and conflict resolution;
The benefits for conflict resolution of shifting the time frame from the moment to the future;
The need to focus concretely on the lives of individuals, their families, and their communities rather than solely on the details of a political agreement;
The critical impact that intra-group conflict has on inter-group conflict as well as efforts to reach a resolution.
The importance and concomitant difficulty of accounting for perceptions of procedural and distributive justice in designing effective conflict resolution strategies.

Using these insights as a foundation, we can identify some emergent themes and questions that provide potential targets for analysis and research.

Relationships and attributions in the pursuit of an acceptable future: At the last Hewlett Center conference, emphasis was given to the distinction between conflict resolution processes that operate on the domestic versus international context. In our view, a more significant distinction may be that between the types of processes and barriers to agreement typically involved in legal or business disputes (which may or may not include parties from different countries) and those involved in disputes between interest-based groups in political or social conflict on either the domestic or international stage. Such groups may be united by religious, ethnic, political, or social class identities, or by other concerns and identities that the groups themselves perceive as dividing them from the "other."

In most business and legal disputes the parties see a resolution as desirable and probably inevitable. They recognize the need to "get to yes" even if they may not yet agree about the shape of the agreement they will arrive at or the best means to get there. They view opposing parties as similar to them, albeit perhaps less reasonable or rational. In most of our previous work, we emphasized particular cognitive and motivational barriers to agreement in circumstances, where parties’ current objective interests conflict to some degree (and common ground may be underestimated by the parties). But the parties in such circumstances do not see each other as enemies or as threats to their own identities and survival.

In our more recent work, we increasingly have focused on conflict that arises not only from opposition of objective interests but also from the parties’ malignant interpretations and attributions of each others’ claims, demands, justifications, and actions in pursuit of those interests. The antagonistic and hateful relationships associated with severe inter-group conflict in particular are exacerbated by attributions of sinister motives and malevolent longer-term goals. In many of social or political conflicts we see around the world today, the parties are not only skeptical about the possibility of reaching agreement with the "other side", they are by no means certain that such agreement is desirable. They view the other side as separated from themselves by identity and ideology. More powerful parties (or those who perceive themselves as more powerful) may view complete victory or continued domination both as achievable and as more desirable than resolution of the conflict. Less powerful parties may perceive continued conflict as a way to sustain their interests or their organizations (or as necessary to validate their worldview) and as a path to ultimate victory. In any event, negotiation is regarded as but one means to achieve political ends. Other means, including violent coercion, are regarded as viable options, and the parties need to be convinced that a mutually acceptable yes is not only possible, but also preferable.

In response, SCCN has championed an approach that challenges the parties to envision possible futures likely to be acceptable to their adversaries as well as themselves, and to communicate that vision in frank dialogue. We have found occasions when one side hears the other side articulate a vision of the future that offers attractive roles and relationships for them especially useful (and invitations to hear such visions, especially attractive to the antagonists). Once such visions have been shared, in our experience, discussions of ways and means to proceed, and identification of more immediate areas of common ground become easier to achieve.

Issues of Justice: Our analysis of barriers gives particular emphasis to divergent claims about the requirements of equity or justice, and the parties’ attributions about such claims. In our experience at SCCN, we find that requiring a proposed agreement to meet the divergent standards of justice or equity held by differing parties (rather than pursuing the more modest goal of seeking improvement over the status quo) almost always prevents progress toward a resolution.

One strategy for avoiding this problem involves the seeking of consensus about a just procedure for deciding contentious issues rather than consensus about the justice of a particular outcome. Nevertheless, even processes that are initially judged as even-handed will be recast as unfair if the outcomes consistently violate one or both of the parties’ entrenched sense of entitlement. Parties are particularly offended when opponents assert that the particular outcomes they seek or have achieved are just rather than a pragmatic solution to the parties’ conflicting needs and goals. Indeed, the parties may feel that anyone making such claims about justice – if those claims are perceived to be merely strategic, but perhaps even more so if they are perceived to be heartfelt – could not possibly be accommodated or trusted. While we think that there is much to recommend in approaches that urge parties to content themselves with the search for outcomes that merely offer mutual advantage over the status quo, we recognize a dilemma. Parties are not likely to treat an agreement they deem unjust, especially one they have reached under duress, as a "final" settlement. Rather, they are apt to treat such an agreement as a temporary and expedient necessity – one that they feel free to abandon once they are no longer subject to whatever threat or have redressed whatever imbalance of power had obliged them to enter into that agreement.

The relationship between conflict resolution and the psychological, cultural, and social processes that shape perceptions of justice is not well understood. What makes a party willing to abide by an agreement that they do not regard as just? How can issues of justice be included in a negotiation without creating the additional barrier to agreement that we described above? One intriguing suggestion is to frame the problem as one not of achieving justice but of rectifying injustice. In addition to recasting proposed settlements in ways that reduce the psychological distance between seeking justice and improving the status quo, there are strong philosophical reasons for thinking that this reframing of goals represents a sounder approach to bridging conflicting notions of justice. These questions obviously offer rich possibilities for theorists and practitioners alike.

Open versus closed agreements: Negotiations to resolve or at least relieve a heated or recently escalated conflict must often pursue two seemingly contradictory objectives. An agreement must be reached that the parties can accept as a basis for relieving the immediate crisis. But that agreement must leave the parties satisfied that they can continue to pursue their own (typically highly divergent) future aspirations. In other words agreement may sometimes be possible only if one or both parties are allowed to hold on to the possibility – however faint or illusory – of attaining historical aspirations at some distant date. Complicating the situation is the likelihood that one of the parties (i.e. the more powerful party) may be willing to make concessions only if it feels sure that it is achieving a long-term end to the conflict. In language that is all too familiar today, the party that feels it is being asked to make concrete concessions is willing to do so for "real and lasting peace" but not for the mere possibility of peace – especially if it feels the "other side" will abide by the peace only so long as it knows that it cannot achieve its historical goals by other, non-peaceful, means.

The more powerful party may have little incentive to entertain immediate compromises if it believes that the other side regards the current agreement simply as a way station on the road to the achievement of further demands. It will have every reason to hold back accommodating gestures, to say nothing of politically difficult compromises, until they can be traded for permanent concessions by the other side in a final deal. The weaker party’s incentives, of course, are quite different. It seeks to "buy time" and gather strength in its longer-term struggle. The obvious compromise is an agreement that remains "open-ended" in the sense that the parties retain the right to pursue their particular aspirations through political, non-violent means; however, the temptation for one or both parties to revert to violent means if it feels they can be successful always looms.

This issue of open versus closed agreements has special significant in two of the conflicts that SCCN has given particular attention: the Middle East and Northern Ireland. But it also is important in understanding the dynamics of and developing strategies for resolving complex and long-standing multi-party public policy disputes, such as those that arise in the context of environmental policy making. Even in more limited and seemingly disparate conflict situations, such as asbestos personal injury litigation, we can glimpse such dynamics, as parties seeking resolutions to the social policy dilemmas posed by such litigation, hang back from negotiation and resolution in the fear that any resolution of the immediate conflict will impair their ability to protect their interests in future and more long-ranging disputes. (For example, an important barrier to achieving policy reforms related to asbestos litigation today is the fear of parties that they will be setting precedents for future tort policy more generally.) The delicate architecture needed for achievement of immediate settlements and balancing of such settlements with the parties’ long-term hopes and fears is another frontier of research for SCCN.

Intra-party versus inter-party dynamics: Scholars and researchers focus on the relationship between the principal parties in a conflict, treating intra-party dynamics as a mere "complication" minor role. Our own experiences and those of many distinguished mediators we have interviewed suggest, however, that it is often relationships and divergences of interest between differing factions on a given side in a conflict that drive events and create the greatest barrier to resolution. Only after these "internal" conflicts have been adequately addressed can the opposing parties make real progress in engaging the issues that separate them. Again, this insight has proven equally relevant for those who seek to understand and ameliorate conflict in the Middle East and Northern Ireland and those who are interested in public policy negotiations in a domestic context.

In the international context, the problem arises from the prospects facing individuals and factions whose status will diminish and whose identity concerns will be compromised by movement toward, and especially by actual achievement of, an end to the conflict at hand. As one Northern Ireland activist bluntly stated the matter, if and when there is a genuine end to the conflict, "some of these guys (i.e. paramilitary leaders) will be lucky if they can get a job driving a beer truck." Conflict and breakdown of central authority provides lucrative opportunities for racketeering, drug trafficking, and various other forms of crime and corruption – opportunities that the beneficiaries are loathe to relinquish. For other antagonists, the threatened loss would be less one of economics than identity. They would lose their sense of purpose and a source of their self-esteem. Our colleague Stephen Stedman has written extensively about the role played by spoilers in social and political conflicts. The need to plan for and present viable futures for those leaders and their functionaries, who have the capacity to wreck deals, and to reestablish a trusted central authority to fight racketeering and corruption by those who would benefit from continuation of conflict, is paramount.

In the less dramatic domestic public policy context, similar problems arise as proponents and opponents of alternative policy solutions seek to form and maintain coalitions. When the disputants are engaged in localized and time-constrained conflicts, when the negotiation space is relatively well understood, and when the options for resolving the conflict are relatively few, maintaining bargaining coalitions, once they are formed, may be relatively easy (although nonetheless requiring attention from coalition leaders). But when conflicts are protracted, changes in leadership of the groups comprising the coalition as well as changes in the external environment are apt to increase the difficulties and costs of coalition maintenance. Fragile coalitions may disintegrate over time. Moreover, such coalitions may not be able to respond effectively to changes in the available options for resolution – changes that may alter the interest calculus that supported coalition formation.

How these kinds of considerations interface with the various processes and interventions regarding conflict resolutions is yet another topic of our concern and target for fruitful investigation at SCCN.

Prospect theory analysis and the role of loss aversion: The work that Amos Tversky pioneered in association with SCCN on prospect theory in general and the role of loss aversion in particular has profound relevance for our understanding of negotiation stalemates. This research suggests that parties attach greater weight to prospective losses than prospective gains, especially when the former are certain and immediate and the latter are uncertain and pertain more to the future than the present. One important consequence is that parties will take unwise risks to avoid certain and immediate losses. (The Holy Cross School confrontation in North Belfast provides a revealing example of such ill-advised risk taking.) At the same time the parties will prove unwilling to take risks – even risks with better prospects in terms of probable outcomes – in order to pursue gains. Another consequence is that parties in negotiation will unwisely turn down proposed changes or concessions that offer a mix of gains and losses, even when the promised gains are objectively greater than the losses. These cognitive barriers to conflict resolution operate in both domestic and international contexts, and in business and legal disputes as well as political and social conflicts.

Prospect theory also points toward a further complication for conflict resolution. Parties quickly assimilate gains as an entitlement but are slow to reconcile with losses. Thus a concession received is likely to be viewed as an entitlement while a concession granted is likely to remain an irritant. This asymmetry of assessment makes it likely that the parties will disagree about the worth of a concession in the negotiation process, and this disagreement foster mistrust and suspicion. Loss aversion, we should note, also is one of the mechanisms that underlies the phenomenon of "reactive devaluation". This phenomenon, much studied by SCCN investigator Lee Ross, involves the tendency for compromises and package deals to decrease in attractiveness once they are offered—i.e. when they cease to be hypothetical and are actually put on the table, especially when they are put there by one’s adversary rather than by a third party.

An obvious implication of prospect theory for practitioners involves the importance of "framing" potential risks and gains. In particular, it is important that parties recognize that maintenance of the status quo is itself a choice that entails potential losses and risks. The risks and losses of a particular course of action may seem more attractive, or at least considered more rationally, when the risk and losses of doing nothing or forcefully preventing changes are also factored into the equation.

Models of third party intervention: The outline of processes and phenomena offered above has clear implications for practitioners who undertake third-party intervention. Beyond recognizing the need for third party mediators to take these processes and phenomena into account, we at SCCN have explored the value of having the parties themselves become more aware of them. Rather than providing "training" per se, we see ourselves as collaborating in interactive processes of mutual skill development. As accomplished practitioners, our colleagues bring an array of practices and insights that have served them quite adequately in the past. Thus, the opportunity to engage with them in extended conversation and reflection has enriched our understanding of both the practical approaches they employ and common-sense considerations that they trust most. In turn, citizen activists and community people involved in inter-community dialogue use the psychological and theoretical insights that we bring to the discussion to sharpen and refine their own techniques and intuitions.