Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution

Culture, Identity, Power, and Practice

Kevin Avruch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317262046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Written by a distinguished scholar, this book explores themes of culture, identity, and power as they relate to conceptions of practice in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Among the topics covered are ethnic and identity conflicts; culture, relativism and human rights; post-conflict trauma and reconciliation; and modeling varieties of conflict resolution practice. Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution is the winner of the 2014 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize.

Part 1

Culture and Conflict Resolution

1

Introduction

Culture, Conflict, and Conflict Resolution

Air Florida: The Ubiquity of Culture

The January 12, 2007, edition of The Washington Post carried on its front page a story commemorating the tragic crash, twenty-five years earlier, of Air Florida Flight 90.¹ The Boeing 737 took off from Washington’s National Airport in a snowstorm and crashed almost immediately into the icy Potomac River. Seventy-eight passengers, crew members, and motorists on the ground died. The subsequent National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) investigation, examining voice transcripts of preflight procedures by the pilot and copilot, focused on faulty de-icing and pilot error in causing the crash, and particularly on the failure of the pilot to heed warnings by the copilot that some instrument readings didn’t “seem right.” The communicational breakdown, safety experts decided, stemmed from the resistance of the copilot to be (or act) more assertive with the aircraft’s captain. The article went on to detail some safety reforms implemented after the crash, as part of pilot training and industry standard operating procedures. “Though some of the lessons may seem simple, such as communication and management skills,” the article noted, “it helped break down an authoritarian cockpit culture dominated by captains.” The article continued: “Safety experts said evolution in the cockpit’s culture, which now also includes listening more attentively to advice from flight attendants, has made aviation far safer.” The article ended by noting that similar communicational reforms have even been extended to other multi-actor high-risk settings, such as the hospital: “A similar ethos has moved into the hospital operating room,” where the surgeon, traditionally the authoritarian “captain” of the surgical team, must now also be willing to listen to other team members who might raise “red flags” but in the past were reluctant to do so. Now, presurgical checklists (modeled on preflight checklists) are common (“Do we have the right patient? The right procedure? The correct limb?”), and surgical team members are encouraged to speak up if something seems amiss.

The notion of culture is used, explicitly, twice in the article—perhaps three times if its semantic first cousin ethos is counted. The first time it is linked to the notions of power and hierarchy through the modifier “authoritarian ( … cockpit culture”). The second time it is linked to the idea of change by speaking of “evolution in the cockpit’s culture.” Implicitly, at least, some idea of norms and values (“it’s right and good for the captain to be unquestionably in charge—until it isn’t”) is also present here, in both uses of the term culture. If we count as well the explicit connection made throughout the article between interpersonal communication and culture, we have in this piece a fair beginning of an understanding of the term. Culture, we learn, somehow connects to communication, to power or authority, to norms and values—and is susceptible to change.

A deeper reading can also connect culture to conflict, mainly though the dynamics of power, authority, and hierarchy. This is because “cockpit culture” implies that pilot and copilot—if not as individuals, then through their roles—even as their goals (the safe operation of their aircraft) are identical, are in potential conflict via any threat to their hierarchical relationship, such as the copilot questioning the captain. Indeed, authoritarianism as a social modality is one way of managing potential conflict by defining and delimiting social relationships along relatively clear dimensions of dominance and subordination: Everyone knows where they stand. In this sense, safety reforms, whether in the cockpit or the operating room, can be seen as modifying, even subverting, authoritarian limits on overt role conflicts, in the service of achieving overarching shared goals—safe flights and successful surgeries. The requirement for achieving these goals, in fact, is to defuse authoritarian and hierarchical strictures that previously managed potential role conflicts by keeping actors in their appropriate place. In a way, potential conflict is now brought into the open—the copilot contradicting the captain, the surgical nurse questioning the surgeon—and is encouraged. Conflict is transformed into collaboration in the service of the team’s shared goals. There is a phrase in our field for this process; after Kriesberg (2007b), we say that conflict is now “constructive.”

There is, finally, the reporter’s use of the notion of (cockpit) culture to begin with. Without bothering to define it as a technical term, the article’s author presumes it to be a colloquial word whose meaning (even when modified by the unlikely “cockpit”) will be understood by his readers. And note how he uses the word as a way of talking about, and bringing together, a number of different aspects—communication, power, norms, values, role expectations, change—of the social setting of the cockpit. He uses it, that is, as sort of shorthand with which to talk about context. Indeed, if we think of the NTSB experts reviewing the pilot–copilot transcript as the close study of a text, then, literally, the idea of context—of culture—is how they came to frame their understanding and interpretation of the various communicational impedances or dysfunctions that ended in tragedy. The idea of culture thus appears protean and ubiquitous. It is used to make sense of communication, the interlocutory dynamics of encounters, and of the larger context in which these encounters take place. This makes culture, as Raymond Williams (1983:87) remarked, a very complicated idea.

Conflict Resolution, Transformation, and Peace: Introductory Remarks

This introductory chapter reviews some of the major conceptions of culture that have developed in the past couple decades in the field of conflict resolution, while touching briefly on some themes that are the main topics of the chapters that follow. In this chapter, I use the term conflict resolution broadly to encompass a variety of discourses in an emerging field, including dispute resolution, conflict transformation, and peace studies among them. The relationship between conflict and dispute (particularly in the guise of alternative dispute resolution [ADR]) is the topic of Chapter 2. Advocates of the other two terms, transformation and peace, base the distinction on what they consider serious limits in the goals of resolution. Some regard transformation as an evolved version of conflict resolution, an advanced form that aims at deeper change in the relationship between the parties than mere resolution aspires to, and points the way toward true reconciliation between the former adversaries (Kriesberg 2008). In contrast, I agree with Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Miall (2005) that conflict resolution “properly perceived,” in the sense of getting to the root causes of serious, deeply rooted conflict, implies notions of transformation (see Chapter 2). The ambitious promise of reconciliation, seen nowadays by some as the ideal endpoint in the process of building peace to replace enmity is, I agree, perhaps less adequately covered by conflict resolution, and it is on this basis that advocates of conflict transformation as an advanced form most strongly make their case.

The connection between conflict resolution and peace studies is more complicated, and the tension between them, of longer duration (see Schmid 1968; Reid and Yanarella 1976). As noted in Chapter 2, when the first postgraduate degree in the field in the United States was envisioned at George Mason University, the word peace was purposely left out of the title. In those early days, the gulf in the academy between the conflict resolution camp and the peace camp was wide. Some scholars in the peace camp thought conflict resolution reflected a cold, technocratic, and even amoral view of the world; it seemed unconcerned with questions of social justice and deeper structural change. (The emphasis here is on social structural; the sort of change epitomized by conflict transformation, in contrast, was interpersonal, in the relationship between the parties.) Although not exclusively associated with national differences—many esteemed peace scholars were and are Americans (and critics of conflict resolution)—the center of peace research remains European (particularly Swedish and Norwegian, and at Bradford University in the United Kingdom). Ramsbotham and colleagues (2005) have characterized this as the difference between a more (perhaps typical) American “pragmatic” approach toward attaining peace and a more “structural” (and consistently leftist) European one. Although I think this distinction held true for a long time, the two orientations have grown together as the field developed and expanded, first because such newer state-of-the-art terms that direct our attention to “post-conflict” (properly, post-settlement) issues, like “peacebuilding” (introduced in 1992 as part of Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s influential Agenda for Peace), have broadened the purview of what conflict resolution ought to consider important—beyond, for example, drafting the formal agreement by “getting to yes.” Second, many younger conflict resolution scholars and practitioners bring a (self-) critical lens to the field, and although still engaged with the mechanics and techniques of resolution—with process—now also agree that concerns with, say, human rights and justice cannot be set aside in favor of processual efficiency. Many of these concerns are expressed as problems in the conceptualization of power in conflict resolution, the theme of Chapter 9.

On the Absence of Culture in Early Conflict Resolution

Although not the case today, in the early days of the field the idea of culture—of the implications of cultural difference—was not a matter for serious concern, either in the academy or among practitioners. There were at least four reasons for this, two stemming from the conceptual biases inherent in the two main academic disciplines that fed the field and two from biases in the world of practice. The field of conflict resolution drew much of its conceptual capital from scholars in the disciplines of international relations (IR) and social psychology. IR had resonance particularly for peace studies: The peace studies perspective was conceived as offering an alternative to IR’s neorealism. The work of social psychologists was influential in the development of conflict resolution as an expression of American “pragmatism.” In both cases, the resistance to culture lay in the effacement of difference.

Political scientists and IR specialists, even when they argued against the policy implications of neorealism and machtpolitik, typically took power to be the only “variable” that counted; power was conceived simply as the ability to apply force or to coerce (how many submarines? how many warheads?); states were autonomous “actors” who “calculated” their interests and behaved rationally to achieve them. In this constricted sense of power (neither Hans Morgenthau nor Kenneth Waltz could pass muster as Foucauldians), culture all but disappears from view (see Chapters 6 and 9). If culture matters at all, then we understand it in its essentialized and totalized form of “national character” (see Chapter 6).

Scholars from social psychology (many with roots in Kurt Lewin’s interest in social conflict) were especially influential in the study of negotiation; and negotiation was often conceived as the fundament, the “atom” of conflict resolution (see Chapter 7). The psychologists assumed that given the biogenetic unity of the human brain, we must all think and reason in the same way, and so, say, decision making (as in negotiation) must look the same everywhere. (“Everyone negotiates the same way; just speak louder and slower”). Once again, culture disappears or—if cross-cultural psychologists are heard from—is to be understood in such constricted senses as individualist versus collective cultures; high context versus low context, and so on.² Moreover, behind both international relations theories of states and world politics, and social psychological theories of the individual actor, the authority of rational choice theory, with its restricted conceptions of motivation and intentionality as simply interests and utilities—and in negotiation research, by the reigning heuristic of the buyer-seller—effaced all other theories of mind or sociopolitical action, but in particular culturally informed ones. In IR, rationality resided in the state; for the social psychologists, in the individual actor (see Chapter 7). The epitome of this, which brought together scholars (and their assumptions) from psychology, economics, and political science, can be seen in the amount of work devoted to game theory in general and the prisoner’s dilemma game in particular, as a way to model conflict and conflict resolution processes in the real world.

As for practitioners, the absence of attention to culture had two main sources. First, many practitioners came from such fields as labor-management relations, where whatever cultural differences between the sides (based on class?) that might exist were subsumed by the strong commitment on both sides to negotiate around shared and usually narrow conceptions of interest. Communicational impedances that arise in the negotiation that might be related to cultural difference were likely attributed to individual personalities and dismissed as “atmospherics.” Then too, the early practitioners themselves were not a culturally diverse group, being overwhelmingly male, white, and North American.

The other source of practitioner resistance to culture was more complex in being intentional, and involved practitioners who worked in situations different from labor management, family, or other domestic settings. For those who worked in deep-rooted or intractable conflicts around issues of race, ethnicity, religion, nationalism (the whole range of so-called identity conflicts), often marked by extreme enmity, violence, and suffering, it seemed that anything having to do with culture was part of the problem and not the solution; therefore, any attempt to bring attention to culture back to the conflict was both counterproductive of conflict resolution—and probably unethical. In several later chapters, I argue that this stance is mistaken. It reflects a sort of categorical error, conflating culture as an analytical term and culture as a political term used in identity politics (see Chapters 4, 5, and 6). This mistake can be costly. Keeping culture (in the analytical sense) out means that the practitioner is potentially self-blinded to the sorts of obstacles—say, communicational impedances or misinterpretations of key symbols by one side or the other—that may doom a negotiation or an entire peace.

As one example, consider Docherty’s account of the 1993 Waco tragedy (Docherty 2001). Docherty prefers to write about significant cognitive and social difference in terms of worldview rather than culture. Whichever term is used, the differences separating members of the American unconventional and millennial religious community calling itself Branch Davidians from the U.S. federal law enforcement personnel who negotiated with them fruitlessly between February 28 and April 19, 1993, outside Waco, Texas, were deep and tragically fateful. Branch Davidians followed a form of Christianity that held that the End of Days was close at hand; they stockpiled weapons against the coming chaos of the apocalypse and practiced unconventional gender and familial arrangements. They also harbored a deep distrust of secular institutions like the government or state. Their variant beliefs and practices troubled some in the larger American community around them, and their possession of many weapons, some thought to be illegal, brought them to the attention of police. When U.S. federal law enforcement agents raided the settlement in force, the Davidians reacted violently, and four federal agents, among others, were killed. Thus began a fifty-one-day siege, during which federal law enforcement tried to negotiate a nonviolent surrender, but unsuccessfully so. On April 19, after negotiations had been stalled for weeks, a forceful entry was attempted, in the course of which the complex burned and more than one hundred people, including twenty-one children, died. The repercussions of this tragedy have been felt ever since in America, often expressed as continuing mistrust, hostility, and even rage, by some citizens toward the federal government. On April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the violent end of the Waco standoff, the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed, killing 168 people and injured more than 500 in the deadliest act of terrorism committed on American soil before September 11, 2001. It turned out that this was conceived as an act of vengeance, linked directly to the events at Waco.

Whatever religious differences separated the Branch Davidian community from mainstream American society and culture, when these differences erupted into open social conflict, the unsuccessful processing of the conflict, ending in lethal violence, was shaped primarily by the communicational difficulties bedeviling the negotiation. It was more than a matter of differences in respective negotiation styles. Docherty analyzed transcripts of the negotiations between the parties and found that that they revealed, in her words, profound differences in the respective worldviews of both sides. Police negotiators brought their own perception of the situation to the negotiations and presumed they could bargain instrumentally with the Branch Davidians. When they ran into difficulties, they assumed that the charismatic but psychopathological Branch Davidian leader, David Koresh, had brainwashed his followers, who were thus irrational. Docherty’s point is that a full understanding of Branch Davidian beliefs would lead one to see not psychopathology or irrationality but another alternative rationality, a completely logical one in the world constituted by Branch Davidian culture. Rejecting this world out of hand, and bound by the realities of their own culture and experience, FBI negotiators and Branch Davidians faced each other for almost two months across the great cognitive and moral divide of different worldviews, and managed at the end only a dialogue of the deaf that ended in death.

It is, finally, useful to compare the Waco and Air Florida cases. Although both illustrate the importance of t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Culture and Conflict Resolution
• Part 2 Culture and Identity, Dilemmas of Power
• Notes
• References Cited
• Index
• About the Author