Resolving Deep-Rooted Conflicts

Essays on the Theory and Practice of Interactive Problem-Solving

Herbert C. Kelman, Werner Wintersteiner, Wilfried Graf, Werner Wintersteiner, Wilfried Graf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317334729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a collection of articles and essays by Professor Herbert C. Kelman, a leading figure in the conflict resolution community and one of the most influential peace researchers.

Professor Kelman, a social psychologist, has been a pioneer of conflict resolution and peace research, and his work in conflict resolution has included a decades-long action research program on the Arab-Israeli conflict which has seen the development of Interactive Problem-Solving Workshops, an approach which has had a deep impact not only on research, but also on the practice of conflict resolution around the world, and especially in the Middle East. Focusing on Kelman's conflict resolution-related work, this volume comprises an important collection of articles written by Kelman across his career as academic and practitioner. By bringing together these carefully selected articles the book offers a concise overview of the body of Kelman's work and his intellectual biography. It traces the origins of the field of conflict resolution, the development of the study and practice of Interactive Problem Solving Workshops, and the wider challenges faced by conflict resolution research and practice.

This book will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, conflict resolution, psychology and IR in general.

Part I
Peace research

Historical facts and personal experiences

1
Reflections on the history and status of peace research (1981)¹

Depending on our tastes and definitions, we can take quite divergent views on what constitutes the beginnings of peace research. The range of possible dates becomes narrower when we think of the beginnings of the peace research movement. I refer here to deliberate, organized efforts to mobilize the resources of different disciplines – especially, but not exclusively, the mathematical models and quantitative methods developed in the social sciences – for studying the conditions of peace and war. Even the beginnings of the peace research movement, however, cannot be dated precisely, since it is in the very nature of a movement that similar ideas and activities spring up almost simultaneously in different places and under different guises.

I like to think of the organization of the Research Exchange on the Prevention of War in 1952 as representing the beginnings of the peace research movement. I recognize, however, that I am not entirely disinterested in suggesting this date, since I was one of the prime movers in the founding of the Research Exchange. At the very least, there are some important forerunners to the Research Exchange that must be recalled. For one thing, the intellectual activities that anticipated the peace research movement are ultimately more significant than the organizational activities. From this point of view, the beginnings of the movement ought to be traced at least to the work of such pioneers as Quincy Wright, Lewis Richardson, and Pitirim Sorokin in the period between the two World Wars (cf. Singer, 1976). Furthermore, the idea of mobilizing the resources of the social sciences for the study of peace and war was promoted vigorously by Ted Lentz before the advent of the Research Exchange (cf. Lentz, 1955, or a later programmatic statement). There were even some organizational efforts that preceded the establishment of the Research Exchange. One of which I am aware is the Committee on the Psychology of War and Peace, in which Ross Stagner and Ralph White, among others, were active. This committee was set up by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues shortly before World War II, but became inactive after American entry into the war.

However we date the beginnings of the peace research movement, my own involvement in it goes back more than thirty years to the origins of the Research Exchange. I would like to comment briefly on that early period, both because I enjoy reminiscing about it (and the norms that govern Presidential Addresses allow such self-indulgence up to a point) and because it may help to highlight some of the features and issues of the peace research movement that have characterized it up to the present time. Admittedly, I am presenting the history of peace research from an idiosyncratic perspective.

The research exchange and the Journal of Conflict Resolution

In April 1951, Arthur Gladstone and I published a letter in the American Psychologist, in which we argued that some of the assumptions about human behavior that underlie foreign policy need to be evaluated in the light of psychological knowledge. We proposed that pacifist challenges to these assumptions seemed consistent with various psychological theories and findings and therefore merited the systematic attention of psychologists. This letter elicited a variety of responses, including suggestions for meetings that would pursue the idea further. Such meetings were held and led to the formation of a group to explore the possibilities of research on alternatives to war in resolving international conflicts. This group eventually became the Research Exchange on the Prevention of War. For several years, the Bulletin of the Research Exchange on the Prevention of War was published regularly. The group also organized workshops and ran symposia at various professional meetings, which in turn produced some publications. The participants in the activities of the Research Exchange were mostly (but not exclusively) young social scientists. The group was interdisciplinary, but its strongest representation came from the field of psychology, in which the whole enterprise had its origin.

Two historical notes are of special interest, because they are relevant to the subsequent development of the peace research movement:

1. The choice of “prevention of war” rather than “peace” for the name of the organization can be attributed in large part to the political atmosphere that prevailed at the time. This was the height of the McCarthy era and the term “peace” was highly suspect and controversial. Even though those of us who started the Research Exchange were committed to peace, many of us having a background in pacifism or peace activism, and even though we were prepared to innovate in our professional work and to take certain risks, we were nevertheless subject to the pervasive pressures and habits of those times. We used the less stigmatized term “prevention of war” in order not to alienate our colleagues any more than necessary. The atmosphere, of course, has changed drastically since 1952, but the term “peace” is still controversial in some circles. What is interesting today, however, is that the concept of peace research is viewed with some suspicion, not only from the right, but also from the left.
2. The impetus for this organization came almost entirely from individuals who were non-specialists in the field of international relations (IR). Their motivation derived from their commitment to peace. It is not surprising that the group had a large concentration of pacifists, Quakers, and the like. Thus, the enterprise started with the handicap of a weak professional base and a lack of professional expertise and legitimacy. Most of us had not been trained in the field of international relations and were, in fact, not working directly in that field. Starting with such a weak base, the Research Exchange had difficulty in attracting participants anchored in the field of international relations itself. I became more and more convinced that we would have to become professionals if we were to make continuing progress. Harold Guetzkow served as an excellent model in this regard: Coming from a religious-pacifist background and trained in social psychology, he had started – a short time before the founding of the Research Exchange – a systematic process of retraining himself to the point where he eventually became recognized as a political scientist and international relations specialist.

After more than two years of activities, I became increasingly frustrated with the failure of the Research Exchange to attract IR professionals – and with my own failure to become one. I felt that there was a limit to how long one can go on writing programmatic articles and organizing meetings with the message that there are things one can and should do – without actually going out and doing them. It seemed to me that the Research Exchange had reached that limit and I was now concerned with where it should go from there.

Just at that time, fortuitously, I came to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, as a member of the initial group of Fellows (1954–1955). While there, I convened a group of other interested Fellows to discuss the Research Exchange on the Prevention of War and to solicit their advice on the future course of this enterprise. The group happened to include, among others, Kenneth Boulding and Anatol Rapoport, who found the possibility of systematic contributions from social science to problems of war and peace highly congenial with their own peace commitments and evolving intellectual interests. Another major input into their thinking came from Stephen Richardson, who was also a Fellow at the Center at that time and who introduced them to the unpublished writings of his late father, Lewis Richardson.

Richardson’s applications of mathematical models to the analysis of international conflict, which had hitherto appeared only in brief, scattered publications (see, for example, Richardson, 1950a and 1950b), struck a responsive chord in Boulding and Rapoport. They took an active part in arranging the posthumous publication of Richardson’s books and in bringing his work to the attention of a wider audience. The work also reinforced their own growing conviction in the possibilities of “peace research.”

The meetings we held at the Center led to a decision to replace the Research Exchange with two separate sets of activities. We felt that the organizational functions of the Research Exchange (i.e., arranging symposia, workshops, joint research efforts, and the like) could be carried out most effectively by a committee of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. As I have already mentioned (in describing some of the forerunners of the Research Exchange), shortly before the outbreak of World War II the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues had established a committee in this area, which soon became one of the casualties of the war. The decision to re-establish such a committee, to take the place of the Research Exchange, thus closed the historical circle. At the same time, we decided to transform the Bulletin of the Research Exchange on the Prevention of War into a more formal journal, which would combine some of the standard functions of professional journals (including full-scale theoretical and empirical articles) with some of the exchange functions of the Bulletin. The hope was that this new journal would serve as the focal point for the development of a new interdisciplinary enterprise. We decided to locate the new journal at the University of Michigan, since Kenneth Boulding was on the faculty there, Anatol Rapoport was about to join that faculty, and William Barth and Robert Hefner had been publishing the Bulletin there. Other interested members of the Michigan faculty, including Robert Angell and Daniel Katz, soon joined the planning group and the editorial board. In 1957, the journal began publication under the title Journal of Conflict Resolution: A Quarterly for Research Related to War and Peace. Although the term “peace” was used in the subtitle, it still did not appear in the main title itself. The term “conflict resolution” was chosen primarily because it best reflected the interests of the editorial board in the analysis of conflict across different system levels, but also in part because it was less controversial (less blatantly normative) than the term “peace.”

Publication of the Journal of Conflict Resolution represented an important turning point, in that it helped to move the field of peace research in a professional direction. The Journal attracted a number of IR specialists, including – among the earliest contributors – Richard Snyder, Karl Deutsch, and David Singer. The Journal also became an outlet for scholars outside of the IR field who were doing professional work in the analysis of conflict, including some – best exemplified by Thomas Schelling – who approached the problem primarily from the perspective of strategic studies rather than peace research.

Specialists and non-specialists

I have been tracing one line of development during the 1950s which, along with a number of other lines, came together in the peace research movement. In describing the development of peace research during that period, I find it useful to distinguish two major strands (although these are by no means totally separable): the work of scholars who were trained outside of the field of IR and the work of IR specialists themselves.

In the first category, the major pioneer is probably Lewis Richardson and the major prophet Ted Lentz. I have already described the early organizational efforts among the “non-specialists.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution served as the focal point for organizing the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution at the University of Michigan, which became a major American center of activity in peace research during the early 1960s. Other early centers – similarly started and led by non-specialists – were the Canadian Peace Research Institute and the Oslo Peace Research Institute, which inaugurated the Journal of Peace Research in 1964. A number of social scientists from different disciplines, located outside of these centers, also played important roles in the development of this research area. Among the names that come to mind in this connection are Lewis Coser, Morton Deutsch, Thomas Milburn, Raoul Naroll, and Charles Osgood.

In the second category, the major pioneer is Quincy Wright. The major centers of activity, started during the 1950s, were the program at Northwestern University (which, incidentally, brought the two strands together in the joint leadership of Richard Snyder and Harold Guetzkow), the Program on International Conflict and Integration at Stanford University, led by Robert North (in which I would also include Charles McClelland), and the national indicators group, led by Karl Deutsch at Yale and elsewhere. Again, various IR specialists outside of these centers – such as James Rosenau – played major roles in the development of this strand of peace research.

I have identified these two strands in the development of peace research because I want to argue that the emergence of peace research as a substantial discipline in the late 1950s and early 1960s can be credited, to a very large extent, to the coming together of two lines of interest: (a) an interest among scholars outside of the IR field (many of whom were Quakers or pacifists – including Lewis Richardson, Kenneth Boulding, Harold Guetzkow, Walter Isard, Arthur Gladstone, Dean Pruitt, and myself – or else world federalists, peace activists, or what Ted Lentz used to call “peacifists”) in using their professional skills for the promotion of peace; and (b) an interest among the new generation of IR specialists in developing quantitative, mathematical, and behavioral approaches to the study of their discipline and linking it to general social science. These two groups developed an almost symbiotic relationship to one another. They formed a coalition, which provided reciprocal stimulation and reciprocal legitimization. The non-specialists needed the specialists in order to legitimize their forays into areas in which they had not been trained (a problem, as I mentioned, that we had from the beginning in the Research Exchange), in order to fill in the substantive knowledge that they themselves lacked, and in order to provide reality testing for their conceptual models. The IR specialists, on the other band, needed their non-specialist colleagues (who were, of course, specialists in the various disciplines on which this new breed of IR scholars was drawing) as sources not only of concepts and methods, but also of the validation and encouragement that they were unlikely to receive from their more traditional IR colleagues.

It would of course be a mistake to draw the lines too sharply. The “nonspecialists” were not only starry-eyed searchers for peace. They had strong scholarly interests, were intellectually intrigued by the problems to which they had recently turned their attention, and were able to draw on an extensive reservoir of knowledge and skills in their own disciplines. Had they lacked these characteristics, they would have been of no use to the IR specialists in this evolving coalition. The IR specialists who became part of this movement, in turn, were often people who also had strong commitments to peace (which may, in fact, have led some of them to enter the field in the first place). Had they lacked such commitments, they would not have been comfortable in this evolving coalition. My main point, then, is not so much that the peace research movement represents the coming together of two separate groups of scholars (although, roughly speaking, this may be true), but that it represents the coming together of two sets of interests – an interest in applying scientific knowledge to the promotion of peace, and an interest in developing a scientific base for the field of international relations. It is this unique confluence of interests, I propose, that accounts for the take-off of the peace research movement and for its continuing vitality.

Tensions in the peace research movement

The confluence of interests that is represented in the peace research movement helps to explain some of the tensions that have characterized the movement, both internally and in its relations with the outside world. In its external relations, we find two interesting anomalies in the reactions that peace research arouses.

1. Among certain traditional academics, peace research is somewhat suspect and subject to criticism for two reasons: both for being too normative and for being too “scientific,” i.e., quantitative and behavioral. Both of these reactions are based on certain correct observations, but their joint occurrence appears anomalous because the behavioral/quantitative approach represents, at least in part, an effort to overcome some of the limitations of traditional normative political science. The situation testifies to the speed with which the field has moved into a “post-behavioral” phase, in which “scientific” is not equated with “positivistic,” and in which normative commitment is not seen as incompatible with scientific objectivity. Many traditionalists in political science and international relations have not yet come to terms with the behavioral revolution at a time when the postbehavioral revolution is already well under way. Peace research, with its combination of peace commitment and a behavioral/quantitative approach must be both confusing and threatening to such traditionalists.
2. Peace research is also suspect and subject to criticism simultaneously for being too radical and for being too supportive of the status quo. Again, there is some objective basis for both of these observations. Peace research does imply a preference for a different kind of world order and is guided by an image of such a world order, rather than by considerations of how best to maintain or enhance the power position of a particular government. This is hardly radical, but it is based on a different set of assumptions than those underlying much of traditional IR research. The suspicion from the right, aroused by the adoption of a different set of assumptions, is a familiar phenomenon. It was even stronger in the 1950s, although it is still alive today to a surprising degree. The suspicion from the left is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: “Seek peace and pursue it”
• Herbert C. Kelman’s essays on the theory and practice of interactive problem-solving
• PART I Peace research: historical facts and personal experiences
• PART II Interactive problem-solving: philosophy, history, and methodology
• PART III Towards a sustainable peace
• Index