Understanding Conflict Types

Terminology

• Conflict involves the pursuit of incompatible goals by different groups. It may manifest as either peaceful or violent political struggles.
• Armed Conflict is a specific type of conflict. It involves the use of force by opposing sides, ranging from minor skirmishes to full-scale war.
• Violent Conflict, also known as Deadly Conflict, is similar to armed conflict, but also includes one-sided violence, example, genocides against unarmed populations.
• Contemporary Conflict describes political and violent conflict patterns in the early 21st century.
• Conflict Settlement is the process of reaching an agreement to resolve a political conflict, often to prevent or end armed conflict which may be revisited over time.
• Conflict Containment is peacekeeping and limiting violence through geographical constraints or termination efforts.
• Conflict Management refers to settling and containing violent conflict. Conflict management also means the regulation of conflict to prevent escalation.
• Conflict Resolution is a complete strategy addresses the root causes of conflict. Conflict resolution aims to transform behaviors, attitudes, and resolve the conflict's structure
• Conflict Transformation transcends conflict resolution by focusing on deep institutional and cultural changes. These changes address conflict root causes and shifts relationships between parties.
• Negotiation describes the process where parties attempt to settle or resolve conflicts through dialogue.
• Mediation describes third-party intervention process facilitates communication and negotiation between conflicting parties. Participation is voluntary, and parties retain control of the outcome.
• Conciliation/Facilitation is like mediation, involving an intermediary assisting parties toward negotiations, sometimes in a minimal role.
• Problem-Solving is a method involves encouraging parties to reconceptualize the conflict and create mutually beneficial solutions.
• Reconciliation is a long-term process focuses on overcoming mistrust and hostility between divided groups.
• Peacemaking aims to settle armed conflict through voluntary agreement, encouraging parties to reach a voluntary agreement, often with international organizations, like the UN.
• Peacekeeping involves deploying international armed forces to separate belligerents. Tasks often include monitoring, policing, and humanitarian support.
• Peace-enforcement is the imposition of a settlement using force by a powerful third party.
• Peacebuilding supports peacekeeping and peacemaking through addressing structural issues and long-term relationships to prevent future conflict. Conflict Resolution aims to transform potentially violent conflicts into peaceful and non-violent social and political change processes.

Context of Conflict Studies

• Conflict Studies was also known as Civil War Studies.
• Conflict Resolution seeks to transform violent conflicts into peaceful processes of social and political change and is an ongoing task.
• Conflict resolution started in the 1950s and 1960s during the Cold War. The goal was to apply industrial relations and community mediation approaches to civil and international conflicts.
• Conflict resolution ideas were increasingly impactful by the 1980s.
• Conflict Transformation seeks to address structural and relational conflict causes rooted in unmet human needs. The goal is reshaping relationships, altering power dynamics, and changing social, political, and economic structures.
• Conflict resolution targets short-term settlements. Conflict transformation focuses on long-term change.
• Conflict resolvers and conflict transformers are engaged in the same enterprise, using "conflict resolution" as a broad term due to its roots, recognition, and ambiguity.
• The dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in internal, ethnic, secession, and power struggles in the 1990s signifying conflicts were due to fragmentation and breakdown of societies.
• Conflict arises from economic differentiation, social change, cultural formation, psychological development, and political organization.
• Conflict becomes overt when parties perceive goals as incompatible.
• The nature of parties, levels of conflict, and issues at stake evolve and may be contested over time. Conflicts are dynamic, influenced by attitudes and behaviors and third party involvement.
• Destructive conflict must be avoided, as opposed to constructive conflict, which is essential for human creativity.
• Conflict resolution emerged in the 1950s to transform destructive conflicts with a broader, integrative approach.

Conflict Resolution's Integrative Approach

• Multi-level analysis considers individual, interpersonal, intergroup, international, regional, and global levels and their interconnections.
• Multidisciplinary approach requires insights from politics, international relations, strategic studies, development studies, and individual and social psychology.
• Multicultural perspective means conflict resolution must be an international, cooperative effort that occurs worldwide within an increasingly interconnected framework.
• Analytic and normative dimensions combine systematic analysis, statistical studies of violent conflicts, with the transformation of violent conflicts into peaceful change.
• Theoretical and practical integration bridges theory and practice. It makes sure theoretical insights inform real-world interventions and that practical experiences refine theoretical frameworks.
• This emphasizing helps understand conflict and strategies for its peaceful transformation.
• "Conflict" is used to describe both consensual conflicts over interests and dissensual conflicts over values, and "disputes" need settlement. "Conflicts' are based on unmet human needs and require deeper resolution.

Causes of Conflict

• Background causes
• Root causes
• Underlying causes
• Structural causes include poverty, ethnic and religious discrimination.
• General explanations are based on statistical generalizations. Poverty and undemocratic regimes are statistically likely to experience conflict.
• Conflict is complex. Civil war triggers in one country may not trigger war in another. Theories must consider the context in which they are applied.

Timeline of International Conflict Phases

• First Phase: Pre-World War I & II focused on traditional warfare and Clausewitz's theories.
• Second Phase: Cold War Era shifted toward a bipolar power structure. It involved proxy wars, politically and ideologically driven conflicts, and experienced a decline in interstate wars after World War II.
• Propaganda played a role in key post-war conflicts. Questions were raised about the meaning of peace. The Day After illustrated a societal issue.
• Third Phase: Post-Cold War & Contemporary Conflicts display the emergence of new and hybrid wars. The third phase involves conflicts over statehood and status. There were fewer interstate wars, but an increase in genocides.
• Active participation and political dialogue are fundamental to achieving conflict resolution and attaining peace. War is a continuation of politics, but also a failure of dialogue.

Framework Models

• Universally generalizing conflict explanations isn’t possible and models/theories must be categorized. Internal approaches focus on human behaviors and cultural influences.
• Relational approaches examine interactions between individuals and groups and Behavioral sociology and psychology.
• Contextual perspectives consider external factors. Marxist theories emphasize socio-economic structures and class struggle.
• Machiavelli emphasized self-preservation and the pursuit of power as conflict drivers.
• Hobbes emphasized competition and insecurity as causes of societal discord.
• Hume focused on scarcity as a central factor generating conflict.

Galtung's Models of Conflict, Peace, and Violence

• The theories provide a framework for understanding conflict, violence, and peace, including negative and positive peace.
• Models emphasize structure, attitudes, and behaviors to understand how conflicts emerge.

The Conflict Triangle

• Galtung conceptualized conflict as a triangle with three interconnected components.
• Contradiction (C) is the core issue. It is defined by incompatible goals between parties. Arising from direct interest clashes/power imbalances shape asymmetric ones in symmetric conflicts. Chris Mitchell explains contradictions from mismatched societal values
• Attitude (A) is the way parties perceive themselves within the conflictd. This perception can be either positive or negative. Violent conflicts have dominate negative stereotypes, emotive, cognitive, and conative elements, or expressive conflict sources.
• Behavior (B) is the actions parties take in response to conflict, ranging from cooperation to hostility. behavior includes threats, material, or structural views on conflict sources.
• Galtung stresses contradiction, attitude, and behavior to exist.
• A contradiction without attitudes/behavior is latent, but shifts occur as conflict escalates.
• Widen, deepen, and spread as conflicts grow, require addressing the three elements for meaningful transformation.

Understanding the Causes of Conflict

• Military power alone is insufficient in conflict resolution, as it only addresses surface manifestations.
• Addressing conflict requires insight into the root causes.
• Unresolved root causes can fuel future conflicts even when peace agreements are signed off.
• Latent conflict continues due to unresolved cultural and structural violence.
• Structural violence cause inequality or deprivation affects marginalized groups.
• Cultural violence involves beliefs/ideologies that legitimize direct or structural violence that allows violence to persist.
• Absence of tensions, structural, cultural, and direct violence is called positive peace.
• Positive peace involves the removal of the root causes of conflict and requires the removal of cultural and bias.

Galtung's Violence Triad

• Direct Violence includes Visible physical or immediate harm caused by war, murder, torture, or abuse. Behavior Ends direct violence.
• Structural Violence includes invisible systemic oppressions where they create include inequality, deprivation, and oppression that result in inequality poverty, discrimination, and lack of access to ends with addressing contradictions.
• Cultural Violence includes ideological justification that results in Norms beliefs of cultural practices that justify direct the need for structural violence ends only when achieved through attitude change.
  • These align with broader peace strategies to Keep stopping violence then to build peace, creating structural communities, as well as making peace to change our attitudes.
• Galtung said his 1969 work introduced contrasting forms for peace. First is the negative absence of direct, structural, and cultural peace can still exist, but there is the threat because the need to reduce the active threat then is the positive state with elimination from the structural, ensuring sustainable peace, which is legitimacy.
  • The idea is at multiple levels, but there are going to be some challenges of positive peace due to perceived injustice. Conflicts arise when parties believe they're victims of course there's the injustice to many groups with the violence. Finally, false. Conscious groups accept the injustice rather the general contempt. Then the conflict requires transforming the roots ism. Then there's a society with the removal creating a just situation with sustainable structures. Addressing the conflict requires a transformation as well, which can happen on many levels with that is the goal.

Escalation and Deescalation Model

• Initial difference creates a conflict
• Original contradiction or in compatibility of goals between the polarization with emotions like interest and tension. Over time this intensifies.
• After that there is the outbreak of directs. Finally, there then it becomes clear that solutions are on attain
• De is equal parts that is really not much different, it is in some cases, though, a breakthrough. The process of can happen again with other processes. Management. The next step with the goal reduce the cultural forces through sustainable solutions. Those social biases are really necessary. ### Hourglass Model of Resolution
• Top Half: the political options available to solving problems narrow as tensions rise. As they become more rigid, finding alternatives appears unavailable.
• Half of this is when the tension begins to fade and more and more diverse strategies are available for us to move forward. In order to be involved to help out, what has become is still is to resolve the crisis can create solutions, with a few steps. There is the appropriate steps then the response for it. Key terms are needed as well. At the same time there is reconciliation that can lead to these steps. We have to look for a solution, to make sure each response has another. These include Conflict transformation. Cultural and structural peace building . To get ready for future conflict to reduce situations of interest .
• Elite Peace and the agreement. Preventive to protect what has developed. The structure requires an equal lasting effort. There has to be equal distribution.
• A normal state does not include structures so, like for for for that structure to stay together at the state of the matter.