Conflict Resolution in an Era of Political Conflict
By Colin Rule
We live in an age filled with social conflict. Anyone who picks up a newspaper in the United States, listens to the radio, or watches television these days can see it almost immediately. We live in a society marked by partisanship and divisive rhetoric, not only among politicians but also among neighbors and co-workers. Recent Gallup polls indicate that the country is currently witnessing the most dramatic gap in recent history between Republican and Democratic opinions.
Some level of social conflict is inevitable and even healthy. However, by many objective measures, American society is now in the midst of a deeper and more destructive social conflict than it has experienced in the last 50 years. This breakdown in our national dialogue is demonstrated most obviously in the media. Discussions on television, radio and the internet dwell incessantly on the back and forth insults and accusations between the leaders of the two political parties, focusing attention primarily on whether the most egregious comments come from the voices on the right or the voices on the left.
As most of us in the conflict resolution field know, this type of insult exchange is not a meaningful or productive conversation; it can go on forever with no closure and only serves to deepen the divide between the two sides. The exchange may feel temporarily satisfying, for example, when we read a blog or listen to a talk radio program that forcefully affirms one's positions and slams the other side as idiotic or immoral, but in the long run it achieves very little in the way of progress toward solutions. In fact, over time such exchanges almost certainly harm the overall discourse and deepen our social fragmentation.
Aaron Brown, the thoughtful former anchor of CNN's NewsNight, noted in a recent article in the Palm Beach Daily News that he’s shocked "by how unkind our world has become" (1/26/06). E-mail and talk radio appear to have given people the license to say anything, regardless of how cruel or false it may be, he said. Many Americans on the left and the right aren't interested in the truth, but simply want news that confirms their viewpoints. "You'd think that it's no more complex than good vs. evil," he wrote.
There is an immense gravitational pull into this social conflict. For example, Jean Schmidt, a Republican Member of the House of Representatives from the Second District of Ohio, offered some well-considered comments upon her swearing in to office in 2005: "Honorable people can certainly agree to disagree. However, here today I accept a second oath. I pledge to walk in the shoes of my colleagues and refrain from name-calling or the questioning of character. It is easy to quickly sink to the lowest form of political debate. Harsh words often lead to headlines, but walking this path is not a victimless crime. This great House pays the price." Of course, just a few months after saying these words, Ms. Schmidt gained notoriety for slighting prominent Democrat (and decorated war veteran) John Murtha as being a "coward." Very few individuals can resist joining the fray, especially in a heated environment like the U.S. Congress.
This extreme partisanship has tainted civil institutions that in the past were regarded as largely apolitical. For example, the judiciary, once revered as impartial and scrupulously devoted to legal rationality, has been accused of bias from both the right ("activist judges" "legislating from the bench") and the left (the Supreme Court's involvement in the 2000 election). To wit, a judge in a prominent political trial was removed because he donated to Democratic causes and then his replacement was removed because he donated to Republican causes. In this manner, the voices of moderation are undercut, almost everyone in the country can be divided into one camp or the other, and every action can be called into suspicion. We all are being pressured, in one way or another, to take a side.
Many people suspect that the evolution of this social conflict did not occur purely by accident and that it has been engineered by those who feel protracted partisanship is in their interest. But regardless of its origins, this divisiveness has now spun out of control in such a way that it is damaging the underlying cohesiveness of our country. And it is becoming increasingly clear that a growing segment of American society is looking for a way out.
Whence the Conflict Resolution Field?
If we are living in a time of extreme social conflict, it only makes sense that those of us in the conflict resolution field should be front and center. We are a field with expertise in working with conflict and helping to resolve protracted disagreements, so our phones should be ringing off the hook as politicians, civic leaders and the media attempt to find answers to our nation’s social challenges. Now is our time to lead.
Unfortunately, as we all know, that’s not happening. As Bernie Mayer wrote in his seminal and important book Beyond Neutrality, we are largely being left out of those conversations. As he puts it, “Conflict resolution professionals are not significantly involved in the major conflicts of our times… {there is an} almost total absence of members of our profession from any public discussion of these {contentious social} issues. There seems to be a nonstop series of discussions, commentaries, panels, interviews and debates in the media about these topics. Diplomats, politicians, journalists, military experts, area experts, political analysts, pollsters, legal experts, and an assortment of other media favorites are repeatedly consulted, but not a conflict resolution practitioner is in sight in these discussions...” (Mayer, Bernie, “Resistance to Conflict Resolution,” Beyond Neutrality (Jossey-Bass, 2004), p. 4).
Why aren’t we part of these conversations? Well, in large part, it is by choice. Too often many of us in the conflict resolution field have eschewed getting involved in political conflicts. We have built a very cozy field for ourselves, where we talk to each other and cite each other’s publications, but we do not feel the need to engage in broader social debates. With some significant exceptions (such as the groundbreaking Public Conversations Project) we have become something of a cloistered order, with our own language and cherished practices, unwilling to take on social controversies that could disrupt our practice. The difficult truth may be that many, if not most, of the people drawn to our field are fundamentally conflict avoiders, and the prospect of engaging some of these difficult and divisive subjects is quite threatening. It is much easier to stay focused on individual and personalized conflicts, where there is a clearer delineation between the disputants and the third party, and a much more easily navigable power dynamic.
Increasingly, however, our field is being defined by the conflicts we are avoiding. The partisanship that is spreading throughout society represents a defining challenge for all of us working in conflict resolution. We are a young field, at a very vulnerable stage of our development. We have long asserted that we offer a perspective on conflict that transcends the narrow interest-based, distributive, me versus you, good versus evil orientation, but now we as a field are being categorized into just that type of simplistic framework. I believe that how we respond to this challenge will be a defining act at a crucial juncture in our development.
Our Challenge: Non-Partisanship vs. Choosing Sides
Those of us in the conflict resolution field like to think of our work as apolitical. Trying to keep dialogue constructive, trying to help disputants work toward mutually acceptable solutions – these tasks don't seem readily categorized as liberal or conservative. In fact, we devote an inordinate amount of effort to the concepts of "neutrality" and "impartiality" in the work that we do. We believe that if disputants don't trust us to be impartial, we have no legitimacy to offer to assist them in their attempts to find a resolution.
There was a time when conflict resolution was supported by "both sides of the aisle". Conflict resolution rose in prominence in the federal sector during the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when it was praised as a way to improve the efficiency of agencies and society as a whole. Al Gore made the promotion of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) a core tenet of his Reinventing Government initiative. On the other side, Dan Quayle made several speeches praising ADR during the first Bush administration. That non-partisan perspective on the work that we do coincided with a rapid growth in the ADR field.
I do not believe that conflict resolution is synonymous with “liberal” politics and anathema to “conservative” politics. The stereotype that dispute resolution is all about singing "kumbaya" and hugging is inaccurate, and in fact quite destructive to the objectives of our field. The spectrum of conflict resolution can stretch from softer, therapeutic approaches to more hard-edged, interest-based, ruthlessly strategic processes. The practice of conflict resolution transcends any individual political persuasion or allegiance. Individuals with “liberal” worldviews can be drawn into conflict resolution by their values, but so can individuals with “conservative” worldviews. Our field must be big enough for both paradigms and it must transcend narrow political labels.
When federal mediators attempt to negotiate a settlement to a two-week-old longshoreman work stoppage, where bad blood between labor and management is a given, there's no kumbaya being sung. But that is definitely conflict resolution. When hostages are taken in a standoff with law enforcement, and a professional crisis negotiator is brought in to end the situation without innocent blood being shed, there are no hugs waiting at the end of the negotiation. But that is also unquestionably conflict resolution.
Conflict resolution happens every day, in the halls of Congress, in corporate boardrooms, even on the battlefield. King and Gandhi, the heroes of non-violence, were conflict resolvers, but so were Eisenhower and Lao Tzu. I'd wager that most police officers and soldiers hold more of a conflict management perspective the more time they spend on their job. They must be welcomed into our field in the same way we welcome social workers and therapists. For example, it must be acknowledged that in some situations war is a legitimate and necessary form of conflict resolution, whether or not we personally agree with it or not. Any absolute rejection of that contention serves to marginalize our field by demonstrating how out of touch with reality we are and to alienate those who see its validity.
What Is the “Conflict Resolution Agenda”?
Perhaps as a result of the need in our modern political climate to sort everything into liberal or conservative buckets, or perhaps because this is a time of war, the conflict resolution field itself is increasingly being pigeonholed and stereotyped. There is now more talk about the "pacifist agenda" and the threat it offers the “American Spirit.” Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin criticized peer mediation by asserting that “…beneath all the fuzzy-wuzzy, touchy-feely jargon is a clear pacifist agenda” (Kansas City Star, 7/1/05). Her column read, in part: "The left-wing Kumbaya crowd is quietly grooming a generation of pushovers in the public schools. At a time of war, when young Americans should be educated about this nation's resilience and steely resolve, educators are indoctrinating students with saccharine-sticky lessons on ‘non-violent conflict resolution" and "promoting constructive dialogues.’ Peaceniks are covering our kids from head to toe in emotional bubble wrap. They are creating a nation of namby-pambies."
While this description is definitely over the top (and as such, it serves as another example of our fragmented national dialogue) the underlying sentiment it represents is not difficult to find throughout our society. Through this lens, conflict resolution is viewed as an attempt to inculcate vulnerability and moral relativism into individuals so that they will no longer have the strength of conviction or moral fiber required to fight for what's right. Though this portrayal of conflict resolution is cartoonish and simplistic, it is not uncommon among many Americans.
There is much to be learned from the critics of our field. In even the harshest criticism, there almost always exists a grain of truth. Our challenge is to embrace the constructive components of these criticisms and to push our field onward, while staying true to our core values. I believe that how we respond to these challenges will be a defining moment.
What Should We Do as a Field?
One of the first lessons I learned in conflict resolution was that in a protracted conflict, odds are, both sides are “right.” No one party or perspective has a monopoly on truth. While people may want reality to be as simple as “good vs. evil,” reality is almost never that clear cut. We should continue to articulate this more nuanced perspective, and test statements that may be cognitively appealing but are divorced from the more complex reality. As an extension of that responsibility, we must resist the temptation to “pick a side” as a field, because that highlights our own inability to walk the walk.
Those of us who work with conflict know that people can fight for a long time without getting any closer to resolution. Fighting in and of itself is not progress. In fact, some fighting may pull participants further away from a solution. That seems to be what's happening in our social dialogue right now; aggressive debate is being mistaken for progress, when in fact it is moving us farther away from solutions. We must work to reframe the issues and statements being expressed in this debate to aid effective communication between people of different perspectives, so as to move our national dialogues toward solutions.