Conflict Resolution

Human conflict is as old and common as human interaction itself. Whenever two or more parties (whether individuals, groups, organizations or nationstates) have a disagreement over ideas, values, beliefs, relationships, or material resources, they may have a conflict, which can ripen into a dispute. Individuals can even have an intrapersonal conflict within themselves (for example, when they hold competing values or make inconsistent choices).

The field of conflict resolution seeks to study and implement different ways of handling and possibly resolving conflict. While some think that all human conflict is potentially destructive or harmful and should, therefore, be controlled or resolved, others think that some forms of conflict may be useful, both for individuals and for social institutions. This functionalist view of conflict sees the possibility of both individual and social change, brought about by conflicts over values, ideas, or resources that alter our thinking, our actions, and how we organize ourselves. Although conflict has produced horrible wars and record-setting deaths in recent human history, some social conflict has led to significant positive social change. This includes the expansion of the right to vote and democracy; civil rights, women's rights, and human rights; community, national and local selfdetermination; labor rights and unions; and environmental justice, to name just a few.

Thus, while the field is most often called conflict resolution or conflict management, others prefer to think of it as conflict analysis, or conflict “handling.” How conflict is perceived, conceived, interpreted, and acted on is itself a variable process, depending on the environments or contexts in which the conflict is situated. Thus, we think of conflict as socially constructed because it is made, interpreted, and resolved by people and can be changed and controlled as cognitive, emotional, material, or social perceptions or conditions themselves change.

Conflict resolution also focuses on preventing conflicts and dealing with intractable or irresolvable conflicts (living with ongoing conflicts), and on ways to encourage reconciliation or facilitate effective implementation of resolution after a conflict is declared over. Thus, as a field of academic study and social practice, conflict resolution looks at the conditions that exist before, during, and after a conflict and considers the perceptions, conceptions, behaviors, and feelings of all the participants in the conflict, not just those that are adverse or hostile to one another, but also those who are potential interveners or conflict resolvers.

Given the ubiquity of human conflict at all levels of human endeavor and the increased levels of destruction that are possible when conflicts escalate in our modern world, it seems true, as the social philosopher Stuart Hampshire has recently opined, that “the skillful management of conflict is among the highest of human skills” (Hampshire 2000, p. 35).