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Conflict

The word conflict, in its capacities both as a noun and as a verb, is pressed into service ubiquitously in the world of human affairs. The conditions and dynamics of conflict attract scholarly attention from the humanities; the social, behavioral, and military sciences; the performing arts; and the fine arts. These collections of academic disciplines intersect where individual and collective bodies of identities and forces (persons, families, groups, communities, organizations, institutions, and nation-states) clash and compete for resources (anything of value). This entry provides an overview of conflict, characterizes its most prominent models, describes the models’ core concepts, sketches a critique of those models, and provides a brief overview of the development of an emerging theoretical orientation.

Overview

Conflict takes place in a world of positioned identities and interested differences that shape the values of resources. That which is of value is desirable, and that which is desirable is in demand, that is, scarce by definition. Demand breeds competition, which, under certain conditions, results in conflict. The relations between competition and conflict are variable; they are intimately related in several important respects, but the two are not isomorphic. Conflict is understood conventionally as intense competition for valuable resources in a world of scarcity and demand. Desire and value are driven by variable interests and represented by positioned identities.

Developing alongside the study of conflict has been the study of how best to manage it rather than to exacerbate it. A variety of academic disciplines investigate forms of communication, such as dialogue, diplomacy, negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and litigation, as methods for dealing constructively with conflict on different scales of analysis. Other disciplines focus on ways of intervening in resistance, revolution, war, and terrorism when conflict escalates. Which methods are to be used and under what conditions depends on the particular ways conflict is theorized.

Models of Conflict

Given the immanence of conflict in daily life, it is not surprising that conflict is explained so many different ways. Most, but certainly not all, of these explanations depict conflict in negative terms, as a failure, a problem, or a threat of some sort. For example, conflict is understood as a failure of rationality that causes problems that threaten civilized forms of life. Or the problems may stem from a failure of social organization in ways that threaten basic human needs. Or the failure of government institutions may threaten the basic human rights of its citizenry. Or the moral integrity of a culture or nation-state may fail, causing problems that threaten identity itself. These depictions of the causes of conflict share certain assumptions about processes and properties of conflict even though they focus on quite different manifestations of conflict. Four of the more prominent ways of understanding conflict are discussed in this section.

Rationality Models

In keeping with long-standing Enlightenment values and principles, conflict often is assumed to be a failure of economic, scientific, or legal rationality, resulting in a loss of rationality to irrationality, a loss of objectivity to subjectivity, a loss of emotional control, and a loss of logic to desire. The resource assumed to be scarce here is the resource of rationality itself. Proponents of rationality models assume that even though appeals to rationality may not work to avoid conflict altogether, approximations of rationality, objectivity, control, and logic can contain or minimize, if not resolve, conflict in ways that produce the most civilized, balanced, and progressive solutions possible.

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