Conflict Management

Conflict management is a diverse and growing field. Over the past 30 years, it has evolved out of a mostly activist-oriented peace and justice focus to become a more politically ‘neutral’ or ‘multi-partial’ amalgamation of theories, practices and interdisciplinary studies. There are now hundreds of peace and conflict studies programmes in the US and throughout the world, including graduate studies programmes leading to the new profession of conflict management or resolution. Work is found in areas such as mediation, coaching, management consulting, human resource management, community relations, law-based alternative dispute resolution, international development and diplomacy and research and teaching.

The ‘field’ is as diverse as the many names used to describe it. The differences in terms frame differences in the ways conflicts are understood and addressed. Perhaps the most differentiating feature is the extent of third party control over a conflict engagement process. All forms of dispute resolution, or third-party-supported conflict engagement, share a basic commitment to disputants' empowerment when it comes to the content and outcomes of conflict processing. The extent to which third parties guide and control the process, however, is one marker of difference between different approaches. Three primary approaches, among others, are described below.

Conflict management is functional and managerial in focus. Problems are viewed as based in competing interests, over which disputants may be assisted by a third party to find common ground, and ideally generate outcomes that foster ‘mutual gains'. Conflict resolution, alternatively, focuses more on threatened or frustrated human needs and is organized around an effort to identify the sources of such problems and how they may be solved. In conflict resolution efforts, parties are brought together by third parties who assist them in defining their own problems in inclusive ways and in finding their own both/and solutions to previously us/them problems. Next along a continuum to an even more ‘client-centred’ approach, there is conflict transformation, in which confrontation between people is seen as a product of disempowerment and injustice, mostly for the weaker side, but for the stronger as well, in which, for example, men may be caught in cycles of oppression themselves when engaging in socially conditioned sexist behaviour. A way to summarize these three general ‘baskets' into which the field may generally ‘fit’ are interests (management), needs (resolution) and values (transformation).

These baskets (and others) can be called ‘conflict engagement’, suggesting an inclusive, contingency-based formulation intended in part to transcend a battle of methods and instead suggest that different approaches are needed for addressing different types and levels of conflicts at different times.