Histories of Violence

Our professor, from our vantage point in 2020, asks us to think about what conflict resolution (CR) has looked like over the past century.

It hasn't been a boring century, and by studying history we can see certain patterns repeat themselves. But while traditional history places a great emphasis on war, we'll be talking about peace over the next three months – or at least conflict resolution.

There are many definitions of conflict, but in this class our professor frames conflict as an "apparently unsolvable dispute with a hostile dimension." This is different than the definition we use in the other courses, which are heavily influenced by Johan Galtung and other major thinkers in the field of peace and conflict studies. This professor isn't a fan of Galtung's theoretical assumptions.

But like the frameworks in other programs this term (particularly Theories of Conflict), we will look at conflict on several levels: local, national and international. We will also be analyzing both negative and positive aspects of conflict and peace.

You can look at conflict through a range of different themes and lenses, and we'll be using some of these:

Our professor describes CR as having four major facets. Conflict prevention seeks to halt tensions from erupting into violence. Conflict management focuses on reducing the destructiveness of conflicts, with or without actually halting them. Conflict resolution seeks to find win-win situations that address the core of the issue. Conflict transformation attempts to shift the cultures, institutions, social norms and other dimentions that produce conflict so that it does not repeat in the future.

And there are a number of strategies that people use to achieve these outcomes.

First there are disappearance strategies, where the conflict seems to go away through voluntary (extinction, renunciation) or involuntary (forgetfulness, evaporation) mechanisms. Domination strategies also fit into two categories, imposition (allocation, adjudication) and submission (surrender, deterrence). Then there are agreement strategies: by trial (contest, lottery) or by deliberation (negotiation, mediation).

But discussing histories of conflict and its resolution is about more than facts, dates and strategies – much comes down to the nature of how we view history itself. History is written by victors, and so recovering the voice of different sides can challenge our interpretation of the facts. So we always deal with issues of truth and validity, or problems of interpretation or anachronisms, when looking at contentious history. And the history of conflict is certainly that.