Conflict: Institutions

The main purpose of this chapter was to talk about how conflict is dealt with at an institutional level. By institutional level, the author means a court system, a group of elders, etc; it just means whatever the tradition in your society is to handle conflicts. There are many things that can affect the legitimacy and therefore the power of the institution. In accordance with Weber, there are three main types of authority: traditional (i.e. royalty being authority, following norms, clear guidelines of who to go to), charismatic, and rational-legal. Charismatic leaders come into play usually when there is discontent with the current social institution; if somebody is able to unify and motivate groups of people, people can look to them as having more authority than the traditional source of authority. This can only last as long as that charisma leader, so it is necessary to routinize the charisma into law. Most modern systems are rational-legal where there is a clear authority (president/prime minister/etc) and a clear path that conflicts get resolved in (the law/courts/etc). There are many factors that unite legal authorities across societies dealing with the fact that there are positive and negative sanctions, specialized people enact and interpret the laws, and there are alternative routes if the courts do not work. This is where the conflict interveners would come in, through these ADRs.

Legal systems need to be viewed as legitimate in order to be effective in enforcing rules/norms/laws. Legal systems can lose its legitimacy in several different ways. Two examples would be if legal systems are not perceived as providing procedural and substantive justice, or if they escalate conflict because they are not equipped to deal with deep-rooted dissension conflicts. Conflict within a legal system is substantially harder if there is not a normative consensus; this would mean that people were not satisfied with the current legal institution, and part of the negotiation would involve how to create legitimate authority again.

I thought this chapter was pretty interesting because it showed how legal institutions can help escalate and de-escalate conflict. It is important that the social institution that enforces the norms be consistent with the actual norms of the society (i.e. some laws people don’t necessarily follow anymore because they are antiquated).