Intractable Conflicts

This article focuses on the five different paradigms for handling intractable conflicts. Intractable conflicts are destructive conflicts that persist for long periods of time and no attempts at resolving them have worked. Intractable conflicts are known for their persistence, destructiveness, and resistance to resolution. All intractable conflicts share a sense of context, core issues, relations, processes, and outcomes. The context of intractable conflicts includes power imbalances and can have roots in racism, colonialism, sexism, and/or human rights abuses. The issues of intractable conflicts usually tend to have a depth of meaning which makes them difficult to be resolved in the traditional sense. The relationship between the parties can often be isolated (little positive interaction between the parties), and sometimes the groups have oppositional group identities. The process has a strong emotional core were rage and righteousness come to the surface. The process usually has to involve over coming stereotypes. The outcome of intractable conflicts often includes a prolonged trauma and loss of trust in the world for the lower power party.

There are five different ways to approach intractable conflict. The realist paradigm focuses on the need for aggression in these conflicts because the conflict is about domination and control; humans are always flawed and strong actions are necessary to be in control of the situation. The Human Relations Paradigm says that people have the capacity for good as well as evil and the external conditions they are exposed to affect their actions. Change can only be brought about by including all aspects of the communities with integrative negotiation and antibias education. The Medical Paradigm views these intractable social conflicts as pathological diseases that need to be contained before they spread. This paradigm focuses on preventative diplomacy. The Postmodern Paradigm focuses on how different people “make sense of the world.” Change is brought about by bringing the assumptions about what is ‘right’ into the negotiations; negotiation would be at the intragroup level and about oppositional identities. The last paradigm, the Systems Paradigm is about is simple cell and its environment. A lot of elements in the environment are interdependent and have complex relationships. Each destructive pattern affects all the elements, and thus conflicts have many different hostile elements and complex layers.

The article ends with 8 guidelines of intervention that are helpful, but I think the most important and helpful part of this article is understanding what intractable conflicts are and the ways to approach understanding them.