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).

Conflict: Situations

This chapter presents an interesting argument that the situational context has a much larger affect on negotiations than personality traits. The situational context can include the social/ political system that you are working in, time constraints, external events, how the issues are framed, where the negotiation occurs (public? media?), and the negotiators’ positions within their group. The author goes on to provide a lot of evidence about this idea that the situation is more important than the psychodynamics. A lot of the criticism of the personality theory involves the inadequacy of personality tests/assessments; these tests do not allow for flexibility of location (i.e. perhaps you are more outgoing at a party than at work, or maybe deciding whether or not you want to go to a party depends on a lot of other factors, not just are you outgoing or not). There needs to be a way to assess behavior within and between situations.


Another major point the author makes is about attribution theory; he says that people over attribute behavior to personality traits rather than taking a step back and thinking about situational influences; this may lead to a conflict spiral by misinterpreting an action and reciprocating in a negative way. Behaviors need to be considered in terms of what role the person is playing, what the organization is like, and how they are defining the situation.


I had a few different thoughts about this chapter. The first was, I felt like some of the situational factors they listed could highly be affected by a personality. For example, if there is a strict time constraint, different people will react differently; some people are more productive working under pressure, and others might feel so pressured to make an agreement that they do not come to the best solution possible. I think that the general size of a negotiation can play a big role in the situation vs. personality debate. If the negotiation is big and people are representing large groups, chances are that the negotiators have been trained in how the organization wants the issues framed, what they will settle for, etc. If it is a negotiation on a smaller scale, for example a community conflict or even mediation, I think that personality will come into play a lot more. If people are not specifically representing a large group, I would imagine that it is harder to separate the conflict from your personal self, and thus personalities would affect the path of the negotiations. All in all, I think that there is an overlap between the situational vs. personality factors, and I think that the size of the negotiation and how distanced the negotiators are from the central conflict can draw out personality factors more than the author acknowledged.

Conflict: Dynamics

This chapter mainly talks about how conflicts can evolve and change over time. The authors introduce several conflict models that include stages like escalation. There are also many models that talk about the tactics of a party, such as how if one party perceives the other as aggressive or deceptive, they might defend themselves by being equally deceptive. The conflict spiral notes that it is not just one party that causes the conflict to go downwards into deception/mistrust; both sides can cause this. I found Jervis' piece about how you need to consider psychological limitations when coming up with models of how the parties interact. By this he means that a party only knows there intentions and motives; they can only infer the other parties' intentions. If they have a negative view of the other party, they will most likely interpret their actions as aggressive. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of schema and how your mind will remember certain people, events, and procedures; they can influence your perception of a situation and perhaps distort your memory. The outcome and your feelings about an outcome can distort your memory of the event. It is good for an intervener to have this in mind because it can help them move a party away from worst-case thinking, and challenging schema.

Conflict: Sources

This chapter focuses on how conflict can come about. Conflict can be caused by personal or situational aspects. Three major situation aspects are socioeconomic transformation, political transformations, and cultural transformation. The socioeconomic transformation would involve something like the switch from horticulture to agricultural societies; the means of production are changed, so peoples' roles are changed and class conflict can emerge. The modernization of production, like factories emerging caused a population transfer to cities and a class difference between the haves and have nots. Political transformation has more to do with reorganization of power and new opportunities for minorities. This can create conflict between minorities because they are competing for these new identities. A large source of cultural transformations have to do with modernization and technology. The material culture is changing before the non-material culture and there can be inner turmoil about these changes.

Once you realize why the conflict is happening, you can more from analysis to resolution. There are two main theories on how to approach this: relative deprivation and basic human needs. The relative deprivation deals with the frustration that occurs when people are not getting what they perceive they should be getting or achieving. This can have to do with where you are living/what you are doing in life. For example, an American might get in a conflict about a promotion they they did not get, but thought they deserved; the would feel relatively deprived in their reality with what they imagined for themselves. A person from a third world country would not feel deprived if they had a job but just did not get a promotion. The basic human needs theorists would counter that most conflicts can be analyzed based on the needs for identity, recognition, and security. They would analyze the job scenario by saying that the worker was having trouble being recognized for his hard work or maybe not getting the promotion hurt his job security and thus the security for getting food/clothes/housing/etc. Human need theorists focus on the fact that these needs are universal and non-negotiable, while relative deprivation theorists focus on the frustration on not getting what one 'deserves.'

C&K Chapter 5: designing strategy

The overwhelming thing I learned from this chapter is that a negotiator or intervener must be highly skilled in multitasking and keeping organized. There were so many little details about how to make the process reach its highest potential. I would feel so pressured if I had to make a lot of the decisions by myself, such as who would participate and when they would find out. The authors talk about a lot of the different roles that interveners can take on; it just seems stressful to manage that many negotiators and that many disputants. Reading this chapter really made me realize that I would not be happy in working in any type of large-scale negotiations; I like the mediation type set-up where there are usually only two disputants and two mediators, which is a nice ratio. I just felt that there were so many little details involved in these larger scale negotiations, like creating packets of information to give related interest groups who might not be at the table, or figuring out the news or funding. It is just very complex.

One thing that I was curious about while reading this chapter was the idea of problem-solving workshops. The authors described these by saying that it is a public meeting that people can come to to try and work out a solution to a problem. I’m confused because it is not clear if these workshops are to solve the current problem that needs intervention, or if this is just a general workshop where the public is giving related problems or scenarios just to practice team-work/brainstorming/negotiating your side. If it is the real problem that needs intervention and it is open to the public, doesn’t that discount all the work doing interviews and deciding who should come to the table? I guess I am just a little confused about how this relates to the formal negotiation settings.

All in all I thought this chapter clearly showed how complex a negotiation can be.

Defining Issues/Setting Agenda: The Mediation Process

This chapter from the Mediation book is all about defining the issues that will be covered in a mediation and setting the agenda (i.e. procedural process to coming up with solutions and the order/way in which the issues will be looked at). The author breaks the issues down into interest and value based conflicts. Most times values cannot be negotiated, so the mediator needs to be skilled in reframing value statements into issue statements. The mediator(s) must be careful about neutrality while doing this. The first level of reframing, detoxification, involves making a statement the party said sound more neutral; I believe this would work best in a caucus or shuttle intervention. If both parties are at the table and one party is saying (as per the example in the chapter) “That fat slob hasn’t paid his rent money for the past two months,” since both parties are at the table, and the ‘fat slob’ can hear the comment, I believe that in addition to reframing what party one has said, the mediator needs to remind the parties of the rules of conduct/politeness. If they don’t, they won’t appear as neutral to the second party.

The other main topic of the chapter, besides the issues, was how to set the agenda. The author gives several examples of types of agenda. You can look at the issues linearly, do the easier items first, alternate issues, do building blocks, and a principled agenda. To me, as a mediator, it does not make sense to separate all of the issues and solve them one at a time because I think that most issues around a conflict will be interlocked, and it is hard to negotiate one without the other. Also, I agree with the ‘trade-offs’ agenda; I think that if I were a party I would not want to be resolving the issues separately in fear that I might lose my leverage and negotiating power when it came to an issue that I really felt strongly about; I would not want to resolve anything before whatever the most important issue to me was. I suppose as a mediator, I would have to learn to adapt if the parties really wanted to solve things linearly or separately. The author touches on this in his psychology department example; you may think you know the best way to attack the issues, but you have to feel out the culture and norms of the group you are working with.

Cultivating Peace: A Practitioner's View of Deadly Conflict and Negotiation

This article was a response to the Zartman article about ripeness. Lederarch's main point is that ripeness is not necessarily the best indicator of the prime time to intervene. He points out that you can really only pick the ripe moment out in retrospect. Another main point of Lederarch's was that ripeness can mainly be picked out by on objective third party. In fact if you see that the situation is 'ripe' as a third party and try and intervene and negotiate, if the parties are not ready, it can escalate the conflict. I think that what Lederarch failed to recognize in the Zartman article was the idea of the way out (WO). Zartman meant that the parties need to perceive the idea that they need the other party to get themselves out of the conflict (i.e. the stalemate is draining the economy and the cost of human lives is too high). The idea of the WO is basically one of the things that Lederarch said was missing from the ripeness idea. I also found the Zartman article a little easier to understand because of the lack of excessive metaphors; I found them hard to wade through in the Lederarch article. Other than that, I think they both had good points. Lederarch especially was perceptive in pointing out that it is hard to see the ripe moment in the present and that sometimes the right moment or thing to say can be purely coincidental.