The Nature of Intractable Conflict

Before embarking on a work that seeks to answer some questions about why and how human societies engage in protracted, violent and “intractable” conflicts, and what might be done about it, it really behoves an author to pause and consider a question — or a set of questions — that might render the whole exercise pretty pointless. After all, if — as some authors have implied or openly argued (for example, Ardrey, 1961; Morris, 1967; Buss, 2005) — the answers lie buried in “human nature”, in the fact that human beings are naturally or biologically programmed to be aggressive, to utilize violence, to organize so as to be able to kill large numbers of their fellow beings, to be compelled by their “nature” to engage in violence and destruction, then the analysis of conflict becomes relatively straightforward. It can focus on the nature of aggressive “drives”, on chemical processes within the brain, on the role of testosterone in fomenting wars, and on intra-personal tensions that lead to confrontations and conflict. Within this “natural born killers” framework, coping strategies logically take the form of therapy, behaviour modification including channelling of aggression, incarceration of the most violently aggressive, the pacifying use of drugs and, ultimately, the manifest forms of deterrence.

In Chapter 2 I dealt, in a preliminary way, with two of four fundamental questions that really have to be answered at the start of any effort to understand some aspect of the social world — in our case the analysis of conflicts, particularly destructive and intractable conflicts. Like every other systematic study, this has to begin by stating clearly two things. First, what is a conflict — or, rather, what observable phenomena shall we agree to call “conflicts” as opposed to things we determine we won’t? This inevitably leads on to discussing, in a somewhat tentative fashion, a second question focused on conflict formation: Where do conflicts come from — or what do we think brings them into being? In other words, the first steps have to do with ideas about conflict definition and conflict formation, and in this respect studying conflict is no different from studying inflation, economic “development”, social status, cooperation, gravity, smallpox, swine fever or schizophrenia.

In the previous chapter I discussed the whole matter of classifying the various types of conflict that would be encountered in a study of CAR, with some attention being paid to the various kinds of “intractable” conflict that had been waged in the past and which were continuing to afflict the world of the early twenty-first century. Summarizing the argument so far, I found that social conflicts could be “intractable” in a number of ways and for a variety of reasons. An “intractable” conflict could

One relatively recent development in thinking about processes for “coping” with conflicts has been a renewed interest in the idea of conflict prevention, linked at the international level to the practice of preventive diplomacy.¹ Both of these conceptions arise from the basic, but not particularly startling, idea that it would be easier — and better — for societies not to have to undergo the worst aspects of violent and protracted conflicts if remedies could be found for them early on, well before dynamic processes have escalated into violent behaviour, attitudes and positions have hardened, feelings of hostility have become entrenched and mistrust has deepened. Once goals have changed to include either deriving compensation for losses already sustained or punishing the adversary for past “crimes” and aggressions, then a conflict has truly become intractable.

Disciplines or fields of study — whichever description best applies to CAR — can grow in a number of different ways. One of these is a process by which, as the world itself changes, new problems are encountered, calling for new explanations and new solutions — the dynamics of state collapse, the spread of nuclear weapons or the rise of transnational terrorism. Another is through the formulation and testing of new theories to explain old puzzles — prospect theory or entrapment theory to help to explain the difficulties of de-escalating an intractable conflict. A third involves a recognition of the failure of existing theories in satisfactorily explaining contemporary events or processes — the inadequacy of traditional power theories to explain the successful resistance of an ostensibly weak Vietnamese nationalist movement against the apparently overwhelming coercive capacity of the United States.

At the conclusion of the last chapter, I emphasized that the most immediate impression one gains from reviewing the range of conflict-mitigation practices is the sheer variety of activities that come under the heading of “mitigation”. However, anyone not put off by the heterogeneous nature of all of these activities will notice that there is, indeed, a common thread running through all of them, from efforts to establish spaces, times and categories of people that are free from violence, to day-to-day action to bring relief supplies to civilians in warzones. To reiterate, all are intended to place some limits on what parties in even the most intractable conflicts can do as a result of being in a relationship of conflict.

At first sight it may seem bizarre to be comparing examples of rule sets as a means of limiting conflicts in societies as distant in time and space as medieval Iceland, twentieth-century West Africa and contemporary China or Turkey. The rules and limitations themselves and the societies which developed them all seem wholly different from one another and surely incomparable. However, I would argue that there are some similarities between, for example, Iceland in its immediate post-settlement, “heroic” era and contemporary examples of “collapsed (or ineffectual) states”. These can justify a comparison of the efforts of people in those societies to bring some order into their lives. Such efforts aim to limit the destructive effects of conflicts that inevitably arise in situations of scarcity, competition, threats and fear, plus the absence of centralized authority, of any means of impartially determining acceptable outcomes from disputes, and of trustworthy security services. In all of these societies, such absences give rise to — admittedly highly varied — efforts to construct some pragmatic and acceptable “rules of the game” to cope with the existence of an anarchical environment. Just as there was “no law west of the Pecos”, to misquote a saying from the nineteenth-century US frontier, so the absence of an acceptable, formal system of law-making, law interpretation and law application in many societies led frequently to the development of some accepted informal rules, based — perhaps shakily — on pragmatism, consensus and restraint. The existence of such routine or ritualized rule sets as a means of confining otherwise unrestrained combat can be seen as a common feature in pre-state societies, in societies where the reach of the state is tenuous and limited, and in situations where the state has virtually fallen apart.

If one recalls that a feature of legal processes often seems to be the interminable number of appeals against verdicts that carry on the contest to “higher” and “higher” courts, it is reasonable to ask whether conflicts within rules ever genuinely come to an end. The question is also pertinent if one also recalls that many conflicts without any rules at all seem to start up again, many generations after a previous spasm of violence.¹ Old rivalries and enmities seem to be played out by entirely new generations of adversaries, frequently with even greater vehemence and venom than the last time round. In the 1990s, for example, the War of Yugoslav Disintegration seemed simply to be playing out once again inter-ethnic hostilities and violence that had occurred in that part of the Balkans in the 1940s, while the latter were symptoms of long fought-out historic rivalries between Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Slovenians, Muslim Bosniacs and Kosovars.²

Chapter 9 started to consider the whole issue of ending a conflict “once and for all”, but immediately confronted the problem that while particularly violent forms of behaviour could cease, this might do nothing to affect the way in which individuals and communities thought and felt about one another. It might also do less than nothing to influence the issues that gave rise to the conflict in the first place. Moreover, even if adversaries could, indeed, be brought to a state in which they had abandoned strategies of violence and coercion — or even felt reconciled to past antagonisms — and were prepared to coexist with one another, the contradictions and contradictory goals which led to the violent behaviour could remain in place, unresolved and ready to lead back to further antagonisms and future harmful behaviour that would start up the cycle once again.

If we are to complete our discussion of various types of intractable conflict, we cannot stop at the point where our main analysis has been focused on incompatible demands for, or aspirations to achieve, goods that are in limited supply or wholly integrated goods that cannot be divided — fairly or unfairly — among adversaries. In any full exploration of “intractability”, we have finally to cope with situations where the adversaries have either (a) taken up quite contrary positions that only appear to permit a winner and a loser¹ or (b) are aiming for a completely different result, the achievement of which will make it impossible for the adversary to achieve their own favoured outcome. In these cases we seem to face wholly incommensurable goals and maybe a genuinely “zero-sum” situation.

Much recent scholarship in the conflict-resolution field has become focused on the question of what happens, psychologically, when an intractable conflict nears its end and inter-party violence is at least abated. The focus in this analysis is less on how it is possible to end overt conflict and its accompanying violence through some negotiated or mediated agreement, and more on how to ensure that an agreement is kept and previous enemies learn to live together — or at least to tolerate one another. What makes agreements durable, apart from their success in resolving core issues? What can be done to change deep-seated attitudes of resentment, fear, mistrust, anger and hostility to something less damaging? Can one ever change negative and stereotyped images of “the Others” into something more positive that enables at least a basic level of cooperation? Most importantly, how is it possible to achieve reconciliation between former enemies, and what is meant by “reconciliation”?¹

The last three chapters have discussed a variety of ways of trying to deal with a range of issues and emotions which — to me at least — lie at the heart of any conflict’s intractability. I began with the argument that to end a conflict “for good and all” it was necessary to find a solution to the goal incompatibility that was the genesis, the starting point, for difficult, protracted, deep-rooted or intractable conflicts — whatever label one chose to attach to conflicts that proved to be highly resistant to resolution. Two chapters discussed different types of intractability, starting with the possibility that the complex dynamics of adversaries’ behaviour and accompanying attitudinal changes that took place as the conflict protracted — process reasons — were, in themselves, the reason for it becoming increasingly difficult to find some durable and acceptable solution. I then tried to show how the search for solutions in conflicts over scarcities, ostensibly indivisible goods, incommensurable belief systems and even “existences” were not quite as hopeless, at least in theory, as they might often appear.