Why are my peers becoming increasingly more focused on solving conflicts internationally and less interested in solving domestic conflicts? Despite the many attempts I’ve made to expel this question from my mind, it has persistently followed me throughout the years that I have been active in the field. I began my journey as a conflict analysis and resolution (CAR) student and practitioner in 2006 as an undergraduate student in Peace and Justice Studies, a major that “combines the social scientific analysis of conflict with the study of strategies for promoting peace and justice."1
This provided me with a comprehensive understanding not only of conflict, but also of concepts such as peace, justice, and fairness. Students are expected to think critically and personally about how we conceptualize right and wrong and the roles that we can and do play in either perpetuating or stopping conflict. Although students are encouraged to concentrate on a particular type of conflict, they are not expected to make a choice between studying domestic or international conflicts, which in my view may be a dangerous choice that many post-graduate conflict resolution education programs ask their students to make.
Nearly every post-graduate CAR degree in the United States makes a statement about how students can apply the knowledge and skills they gain from the program in either domestic or international settings. While the international programs discuss topics such as ethnic tensions, civil society, reconciliation, and culture, domestic concentrations focus on management, arbitration, and organizational or interpersonal conflicts.
This inconsistency is worrisome because it has given me the impression that students are studying CAR and assuming that: 1) there are only organizational and interpersonal domestic conflicts and no domestic social conflicts worth learning; 2) domestic conflicts that are worth learning about are too difficult to solve; and 3) violent conflicts abroad are easy to solve, as long as we teach them the American way of doing things. What sets CAR apart from other fields is its understanding that the way conflict manifests itself within a nation differs from the way that conflict manifests itself between nations. Although this distinction produced many of the foundational theories for our field, most of the conflict today occurs within states, not between them.
The desire to do good is not enough to actually do good and students can better understand what it takes to accomplish peaceful change by recognizing the need and working for it in their own lives. There is great risk in entering into unfamiliar contexts where the stakes of the CAR intervener are low but the stakes of the conflicting parties are high and assuming that an academic overview of the situation will provide the intervener with enough information to positively and sustainably influence the situation. CAR students should be encouraged to examine domestic examples of direct, structural, and cultural violence so that CAR becomes something that we all engage in, not just something that we teach people to do elsewhere. Many of the concepts that I have learned since entering the CAR field have been particularly eye opening once I considered them in the context of what I had always (and often incorrectly) assumed to be correct and indisputable norms. For example, Johan Galtung defines cultural violence as that which any given society uses to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.2 After being introduced to this theory, I felt that in order to determine whether or not I understood it or believed it to be true, I needed to determine the extent to which forms of direct and structural violence existed in my own culture.
Although I initially was reluctant to change the ways in which I thought about my world, I overcame that reluctance once I realized the hypocrisy inherent in me asking others to do that which I cannot bear to. In the United States, pointing out examples of discrimination is often met with resistance because accepting these claims means recognizing the negative aspects of American culture. However challenging it was to do, accepting the fact that many Americans are at a systematic disadvantage and do not have the same access to opportunity, success, and self-determination as others simply because of their identity refueled my conviction to put an end to such inequality and renewed my passion for conflict resolution.
The process of reassessing one’s own cultural norms and traditions is not easy or comfortable; it is painfully difficult and many people go their entire lives without doing so. But if we are to be a field that claims to be about the “in-depth analysis of human behavior,” examining “the sources of discontent and animosity,” and “identifying the phases of evolving relationships between adversaries” then we must own up to doing these things in our own lives and own up to our uncomfortable truths. Conflict resolution students and practitioners must not believe that things in their home cultures are the way they are because that’s the way they should be. Passively and uncritically accepting one’s own norms as true while seeking to change the norms of others is a type of willful ignorance and cultural superiority that must be vehemently resisted.
As the CAR field moves forward, it will be important to ensure that students gain a deeper understanding of the complexity, history, and socio-cultural contexts of whatever conflicts they choose to study. Familiarity is not synonymous with expertise, but it is healthy for conflict resolution students and practitioners to consider the extent to which physical, structural, and cultural violence surrounds them every day and reflect upon how one might go about ending it. By spending more time learning about and analyzing conflicts related to race, class, gender, political affiliation, and religion in one’s state, students of conflict resolution can strengthen their analytical and problem-solving skills, be more prepared to transfer those skills into other settings, and be better prepared to compare and contrast their own intrastate conflict resolution processes and outcomes around the world.
Although I have expressed concerns that the internationalization of conflict resolution might result in the oversimplification of conflict abroad and the neglect of conflict at home, I recognize that our ability to interact with, learn from, and help people around the world is greater now than it has ever been. We must use this newfound access to not only teach each other, but to learn from one another. Conflict resolution should not only be understood in an abstract global context, but it should also be understood at the personal level in order to be useful. The future success of our field ultimately relies upon our ability to recognize injustice and combine our diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and skill sets to create a more just and peaceful world. CAR students and practitioners should not seek to exclusively work on domestic or international conflicts; they should instead grasp opportunities to make positive change wherever they can.3