Welcome to Confrontations, an online portal to timely and pressing discussion and analysis related to the field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution. I am a professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. I received my Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a B.A. in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Chicago. I am a practicing statistician, specializing in psychometric approaches and categorical data analysis, with theoretical interests in ideology, social movements, human needs and political discourse.
I think of Confrontations as both a kind of alternative educational channel and a public forum for the newly emerging Conflict Resolution field. Accordingly, I will allow for more free play in these discussions than I would in scholarly work or even the classroom, and there should be ample opportunity for a wide variety of members of the CAR community to join in and share their views on the most important topics facing the field. The level of discussion should be high and the material may often prove difficult for a general audience, but I hope to keep it interesting for you in the spirit of public intellectualism, while avoiding the pitfalls of public work described by Burton Clark four decades ago.
The temptation is to be clever, even sardonic: The provocative phrase, rather than the truth, will set us free. Thus we are right on one page and wrong on the next and only a few informed people are able to distinguish the one from the other.
Sociology of Education 1973
Solon Simmons