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Creativity and Conflict Resolution: Alternative Pathways to Peace (Routledge: London, 2009) This book explores how creative ways of resolving social conflicts emerge, evolve, and subsequently come to be accepted or rejected in inter-group relations. Creativity and Conflict Resolution explores a subject with which political communities involved in social conflict have always grappled: creative ways of imagining and actualizing visions of conflict resolution. This is an ambitious question that concerns human communities at many different levels -- from families, to regional independence movements, national governments, and inter-state alliances. The author argues that unconventional viability lies at the heart of creativity for transcending seemingly intractable inter-communal conflicts. More specifically, conflict resolution creativity is a social and epistemological process, whereby actors involved in a given social conflict learn to formulate an unconventional resolution option or procedure, and a growing number of others gradually come to recognize it as acceptable and workable. Demystifying the origin of unthinkable breakthroughs for conflict resolution and illuminating theories of creativity based on seventeen case studies from around the world, this book will be of much interest to policymakers, civil society leaders, scholars, and students in such fields as conflict resolution, peace building, human security, public policy, and international affairs.
Case studies discussed in the book include, but are not limited to: • The Oslo Peace Process: Stretching the Envelope to Its Utmost • The Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Conflict: Philosophical Creativity • Estonian-Russian Psychoanalytic Dialogue: Activating Symbols Constructively • The Cyprus Conflict: Sustained Commitment to Bicommunal Peace • The Helsinki Process: Tapping the Potential of a Small Neutral State • The Peru-Ecuador Border Dispute: Transcendence with a Quantum Jump • The Origin of Gandhian Nonviolence in South Africa: Moral Imagination Born out of Pragmatism
