From Explanation to Understanding: Toward a Critical Hermeneutic Reconstruction of Conflict Resolution Theory

This dissertation explores the evolution of the self-understanding of the field of conflict resolution as an interdisciplinary and applied social science. To this end, the historical development of the field is reconstructed as distinct stages beginning with the inception of the field in the mid 1950s, followed by a transitional period in which three different schools of conflict resolution emerge, and ending with the cultural critique of human needs theory in the mid 1980s and early 1990s.

In tracing the development of the self-understanding of the field through these different stages, it is argued that the field's goal of integrating its component disciplines into an epistemological unity of pluralities comes up against theoretical and practical limiting conditions that cannot be resolved within the explanatory framework of the positive sciences. Although scholars in conflict resolution have been cognizant of these problems from its inception, their commitment to philosophical objectivism and their privileging of explanation over understanding has prevented the field from engaging in the kind of critical self-reflection that would be required to effectively address these problems. In recent years, proponents of a fourth stage in the field's development have begun to embrace alternative, non-positivist modes of social inquiry such as critical theory and philosophical hermeneutics.

However, while much of this work reflects a commitment to understanding that is not treated simply as preparatory to scientific explanation, it nevertheless employs a universalizing mode of reason that is not sufficiently divorced from the philosophical objectivism of the earlier stages. It is suggested in this dissertation that embedding a critical hermeneutic framework in the context of a more robust commitment to relativism than that which currently exists in the field, such as the conception of critical hermeneutics developed by Hans Herbert Kogler, may better position the field to advance its normative commitment to nonviolent and just solutions to deep rooted social conflicts.