ICAR Then and Now: The Institute Turns 25 Years Old

As the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) celebrates its 25th Anniversary this year, any personal retrospective, which this inevitably is, cannot hope to cover all, or even the most important changes that have taken place. This is especially so since I only joined the faculty in 1988, the first year of the then-new doctoral degree and five years after the initiation of the first teaching program. The year prior, the Center—no longer the Center for Conflict Analysis but renamed the Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (CCAR)—began the steady expansion that led to its present incarnation as an institution with over 20 faculty and over 400 students, with an M.S. and Ph.D. program, with an undergraduate major and three certificate programs, and with headquarters in Arlington.

Looking back, one of the major changes that has taken place in the intervening years has been one of sheer growth. Up until a few years ago it was possible to think of ICAR (the place became an Institute in 1990 while Rich Rubenstein was Director) as a small and fairly tight-knit community, where everybody knew everyone else. Between 1987 and 1990, a number of full-time faculty had been appointed and we were admitting M.S. students on a yearly rather than two-yearly basis, plus 8 or 10 Ph.D. students annually, increasingly from all over the world. However, the place still had a somewhat cosy feel to it, reinforced by the fact that CCAR then occupied rooms in a ramshackle and leaky hut that stood where the Johnson Center now stands on the Fairfax campus, its fifth home in as many years. It shared this scruffy residence with three organizations closely affiliated with CCAR, including Conflict Clinic Inc., a non-profit organization established by Jim Laue and his colleagues at the University of Missouri.

At that time, the Institute was heavily oriented towards practice, although the presence of John Burton made sure that we were aiming for theory-based practice, the presence of Jim Laue ensured that there was a continuing intellectual debate about the nature of "protracted and deep-rooted" conflicts. Kevin Avruch and Peter Black kept up a guerrilla war with John Burton and Dennis Sandole over the issue of cultural relativism versus "generic", or general, theory. However, everyone agreed that the aim of ICAR was to produce "practical theorists", who actually did practice. Hence, ICAR faculty conducted and involved students in confidential dialogues or workshops with adversaries such as those involved in conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Basque country, the Middle East and Latin America, while Jim Laue and his colleagues became involved in local intermediary work for Virginia's then Governor, Douglas Wilder, part of which involved a running dispute over leaky oil tanks on the boundary between Fairfax City and County.

Those traditions still carry on twenty years later, partly because of the early and firm establishment of the Applied Practice and Theory courses in 1992 and later encouragement of specific ICAR Working Groups in the mid-1990s. It was around this time that ICAR alumni founded the Northern Virginia Mediation Service and ICAR students, led by Mara Schoeny, set up, managed and staffed the University Dispute Resolution center on the Fairfax campus.

Intellectually, this middle period of ICAR's existence was also a lively time, with debates, arguments and publications about the essential nature of "conflicts" as opposed to "disputes", the role of culture in theory building, class conflict and the legitimacy of deep rooted structural conflicts, the first tentative consideration of gender issues in conflicts, theories that underlay the practice of "resolution", and the nature or even the possibility of impartiality. By the start of the new millennium, resolution was beginning to seem passe, and talk turned to transformation, reconciliation and healing, with the advent of a new interest in spirituality, religion and non-Western approaches to conflict resolution. All of this pushed the intellectual focus much closer to the traditions of peace research and its Scandinavian proponents and practitioners Johan Galtung and Hakan Wiberg.

Throughout this post-1987 period, ICAR's tradition of publishing books and working papers persisted. In his last year in the US before returning to Australia, John Burton became a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace and, working with then-graduated Frank Dukes, produced four books summarizing his work on the theory and practice of conflict resolution. Fifteen years before "9/11", Rich Rubenstein moved from a generalized interest in terrorists to historical biography and a study of a single pre-1914 revolutionary terrorist, and then to the whole issue of the religious roots of, and remedies for, conflict in increasingly remote historical eras. Dennis Sandole started another ICAR tradition of publishing books and articles co-authored with graduate students. Mary Clark, at ICAR briefly as the first French Cumbie Professor, published her study of the social and biological bases of cooperation and conflict, Ariadne's Thread, and started on her survey of human nature and conflict. In 2007, faculty and students published six books, a record but certainly not that unusual.

On reflection, perhaps the changes over the last 25 years are not matters of numbers and size, as many ICAR traditions laid down in earlier days have survived and flourished: trying to involve an increasingly growing and diverse student body in writing, research and practice; trying to maintain a sense of community; trying to develop the tradition of thoughtful practice amid pressures of time, donor impatience and limited resources; trying to remain a "pre-eminent" center for theory, research and practice in the face of increasing competition, when, in the old days, ICAR was the only center in existence. But to some degree it has always been like this over the 25 years, and at least the University has not asked us to move yet again. ICAR continues to live in interesting times and will probably do so for the next 25 years and be none the worse for it.