CCCRTE

A meeting of minds?

Guus Meijer

From 11 to 14 June 1995, the Ethnic Studies Network (ESN) held its second conference in the LO-Skolen (union training and conference centre) in Elsinore, Denmark, together with the 8th annual conference of the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM). Both organizations are comprised mostly of academic researchers, and the programme largely consisted of parallel sessions of paper presentations, interspersed with some plenary addresses and forum discussions. It was the first time the two organizations collaborated in this way and there were over 150 participants.

The ESN was established in 1990 by the Centre for the Study of Conflict at the University of Ulster and is now made up over 300 scholars worldwide. The greatest number are political scientists, but all other social sciences are represented. The IACM was founded in 1984 to provide a forum for scholars and practitioners from all disciplines interested in the study of social conflict and conflict resolution at every level of society.

Method versus relevance

The joint conference was certainly succesful from an organizational point-of-view, but the degree of mixture and cross-fertilization between the two constituent groups was rather disappointing. The IACM-papers dealt mostly with organizational and interpersonal conflict management and with negotiation strategy and behaviour, with little attention to, for example, the kind of violent confrontations that characterize so many socio-political conflicts (ethnic or other) today. Besides, much of the political science and social psychology (the two disciplines that dominated the IACM sessions) was of a rather narrow -- positivist and/or behaviourist -- kind; there was sometimes more concern about `the scientific method' than about the substantive interest, relevance or practical applicability of a piece of work. An exception was William Zartman's keynote address on "How much conflict does it take to warrant management: Dilemma's of the discipline", in which he took a broad look at international efforts to manage `hot' conflicts in Africa and elsewhere.

The ESN sessions were generally more wide-ranging, but also less well attended. Of particular interest for the CCCRTE was the one devoted to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Anja Weiss and Alexei Nazarenko, from the Berghof Centre in Berlin, gave an overview of their preliminary investigations based on interviews into "The situation and needs of NGOs mediating ethno-political conflicts in new Eastern democracies". This was probably the only presentation that directly dealt with training. Airat Aklaev, from the Institute of Ethnology in Moscow, presented a paper on "Changing patterns of legitimacy and ethnic identities in ethno-political conflict: four cases within the Russian Federation", based on sociological surveys in North Ossetia, Yakutia, Tatarstan and Tuva.

Another session of interest was the one in which Herbert Kelman, Nadim Rouhana and Eileen Babbitt (all Harvard University), discussed the acute dilemmas of accomodating ethnic identity in democratic systems (referring to Israel and Macedonia). Norbert Ropers, director of the Berghof Centre, talked about the Centre's work in Transylvania with the Romanian majority and the Hungarian minority between 1990 and 1995, putting it into a broader theoretical framework which distinguishes between the "world of states" and the "world of societies".

The conflict studies and conflict resolution field still feels severely fragmented into separate sub-groups. This particular conference could have been a step towards bridging one of these gaps. My conclusion from the conference, however, is that, despite a number of interesting sessions and panels, it rather reconfirmed the fragmentation and lack of communication. More direct dialogue between different groups of conflict researchers and conflict resolution practitioners is still very much an unfulfilled need.

ESN: c/o Lyn Moffatt, INCORE, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Noorthern Ireland, BT52 ISA, UK; Tel: (44) 1265 44141 ext 4649; Fax: (44) 265 324937; Email: l.moffat@uk.ac.ulster.ucvax. Membership is free.

IACM: c/o Tom Fiutak, Executive Officer, Conflict and Change Center, Hubert H Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MA 55455, USA; Tel: (1) 612 625 0362; Fax: (1) 612 625 3513; Email: fiutak@maroon.tc.umn.edu.Membership is $15 per year.

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