| Committee for Conflict Transformation Support | CCTS
|
Conflict Resolution Training: Purpose and Content Introductory Talk by Judith Large The work of "training" in conflict resolution, especially in situations of social and political upheaval and war, is controversial. The craft of helping others to better handle their conflicts is often misunderstood and dismissed by others who believe that the outcome of conflict will be determined chiefly by force. In a spirit of self-examination and mutual support, about 25 people involved in conflict transformation work gathered in London on November 2, 1998, for a day's workshop on "Conflict Resolution Training: Purpose and Content." Among the tasks for the day were to explore what training for conflict transformation actually means to the people who practice it, to identify the impacts this work might have upon participants, and to define its limits. Judith Large opened the day, drawing upon her practical experience as a trainer and facilitator in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia and upon her subsequent research on the impact of "conflict transformation support." Her findings were published in 1997 as The War Next Door: A Study of Second-Track Intervention during the War in Ex-Yugoslavia. While in some ways a "growth industry" at present, conflict resolution training is also generating debate and controversy. It is accused of "not delivering", while claiming to have the solutions for "ending internal war". The debate warrants our own attention, reflection and response. I noticed with some amusement the way the advance notice - and the last CCTS minutes, were framed: "Perhaps one or two people who in the past have been on the receiving end of this kind of training will then briefly comment on their experiences". May I please here and now volunteer to be such a person - surely anyone purporting to be a trainer has also experienced training? In my case a trainer came from London to our West Country rural pocket (not north to south transfer but certainly east to west) and I was invited to a session billed - you guessed it, "Conflict Resolution Training". I accepted the invitation eagerly, showing up on the said evening with hope of learning how to pour calm on and bring just outcomes to the troubled waters of inner city street violence, Welsh nationalist armed resistance, or perhaps in war zones themselves. I found myself sitting around a card table with a cluster of people sharing an assignment on how to put together a cut out paper jigsaw puzzle. The fact that I could see where the pieces might go and wanted to hurry up the task seems to be a portent of some non-co-operative personality indicator and domineering tendencies not prone to co-operation - which was alarming to say the least. It was not that I objected to doing a jigsaw puzzle, but what particular conflict was this exercise addressing? We hardly knew each other and got on very well in a cordial sort of puzzling way. This sense of acute impatience has never really left me, and makes me sensitive to the real rather than symbolic reactions of others in any given training - that key question of what is really engaging participants and what is merely being tolerated? Having said this, let us turn to the questions in hand. Who is training really for? Why is it so controversial? I shall address these in reverse order. Conflict resolution is controversial because somewhere along the line it has entered the discourse on "humanitarianism - that is, a debate on how to respond to world crisis in a way which makes life more humane under intolerable conditions.1 Put crudely, the aid industry needs victims, and sees competition for funding as unrealistic and unfair when this distracts away from relief to questions of causes or internal response. This is a shame, because the spectrum of basic human needs, with its absolute essentials of food, water and shelter on the one end, has also other questions of identity, recognition, and some control of ones environment.2 Like it or not, the split between relief and development in the mind sets of decision makers, donors and international NGOs is still a reality, even though we are all grappling with it. One question we need to ask ourselves is whether conflict resolution training sits more evenly under social development strategies or as crisis intervention. The other question is, regardless of where it sits, do we know what we are doing? Secondly,it is controversial because along with gender, human rights and psycho-social interventions, conflict resolution training rides a wave of what must be called a "normative" debate in the conduct of world affairs - that is, issues and approaches which challenge operative norms about how the international system works. States declare war, or armed groups go to war, and they win or lose; their representatives may attend high-level summit meetings on agreed settlement or outcome. These are operative norms. It has not always been custom to intervene and pick up the dead or dying - but thanks to the likes of Florence Nightingale and Henry Dunant this is also enshrined in our understanding of how the world operates. The Red Cross and Red Crescent paved the way for other agencies, non-governmental and UN, who tend to those uprooted and suffering due to the ravages of war. Human rights hold great sway at the moment because of the conventions which enshrine them and may be invoked either in judgment of, or as aspiration and goals in, a given society. Psycho-social assistance is controversial because it claims that people "ought" to have certain types of care after violence, when the validity of this is probably best measured by those people themselves. Conflict resolution training does the same thing, suggesting that there ought to be options to war or to violence: moreover, in a given mode of responding to the problem. We buy into this whenever we use "winÑwin', neo-liberal market models or a religious moral basis for training. We have not begun to consider the full cross-cultural implications of this message. In this sense conflict resolution training is FOR people who are, or potentially will be, like us. If this does not apply, then is it for ourselves, such that we earn from it or feel better from it - some sense of having tried to make something better. In this sense the term the "new missionaries" is not unreasonable. Finally, the field suffers from two severe problems: 1) the term "conflict resolution" does not transfer easily from domestic to national levels, and 2) it is ahistorical, that is, it needs - but seemingly lacks - a convincing history to demonstrate its efficacy, or not. The term "security" transfers easily from domestic to national and even international levels. It denotes warmth, food, infrastructure, shelter from storm and flood and, indeed, police on the domestic level. At the national level it means armies, civil defence, employment policies, etc. The same may be said of trade or development - say the word and it has acceptable meanings on several levels. Conflict resolution has no such semantic credibility. It is associated with community meetings, with business negotiation, etc. - rarely do we see or recognise it on the other level, although interestingly the term was used by Northern Ireland representatives to the media after the Good Friday agreement and its aftermath. If the fighting has stopped in Moldova, or Czechoslovakia managed a "velvet divorce" avoiding bloodshed in its break-up, there is some tacit assumption that perhaps these were never real crises anyway, as though armed violence is the only indicator of severity. And yet here are two examples where resolution took place on the international level. Let us examine what the term is taken to mean for training, for "conflict resolution" is an umbrella phrase. You may wish to amend this list yourself.3 TRANSFER OF LEARNING SKILLS The idea of transferable skill sets, or more recently "tools", is evident in the production of training guides and handbooks, some of which are intended to bridge potential cultural divides. One peace studies document lists a "skill set" as:
This list is characteristic of findings in other materials, of which the following are representative:
As Duffield4 suggests, "training groups of people in conflict resolution techniques, for example, is one thing. Whether such activity can mollify societal instability or entrenched group hostility, however, is another." Herein lie many questions. Are we training in negotiation, for instance - so that our trainees may take on Tamil Tiger leadership, Taliban commanders, General Sharon, or S. Milosevic? Probably not. On the contrary, Milosevic could probably teach us a thing or two - certainly is teaching NATO and the UN a thing or two - about negotiation, what a student from Belgrade described to me last week as "Ottoman negotiation: giving in a little, holding ground, then taking a lot..." What do we say about negotiation training? That it can be used in conflict situations? What does that mean? In practice it is probably used with donors. The same would apply to mediation - with whom are our trainees mediating? How do we address uneven power relations or situations of scarcity? You all know the famous exercise about two parties who desire the same supply of oranges and the win-win outcome of one needing skin and the other juice. As a student from Central Asia commented to me wryly, "Great play. But where I come from there are not even any oranges." Let's accept for a moment that a trainer adapts any and all of the components of conflict resolution to a given socio-political context...and let me quote from your own document on Dilemma of Evaluation: "While the community should be the primary source of the definition of criteria for the evaluation of performance, this must be compatible with the overall objectives and values of community development."5 Let's accept that we are working for community (or social) development, and that our major premise is change from the "bottom up". Where is the evidence, the history of success, which backs up our claims? This brings us to the charge of being ahistorical, without history. Consider the following outline on steps for a prejudice reduction programme. WHERE DO WE STAND IN THE FIGHT AGAINST PREJUDICE? How can we determine which methods are getting results and which are not? The testing process is basically the same in this field as in any other. To begin: We must have a clearly stated PROBLEM Next, we need an IDEA about solutions to the problem Then we must TEST THE IDEA to see if it works Finally, a report is made of the FINDINGS And, the RESULTS GO INTO ACTION When these steps are followed, a TESTED method of combating prejudice is being put to use. (From CCI pamphlet on action research "But What Works?" circa 1946.) Does it sound familiar? This is an extract from a pamphlet printed and used in 1946 by the Commission on Community Relations in New York City - a progressive action research experiment designed to combat anti-Semitism. Consider this quotation from a recent article "Social Action Research and the Commission on Community Interrelations" in the Journal of Social Issues: "Women participating in CCI projects through National Women's Division chapters were involved in community self-surveys, fund raising for inter-cultural education programmes, and cultural sensitivity training for teachers, study groups on raising Jewish children, fact finding on housing conditions in Harlem, investigation of anti-democratic incidents in neighbourhood schools and factories..."6 In its prime, the CCI was a model for new groups like the NAACP. This is surely methodology worthy of respect today. It is, however a good news/bad news example. On the one hand, it is a worthy precedent, a forerunner of current programmes, perhaps akin to the Osijek project, which some of you have been trainers for. On the other hand, if we look at New York City today 52 years later, one of the most pronounced social conflicts is between the Hassidic Jewish community and its bordering Afro-American one. Moreover, the CCI project predated by only a couple of years that mass prejudice exercise, the witchhunt of American communists in the McCarthy era. Where does this leave us for history? For evaluation? For our own learning? Recent writers suggest that for the U.S. civil rights movement, the location of the problem "as a conflict in the minds of White Americans helped to focus post-war research on psychological issues at the expense of social structural and economic analyses."7 It seems to me that we are in danger of repeating this pattern, translating methods and processes into situations where there are simply, and increasingly, "no oranges". We ignore both resources and power relations. Five years ago, peace activists in Croatia and Serbia, for example, received the same trainings. Today you will find established NGOs flourishing in a Croatia, which has Western investment and aspirations to be part of Europe. In Serbia, individuals working for B92 radio and open media initiatives were detained and imprisoned as enemies of the state, their station closed down. In the face of repressive state power mediation skills were of no use to them. Who, then, are "we"'? The title "conflict resolution training" is claimed by teachers of Zen Buddhism., who instil meditative mantras into circles of new initiates. It is claimed by management consultants, who look at desirable goals in workplace co-operation. It was used by private US military consultants to improve teamwork and co-operative practice in the Croatian army. It is used for NGO development. In my modest survey of recipients of training in Croatia and Serbia for The War Next Door I began with an admitted bias against new age or sectarian-based approaches to conflict resolution. I was astonished to find how little content rated in the responses, and how important people, process and, more importantly, subsequent follow-up, connections and relations were. My bias towards preparation and knowledge of context remains. A trainer must both know about and then elicit more knowledge about context when training. We must also assist others in generating options relevant to and owned by them. Before concluding then with what is almost a check list of questions on parameters of viable outcomes, let me say a little something about social learning. Albert Bandura8 is a name associated with studies on social learning and aggression. His work helps me when I contemplate examples of neighbours in Bosnia who celebrated both Ramadan and Christmas together for years and then seemingly overnight were capable of slitting each others throats. It also help me understand turf wars in U.S cities and the resort to knife or gun battles there. In a nutshell, Bandura speaks of:
Let me close with a few questions: With conflict resolution training are we:
In closing I must assure you that it was not my intention to bombard you with questions in order to preclude any you may have for me. We need to open up the debate. We shouldn't forget to share the oranges. Notes
|