M. Shane Smith is a graduate student in the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Research Assistant at the University's Conflict Research Consortium.
The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field
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Beyond Intractability
Beyond Intractability
The Intractable Conflict Challenge
Our inability to constructively handle intractable conflict is the most serious, and the most neglected, problem facing humanity. Solving today's tough problems depends upon finding better ways of dealing with these conflicts. More...
Selected Recent BI Posts
Including Hyper-Polarization Posts
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of September 8, 2024 -- Readings on Israel, the U.S. political scene, and other intractable conflicts of note.
- Reprise: Constructive Confrontation: Applying Conflict Insights from a 1st Party (Not 3rd Party) Perspective -- A reprise of an old newsletter on constructive ways of engaging in conflict that is less likely to create backlash and more likely to achieve one's goals than typical adversarial approaches are likely to do.
- Guy and Heidi Burgess Talk with David Eisner about Threats to Democracy and How to Address Them -- The Burgesses talked with David Eisner about what he thinks the threats to democracy are, and how (and when) we might respond to them. We agreed, citizen involvement in governance is key.
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Constructive Conflict Initiative
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Things You Can Do to Help Ideas
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Conflict Frontiers
A free, open, online seminar exploring new approaches for addressing difficult and intractable conflicts. Major topic areas include:
Scale, Complexity, & Intractability
Massively Parallel Peacebuilding
Conflict Fundamentals
An look at to the fundamental building blocks of the peace and conflict field covering both “tractable” and intractable conflict.
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BI in Context
Links to thought-provoking articles exploring the larger, societal dimension of intractability.
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