All Recent Posts
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Things You Can Do To Help | Conflict Frontiers | Conflict Fundamentals
Beyond Intractability in Context | Colleague Activities
- Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess: Massively Parallel Peacebuilding vs. Massively Parallel Partisanship -- Advocacy plays a key role in Massively Parallel Peacebuilding. But, this role can either be supportive and helpful, or destructive, depending on how it is done.
- Julia Roig: Where Does Civil Resistance and Social Justice Fit in MPP? -- How do we distinguish when taking a stand is what’s absolutely called for – because we’ve reached the tipping point of uncivil politics/undemocratic behaviors? But perhaps we need to find a better way of doing it.
- Beyond Conflict's Reports on America's Divided Mind and Renewing American Democracy -- Now is our time to re-rebuild our democracy, and it will take all of us, working on multi-faceted solutions at the local, state, and national levels.
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of January 22 -- Links to things that our colleagues are doing at places like Search for Common Ground, Renew America, the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers, as well as fifteen fascinating articles that help us understand the complexity of society-wide intractable conflict.
- The Google Maps and Adopt-a-Highway Approach to Systems (Newsletter 72) -- If we were to map all the challenges Google-maps style, and then each person or organization were to adopt one or two of the challenges that were not widely adopted by others, that could have a much bigger impact.
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of January 15 -- Rather than continuing to post individual links on social media, I have decided to start posting a larger collection of such links each week in the Beyond Intractability Substack Newsletter.
- Anne Leslie: Embracing Ambiguity -- Curiosity will get you SO FAR. …Never underestimate the power of being curious and likeable! It will get you so far in life! And it’s massively, massively underestimated.
- Conversation with Kristin Hansen, Executive Director of the Civic Health Project -- To really do bridge building work credibly, you can't assume an outcome. You have to move upstream. and you have to be about means and not about ends. You have to trust that the ends will go where the universe wants them to go. (Full interview)
- Kristin Hansen talks about the Civic Health Project's Work on De-polarization in America -- A discussion of ends and means, incentives, interventions, scale, challenges, successes, visions--Kristen's vision is clear and exceptionally wide ranging at the same time. (Summary of full interview)
- Canaries, Constructive Advocates, and Intermediaries -- A comparison of three conflict roles, all of which are needed to successfully confront challenging and complex social problems and issues.
- Lou Kriesberg's Chapter 10 in Fighting Better - Recovering and Advancing Equality in the Future -- A review of Louis Kriesberg's seven elements of constructive conflict, as illustrated in the closing chapter of his new book Fighting Better: Constructive Conflicts in America.
- Review of Fighting Better: Constructive Conflicts in America by Louis Kriesberg -- A review of a new (December 2022) book looking at the struggle for class, status, and power equity in the United States from 1945- 2022, drawing lessons about what strategies work and which don't.
- Essential Elements + Obstacles = The Things That Need Doing Matrix -- Just as a body needs coordination between its different parts, so does the democracy ecosystem. Everyone has a role to play!
- Caleb Christen: Creating an Inter-movement Community -- Transforming democracy is an adaptive challenge requiring flexibility, adaptability and intentionality in organizing to enable organizations and millions of Americans to work in unison.
- Obstacles to Implementing the Elements of Successful Democracy -- Fixing democracy is everyone's responsibility: we can't leave it to our leaders or the other side. Everyone can -- and must -- do their part.
- Matt Legge: When Polarization is Beneficial -- Issue polarization can help people come closer to understanding "the truth" about controversial events or issues. How information is presented to parties in conflicts makes a big difference to the quality of the conflict that ensues.
- Essential Elements of Successful Democracies - Part 2 -- Boulding's First Law is ""If it exists, it must be possible." All of the essential elements of democracy exist--though sometimes in other contexts. We need to implement them in our governance systems.
- Is Polarization Good or Bad? -- Rising heat is not necessarily bad--it shows changes are needed. But we need to pursue those changes constructively, as attempts to overpower or destroy the other will also destroy ourselves.
- AfP Seminar--Toxic Polarization: What's the Left Got to Do with It? -- The language used to refer to the right is just making things worse, not better. The substance of the left's arguments matters too.
- Essential Elements of Successful Democracies - Part 1 -- Successful democracies control destructive escalation, promote respectful communication, use verified facts for decision making, and balance power among constituency groups fairly.
- Jean-Jacques Subrenat: Implementing Democracy -- Attacks on the rule of law in the U.S.A. are having an impact on the political mores of other democracies. The U.S. badly needs to update its own democracy to preserve the safety and prosperity of all around the world.
- Kristin Hansen: Are Bridge-builders Being "Too Nice" to the Right? -- The primary role of bridge-builders in America at this time is to "call in," not to "call out." That this does not make us irrelevant, it makes us essential.
- Matt Legge: Beware the Popular Idea That You Know a Hidden Truth -- This metaphor leads to a binary assumption: I'm right, they are wrong. We'd be well served dropping that assumption, and listening to others to learn how they might, actually, be right, and we are wrong.
- Frederick Golder on Common Ground instead of Polarization -- We cannot change anyone’s opinions, values, ideas, attitudes, judgments, or viewpoints, but, we can understand each other better through learning conversations and use those to find common ground.
- Guy Burgess: Finding Common Ground / Constructive Approaches for Addressing Differences -- This process focuses on five questions examining the nature of the different beliefs and opinions, and how they might be dealt with most constructively depending on whether they are fact-based, moral, or both.
