A CRITIQUE OF WESTERN CONFLICT RESOLUTION FROM A NONWESTERN PERSPECITVE
PAUL E.SALEM
THE FOLLOWING ARE reflections on the premises and assumptions of Western
conflict resolution as viewed from another cultural perspective, in this case, Arab.
They derive from exposure to conflict writings and simulations in a Western
milieu and the experience of teaching conflict resolution in a non-Western context,
namely in Beirut. The essay aims to present a tentative critique of some hidden
assumptions in the Western approach to conflict resolution, and to provide some
insights into the macro-cultural framework to which Western conflict resolution
approaches must adapt if they are to be used in the Arab world-and perhaps also in
other areas of the non-Western world.
One must make clear from the beginning that any attempt to make broad
generalizations about two diverse and loosely defined cultural and social
groupings as "the West" and" the Arab world" is fraught with dangers of
reductionism, essentialism, and simplification, to say nothing of Orientalism (Said
1978). The effort of finding general cultural patterns and tendencies, however, is, I
think, well worth the risk and the effort; and the generalizations presented are only
intended as food for thought and signposts for further research rather than as
definitive conclusions. Also, it should not be understood from the text that Arab
society does not have effective conflict resolution methods of its own. Indeed,
such methods are widespread and considerably effective. This paper, however, is
more narrowly concerned with developing a sober view of Western approaches to
conflict resolution than with exploring indigenous Arab methods of conflict
resolution.
Peace and Empire
The Western community of conflict resolution theorists and
practitioners operate within a macro-political context that they may
overlook, but which colors their attitudes and values. This seems remarkably
striking from an outsider's point of view and is largely related to the West's
dominant position in the world. All successful "empires" develop an inherent
interest in peace. The ideology of peace reinforces a status quo that is
favorable to the dominant power. The Romans, for example, preached a Pax
Romana, the British favored a Pax Britannica, and the Americans today
pursue - consciously or not - a Pax Americana. Conflict and bellicosity is
useful - indeed essential - in building empires, but an ideology of peace and
conflict resolution is clearly more appropriate for its maintenance.
Indeed, for many outsiders, it is quite common to view Western international
conflict resolution policies, whether in the Arab-Israeli peace process, the UN
Security Council, or elsewhere, as merely stratagems for defusing opposition to
and rejection of the status quo. To the dominated members of a "pseudo-imperial"
world system, peace may be something that they might indeed seek to avoid, and
conflict may be an objective that they might seek to invigorate in order to
destabilize the world system and precipitate its crisis or collapse. They may prefer
to bum the temple down, rather than succumb to the worship of a foreign god.
The debatable virtues of peace and the underestimated virtues of battle
Other than the interest a triumphant West naturally has in peace, the concept of
peace itself has a particular and positive cultural valuation there. The centrality of
the idea that peace is, in any conditions, "good" and war is necessarily and in all
circumstances" bad" is to some degree peculiar to the Christian worldview. This is
not to say that other religions do not value peace or that the Church in history did
not succeed in devising intricate theological arguments for a theory of the Just or
Good War; in its central precepts, however, the Christian religion does specifically
exalt the categories, such as socio-political justice or obedience to a strict moral
code.
This exaltation - or over - valuation - of peace and blanket denigration of war
and the traditional military virtues, to a considerable degree, characteristic of the
Christian worldview; but it is not a central part of the ancient Greek, Babylonian,
Roman, Jewish or Islamic worldviews.
In addition, early Christianity adopted outward doctrines of peace partially to
insinuate itself throughout the Roman Empire; Islam, however, although it places
peace as an exalted virtue, openly declared a sacred political program, and set out
unapologetically from the beginning to back up its proselytism with force. The
Prophet himself and all the Rightly Guided Caliphs were proud warriors. In this
context, war in itself is not shameful, nor is peace necessarily and always good.
With regard to conflict resolution, the Western blanket assumption that working
for peace is always, regardless of circumstance and conditions, a good thing might
be questionable in other cultural contexts.
Conflict without struggle and the end of history
The Western world of the post-World War II era has largely abandoned the ideal
of struggle which characterized its earlier history. Pre-World War II Western
history, on the other hand, is largely marked by intense and often violent struggles
to establish national unity, national independence, socioeconomic equality, and/or
popular government. The more successful among western nations also prospered
by conquering other nations and struggling for world supply and consumer
markets.
The ideal of struggle was especially exalted in the nineteenth century
philosophies of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche; it was lent a pseudo-scientific basis
by Darwin and bastardized by the national supremacy of German and Italian
fascism. Moreover, among the decisive events that shaped modem Western
political history-the revolutions of 1776, 1789, 1848 and 1917; the wars of
Napoleon; and World Wars I and II was the ideal of struggle that was held in
highest regard.
As Francis Fukuyama (1992) describes, however, many in the West today
enjoy an indeterminate satisfaction that they have somehow reached "the end of
history." This may not be completely illusory: in politics the "West" has achieved
stability, orderly transitions of power, widespread freedoms, protection of basic
rights, and participation in government; in economics it has achieved high levels
of wealth and reasonable patterns of wealth distribution; class conflict has been
more or less resolved in favor of a large middle class; in other social matters,
education and literacy are widespread, health care is adequate, and popular culture
through various media offers amusement and enjoyment of leisure time to a
majority of the population. The West, in other words, may see nothing major that
it still needs to struggle intensely in order to secure. It has reached a situation of
relative self satisfaction. From the West's perspective, what is, in a broad sense, is
good, and should be preserved.
Outside the context of struggle, however, conflict is an overwhelmingly
negative phenomenon, notable only for its harmful side effects of violence,
suffering, and general discomfiture. If the macro picture is indeed positive, as
described above with regard to the West, then conflicts are, in a sense,
troublesome brush fires that need to be put out rather than incipient struggles
that need to be fanned. Obviously, from the outside - for example, Arab perspective, wherein major and, perhaps, revolutionary change seems, to many,
necessary at the level of political, economic, and social affairs, the side - effects
of conflict are not nearly as significant as the value of the struggle itself if it
succeeds.
Indeed, in the major ideological currents that have defined political thinking
in the modem Arab world - nationalism, Marxism, and Islamic fundamentalism struggle has been held in high regard. In the thought of Arab nationalism
(and indeed various regional nationalisms such as Syrian nationalism and
Egyptian nationalism) the struggle - often violent - against external colonial
powers and internal collaborationist forces was at the center of the nationalist
worldview (see Aflaq 1959 and Saadeh 1959,79). In the Marxist and leftist
currents that swept the Arab world, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, an
irreducible struggle between the working class on the one hand and the local and
international capitalist classes on the other was central. In Islamic
fundamentalism of the radical type such as that challenging power in Algeria,
Egypt, Jordan, SYfia, Lebanon, and other Arab countries, a central struggle is
posited between the minority of true believers and the majority of the population
that is Muslim in name only. (A Qur'anic verse which is cited frequently by the
main ideologue of modem Islamic fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb, is "[F]ight them
until persecution is no more, and religion is all for God." [Qur'an 2:93, quoted in
Qutb 1964, 152.]) In each of these cases, struggle, and the conflict that comes
with it, is central to the group's political view and is regarded, in some cases, as a
progressive, invigoration, and purifying process.
Utilitarianism and the comfort culture of the twentieth century
Western conflict resolution relies heavily on the assumption that pain is bad
and pleasure, or comfort is good. It is accepted as obvious that the suffering,
physical or otherwise, associated with conflict is one of the main
inconveniences that conflict resolution practitioners try to eliminate. First,
this assumption in itself that suffering is bad and comfort is good required a
significant philosophical revolution in the West to become accepted. It was
the task of nineteenth century utilitarian philosophers, like Jeremy Bentham
and John Stuart Mill, to make this principle a fairly widely accepted premise
of modem Western culture. It flew - and still flies today among other cultures
- against the more original principle that "good is good and bad is bad,"
where the first usages of good and bad in this phrase are defined in general
moral or religious terms having nothing to do with pleasure or pain. The
focus of Western conflict resolution theorists on the suffering generated by
conflict rather than on the justice or morality of the cause may not strike
resonant philosophical cords in other cultures. On the contrary, suffering itself in
many cultures, including pre-modem Western culture, enjoys a fairly high
valuation as a means for moral or spiritual purification or a necessary divinelyordained component of life.
Second, the belief that discomfort is an isolatable evil and one that can be
eradicated seems a characteristic of twentieth century postwar Western culture.
With advances in health care, economic standards of living, and home appliances,
and a vigorous media culture of consumerism and immediate-needs-satisfaction,
the modem Western urbanite or suburbanite lives in a world where comfort is
achievable and discomfort is limited if not eliminated. In this context, suffering
associated with conflict stands out. In order societies, however, where levels of
socio-economic development in virtually all spheres are still considerably behind
those of the West, comfort itself is the aberration, and discomfort and suffering
are more familiar companions of life. In that context, the suffering or discomfort
associated with conflict does not stand out; it blends in with a fabric of discomfort
and suffering that embraces most aspects of life. The Western conflict resolution
emphasis on the necessity of resolving conflict because of the salient discomfort
that it brings with it may not be relevant in a social setting in which discomfort is
widespread. People there may give less importance to the discomfort generated by
the conflict and more importance to the justice or outcome of the dispute.
Third, there seems to be a hidden assumption among the Western conflict
resolution community that physical suffering - to be precise, physical violence-is
in a category of unacceptable suffering all its own. This assumes a valid and clearcut distinction between physical and non-physIcal suffering along the continuum of
suffering. The confusion here stems partly, I think, from the pleasure-pain
utilitarian philosophy and the acculturation to physical comfort, both
described above. Is physical pain indeed more painful than non-physical
pain? Is a serious flesh wound worse than a serious injustice? If we gave a
person a choice between getting punched in the face or having their home
taken away from them, which would they choose? If we gave them a choice
between losing their life, or losing their country? Injustice, economic need,
political need (struggles for liberty or freedom from oppression) are all, in
many cases experienced as acute non-physical suffering. The definition of
suffering itself, therefore, needs considerable clarification and specification.
It may not mean the same thing from one culture to the next. In the Arab
world as well, suffering is not something necessarily to be shunned, nor is
physical pain or sacrifice particularly worse than non-physical losses like
loss of honor, loss of patrimony, loss of face, etc.
Prometheus and Sisyphus
The West is riding at the crest of a wave of success at many levels. It is
enjoying the later stages of a period of astoundingly rapid advances that began
with the Italian Renaissance and expanded with the Industrial Revolution. With a
record of Promethean achievement in technological, economic, political, social,
and intellectual spheres, and with a modem history of continuous development, the
West enjoys a basic optimism that things can be changed and that change can be
for the better. World War I, World War II, the German holocaust, and the
development of nuclear weapons have dampened but not extinguished this
optimism.
This Arab and Islamic world, by contrast, is in the trough of a wave of decline
and defeat. The heyday of Arab-Islamic culture, politics, economics, and
technology began to fade in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the history of the
past seven centuries has largely been one of stagnation and decline from that
apogee. The legacy of this period is partially a pessimism that things cannot easily
be changed, that change may often be for the worse, and that the forces that
determine change are beyond one's control. For conflict resolution, the optimism
of Westerners who approach conflicts with the confidence that they can be
managed and resolved, contrasts sharply with the pessimism of others who may
regard conflicts as inherently unresolvable or unmanageable, and for whom the
whole project of conflict resolution may smack of naive over-optimistic
enthusiasm.
could be "right," even if their positions are contradictory to one another never mind Aristotle's logical premise on which most Western thought was
subsequently built, that a thing must be either "A" or "Not A"; from the
Postmodern standpoint it could be "A" here, and "Not A" somewhere else.
This is a great boon to modem approaches to conflict resolution, in
which it is essential for parties t a conflict to be open to the possibility that
while they may be right, so may the other parties. Postmodernism's mood of
relativism allows an easy acceptance that the interplay of right and wrong is
not necessarily a zero - sum game. In other more traditional cultures, that
could best be described as pre-modem or modernizing, rather than
postmodern, there are stricter codes of right and wrong and more rigid
accounts of truth. From their perspective, the interplay of right and wrong is
more likely to be a zero - sum game: "I am either right or wrong; and to
the degree that I am right, my opponent must be wrong, and vice versa."
This mode of thinking makes several aspects of modem conflict resolution
techniques (such as, for example, formulating a problem in a way that
satisfies all parties (Moore 1986, 18)) difficult to carry through.
"Flower Power" and the new negotiation
The credo of individual openness that was part of the cultural revolution of
the 1960s and 1970s in the West has found its way into Western conflict resolution
techniques. Most Western conflict resolution manuals start with several exercises
in which opponents are supposed to "open up," talk about their "personal
experiences," "feelings" or "deep interests," and develop "relationships" with their
opponents "as individuals." This segue into the negotiation proper may seem
natural and comfortable to Westerners, but it may go against the grain of members
of many other cultures. "Opening up," rather than maintaining and reinforcing
formal roles, may be a highly distressing and counter-productive process that may
alienate the participant from the negotiation process and from his negotiation
partners and opponents. In many non- Western negotiation situations, it might be
wiser to increase the level of formality and social role-playing in order to get the
negotiations goin, rather than to increase the level of personalization and
individual self-revelation or to engage in game-playing to supposedly bring out the
Jungian "inner child."
The role of the good citizen
The West has already undergone the processes of centralization,
bureaucratization, atomization, rule-formation and rule-acceptance that was
described by Weber as characteristic of modernization. One of the results of this
process is the production of the "good" citizen/subject who generally accepts
authority and rules (even if fairly anonymous), pays his taxes, stops at red lights
Conflict resolution and the "Scientific" Worldview
Western culture has internalized the natural mechanistic universalism
of Thales and the atomism of Democritus, both of which provided a large
part of the philosophical foundations on which the West's scientific and
technological advances were built. Both allow a view of conflict resolution
in which conflict is seen as the result of a clash of natural forces among
discrete and independent units. The forces can be understood and resolved,
and the atoms can be independently identified and dealt with. This is a
particular worldview, and is profoundly different from others, such as a
truly religious worldview in which conflict is the result of a struggle
between divine, devilish or profane forces; a moralistic worldview, in which
conflict is the result of a natural struggle between right and wrong; or a
superstitious worldview, in which conflict is the result of magic,
unknowable forces. A neutral, "objective" approach to conflict assumes a
certain neutral and "objective" view of the world. The collapse of the
religious and moralistic worldview was a painful process that the West took
centuries to pass through; it cannot be assumed that other cultures are at the
same stage of advanced a-religiosity and a-morality.
The descent into psychology
In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche made it no longer possible to easily float
religious, moralistic, or even historicist explanations of events. His grand nihilism
reduced the world to the individual and his individual will. Furthermore, his attack
on the idea that reason and morality are the fundamental guiding lights of the
individual led to a revived interest in psychology. Freud's "discovery of the
unconscious," followed by Skinner's behaviorism and other explanations of human
motivation and action provided the intellectual tools for an entirely human
explanation of human attitudes and behavior, downgrading religious, ideological,
moralistic, and other explanations.
With regard to conflict resolution, this intellectual legacy of the modem West
encourages it to perceive conflict as the result of the thoughts and impulses of the
individual, the causes of which are largely within that individual. In other cultures
that have not yet gone through this process of nihilism and psychologization it
may be far more difficult to interpret conflict by reducing it to a set of perceptions,
attitudes, and behavior patterns exhibited by autonomous individuals.
The convenience of Postmodernism
The Postmodern perspective that took hold of Western intellectual life
after World War II downgrades systematic philosophies in favor of an
attitude of vague relativism. Being right - indeed rights themselves - is a
matter of perspective and may differ from culture or from individual to
individual. Within their `own contexts, more than one person or culture
(even at midnight on a deserted crossroads), etc. In the Western conflict
resolution context, this usually means a relatively easy acceptance of the role of
the anonymous moderator, facilitator, mediator, or other such central figures in
the negotiation process; also it may facilitate an easy acceptance of freshlydevised rules to guide the negotiation process.
In other contexts, the attempt of an anonymous (i.e. non-traditional)
moderator/facilitator to establish leadership and authority over a negotiation
process may cause resentment and may become part of the problem in the form
of a struggle for power between the moderator/facilitator and the various
participants. The same may be true of new, non-legitimized negotiation rules and
guidelines; the imposition of rules may in itself be resented and resisted as an
imposition of inappropriate authority. It is in this context that the importance of a
traditional authority figure as moderator/facilitator and traditionally accepted
rules of conflict resolution become apparent.
Militarization, industrialization and the team player
The grand factories brought on by industrialization and the mass
citizen armies inaugurated by Napoleon eventually brought the majority of
the population in the West into large group enterprises. This continued in the
twentieth century with the growth of bureaucracies and large corporations
that employ the bulk of the new middle class. Through these formative
experiences, many Westerners have internalized the benefits of team work
and the costs of uncooperativeness or prisoner's-dilemma profiteering. In
more fragmented societies organized around the family, the clan, or the
small enterprise, the world appears far more competitive and large-scale
team work has very few exemplars. Large-scale group work there may often
be perceived as a formula for getting duped, and prisoner's-dilemma
profiteering is often regarded as rewarding and rarely punished. As a result
the seemingly natural appeal to "work together" (e.g. Moore 1986, 19)
toward reaching an agreement does not resonate as positively elsewhere as it
does in the West. Working together, as opposed to working separately, in
other context may cause apprehension as control is cede to a group in whom the
individual has little inherent trust.
Hobbes and the problem enforcing agreements
In the seventeenth century, Hobbes identified the difficulty of negotiating a
social contract, or building trust, without a coercive power to enforce it; he argued
that for parties to participate in negotiating an agreement without the guarantee
that there will be a power to protect and enforce it would be irrational (Ebenstein
1969, 377). He also pointed out how dangerous it would be for parties to
participate in such an agreement if the guarantee was not provide; it might even be
worse than the state of nature in which you at least had a measure of freedom and
equality as protection. In the West, most people have had the guarantee of strong
government and the rule of law for a number of centuries now.
In the Western conflict resolution literature, the final phases of negotiation,
those of "working toward agreement," have a breezy relieved air to them, as if the
most difficult and threatening part were over, and the parties would soon have an
"agreement" on which they both could rely. In a political environment in which
governmental authority is unstable and in which the rule of law is not necessarily
paramount, moving toward "agreement," which is, after all, a situation of
interdependence not only involving your adversary but also some external
guarantor of the agreement, may be in itself disquieting. It implies a giving up of
control and autonomy and a limiting of one's freedom of action on the shaky
gounds that the adversary can be trusted to fulfill his part of the bargain and that
the "system" will help protect his contract. But in the absence of an enforcer, it
may be preferable to maintain a conflictual but known and predictable situation,
than to try to construct a less conflictual but more interdependent and
unpredictable one.
Locke and negotiating with have-nots
Another point to consider is that in developing societies, people are
mostly concerned with getting things they do not presently have rather than
protecting what they do have, John Locke’s social contract, on which of
Western liberalism is founded, was based on protecting what one has: life,
liberty, and private property. It is a negotiation among haves for the
protection and preservation of what they have. Western conflict resolution
is not too far from this perspective, based as it is on some assumption that
all parties to the conflict have something to lose, something to preserve, and
something to gain. Negotiating with real have-nots who have nothing to
lose nothing to preserve, and everything to gain, might be quite different.
Negotiating and bargaining assumes that each party has some number of
"chips" that they can trade and shuffle around with other to create a
satisfactory resolution to some conflict; but what of the party who has no
chips at all, and whose only option in an uneven negotiation situation is to
seize the other party's (or parties') "chips"? Indeed, with some veiling
sophistication, this is what Marxist revolutionism proposes. Thus, Western
conflict resolution through negotiation in a society of haves and have-nots
may prove problematic and, at times, impossible.
In closing
I hope that in the paragraphs above I have raised some worthwhile question
about the philosophical, moral, psychological, and cultural framework from within
which Western conflict resolution departs. It should be kept in mind that I am not
suggesting any judgments on Western or Arab cultures, but merely trying to
underline the serious diversity that exist at the deepest levels of different cultural
and social formations. Value judgments only make sense from within one culture
framework or another.
Moreover, I have attempted to present a tentative critique of some hidden
premises of Western conflict resolution and to point out a number of areas within
Arab political culture in which modem Western assumptions relating to the theory
and practice of conflict resolution do not fully apply. I have tried to indicate that
some of the bases on which Western conflict resolution rest are not to be found, in
exact mirror image, in the Arab world, nor perhaps in other cultures. The
conclusion to be drawn from this is not that the Arab world, for example, is more
conflict-prone or less conflict resolution-oriented than the West but that in
transporting Western conflict resolution theories and techniques to the Arab world
or elsewhere, they must undergo considerable cultural adaptation.