Lessons from the Frontiers of Failure

• 1. Introductory Reflections

  In this issue of IJCER Jay Rothman says that “success and failure are two connected sides of the same coin”. He is right. Given the deep complexity of human conflicts, and the multiplicity of their social, political, psychological and cultural roots, we should see failure as normal. More than that, as he says, failure can be regarded as opportunity rather than defeat, so long as we are able to learn lessons and adapt. These then become what Rothman calls “successful failures”. They are growth points, which, if the weather is propitious, may flourish and provide new opportunities for further success – and failure.
  Also in this issue, Michal Alberstein contrasts ‘first generation’ pragmatic-managerial approaches to conflict resolution, including their static ‘external consequentialist’ perspectives on success, with dynamic ‘second generation models of transformation’ which aim to inspire a more complex self-referential process that favours inclusion and respect for all the differences of ‘voice’. This is, indeed, an inspiring programme. But I am not sure whether Alberstein is challenging the whole idea of evaluating success and failure here. How can self-referential processes of this kind be assessed, and by whom? Can the pioneering work of Kenneth Bush, cited by Alberstein, be developed into a methodology for testing for elements such as ‘satisfaction’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘recognition’? This identifies a challenging new frontier for the field.
  As for me, the moment I entered the conflict-resolution arena in the late 1970s, I saw that the very criteria for evaluating success and failure in conflict analysis and intervention depended on the theoretical orientation of the evaluator and the relation between the evaluator and the conflict. Above all, I realized that in intense conflict everything is politicized, so evaluation of success and failure is also caught up in the on-going struggle (Ramsbotham et al., 2011: 241-244). In a brief supplement to this article, I describe some of my own recent attempts to respond to these difficulties in relation to the ‘radical disagreements’ that lie at the heart of linguistic intractability.
  The main body of this article, drawing on research originally done by Tom Woodhouse, argues that the idea of ‘learning from failure’ has been inherent in the conflict-resolution enterprise from the start. It offers a survey of the field from that perspective and ends with a series of questions. At the moment, these questions are somewhat left in the air. On another occasion, I may be able to respond to them with reference to what is going on at the cutting edge of the field today.

• 2. Second-Order Social Learning and Conflict Resolution

  From the beginning, social learning theory has been at the heart of conflict resolution.¹xIn this article I take the broad term ‘conflict resolution’ to include conflict settlement at one end of the spectrum and conflict transformation at the other, as argued in Contemporary Conflict Resolution (3rd ed.; Ramsbotham et al., 2011, pp. 9-10 et seq.). Rothman suggests in this issue that he would prefer to jettison ‘conflict resolution’ as the overall label and replace it with ‘conflict engagement’. At the moment I prefer to keep ‘conflict resolution’ as the generic term, in order to be able to use ‘conflict engagement’ to refer to what can be done in those cases where so far conflict resolution does not work. For example that is why I use the term ‘strategic engagement’ for the approach I suggest best addresses the failure of conflict resolution to cope with radical disagreement (see the case study at the end of this article). The founders of the field stressed the importance of understanding complex systems in the search for ways of transforming violent conflicts into non-violent ones. Morton Deutsch, John Burton and others drew on general systems theory to explain the cooperative and competitive behaviour of social organisms (Coleman, 1957; Coser, 1956) and on game theory to analyze the variety of options available to conflict parties (Rapoport & Chammah, 1965; Shelling, 1960). Burton was particularly influenced by the idea of first-order and second-order learning (Burton, 1968, 1969, 1972, 1990a). It is not only individuals who need to learn adaptive responses in order to survive, but also socio-cultural systems in general, whose underlying assumptions and habitual patterns of behaviour tend to resist necessary change. If a system – or species – does not adapt, it is discarded. History is littered with examples of systemic obsolescence. It is a never-ending process, as previous success may prove counter-productive in a new environment. Then it is important to stop investing in what may have worked before, and to discover what the altered circumstances demand. The requirement is to learn the right lessons and to adapt accordingly (Burton was influenced here by the abductive logic of Charles Sanders Peirce, 1958). What are the right lessons? It is by looking at the frontiers of failure – those locations where the system is malfunctioning – that second-order social learning is best achieved.
  In the 1950s, when the conflict-resolution field was established, the advent of nuclear weapons meant that violent human conflict now threatened the future of Homo sapiens as a whole. This was an existential crisis. For Kenneth Boulding (whose systemic training was in economics), “the international system is by far the most pathological and costly segment of the whole social system” (quoted Kerman, 1974, p. 83). For Anatol Rapoport (biologist and mathematician), “the illusion that increasing losses for the other side is equivalent to winning is the reason that the struggles are so prolonged and the conflicting parties play the game to a lose/lose end” (1960: 441, emphasis in original). Social systems that cling to what Rapoport called “default values” (first-order learning) are not capable of achieving the transformation required. So the “critical issue of peace” – the need to convert destructive conflict into constructive one – demanded the “incorporation of second order learning in social systems”. And, given the changed environment, this could only be done “through a participative design process”.²xThe first two paragraphs of this article are heavily indebted to my colleague Woodhouse, who did the original research into this topic for Chapter 2 of Contemporary Conflict Resolution (Miall, Ramsbotham & Woodhouse, 1999).
  Such were the ideas that inspired the ‘early church’ of conflict resolvers in the 1950s and 1960s. The first issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (1957, 1) put it like this:

  The reasons which have led us to this enterprise may be summed up in two propositions. The first is that by far the most practical problem facing the world today is that of international relations – more specifically the prevention of global war. The second is that if intellectual progress is to be made in this area, the study of international relations must be made an interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing its discourse from all the social sciences and even further.

  The complex systems that made war not only possible, but in some cases likely, operated in many overlapping spheres – military, political, economic, social, psychological – and at many different levels. So this must be matched by the requisite responses from conflict resolution. That is why the new field had to be interdisciplinary.
  But as conflict-resolution theorists and practitioners developed their programme, they found that more and more ‘frontiers of failure’ needed to be taken into account and addressed if the complex system as a whole was to be transformed. What had begun as a focus on the pathology of interstate war had expanded twenty years later to take in major drivers of conflict, such as north-south socio-economic divisions and environmental constraints, which were seen as potential generators of global conflict and therefore in urgent need of systemic transformation:

  The threat of nuclear holocaust remains with us and may well continue to do so for centuries, but other problems are competing with deterrence and disarmament studies for our attention. The journal must also attend to international conflict over justice, equality and human dignity; problems of conflict resolution for ecological balance and control are within our proper scope and especially suited for interdisciplinary attention. (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1973, 5)

  A critical early realization among some of the most creative shapers of the new conflict-resolution field was that the stipulations of second-order social learning applied as much to their own enterprise as to any others. In order to keep the field adaptive, innovative and effective, therefore, it was necessary to focus continually on the ‘frontiers of failure’ – those sites where conflict resolution itself did not (or did not yet) work. These were the locations where adaptation and growth were most needed, where reality checks could best be taken and where new ways of responding were most likely to be discovered.
  The rest of the article reflects on the evolution of the field from this Popperian perspective.³xPopper's (1959) well-known test for the empirical content of hypotheses is whether they are falsifiable. If they are not, as scientific theories they are devoid of content. So scientific advance depends on searching for ‘failure’. In the same vein Kuhn (1962) argued that scientific revolutions take the form of paradigm shifts as a result of anomalies in the old paradigm. It can, therefore, be said that the old paradigm (e.g., the Ptolemaic world system) deserves the credit for identifying its own ‘failure’ and therefore generating the new paradigm (e.g., the Copernican system). And so on.

  2.1. Lessons from the Frontiers of Failure: Conflict Resolution in Its First Fifty Years

  In the first, heroic, period in the 1950s and 1960s, the existing study of international relations was seen to have been taken over by first-order realist ways of thinking, which offered no solution to the main systemic threats. The pioneers of the conflict-resolution field challenged realist reliance on competitive military defence preparations, balance of power theory and deterrence as the main preventers of war because these could no longer be relied on to work in the nuclear age, and the penalty of failure would be too high. Instead they looked to a far wider study of human conflict that also embraced non-interstate wars, revolutions, insurrections, and human conflicts at other levels right down to small group and individual struggles. The statistical underpinning for this study was found in earlier analyses of ‘deadly quarrels’ in general by Pitirim Sorokin (1937), Lewis Fry Richardson (1960 posthumous publication) and Quincy Wright (1942). There are accounts of the excitement with which founders of the field greeted the arrival in the United States of Stephen Richardson with microfiches of his father's as-yet-unpublished work.
  As well as being multi-disciplinary and multi-level, the new field also aspired to be multi-cultural – drawing from non-Western Gandhian, Buddhist and other traditions – and aimed to be both analytic (polemology) and normative (eirenics), and to combine the theoretic (theoria) and the applied (praxis). This manifested itself in the way innovative pre-1950 initiatives at different levels were now brought together and integrated into what it was hoped would be a decisive paradigm shift – including Mary Parker Follett's (1942) seminal ‘mutual gains’ approach in labour relations, von Neumann's and Morgenstern's (1944) game theory, Kurt Lewin's (1948) work on the social psychology of group conflict, Crane Brinton's (1938) Anatomy of Revolution and David Mitrany's (1943) argument for the ‘functional development of international organisation’ as the foundation of a ‘working peace system’ (later seen to have anticipated the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union).
  At the heart of this distinctive new conflict-resolution field were three conceptual nodal points. First, Morton Deutsch's (1949, 1973) distinction between destructive and constructive conflict. The normative aim of conflict resolution was to overcome the former, not the latter. Second, Johan Galtung's (1969, 1975, 1990, summed up 1996) contrast between direct, structural and cultural violence (and his parallel distinction between behaviour, contradiction and attitude in human conflict – and the complementary enterprises of peacekeeping, peacebuilding and peacemaking). Third, John Burton's (1987, 1990b) idea that intractable conflicts were rooted in the failure of existing institutions to satisfy non-negotiable basic human needs:

  The conclusion to which we are coming is that seemingly different and separate social problems, from street violence to industrial frictions, to ethnic and international conflicts, are symptoms of the same cause: institutional denial of needs of recognition and identity, and the sense of security provided when they are satisfied, despite losses through violent conflict. (Burton, 1997: 38)

  For Burton, although basic human needs – identity needs, security needs, autonomy needs, development needs – were non-negotiable, they were also non-zero sum, so that the door to resolution was always open.
  It seems fair to conclude that in its first two decades the founders of the conflict-resolution field had indeed creatively explored the ‘frontiers of failure’ in the management of human conflict, and as a result had put together a promising alternative paradigm. The institutional bases for the new approach had been laid, mainly in North America and Europe. A set of complementary methodologies had been formulated, encompassing the ‘subjectivist’ controlled communication approach, the ‘objectivist’ rational negotiation approach and the ‘structuralist’ social justice approach – tentatively corresponding to attempts to address the ‘attitude’, ‘behaviour’ and ‘contradiction’ vertices of Galtung's conflict triangle. And there had been the beginning of a testing out of theory in practice with the early experiments in ‘controlled communication’ or ‘problem solving’ workshops (summed up in Kelman 1996; Mitchell & Banks, 1996). Some internal disputes within the field were still unresolved, but this can itself be seen as a sign of potential future growth from a social learning perspective (e.g. Boulding v. Galtung).
  During the next period in the 1970s and 1980s, those working in the conflict-resolution field continued to labour under the constraints of the Cold War, intensified by the Soviet take-over in Afghanistan (1979) and complicated by the Iranian revolution (1979). In the early 1980s, the nuclear arms race reached its zenith. This was a period of consolidation and development in conflict resolution, possibly less innovative, but still responsive to newly perceived challenges. Notable here at the international level, building on Charles Osgood's ‘graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction’ (GRIT) approach to détente, were Robert Axelrod's associated conclusions about the ‘evolution of cooperation’ in game theory together with its implications for arms control (in which Rapaport's ‘tit-for-tat’ strategy came out surprisingly strongly) (Axelrod, 1984; Osgood, 1962). At the domestic level, the whole field of Alternative Dispute Resolution began to be elaborated (covering labour relations, public policy disputes, neighbourhood conflicts, family mediation etc.). While, between the two, Burton's needs theory was applied with great prescience by Edward Azar to a host of non-interstate intractable conflicts that he called “protracted social conflicts”. His analysis in terms of preconditions that made certain societies more prone to conflict, and process dynamics that dictated whether or not in the event major armed conflict erupted, laid a sound theoretical base for what the Carnegie Commission later called ‘structural’ and ‘operational’ prevention (Azar, 1990; Azar & Burton, 1986; Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, 1997). All of this was innovatory at a time when international relations and security studies were mainly preoccupied with the Cold War confrontation. This was a period in which negotiation studies (notably the Harvard Program on Negotiation), multi-track diplomacy and mediation studies were put on a firm analytic basis. Conflict resolution centres spread around the world, and the idea of a global civil society that transcended gender and culture barriers was articulated, notably by Elise Boulding (1976, 1990), Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), with her promotion of the idea of ‘future imaging’ in all social and political planning, so that decisions are taken in terms of human needs over a ‘200-year present’ which in terms of explanation and understanding reaches back into the past, but in terms of impact takes in the equal interests of future generations.
  In the 1990s, the conflict-resolution field had reached a point of maturity where the end of the Cold War made a number of its terms and approaches, relatively marginalized in the earlier period, all at once the stock-in-trade of politicians and pundits. Peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding occupied international attention, while ‘conflict prevention’ moved to the centre of the UN's agenda. The ending of the Cold War revealed a world that had long been familiar in conflict resolution – a plethora of protracted social conflicts in which economic struggles to control the resources of vulnerable states, ethno-national efforts to redraw the boundaries of states and ideological attempts to change the nature of states all demanded a more sophisticated array of management, settlement and transformation approaches than had been widely familiar before. The conflict-resolution field responded by elaborating ideas of ‘contingency’ (varying requirements in different conflict types and phases) and ‘complementarity’ (synchronizing a range of responses; Fisher & Keashly, 1991). For example, aid and development agencies that had hitherto avoided conflict resolution because they did not see their role as ‘political’, now acknowledged that good conflict analysis was essential for the success of their missions and that good conflict impact assessment was necessary to ensure that they ‘did no harm’ (Anderson, 1996). Most of the environments within which they now worked were intense conflict zones of the kind conflict resolution had long been engaged with, where traditional ideas of political neutrality were compromised.

  2.2. Where Are the Frontiers of Failure Today?

  But greater exposure also brought greater criticism. After a honeymoon period in the early 1990s, when some hoped that the original declared purposes of the United Nations and associated international organizations might at last be realized – and the paradigm shift envisaged by the founders of conflict resolution might actually take place – the skies soon clouded over. Debacles in Bosnia and Rwanda (no doubt unfairly) discredited UN-led peacekeeping interventions. The Oslo peace process in Israel/Palestine, hailed in the conflict-resolution field as a textbook example of its methodology, stalled in the second half of the decade and appeared to discredit this mode of peacemaking. Moreover, post-war peacebuilding projects in countries such as Cambodia and Haiti too ran into difficulties. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the US ushered in the ‘war on terror’ to be followed by the embroilments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much of the Islamic world was convulsed by struggles to define its ideological and political identity. The quiet voice of conflict resolution seemed to be drowned out.
  At the theoretical level, too, conflict resolution was assailed by critics from the right and from the left. For traditional realists, in a world where irreconcilable interests compete for power, ‘soft’ conflict-resolution approaches were dismissed as ineffective and dangerous. What possible answer could conflict resolution have to the lethal combination of rogue states, globalized crime, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the fanatical ideologues of international terrorism? For critical theoretic inheritors of the Marxist mantle, in the structurally unequal world of late capitalism, ‘problem solving’ conflict-resolution approaches were seen to reinforce existing imbalances and to fail to address the need for underlying change. For post-structural theorists, conflict-resolution discourse about cosmopolitan values was permeated by unwarranted universalizing assumptions about truth and reality. Beyond this lay even broader assaults such as Paul Salem's “critique of western conflict resolution from a non-western perspective” (1993, 1997). For a response to these criticisms, see Chapter 19 of Contemporary Conflict Resolution (3rd ed.; Ramsbotham et al., 2011) by fellow authors Hugh Miall and Tom Woodhouse as well as myself, and Woodhouse's (1999) paper International Conflict Resolution: Some Critiques and a Response.
  The key question for the conflict-resolution field from the perspective of second-order social learning is whether it has responded creatively to these critiques. Have theorists and practitioners from around the world acknowledged the cases in which established conflict-resolution approaches have so far failed, and adapted accordingly? How are success and failure measured? Is adequate on-going evaluation built in to the different enterprises so that they can be self-correcting? Is the field still innovative and dynamic? Are lessons being learned from the frontiers of failure?

• 3. Case Study: Engaging the Challenge of Radical Disagreement

  I conclude this article with a brief account of my own recent work in attempting to learn “lessons from the frontiers of failure”.
  The failure in question is constituted by those conflicts in which in the communicative sphere conflict resolution so far does not work. Attempts at negotiation (settlement) and dialogue (transformation) – together with various forms of problem solving – prove to be premature. These creative efforts are inspiring, but as yet they do not gain sufficient purchase. They may work sometime in the future. But ‘so far’ can go on for a very long time, and the human suffering in the interim can be great.
  At this point, second-order social learning theory says that we should (a) take the failure seriously, (b) try to understand it, and, in the light of this, (c) search for new approaches.
  So far as concerns taking the failure seriously, this means looking at the main blockage in the communicative sphere, which I call linguistic intractability. At the heart of linguistic intractability lies the phenomenon of what I term radical disagreement, the chief linguistic feature of intense political conflict. The problem here is that conflict resolution does not take radical disagreement seriously. In the form of ‘positional debate’, ‘adversarial debate’, ‘competitive debate’ and so forth, radical disagreement is largely dismissed in negotiation, problem solving and dialogue work as what needs from the outset to be overcome, not learned from. Radical disagreement is seen as an unproductive dead end, an all-too-familiar feature of intransigence, a terminus to ‘constructive controversy’ and genuine dialogue. So the starting point from a second-order social learning perspective is to look in the opposite direction. Take linguistic intractability seriously. Begin by focusing on the radical disagreement itself.⁴xIn addition to Rothman's (1997) ARIA methodology, other conflict-resolution programmes that do address the issue of radical disagreement include G. Burgess and H. Burgess's (1996) ‘Constructive Confrontation’, Johnson et al.'s (2000) ‘Constructive Controversy’, Bradford's (2000) ‘Managing Disagreement Constructively’, Mayer's (2009) Staying with Conflict and Myrna Lewis's ‘Deep Democracy’ (www.deep-democracy.net/view).
  So far as concerns understanding the causes of failure in the communicative realm, I have been trying to explore radical disagreements with conflict parties for many years. This is a process of participant-led enquiry exactly along the lines sketched out by Michal Alberstein. The general outcome – usually striking, sometimes dramatic – has been the discovery that conflict parties are, not nearer, but much further apart than was realized. Radical disagreement is found to involve what it is about, to involve the background appealed to, and to involve the very distinctions invoked by conflict parties in the process of disagreeing. Radical disagreement is not ‘all too familiar’, but perhaps the least familiar feature of intense political conflict. And it is not a terminus to dialogue, but, on the contrary, the most characteristic form of dialogue in conflict situations, namely what I call agonistic dialogue or dialogue between enemies. This is nothing less than the war of words itself. Wars of words are propaganda contests for media control. But at a deeper level, they are clashes of perspectives, horizons and visual fields. They are gravitational battles. A radical disagreement is not a co-existence of discourses within some supposed third conceptual frame. It is a life-and-death struggle to occupy the whole of discursive space (Ramsbotham, 2010: 109-132).
  What lessons can be learned from this about how to search for new approaches? In my own attempt to do this, the logic of second-order social learning dictates that, when negotiation and dialogue for mutual understanding fail, we should begin by working with the grain of radical disagreement rather than against it. How can this be done? I suggest that it is best undertaken at three parallel and interconnected levels. The aim is to promote a strategic engagement of discourses (SED) within, across and between conflict parties, and involving third parties. In order to engage linguistic intractability, it is first necessary to bring it out into the open. What is needed is not less radical disagreement but more.
  The starting point, therefore, is not an attempt to encourage premature exchanges between conflict parties, but to promote inclusive strategic thinking within them (first level).⁵xThis is being put into practice in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict where, with colleagues from the Oxford Research Group, we have since 2006 been supporting inclusive strategy groups for Jewish Israelis, Palestinians and more recently Palestinian Citizens of Israel. Begin from where the conflict parties are, not from where third parties may want them to be. The three criteria are that the forum in question should be inclusive (representative of all main constituencies of that conflict party so far as is possible), strategic (in the simple sense of asking: where are we? where do we want to go? how do we get there?) and with results fed continuously into the national debate at all levels. Conflict parties are usually keen to do this even in intense conflict phases because the aim is not mutual accommodation or understanding with the other, but the overcoming of internal differences in order to win. This may seem the antithesis of conflict resolution, but negotiation of internal differences can be a major contribution to unlocking possibilities for external engagement, while the very nature of strategic thinking ‘mimics’ aspects of conflict resolution.⁶xFor example, the strategic thinking looks forward, not back. Its inclusive nature tempers the tendency for ‘extremists’ to take over – although they are also included. It takes note of the systemic complexity of the current situation. It analyses possible future scenarios, not just in terms of desirability but also in terms of attainability and likelihood. It distinguishes short-term, medium-term and long-term goals. It evaluates strategic means in terms of effectiveness, thus discriminating between different forms of power. It looks at the chessboard from the perspective of the opponent because otherwise it loses. It is aware of the importance of shaping strategic messages for multiple audiences. And so on. Two other possible advantages follow. The process can do a lot to overcome the debilitating gap between strategic thinking at elite and popular levels. And it can make a major contribution to empowering the ‘challenger’ in asymmetric conflicts.⁷xFor example, Palestinians who are otherwise scattered across Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora are able to carry on shared strategic thinking about the national future.
  On this on-going basis, it is then possible to channel agonistic dialogue into an on-going strategic engagement of discourses across and between conflict parties (level 2). Avenues of communication can be kept open that are otherwise closed because even though direct cross-party communication may in the first instance be confined to a few interlocutors on either side, the inclusive nature of the internal strategy fora means that these messages are nevertheless transmitted across the entire spectrum. One feature that is immediately revealed by such strategic engagement is that conflict parties are not divided en bloc on most of these issues, but that internal divisions link ‘strange bedfellows’ in a complicated pattern across different stretches of the conceptual terrain. Above all, key issues are raised and contested that otherwise do not appear on the radar screen at all. A range of scenarios (possible futures) are thus publicly argued out within and across conflict parties. This can provide the necessary, but often missing, background to negotiations, which depend on such comparison of alternatives if decision makers on all sides are to conclude that entering negotiations is preferable to not entering them, that reaching agreement is preferable to not reaching agreement, and that implementation is preferable to defection.
  Finally, in the light of all this, third parties, including would-be peacemakers, see why, whatever their own self-interpretation may be, they are not neutral, impartial or disinterested (level 3). They are part of the struggle. They, too, want to occupy the whole of discursive space. They seek change or transformation in which the discourses of the primary conflict parties are not what they were before. In this sense, peacemakers – including elicitive peacemakers – also want to win. So they, too, need strategies to bring this about – and do well before they enter the arena to learn all that they can about the bewildering multiplicity of constituencies involved and the highly complex interplay of conceptual frames, emotions, assertions and claims that has already been revealed at the other levels.
  Strategic engagement as an alternative to negotiation, problem solving, and dialogue for mutual understanding should be seen, not in any way as a critique of conflict resolution, but as a complementary process, another string to the bow, that can open opportunities when so far those other approaches do not gain sufficient traction. The promotion of a strategic engagement of discourses can be pushed forward even in the most intense phases of political confrontation. It is not pre-negotiation. It is not even pre-pre-negotiation. The hope, however, is that, as a result, it may help to prepare the ground for a revival of conflict resolution and maximize its subsequent impact. If so, then its proudest claim will be to have served as another example of ‘successful failure’ – the never-ending effort of the conflict-resolution field to learn from failure in order to do better in the future.

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Noten

• 1 In this article I take the broad term ‘conflict resolution’ to include conflict settlement at one end of the spectrum and conflict transformation at the other, as argued in Contemporary Conflict Resolution (3rd ed.; Ramsbotham et al., 2011, pp. 9-10 et seq.). Rothman suggests in this issue that he would prefer to jettison ‘conflict resolution’ as the overall label and replace it with ‘conflict engagement’. At the moment I prefer to keep ‘conflict resolution’ as the generic term, in order to be able to use ‘conflict engagement’ to refer to what can be done in those cases where so far conflict resolution does not work. For example that is why I use the term ‘strategic engagement’ for the approach I suggest best addresses the failure of conflict resolution to cope with radical disagreement (see the case study at the end of this article).

• 2 The first two paragraphs of this article are heavily indebted to my colleague Woodhouse, who did the original research into this topic for Chapter 2 of Contemporary Conflict Resolution (Miall, Ramsbotham & Woodhouse, 1999).

• 3 Popper's (1959) well-known test for the empirical content of hypotheses is whether they are falsifiable. If they are not, as scientific theories they are devoid of content. So scientific advance depends on searching for ‘failure’. In the same vein Kuhn (1962) argued that scientific revolutions take the form of paradigm shifts as a result of anomalies in the old paradigm. It can, therefore, be said that the old paradigm (e.g., the Ptolemaic world system) deserves the credit for identifying its own ‘failure’ and therefore generating the new paradigm (e.g., the Copernican system). And so on.

• 4 In addition to Rothman's (1997) ARIA methodology, other conflict-resolution programmes that do address the issue of radical disagreement include G. Burgess and H. Burgess's (1996) ‘Constructive Confrontation’, Johnson et al.'s (2000) ‘Constructive Controversy’, Bradford's (2000) ‘Managing Disagreement Constructively’, Mayer's (2009) Staying with Conflict and Myrna Lewis's ‘Deep Democracy’ (www.deep-democracy.net/view).

• 5 This is being put into practice in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict where, with colleagues from the Oxford Research Group, we have since 2006 been supporting inclusive strategy groups for Jewish Israelis, Palestinians and more recently Palestinian Citizens of Israel.

• 6 For example, the strategic thinking looks forward, not back. Its inclusive nature tempers the tendency for ‘extremists’ to take over – although they are also included. It takes note of the systemic complexity of the current situation. It analyses possible future scenarios, not just in terms of desirability but also in terms of attainability and likelihood. It distinguishes short-term, medium-term and long-term goals. It evaluates strategic means in terms of effectiveness, thus discriminating between different forms of power. It looks at the chessboard from the perspective of the opponent because otherwise it loses. It is aware of the importance of shaping strategic messages for multiple audiences. And so on.

• 7 For example, Palestinians who are otherwise scattered across Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora are able to carry on shared strategic thinking about the national future.