Course Overview

PACS 201, Roots of Conflict, Violence, and Peace, is the first of three introductory core courses in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Waterloo. The course was originally developed by Nathan Funk and redeveloped for its online format by Rachel Reist and Alexandra Bly with support from the Centre for Extended Learning. Over twelve modules it introduces students to foundational concepts and competing paradigms in peace and conflict studies, asking three overarching questions: What do we mean when we speak of peace, conflict, and violence? What are the major schools of thought for analyzing the sources of violent conflict? And how do our understandings of conflict and violence relate to understandings of power?

The course situates itself within a broad intellectual tradition that insists conflict is not inherently bad — it is dual-natured, carrying both danger and opportunity — but that the ways societies choose to handle conflict determine whether it becomes constructive or destructive. By the end of the course, students are expected to discuss issues using peace-and-conflict themes and concepts, examine diverse perspectives on dealing with conflict, identify approaches to peaceful change, evaluate strengths and weaknesses of major theories, and apply conceptual tools to contemporary situations.

Module 1: Conflict, Violence, and Peace

What Is Conflict?

Peace and conflict studies begins with precise definitions because the terms “conflict,” “violence,” and “peace” are routinely used interchangeably in everyday speech, obscuring important distinctions. Conrad Brunk, a prominent advocate for the field, defines conflict as “what results from the existence, real or imagined, of incompatible goals, beliefs, or activities.” Three propositions follow from this definition that peace scholars regard as foundational.

First, conflict is not always bad. The discipline insists that conflict carries a dual nature — it can be destructive but it can equally be a catalyst for growth, creativity, and social change. The emphasis in peace and conflict studies therefore falls not merely on preventing conflict but on handling it constructively rather than destructively.

Second, conflict is not the same as violence. Mathematically, violence is a subset of conflict: all violence involves conflict, but the vast majority of conflict is non-violent. Common discourse tends to collapse these two terms, and one of the course’s early tasks is to re-establish the distinction so that students can think clearly about the full spectrum of conflict behaviour.

Third, conflict is normal. If incompatible goals, beliefs, or activities are present in virtually every human relationship and institution, then conflict is a routine feature of social life. Most of this conflict never becomes violent. Recognising this normality helps prevent the common error of treating all conflict as crisis.

Galtung’s Triangle: Three Forms of Violence

The course draws heavily on Norwegian peace scholar Johan Galtung, whose typology of violence has become one of the most influential frameworks in the entire field. Galtung distinguishes three interconnected forms:

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” one of the module’s assigned readings, illuminates cultural violence vividly. King describes how entrenched attitudes about Black Americans produced harm not only through laws and institutions but through the very experience of being forced to tell a child she cannot enter the amusement park advertised on television, producing what he called an internalised “degenerating sense of nobodiness.” Cultural violence, the course notes, is particularly dangerous because it operates subtly and often acts as a precursor: once a group is culturally dehumanised, acts of structural and direct violence become socially acceptable and easier to perpetrate.

The three forms of violence are interrelated. They form a mutually reinforcing triangle: direct violence is most visible but is propped up by structural and cultural violence, and these in turn are harder to see but often more durable in their effects.

Three Forms of Peace

Just as violence is multidimensional, so is peace. The course delineates three corresponding forms:

The relationship between peace and justice emerges here as a central tension in the course. Those who advocate for structural and cultural peace insist that a “peace” that leaves structural violence intact is not genuine peace but merely a managed form of oppression.

Module 2: The Problem of Aggression

Defining Aggression

Aggression is not synonymous with violence, and the module begins by distinguishing minimalism — assertiveness, firmness, energetic pursuit of a goal — from maximalism — unprovoked attack or invasion. The study of aggression in peace and conflict contexts focuses specifically on how aggression connects to direct violence. Two broad schools of thought compete: those who argue that human aggression is innate, and those who argue it is shaped by situational and environmental factors.

Innate Theories of Aggression

The course examines four principal innate theories:

1. Instinctivism is most associated with ethologist Konrad Lorenz, whose reading appears in the module. Lorenz held that aggression is a genetically determined drive in animals with a Darwinian preservation function — it serves survival. He extrapolated to human beings, arguing that human behaviour is ultimately animal behaviour, and that war, like animal aggression, must be instinctively grounded. He introduced the concept of militant enthusiasm: the phenomenon whereby people in group contexts abandon ordinary inhibitions and participate in collective violence with apparent fervour. For Lorenz, this enthusiasm is traceable to communal defence responses in prehuman ancestors.

2. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, a term coined by Edward O. Wilson in 1975, proposes that behaviours have both genetic and social learning bases, but that evolutionary pressures have left strong imprints on behavioural repertoires. Aggressive behaviour is “adaptive” in an evolutionary sense because it has historically served survival. This perspective is highly controversial.

3. Psychoanalysis, in the early Freudian tradition, holds that two unconscious forces — Eros (the life/love instinct) and Thanatos (the death/destruction instinct) — motivate human behaviour. Freud argued that human beings achieved civilisation only by repressing and channelling these forces, and that the deep structure of human nature is narcissistic. His concept of narcissistic injury — the experience of collective humiliation when one’s identity-group suffers a loss of territory, honour, or prestige — remains influential in explaining nationalistic and ethnic conflict even where his death-instinct hypothesis has been rejected by mainstream psychiatry.

4. Early political theory, most centrally the work of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), provides a foundational rationale for the view that external authority is required to prevent human beings from destroying one another. Writing during England’s civil war, Hobbes characterised the human condition as competitive, fearful, and power-seeking, and described the state of nature as violent anarchy. Without a sovereign to impose order, humans would be in a perpetual war of all against all. This Hobbesian view became one of the intellectual pillars of the power politics paradigm examined in Module 3.

Criticisms of Innate Theories

Four major criticisms are advanced against innate aggression theories:

First, generalisations about “human nature” have insufficient explanatory value. If biology fully explained social violence, it could not account for the wide variation in levels of violence across cultures and historical periods. The transformation of Scandinavian societies from the Viking era to modern Scandinavian democracies is a frequently cited counterexample.

Second, innate theories underestimate the importance of nurture, socialisation, and culture. Studies of identical twins raised in different environments demonstrate that social context shapes outcomes substantially even among genetically identical individuals.

Third, focusing too heavily on innate aggressiveness distracts from other, more actionable causes of violence — economic systems, patterns of social organisation, ecological pressures, governmental effectiveness — that can in principle be changed.

Fourth, innate-aggression arguments have historically been misapplied for political purposes, used to justify exclusionary nationalism, racist policies, and the pseudoscience of phrenology.

Situational and Environmental Explanations

The alternative school of thought explores social causes of aggression:

The module concludes without declaring a winner. The situational-environmental perspective is compelling because it implies that violence is not inevitable — if certain environmental factors change, outcomes can change. But the debate about how much weight to assign nature versus nurture in explaining human aggression remains genuinely open and contested.

Module 3: The Power Politics Paradigm

Introducing the Paradigm

The power politics paradigm is one of the oldest and most influential traditions in international relations thinking. Its synonyms — realpolitik (state policies based on material power and expediency rather than ethical considerations, credited to Otto von Bismarck), machtpolitik (German: power politics), and political realism — share a common orientation: they insist on analysing the world as it is rather than as we might wish it to be.

Power politics is not a single unified theory but an intellectual tradition with overlapping assumptions about history and human behaviour. It reads history as a drama of military and political competition among sovereigns seeking survival and the acquisition of wealth, status, and power.

The historical case most frequently invoked by power politics scholars is the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) between Athens and Sparta. As Athens grew in power and alliances, Sparta felt threatened and pre-empted. The conflict lasted thirty years, both sides committed atrocities, and both suffered heavily. From this case, power politics writers distil lessons about prudence, statecraft, and the way rivalries for power unfold — lessons they regard as transhistorical. The Athenian historian Thucydides is their canonical source, and his observation that Spartan fear of Athenian power made war inevitable articulates what power politics regards as the fundamental dynamic of international politics.

Six Basic Assumptions

Power politics rests on four basic assumptions about conflict, violence, and peace:

Conflict and violence are natural, rooted in inherent aggressiveness or competitiveness. The primary mechanism for controlling violence is the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force internally and its military deterrent capability externally. Peace is an absence of war, maintained under unstable foundations and requiring constant vigilance. Domestically, peace depends on the state’s coercive authority; internationally, it depends on the distribution of power among states.

Six Key Principles

The paradigm is also structured around six key principles:

1. Scarcity and competition. Resources are never sufficient to satisfy all demands, and individuals and groups inevitably compete for them. Some, following Hobbes, root this in human nature; others, following Adam Smith, root it in the competitive structure of group interaction.

2. Pre-eminence of the nation-state. The strong nation-state is the only basis for security. States regulate competition within their boundaries and advance the interests of their citizens internationally. There is no real community beyond the state in this framework.

3. Absence of universal human values. Morality is largely group-specific, enforced by the capacity of a political authority. International moral norms carry little weight because there is no authority with the capacity to enforce them.

4. Infeasibility of world government. The international system is characterised by anarchy: no reliable arbiter of disputes exists. The UN is a diplomatic forum but not a genuine authority. States therefore exist in a self-help system in which each must look out for its own interests.

5. Pre-eminence of national interest. Authorities within the state must guard and advance state interests based on rationality and self-interest, a principle rooted in the historical doctrine of raison d’état (reason of state). Long-term co-operative interests are viewed with scepticism; immediate security concerns dominate.

6. Dominance of national security concerns. States can and will use military force to protect their interests. Each must remain on guard; the threat of violence is constant.

War, Deterrence, and the Security Dilemma

Power politics defines war as a violent struggle on a mass scale, conventionally measured by at least 1,000 deaths in a year. Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), the German military theorist, contributed the famous formulation that war is “the continuation of politics by other means” — that is, war must be kept subordinate to rational political objectives and not allowed to follow its own escalatory logic.

The paradigm distinguishes several types of war: total wars (arising from mass nationalism, conscription, and modern military technology, culminating in World Wars I and II); inter-state wars (between states) and internal wars (civil wars); status quo wars (a great power defending existing distributions of influence); hegemonic wars (a power seeking expanded influence); revisionist wars (a lesser power attempting to rise); imperial wars (colonial conflict); wars of liberation (colonised peoples fighting for independence); and asymmetric warfare (where one side vastly outmatches the other, often producing guerrilla tactics and terrorism).

The paradigm also centres on alliances as a mechanism for balancing power. The debate within power politics pits advocates of bipolarity (tightly organised opposing alliances, like NATO and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, which supposedly produced predictability) against advocates of multipolarity (many centers of power with flexible alliance options). A more contemporary debate contrasts unipolarity/hegemony (one dominant power providing stability) with multipolarity.

Evaluating the Power Politics Paradigm

The course presents arguments both for and against the paradigm. In its favour: it focuses on historically significant issues like territorial expansion and state survival; it does not reduce conflict to a simple moral drama of good versus evil, recognising that even ostensible “bad guys” may have logical security motivations; and it offers a parsimonious explanation using the single principle of self-interest.

Against it, three critiques are advanced:

Unrealistic. The paradigm does not predict or explain most wars in the contemporary world, the majority of which are internal rather than inter-state. It cannot adequately account for the extensive international cooperation that does exist, and its state-centrism misses the fact that many wars are between nations within multi-national states, and that poverty is a major contributing factor to contemporary armed conflict.

Outdated. The world has changed significantly since ancient Greece. The paradigm’s reading of history as cyclical rather than developmental fails to account for genuine historical change and transformation.

Irresponsible. The paradigm downplays moral choice. It “thinks itself into a box” where the only prescription for peace is the threat of mass annihilation. Critics argue this fails to use the moral imagination to envision security in any other way.

Module 4: World Order Perspectives

The World Order Paradigm’s Critique of Power Politics

The world order paradigm begins with a systematic critique of power politics. Where power politics says “if you want peace, prepare for war” (si vis pacem, para bellum), the world order paradigm counters “if you want peace, prepare for peace” (si vis pacem, para pacem). The paradigm charges that power politics misdiagnoses the roots of conflict, that its prescriptions for peace are not only inadequate but actively dangerous, and that it forecloses more imaginative solutions.

World Order Explanations for Conflict

The paradigm identifies five root causes of conflict and violence:

The narrow or short-sighted pursuit of interests by states and leaders, which makes politics a power struggle rather than a co-operative project. Unregulated security competition (arms races), which consumes resources that could address shared problems. Reliance on threats and self-help rather than rules and institutions, which produces disorder and injustice. Structural disadvantage in global trade and finance for poorer countries, which generates instability. And the underprovision of global public goods — human rights, environmental health, global health — because no effective global governance mechanism exists to supply them.

Six Key Premises of the World Order Paradigm

Premise 1: Sufficiency. The world has sufficient resources, but they are mismanaged through unsustainable and inequitable practices. Scarcity is not a natural condition but a social and political one. This premise reconnects the paradigm to the concept of structural violence from Module 1. Inequality and deprivation are identified as sources of tension.

The premise is elaborated through several explanatory frameworks. Relative deprivation — feeling less well-off than others whom one does not regard as more deserving — generates humiliation and the potential for political mobilisation. Absolute deprivation — inability to access basic necessities — reflects fundamental weaknesses in social systems. The erosion of subsistence culture — rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, and commodification of economic life — disrupts traditional livelihoods and produces visible poverty. Environmental mismanagement, not natural scarcity, explains many resource-based conflicts. And resource capture, following theorist Thomas Homer-Dixon, describes processes by which land and resources become concentrated in fewer hands, pushing the poor to the margins and deepening social inequity.

Premise 2: Multiple actors. International affairs involves a complex web of actors beyond states: international organisations, transnational corporations, ethnic groups, NGOs, transnational social movements, global civil society, and insurgent or criminal groups. Key concepts include international regimes (sets of rules, norms, and procedures governing clusters of global issues) and global civil society (the conscious voluntary association of diverse actors in different parts of the world linking themselves for common purposes).

Premise 3: Shared values. People and states share interests across national boundaries that may be rooted in underlying shared values. Human rights exemplify this. The world order paradigm works with three generations of human rights: first-generation civil and political rights (the individual’s rights in relation to the state, enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights); second-generation economic, social, and cultural rights (rights to education, work, and health, including group cultural rights); and third-generation collective and solidarity rights (the right of peoples and future generations to peace, development, and a healthy environment). Key world order values include security, human dignity, development, ecological balance, and participation in governance.

Premise 4: Global governance. The paradigm distinguishes government (a formal, centralised, top-down authority structure) from governance (organised co-operation based on consensus-building and common norms). The world does not have global government and is unlikely to soon, but it does have imperfect global governance that needs to be improved. Governance failure — local or global — is a proximate cause of destructive conflict. The United Nations, with its original purposes of preventing war, affirming human rights, promoting international justice, and improving living standards, is viewed as a key institution that must be reformed and strengthened rather than abandoned.

Premise 5: Human interests. Beyond national interest, there is such a thing as a human interest — an enlightened and inclusive self-interest that recognises the rights of others and future generations. The Global Public Goods model, advanced within the UN Development Programme, holds that some conditions for human well-being cannot be secured by any single state acting alone. The underprovision of global public goods — ecological balance, equitable trade, global health, international security — contributes to conflict; their provision through collective action creates conditions for structural peace.

Premise 6: Co-operative/collective security. Security is understood collectively rather than individualistically. Key concepts here include common security (in the nuclear age, security is no longer divisible — if nuclear weapons are used, everyone loses), human security (security of the individual human being rather than of the state), and ecological security (a liveable biosphere and healthy environment as a condition of human security).

Module 5: World Order Systems

The Five Core World Order Systems

The module moves from the theoretical premises of the world order paradigm to the institutions and practices through which it operates. Five core world order systems are examined.

International human rights. The foundation is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948), created in response to the Holocaust and the revelation that genocide had not yet been formally prohibited by international law. The UDHR radically modified the concept of absolute state sovereignty: states no longer had the right to do whatever they wished to their citizens without international censure. Built on the UDHR foundation are approximately seventy human rights treaties including the Convention against Torture (CAT), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Human rights are valued not only intrinsically but instrumentally: nations are more stable when human rights are respected because they provide a safety valve for dissent and aggregate the collective wisdom of their citizenry.

International law. Defined as “the acknowledged principles that guide the interactions between states, and that set limits upon what is and what is not permissible,” international law confronts the power politics picture of international anarchy. Its sources are classical writings (the term itself first appeared with Jeremy Bentham in 1783, though practice dates to the 16th and 17th centuries); custom (evolved practices that become binding norms, such as diplomatic immunity); treaties (binding agreements analogous to contracts, including the UN Charter); and courts (such as the International Court of Justice in The Hague). States comply with international law for reasons of interest (maintaining normal relations), duty (moral commitment and concern for public opinion), and coercion (fear of sanctions and ostracism). Fundamentally, building consensus on norms — shared standards of appropriate behaviour — is essential for the world order project.

UN systems. The UN is a complex body comprising 11 programmes and funds (UNICEF, UNHCR), 15 specialised agencies (World Bank, WHO), and other organisations. These systems create international standards and platforms for governmental dialogue on climate change, disarmament, women’s rights, and other cross-cutting issues. Proponents argue that imperfect as these systems are, the alternative — abandoning them — is worse.

The law of war. Emerging from the Geneva Conventions, customary law, and humanitarian treaties, the law of war rests on the assumption that peace is normal and war is abnormal and temporary. Two foundational concepts structure it. Jus ad bellum (“justice of war”) specifies when war may be justified: it must be declared by a duly constituted authority, with right intention, just cause (restoring just and peaceful conditions), tolerable loss of life, and only as a last resort. Jus in bello (“justice in war”) specifies how war must be conducted: through proportionality (balance of means and ends), discrimination (civilians and non-combatants must be protected), and humane treatment of prisoners.

Civil society. Defined as collective citizen action — groups of people outside government coming together to accomplish a common purpose — civil society functions as the conscience of communities. At the local level it operates through food banks, charities, and advocacy groups. Nationally it shapes debates on major social issues. Internationally it has demonstrated the power to create and enforce norms: the campaign to ban landmines (1992–1997), led by Jody Williams and a coalition of NGOs, produced the Ottawa Treaty and demonstrated that ordinary citizens can change international law. Civil society, international law, UN systems, and human rights work best not independently but complementarily, each reinforcing the others.

Module 6: Nonviolence Perspectives

Strategic Dependence on Violence

The nonviolence paradigm begins with a claim about power: we have conditioned ourselves to associate power with violence, to the point that when normal means fail and vital objectives are at stake, we feel pressure to endorse violence. This conditioning produces cycles of violence: when one party turns to violence, adversaries typically respond in kind, escalating the conflict. The paradigm cites Bloody Sunday (Derry, Northern Ireland, January 30, 1972) as an illustration — when British soldiers shot thirteen protesters, support for the Irish Republican Army surged, demonstrating how violence by the powerful radicalises those it oppresses.

The pacifist scientist Ursula Franklin summarised the paradigm’s central claim: “Violence is a form of resourcelessness — in other words, we use violence when we lack the creativity to come up with a nonviolent solution.”

Defining Nonviolence

Nonviolence is a multi-dimensional concept used in five main ways: as a strategy for social change, a method for resolving conflict, a method of liberation, a method of defence, and a way of life.

Principled vs. Pragmatic Nonviolence

The principled approach holds that opposition to violence is a moral necessity rooted in philosophical ethics, religious pacifism, spirituality, and the Gandhian tradition. Mohandas Gandhi is its preeminent figure. His principle of ahimsa (non-harming) and his insistence that “when nonviolence is accepted as the law of life it must pervade the whole being” represent the fullest expression of this approach. Crucially, the principled approach refuses to dehumanise adversaries: no one has a monopoly on truth, and conflict waged nonviolently is an opportunity to search for truth together.

The pragmatic approach treats nonviolence as a means to an end. It studies past campaigns to identify what worked and what did not. Its argument is frequently that nonviolent action can provide the weak with an effective means of seeking justice: a poorly armed group cannot defeat a heavily armed state on its own terms, but a carefully thought-out nonviolent strategy changes the terms of engagement.

The course insists the two approaches need each other. Without principle, the pragmatic commitment to nonviolence may erode under pressure; without action, principled commitment to nonviolence becomes passive conflict-avoidance rather than transformative social force.

Three Operative Principles of Nonviolence Theory

1. Strong linkage between means and ends. The means we use to achieve objectives shape the ends we can reach. Violence’s built-in flaw is that it tends to produce unintended consequences: deep scars, increased probability of future violence, and organisational structures (secrecy, hierarchical authority) that undermine open democratic governance. Therefore: work for peace peacefully, for justice justly, for truth truthfully.

2. Consent theory of power. Government rests not only on coercion but on consent and obedience. By withdrawing consent — “people power” — broad masses can reclaim political power. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Czechoslovakia exemplifies this: on November 20, half a million people took to the streets, forcing the Communist Party to relinquish power. The people withdrew their consent and the regime fell.

3. Moral or political jiu-jitsu. By yielding to an opponent’s force rather than meeting it with force, and by refusing to retaliate, nonviolent actors can potentially turn an adversary’s oppression against itself. Unrequited violence challenges the legitimacy of the oppressive force. If the message that “the whole world is watching” gets out, oppression undermines the oppressor’s authority.

Methods of Nonviolent Action

Theorist Gene Sharp categorised methods of nonviolent action into three core types arranged on a continuum of assertiveness:

Module 7: Nonviolent Action in Practice

Four Mechanisms of Change

How do nonviolent struggles actually produce outcomes? The course identifies four mechanisms of change:

1. Conversion means changing an opponent’s mind — a genuine change of heart or conviction. Major social change typically requires at least some conversion, as it would be hard to imagine lasting equality without changing prejudices at the societal level.

2. Accommodation means opponents make partial or complete concessions because the cost-benefit calculation favours doing so, not because they have been converted. A government may offer political space to a marginalised group without surrendering power.

3. Nonviolent coercion occurs when activists generate sufficient pressure that adversaries must bend to their demands even without wanting to.

4. Disintegration is the extreme result of nonviolent coercion — the irreparable collapse of the adversary’s power base. The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia (2010–2011) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union’s satellite regimes after popular nonviolent protests in Eastern Europe both exemplify disintegration.

Criteria for a Successful Nonviolent Campaign

Drawing on Gene Sharp and other scholars, the course identifies several criteria: a significant mass of people motivated by shared needs and values; will and commitment (including willingness to accept the costs and risks of participation); strategy and leadership (including flexibility, deep knowledge of both supporters and adversaries, and contingency planning); training (preparation and organisational discipline); realizable objectives (incremental goals that build momentum toward larger aims); and nonviolent discipline (maintenance of the commitment to nonviolent methods, without which legitimacy quickly erodes).

Nonviolence as a Way of Life

For deeper practitioners, nonviolence is not merely a strategy but a spiritual and ethical orientation structured around five principles: non-injury (ahimsa or non-resistance — not causing harm to others); love of enemy (refusing to dehumanise adversaries, recognising that obsession with enemies darkens one’s own life); self-suffering (the willingness to accept harm without retaliation, turning the other cheek actively rather than passively); commitment to truth (recognising that no one has a monopoly on truth, and that violent struggle tends to distort truth through dehumanisation and propaganda); and involvement with the grassroots (generating new leadership among ordinary people rather than merely mobilising followers).

Peace Movements

Peace movements apply nonviolence in a broader context, challenging not specific governments but the overall logic of violence and the institutionalisation of military solutions to political problems — what activists call militarism, the process by which violence becomes a cultural, political, and economic institution. Peace movements are coalitions seeking to remove conditions believed to contribute to war, including structural violence and “cultures of violent solutions.” They are characterised by their independence from any government or political party.

The Cold War period saw intense peace advocacy — groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility mobilised against nuclear buildups, promoting concepts like common security (security as mutually dependent rather than competitive). Many scholars credit peace movements with contributing to the erosion of Cold War tensions and the empowerment of Eastern European democratic movements. The run-up to the 2003 Iraq War produced some of the largest and most geographically widespread peace demonstrations in human history.

Module 8: Sources of Conflict and Conflict Escalation

The Conflict Resolution Paradigm: Basic Assumptions

The conflict resolution paradigm accepts that conflict is inevitable but insists it need not be violent. It rests on several basic assumptions. Focusing on relationships produces new insight into conflict sources and dynamics that purely structural or individual-level analyses miss. Attitudes, perceptions, and behaviours that fuel destructive conflicts can be changed through the right processes. Conflict resolution is not merely about ending fights or reaching agreements but about expanding our capacity to handle conflict without violence. Conflict resolution is a continuous process, not a final settlement. And conflict is dynamic: it has an external dimension (clashing positions or structural situations), an internal dimension (attitudes and perceptions), and a relational dimension (behaviours and how we act), all interacting.

Four Perspectives on the Causes of Conflict

Conflict analysis theorists have identified four analytical perspectives: the individual characteristics perspective (instincts, personality, learned responses); the social structural perspective (unequal access to resources along class, gender, nationality, and other lines); the formal perspective (game theory and rational actors with incentives for conflict or cooperation); and the social process perspective (the interactions, perceptions, interpretations, and communications of individuals and groups). The social process perspective has historically been most central to the conflict resolution paradigm.

Within the social process perspective, two important models of conflict are distinguished. The aggressor-defender model depicts conflict as a one-way trespass by an aggressor against a defender. The conflict spiral model offers greater complexity: conflict begets conflict in a reciprocal cycle. Party A uses heavy tactics; Party B responds with defensiveness, psychological changes (blame, anger, identity shift), and then its own heavy tactics; Party A responds in kind. Getting out of the spiral is the central challenge of conflict resolution.

Macro-Level Conflict: Structural Vulnerabilities

At the macro level, poverty intersects with multiple risk factors to make armed conflict more likely: a smaller economic pie raises the stakes of competition, resources may be lootable, central governments may lack efficiency or legitimacy, national identity may be weak, and external intervention is invited. The cases of the Democratic Republic of Congo (resources tied to ongoing conflict) and Colombia (displacement of six million people from resource-linked conflict) illustrate how structural vulnerabilities translate into human catastrophe.

Identity, Nationalism, and Protracted Social Conflicts

Many contemporary conflicts centre on identity, the need to preserve cultural, ethnic, and linguistic integrity. Three perspectives on collective identity and nationalism are distinguished:

Edward Azar’s theory of protracted social conflicts synthesises these dimensions into a four-part framework developed from his observation of the Lebanese civil war and other intra-state conflicts of the 1980s. Protracted social conflicts combine: (1) communal content — some dimension of ethnicity or culture is at stake; (2) denial of basic human needs of identity, development, security, and control of destiny; (3) governance problems — one group is excluded from institutions or faces discrimination within governance systems; and (4) international linkages — diasporas, great-power interventions, and transboundary identities that draw external actors into the conflict.

Conflict Escalation Patterns

John Paul Lederach’s ABC model maps the relationship between emotional involvement and communicative quality. If parties have no emotional stake, communication is disengaged; if parties are in full defensive-aggressive mode, communication breaks down. The productive zone lies between these extremes — a creative tension that can enhance understanding if properly facilitated.

The course traces an escalation sequence: the other person begins to be seen as the problem rather than a specific issue being the problem; issues proliferate and become more general; communication deteriorates and becomes more accusatory; triangulation occurs (parties stop speaking directly to each other and recruit allies); reciprocal causation sets in (tit-for-tat responses); hostility increases; and polarisation reshapes social organisation.

Key escalators include multiplying issues, stereotyping, threats, coercive tactics, and win-lose framing. Key de-escalators include increased direct contact, improved communication, working on easier issues first, identifying common interests, identifying superordinate goals, offering face-saving opportunities, and working to correct selective perceptions.

Attribution bias (also called fundamental attribution error) is identified as a critical psychological dynamic: we attribute aggressive behaviour by adversaries to ill will while attributing our own comparable behaviour to understandable self-protection. In conflict resolution practice, this bias must be consciously counteracted.

Module 9: Conflict Resolution

The Paradigm’s Core Commitments

The conflict resolution paradigm identifies five foundational commitments. Relationships — not just structures, institutions, or individual characteristics — must be the central focus of conflict analysis. The right processes can change the attitudes, perceptions, and behaviours that fuel destructive conflict. Resolution is not just about ending fights but about building capacity for nonviolent conflict management. Resolution is a continuous process of managing relationships, not a one-time fix. And conflict is dynamic across its external, internal, and relational dimensions simultaneously.

The terminology within the paradigm itself varies. Conflict management suggests that resolution may not always be achievable but that conflicts can be kept within non-destructive parameters. Conflict transformation emphasises not settling for an agreement but changing the character and relational quality of the conflict itself. The course treats these as complementary emphases.

Conflict Management Styles

The module introduces a widely used grid of conflict management styles mapped along axes of assertiveness and cooperativeness: collaborating (high assertiveness, high cooperativeness: integrating both sets of concerns); competing (high assertiveness, low cooperativeness: zero-sum orientation); compromising (moderate on both axes: splitting the difference); accommodating (low assertiveness, high cooperativeness: yielding to the other); and avoiding (low on both axes: withdrawing from the conflict). Cultural ideals shape which styles are favoured: many East Asian cultural contexts emphasise avoidance to preserve face and group harmony, while individualistic Western contexts often favour direct competition or collaboration.

Negotiation

Negotiation is formally defined as “a discussion between two or more parties with differing preferences, interests, or goals aimed at reaching some form of mutually beneficial agreement.” Two contrasting models structure conflict resolution thinking:

Third-Party Roles

The paradigm places great emphasis on third parties — actors external to the conflict who can facilitate resolution. A continuum of roles runs from least to most involved:

Fact-finding/inquiry investigates and answers sensitive factual questions, sometimes producing advisory judgements. Good offices/conciliation provides a secure channel or private space for communication. Mediation — from the Latin mediare, “to be in the middle” — deploys a mutually acceptable third party to assist negotiation and facilitate communication without imposing a decision. Mediators can find commonalities, change the dynamic, serve as repositories of trust, provide information, draw on precedents, assist in the search for solutions, and empower disadvantaged parties. Arbitration involves the voluntary submission of a dispute to a third party for a binding decision. Judicial settlement involves submission to a national or international court whose ruling will govern the outcome.

Mediators in major inter-group and international conflicts include states (especially smaller “middle powers” trusted by multiple parties), international organisations (which bring legitimacy and can supply peacekeepers, development assistance, and election supervision), and NGOs and citizens engaged in grassroots dialogue, track-two diplomacy, and problem-solving workshops.

Module 10: Transforming Conflictual Relationships

Digging Deeper: Needs, Values, and Interests

The module deepens the analysis of what must be addressed for conflict resolution to succeed. The well-known Fisher-Ury rule — separating interests from positions — is a first step: what parties explicitly claim they want in a negotiation is not the same as their underlying interest. But the course goes further. Below interests lie values and belief systems that must be respected through sustained dialogue that seeks to understand cultural differences and find common ground. And below values lie basic human needs that are non-negotiable.

Human Needs Theory

The course identifies four categories of basic human needs particularly relevant to conflict:

Identity/dignity: People want to be respected and to have who they are affirmed. Conflicts over whose identity “prevails” and at what cost to others are among the most intractable in the world today.

Security/control: If people feel their security is threatened they cannot respond cooperatively. The need for control over one’s own reality is fundamental.

Development: People need to feel that life is progressing and that they are not excluded from growth.

Meaning: Trauma and violence can produce existential crises; survivors need to make the world whole again through healing.

The theory proposes that one side’s needs can be fulfilled only if the other’s are fulfilled simultaneously, in a spirit of understanding and trust.

Humiliation

Ways of Relating and Communicating

Cultural patterns shape how conflict is experienced and managed. The distinction between individualistic cultures (focused on individual achievement and direct conflict engagement) and collectivist cultures (where group membership is central and conflict is handled more indirectly) is one major pattern. The distinction between low-context cultures (direct communication, “telling it like it is”) and high-context cultures (indirect communication, emphasis on saving face and maintaining group harmony) is another. Neither is right or wrong; both require flexibility and willingness to stretch beyond one’s own default.

Active listening and self-disclosure are the communicative disciplines that sustain productive dialogue. Active listening involves reflective listening — hearing what someone says and testing understanding by reflecting back both explicit content and implied emotional content. Self-disclosure is revealing personal reactions in a non-threatening way (using “I” statements rather than accusatory “you” statements), offering explanations for one’s feelings rather than just insults or anger.

Critiques of the Conflict Resolution Paradigm and Responses

Four critiques are identified. First, the paradigm may fail to address root causes of conflict, focusing on miscommunication and emotion rather than the structural systems that generate violence. Second, it may perform poorly in tough cases with major power imbalances — when one party refuses to cooperate or is profoundly disempowered. Third, it may be insufficiently participatory and locally adaptive, involving only elites and overlooking local wisdom and cultural resources. Fourth, it may be too transactional — focused on negotiating deals rather than transforming relationships and achieving reconciliation.

The paradigm’s advocates respond by framing conflict resolution as a social movement that seeks systemic change through restorative justice, peer and community mediation, and interreligious dialogue. They acknowledge power imbalances and argue that intervention must first work to redress them. They advocate multiple peacebuilding roles across all levels of society (following Lederach’s model of peacebuilding involving top leadership, middle-range leaders, and grassroots actors). And they embrace conflict transformation — not merely resolving conflicts but changing the nature of relationships and working toward reconciliation.

Module 11: Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation

Reconciliation in Depth

The module deepens the concept of reconciliation, placing relationships — rather than agreements — at the heart of the analysis. The Latin root of “reconciliation” (re + com + calare) means “to call together again,” implying that interaction and gathering between parties is fundamental.

John Paul Lederach’s framework holds that reconciliation requires an encounter where people address the past without being trapped in it, where trauma, grief, anger, and pain can be expressed, where acknowledgement of stories and memories provides validation. Reconciliation must also be proactive, envisioning a shared future. For Lederach, reconciliation is “a place, the point of encounter where concerns about both the past and the future can meet.”

Lederach identifies four tenets of reconciliation that must all be present simultaneously: truth (acknowledgement of wrongdoing and validation of loss); justice (advancement of human rights, social restructuring, and restitution); mercy (compassion, forgiveness, and healing); and peace (interdependence, well-being, and security).

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

South Africa’s TRC (established 1996) offers the world’s most studied example. Created after the end of apartheid, it combined public testimony from victims and perpetrators, a process for granting amnesty in exchange for full disclosure of the truth, and special hearings on topics including the effects of apartheid on women. The decision to offer amnesty in exchange for truth was controversial — trading justice (in the retributive sense) for knowledge — but was judged necessary to gather the most complete picture of what had happened.

Canada’s TRC (2008–2015) addressed the Indian Residential School system, which from 1870 to 1996 forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families, suppressed their cultures and languages, and subjected many to physical and sexual abuse. Nearly 7,000 people testified. The TRC’s final report identified the system as cultural genocide and issued recommendations including preserving Indigenous languages and establishing commemorations for survivors. The TRC represents an ongoing reckoning with the structural violence of Canadian colonialism.

Types of Justice

Beyond these two primary types, the course examines social justice (creating a fair and just society by challenging and changing unfair structures and systems — housing, food security, income equality); environmental justice (the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in environmental decisions and protections, born from the 1982 Warren County protests against a toxic waste landfill in a Black community); and feminist justice (a gender-sensitive approach that recognises how the mainstream justice system marginalises women’s voices, realities, and experiences, exemplified by the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia).

The Arts and Reconciliation

The arts offer underappreciated resources for reconciliation. They draw on local resources, making processes locally owned and meaningful. They provide empowering ways to promote healing, give voice to those affected, and bring together diverse groups. Ingoma Nshya, a traditional drumming group of Rwandan women that brings together Hutu and Tutsi members after the 1994 genocide, illustrates how shared creative practice can demonstrate and model reconciliation.

Module 12: Conclusions — The Transformation Paradigm

The Transformation Paradigm

The transformation paradigm is the final framework introduced in the course. Its essential claim is “peace through me”: each individual has something to contribute to peace, and peace is ultimately created through individuals who begin with themselves. Three ideas structure the paradigm.

1. Unlearning violence. As we grow up, we absorb explanations for why the world is violent and why we are powerless to change this. The transformation paradigm argues for the possibility of becoming more dynamic moral actors by questioning these assumptions. An important analogy is beginner’s mind: the willingness of even the most experienced to approach their assumptions with fresh eyes, to question their conditioning, and to remain open to new possibilities. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”

2. Reclaiming capacity for creative behaviour. Rather than passive acceptance, the paradigm calls for experimenting with truth: testing new perspectives through experience and developing critical openness. Engagement across cultures is especially valuable — different cultures have developed different ways of resolving conflict, listening, and creating meaning, and every culture does something better than anyone else. The multicultural character of contemporary societies is an opportunity for this cross-cultural learning.

3. Enacting positive visions. Once we begin thinking differently, we must act on those visions. It requires moral courage to act on something that brings no immediate reward. The case of Malala Yousafzai — who chose to speak about education for girls in Pakistan despite Taliban threats, survived a point-blank shooting at age 15, and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 while founding an international education fund — exemplifies the transformation paradigm in action: one person working from her individual position and recognising that her vision speaks for millions.

Six Key Propositions

The transformation paradigm rests on six propositions: each human being has the capacity to choose between violence and peace; social and cultural institutions influence those choices; the fragmentation in the world reflects internal fragmentation of worldviews and values, requiring introspection; our belief systems are sometimes part of the problem and can potentially become part of the solution; personal growth and transformation is both metaphor and catalyst for change in the world; and peace is both internal and external, beginning with the individual and working outward through communities and relationships.

Course Conclusions: Many Voices

The course’s concluding module resists the temptation of a single synthesis. The paradigms studied — power politics, world order, nonviolence, conflict resolution, transformation — are not just voices in a vacuum. They are contrasting and competing perspectives that disagree about who should act, how, and which problems are most urgent. All of them should be listened to. The course’s final message is that we need multiple perspectives to have a complete map of the terrain, and that while we may assign more weight to some than others, no single paradigm captures the full complexity of conflict, violence, and peace in the world today.

Key Scholars and Readings

The following thinkers and texts appear centrally in the course:

Johan Galtung — Architect of the direct/structural/cultural violence typology and the corresponding typology of negative, positive, and cultural peace. His 2012 article “Positive and Negative Peace” is a foundational Week 1 reading.

Conrad Brunk — Peace and conflict studies scholar whose definition of conflict as the result of “incompatible goals, beliefs, or activities” anchors the course’s first conceptual move.

Konrad Lorenz — Ethologist whose work on instinctivism and “militant enthusiasm” represents one innate-aggression perspective.

Margaret Mead — Anthropologist whose argument that “warfare is only an invention — not a biological necessity” provides a foundational counter to innate-aggression theories.

Sigmund Freud — Whose late essay “Why War?” introduces the psychoanalytic perspective on aggression.

Thomas Hobbes — Early modern political philosopher whose state-of-nature argument anchors the power politics paradigm.

Karl von Clausewitz — Military theorist who defined war as the continuation of politics by other means.

Thucydides — Athenian historian of the Peloponnesian War, canonical source for power politics.

Richard Falk — World order theorist whose work on humane governance structures Module 4.

Vandana Shiva — Feminist environmentalist whose analysis of economic growth and structural violence informs the world order discussion.

Michael Klare — Resource competition scholar whose analysis connects environmental scarcity to conflict.

Gene Sharp — Theorist of nonviolent action, categorist of 198 methods of nonviolent struggle, and developer of the consent theory of power’s practical implications.

Mohandas Gandhi — Exemplar of principled nonviolence and the Gandhian tradition, read through “The Gospel of Nonviolence.”

Henry David Thoreau — Author of “Civil Disobedience,” foundational text for the noncooperation tradition.

Martin Luther King Jr. — “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” appears in Module 1 on cultural violence; King’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech on nonviolence appears in Module 7.

Edward Azar — Developer of protracted social conflicts theory, whose reading “Protracted Social Conflict: An Analytical Framework” structures Module 8.

John Paul Lederach — Peace scholar and practitioner whose work on the ABC model of conflict communication, the pyramid model of peacebuilding roles, and the tenets of reconciliation structures Modules 8, 10, and 11.

Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton — Authors of Getting to Yes, the foundational text of principled negotiation, read in Module 9.

Desmond Tutu — Archbishop and TRC commissioner whose essay “No Future Without Forgiveness” structures the discussion of reconciliation and forgiveness in Module 10.

Dalai Lama — “A Human Approach to World Peace” is the concluding reading for Module 12.

Paradigm Comparison Summary

The course’s central organising device is the comparison of paradigms — coherent frameworks of assumptions, principles, and prescriptions. The following table summarises the four primary paradigms across their key dimensions:

The transformation paradigm, introduced in Module 12, cuts across all of these by insisting that change begins within individuals who choose to unlearn violence and enact positive visions — a proposition that complements rather than replaces the others.