19.1: Introduction - What Do We Mean by ‘Transforming’ Conflict?

Conflict resolution is not new, historically speaking. Small scale, local societies predating the European system of states and Indigenous communities extant today often have processes for bringing closure to injuries inflicted upon one another by community members. Palestinian peacemakers in Palestine and Israel, for example, engage in a process of conflict resolution and transformation that is common among many Arab societies known as Sulha and a related practice called hudna. Sulha is usually used to resolve a conflict involving a murder or murders. The parties to the conflict, normally, the families, must choose, voluntarily, to enter into sulha.

The point is that people have commonly devised social practices to manage conflicts arising in their societies in order to avoid violence or escalation to violence, or redress grievances arising out of injuries caused by violence. In this scenario, conflict is resolved in the sense that everything surrounding it, the issues that gave rise to it, the grievances that followed, the perception of injustice, are “erased.” In Sulha, anyway, entering into the process and coming to an agreement on compensation for injury means that the families and people involved never speak of the conflict again, as if it never happened.

Large-scale, bureaucratic (organizationally complex and hierarchical), western, militarized societies, however, took a different path, from the Roman to the British empires, and most of the nation-states now-states formed as they declined, developed systems of retributive justice to deal with internal conflict, and regarded the use of coercive force as an instrument of influencing and dominating others in their external relations. Internal or domestic processes for channeling or managing conflict we and still are largely, retributive and punitive although there are parallel civil and criminal systems and some opportunities for alternative dispute resolution or ADR, bargaining, and negotiation. In that regard, it is also worth pointing out that some of the practices, including ADR, developed specifically as a means of resolving conflict in labor relations, which in turn arose out of a period in the history of labor movements when they were more inclined to act collectively, and sometimes violently.