Intercultural Conflicts

Abstract

While Johan Galtung’s poem on conflict and diversity was written more than four decades ago, it still seems more relevant today than ever before. While recent research has shown that most people across cultures would like to avoid conflict and remove conflict from their lives (Mayer, 2005), in most cases this is neither functional nor realistic. Since the theoretical turn of the 1970s toward a constructivist world view, it has been a matter of adapting one’s own realities, one’s own thinking to the lived and experienced situations (Watzlawick, 2016) in order to deal with them consciously and peacefully, and find solutions. Galtung, as one of the great European conflict and peace researchers, pointed out relatively early on that because we cannot simply exclude conflict from our lives, we should come as close as possible to them in order to connect with them as part of life, to understand the “salt of life”. With such a fundamentally positive understanding of conflicts, they become an energetic force that adds to life a “certain something” and can thus enrich life, provide for our development and trigger positive dynamics: Thus, conflicts become small rapids in the calm waters, they give life a new momentum, new energy and should always be seen as a challenge to which we are exposed throughout our lifetime.