Second Generation: Conflict Resolution Approaches to Ending Conflict

Abstract

This chapter examines the development of the theory and practice of conflict resolution, facilitation and transformation approaches, as well as some of the insights provided by peace research approaches, both as a response to the shortcomings of traditional diplomacy and as an independent approach to conflict. It examines their contribution to, and critique of, peacekeeping and peacemaking in the Westphalian environment. I have given such approaches the appellation of ‘second generation’ in order to indicate that they lead to a significantly different understanding of conflict and have created a profitable debate about making peace. They provide an important critique of approaches to ending conflict in the Westphalian system and point in a direction beyond that system. Thus, second generation conflict approaches take a radically different view of conflict; the assumption is made that conflicts can be (and ought to be) resolved rather than merely managed. Second generation approaches see difficulties in the way first generation approaches attempt to understand and address conflict and therefore propose to address the civil level of conflict, and the structural violence surrounding it. The resolution of conflict, it is argued, can therefore be viewed from a win-win perspective.

... the resolution of any conflict, whether it be intercommunal or international conflict, must be analysed as a situated process located within the structural properties of patterned social systems. The role of conflict resolution or mediation may thus reproduce such continuities or contribute to their problem.¹