before December 7, 1941, relations between Japan and the United States were strained, but no overt hostilities existed. Then came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the ensuing war between Japan and the United States. Why did the hidden hostilities change into an open war? Was it caused by the attack on Pearl Harbor?

Generally speaking, for an open conflict to emerge, two main conditions are needed: the formation of “conflict groups,” and a sequence of events that ignites conflict action. Dahrendorf (1959) addressed the problem of conflict group formation in considerable detail. He argued that groups whose goals are incompatible but who do not realize it, will become full-scale conflict groups if each of them (1) has leaders committed to the conflict, (2) has a conflict ideology, (3) is free to organize for conflict, and (4) has members who can communicate with each other. Dahrendorf's four conditions exist in groups that, in addition to having incompatible goals, have high conflict solidarity and sufficient conflict resources.

Conflict Solidarity

We noted in Chapter 3 that free communication produces socalled communal values. But free communication can also promote conflict solidarity.

Free Communication as a Cause of Solidarity

Sociologists usually distinguish between individuals who form a group and those who do not: if they interact with each other fairly regularly, they form a group; if they do not interact, they don't.

in the 1880s ranchers in the western United States fought over water rights; in 1939 Germany attacked Poland; last week a husband and wife argued bitterly over their finances. That all were engaged in a conflict is obvious. In fact, it may seem that nothing is simpler than recognizing a conflict – after all, it involves fighting, does it not? Actually, no, not always. Some conflicts are “latent” and do not involve overt fighting; and some overt fights, such as wrestling matches, are not due to a conflict. Thus it is important to agree on what is and what is not a conflict.

What Is a Conflict?

It might not surprise you to hear that even theoreticians differ in how they view conflict. For many practical purposes, they may understand it as a special set of interrelated elements: parties, issues, dynamics, and contexts. To gain a deeper understanding, however, they may use certain abstract concepts such as cause and effect; direct, indirect, and intervening causes; and payoff matrices. The discussion in this chapter deals with these concepts.

Students of social conflict have offered many different definitions of conflict. Early on, Park and Burgess defined it simply as struggle for status. Somewhat later, Mack and Snyder defined it as struggle not only for status but also for scarce resources and significant social change (Himes 1980, 12). Other writers have offered additional definitions. How then should we conceive of conflict?

even when one has a general understanding of why conflicts occur, one may wish to know why a specific conflict has occurred. This chapter addresses that concern by applying the theory of the preceding chapter to the civil rights struggle in the United States.

The African American Struggle for Equality

The most common type of internal conflict develops out of unjust inequality. It is often manifested as the domination of one economic, cultural, or racial group by another. Such dominance produces the potential for conflict of such magnitude that it literally tears a society apart.

Most Americans would agree that the struggle between African Americans and American whites has been largely due to the unfair treatment of blacks, first as slaves, then as second- or third-class citizens. The blacks' goal of equality has been incompatible with the goal of continued dominance by whites. As obvious as that explanation might seem in the light of history, in this book we take nothing for granted, not even a universally held belief. We shall use our theory and known facts to determine whether this belief is correct. Most of the facts of the case can be summarized in a brief history of that struggle.

Before the Civil War, most African Americans were held in slavery. In the South their legal enslavement was soon thereafter replaced by Jim Crow segregation, from which they then struggled to escape for nearly a century.

in this final chapter, we review the most important principles and methods of understanding and managing conflicts, then suggest how conflict students might use them in building their personal and professional lives. Whether these insights are valuable to you is, of course, for you to decide. But you will probably agree that you did learn something new. But what exactly was it? Let's go over the main points.

Understanding Conflicts

You may feel that exact definitions are, by and large, a waste of time. We agree, but only up to a point: there are a few basic concepts that you really ought to know. The concept of conflict is one of them.

Conflict

You may recall that, in Chapter 2, we defined conflict as a situation in which actors use conflict behavior against each other to attain incompatible goals and/or express their hostility. Chances are that this definition, when you first encountered it, did not mean much. But it should mean more now that you have explored, in depth, the meaning of the three main concepts in that definition: conflict behavior, incompatible goals, and hostility.

Perhaps you remember that “conflict behavior” can be viewed both as a set of categories and as a continuum. We distinguished two main categories of conflict behavior, noncoercive (which includes pure cooperation, promising reward, and persuasion) and coercive (which includes threat of coercion, nonviolent coercion, and violent coercion).

in the twentieth century, knowledge about social conflict has increased considerably, but so has the technology and scope of violence. As the new millennium begins, conflict actors must learn not only how to deescalate destructive conflicts, but also how to utilize “constructive” conflicts: how to clarify their own goals; how to select conflict strategies and tactics rationally; and how to apply them to achieve their goals while minimizing the costs.

The Development of Conflict Knowledge

Homo sapiens has been learning about conflict throughout its development. That knowledge is spread across humanity, residing wherever humans live, work, and play. It is folk knowledge, used continuously in everyday life – in commerce, family relations, government, sport, child rearing. The ways of dealing with human conflict around the world are legion. They are passed down from parent to child, from generation to generation. They are transmitted from one life experience to the next. That knowledge is created within generations, as humans learn better how to interact with minimal cost. We do this pretty much unconsciously. Handling conflict is simply one of the life skills we learn and practice. Some of us do it better than others.

Particularly in the twentieth century we have become more conscious of how to understand conflict and how to deal with it in constructive ways. Conducted in numerous abstract and formal ways – through writing and teaching in schools and universities, and through research programs, seminars, and training – this effort was not simply due to curiosity but was a search for a solution to an increasingly serious problem, the growing scale and cost of human conflict.

in the preceding chapter, we suggested how conflict, once it has emerged, can intensify through escalation. We saw how various factors can make conflict parties more hostile, more retaliatory, and less willing to curb coerciveness, thus leading to escalation. There is hardly a better contemporary real-world illustration of this process than the Bosnian civil war of the 1990s. In this chapter, we apply our theory of escalation to that case. We thereby add a cross-national illustration to the intraorganizational and intrasocietal cases used in earlier chapters.

The Bosnian Conflict

The origins of the Bosnian conflict are more complex than we have space to explore here. However, we do present an account of its post–World War II roots for the reader in the Appendix, “Prelude to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia.” Here we present only the historical background immediately preceding the escalation of the conflict, the central concern of the chapter.

As the Bosnian civil war developed from 1991 to 1995, four main conflict groups were involved. Group 1 comprised the government of the Republic of Croatia (Zagreb) and the Croat minority in Bosnia. When those two acted together, as was usually the case, we refer to them as “Croats.” Group 2, the government of the Bosnian republic and its forces, was very much a multiethnic body in 1991 but by 1995 had become mostly Muslim. We refer to this group as the “Bosnian government,” because an independent, multiethnic Bosnia was its intention.

much of this book is about understanding social conflicts. Why did World War II occur? Why do I and my husband fight so often over trivial matters? Why does the Palestinian conflict continue to fluctuate between escalation and deescalation? There are three different ways to answer such questions: to look at the origins of conflict, to consider conflict actions, and to focus on conflict dynamics. This chapter considers the first problem, origins due to goal incompatibility.

Clearly, there are any number of specific reasons why two conflict actors can have incompatible goals. But it is possible to subsume them under three main headings: contested resources, incompatible roles, and incompatible values. This point is so important that it is worth representing it graphically (see Figure 3.1).

Contested Resources

As the term suggests, resources are contested when a party wants some of the resources the other party has or when both adversaries want the same unallocated resource. Let us consider the main types of such resources, and then ask why a party may want more than it has already.

Frequently Contested Resources

Humans can fight about a bewildering variety of things: about money, about land, about children, about infidelity, about politics. And yet it is possible to reduce this perplexing variety by classifying resources into three main categories: wealth, power, and prestige (Weber [1922] 1947).

Wealth Because the first of the three main resources, wealth, usually involves “tangibles,” it is easiest to understand.

an israeli army jeep patrols the streets of Hebron in occupied Palestine. It has been doing this for months, without incident. But today things go differently. Suddenly, a crowd of young Palestinians starts throwing rocks at the jeep. The Israeli soldiers respond with gunfire. Several youths are wounded. And an upward spiral of violence is begun. Why?

Answers to this question cannot be found in the writings of classical theoreticians. Although they spent considerable effort on the fundamental causes of conflict, they were, by and large, uninterested in its dynamics. Much more relevant for us are modern writers such as Coleman (1957), Deutsch (1973), Pruitt and Rubin (1986), and Kriesberg (1998). Their writings suggest that certain fundamental – and controversial – aspects of escalation need to be considered first.

Main Ingredients of Escalation

We may begin by asking a deceptively simple question. What makes conflict escalation different from processes considered so far? And the answer is again seemingly simple: the fact that there are two (or more) contestants – the “Party” and the “Opponent” – who interact with each other. This fact is of crucial theoretical importance, because it suggests that Party's escalation is driven by two separate forces: one that originates within the Party itself, the other that originates in its Opponent. The first force may be called “unilateral” escalation (or deescalation), the other “reciprocated” escalation (or deescalation). Let us begin by considering how these two forces contribute to the intensification of the conflict.

so far, we have explored theories that help us understand why a conflict comes into being and grows. We saw that often this understanding helps us to deal with a conflict in its latent stage. But many problems cannot be solved entirely by addressing their root causes. For example, to fight a large fire, we seldom need to know how it got started; what we need is fire-fighting equipment and fire fighters who know how to use it. Similarly, while knowing how a conflict started is often essential, we also need conflict-moderating skills that are as specialized as those of a fire fighter.

In this chapter, we discuss theories useful for conflict actors: those who are actively involved in the conflict. While some of our discussion could be seen as a restatement of the theories we have already considered, some of it formulates new principles. We focus on approaches that can help one determine how to minimize costs of a conflict.

There are three main approaches to moderating conflict: preventing serious, unnecessary conflict at its points of origin; moving inevitable conflict toward cooperation as it emerges; and moderating coercive conflict as it escalates.

Preventing Serious Conflict

Because incompatibility of goals is a major source of conflict, a society can lessen conflict by addressing the main causes of incompatible goals: social injustice, role conflict, and value differences (see Chapter 3). But a society can also build into itself a tolerance for “healthy” conflict.

the progressive disintegration of Yugoslavia from 1991 onward can be seen as one part of the larger process of political reorganization in Soviet bloc nations, begun by the Polish Solidarity movement in 1980 (Wehr 1985). The winds of change were blowing into every corner of central and eastern Europe. But Yugoslavia, as a Communist state long independent of the Soviet Union, had an unusual set of factors variously restraining and stimulating conflict among its republics and ethnic communities.

The Early Stage

Yugoslavia had become a nation-state – a constitutional monarchy – only at the end of World War I. Until then, the region had been an uneasy frontier among the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires. Each empire had used its coreligionists in the area – Croatian Catholics, Serbian Orthodox, and Muslims – to further its imperial aims. In fact, the assassination of Austro-Hungarian archduke Ferdinand in 1914 by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo provided the flashpoint for World War I.

Between the world wars, Yugoslavia's fragile nationhood was held hostage by nascent Croatian and Serbian nationalism. But Yugoslav communism and the political nationalism forming around Tito during World War II provided an integrating force countering any tendencies toward ethnic separation. Tito, a Moscow-trained operative whose real name was Josip Broz, emerged as the leader of antifascist forces and became a legendary hero – the first real embodiment of Yugoslav nationalism. With massive popular support, his Yugoslav Communist Party easily assumed control of postwar Yugoslavia.

sometimes a conflict results not so much from direct discrimination and prejudice, as in the case of the civil rights movement, as it does from established ways of evaluating performance and from honest disagreement over standards and procedures to be used. In an organization, those disagreements can combine with friendship patterns, putting those who are without such ties – such as minority and women faculty – at a considerable disadvantage. They cannot benefit equally from membership in the “old boys network” or from long-standing and inflexible standards of evaluation. The result is what is commonly known as institutional racism and sexism. Here we use a conflict in a university to illustrate the theory developed in Chapter 5. Although in this chapter we focus on how a hidden conflict became open, we need to prepare the ground first by giving a brief synopsis and then by considering why the goals of the two parties in this chapter's conflict were incompatible.

Goal Incompatibility

For the necessary data for our analysis, let us describe briefly the early history of an actual faculty tenure conflict at a university in the western United States.

Short History

Top administrators had been trying for some years to lift the university into the top rank of research universities in the nation. Standards for faculty promotion and tenure had consequently been tightening and becoming more narrowly academic. At the same time, recruitment and retention of women and minority faculty had also become a major goal of the university.