ABSTRACT
This study explores creativity for conflict resolution. It aims to generate useful hypotheses and models of practice and policymaking informed by empirical findings. The key question is: how do creative approaches to conflict resolution first appear, evolve over time, and subsequently come to be accepted or rejected in a given social and epistemological context of inter-group conflict? In this inquiry, creativity is defined as unconventional viability. More specifically, it refers to a social and epistemological process where an actor or actors involved in the conflict learn to formulate an unconventional resolution option and/or procedure for resolution, and a growing number of others come to perceive it as a viable way of coping with the underlying problems from their collective and subjective point of view. The two interrelated elements of conflict resolution creativity, unconventionality and viability, are both multifaceted concepts. They have emerged through trial and error from years of exploratory inquiry that has culminated into this book.1 On one level, unconventionality entails altering or even breaking through a conventional reality of conflict. Much of the inquiry conducted in social science in general and conflict analysis in particular is designed to account for the nature of given conventional realities. Explaining and understanding conventional realities requires data, analysis (causal, correlational, or otherwise), evaluation, description, and diagnosis. It focuses on the past, or otherwise on plausible links between the past and the present. It is a realm of empirical reality, or what is. In contrast, envisioning unconventionality in a given social and epistemological context requires entering into the realm of potential realities, or what can be. It is often inseparable from normative visions, or what ought to be. Exploration of potential realities activates such belief systems as worldview, value, culture, cosmology, ideology, and religiosity. It directs one’s attention to such modes of thinking and action as prognosis, prediction, therapy, resolution, and “practice” in general. In short, unconventionality in conflict work is derived from conscious efforts to shape the future, or more precisely the present-future link, beyond conventional realities of conflict. On another level, unconventionality entails reshaping what is considered a conventional reality in a given local context of collective subjectivity. In this
respect, unconventionality has the spatial and relational dimensions, in addition to the temporal dimension discussed already. Because a conflict remains intact as long as parties with different aspirations are unable to interrupt their confrontational patterns of interaction, breaking the patterns, which come to form what the parties might consider a conventional reality, inevitably invites resistance. Therefore, taking unconventional action for conflict resolution requires mobilizing the cognitive and emotive resources of the parties and other attentive stakeholders in such a way as to break the conventional patterns that have sustained their conflict. To be useful for conflict resolution, unconventional visions and actions must be viable. The essential core of viability is the practical effectiveness for resolving conflicts at hand. This quality inherent in creativity for conflict resolution distinguishes itself from utopian thinking of impractical types. The requirement of effectiveness also implies that viable action must be informed by empirical conflict analysis that illuminates underlying roots of the problematic reality in question. Part and parcel of effectiveness is ethicality, the concept rephrased variously by such terms as morality, legitimacy, and justice. Although the multifaceted nature of ethicality in conflict resolution may not be fully explored within the scope of this inquiry, it is suggested, at least in theoretical terms, that any attempt to advance direct and structural violence consciously and conspicuously,2 however unconventional it may seem, fails to meet the mandatory standard of ethicality. Therefore, for example, the arguably unconventional behavior of the kamikaze hijackers on September 11, 2001 in the US is outside the scope of this inquiry. In short, viability is a confluence of effectiveness and ethicality, or according to Lederach (1999), “justpeace.” Integrating the twin components of unconventionality and viability, the working definition of creativity for conflict resolution may be presented in a simplified form as in Figure 1.1.
