ABSTRACT
The last chapter provided a picture of what can be thought of as the ‘normal’ process of confrontation. Here the word ‘normal’ is used in the same sense that it is used in medicine to signify a ‘healthy’ process that delivers a specifi c outcome. In the context of confrontation such an outcome might be the resolution of an interaction: whether this is by co-operation or confl ict is irrelevant. For example, the analysis of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian confl ict used there for illustrative purposes showed a pathway by which the situation might have been ameliorated. The development involved successively a mutual realisation of intentions and doubts, the recognition of drama-theoretic dilemmas and the taking of specifi c measures to address these: as a process it followed the template of the episodic model shown earlier in Figure 3.2. While such a model captures the essentials of many, perhaps most, interactions, there is a signifi cant number of cases where it does not: and these ‘irregular’ instances are of importance not only in themselves, but also for the light that they shed both on common behaviours and on the psychology of confrontation.
