A Historical Overview of Anthropology and Conflict Resolution

Kevin Avruch
Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution
George Mason U

Kevin Avruch

In one sense, of course, anthropologists have been investigating issues in, and contributing to the study of, “conflict resolution” for a very long time.

If forms of participatory governance are central to modes of conflict management and resolution—as democracy theorists now tell us—then Lewis Henry Morgan recorded such processes in The League of the Iroquois (1901).

If such matters as disputing in the absence of formal courts, the role of third party “go-betweens” in the settlement of disputes, forms of negotiation in tribal societies, the uses of ritual in the resolution of deep conflicts, or a case-oriented methodology in the study of conflict are considered—to name a few areas of concern in conflict resolution—then the early work of R F Barton, P H Gulliver, E E Evans-Pritchard, Leopold Pospisil, Victor Turner, Max Gluckman and E A Hoebel (again, to name a few), demonstrates anthropology’s long involvement with understanding social conflict and its management or resolution.

Alternative Dispute Resolution
For the most part, this work is known to anthropologists as legal anthropology or the anthropology of law and it has been, except in one curious way, mostly marginal to the emerging field of conflict resolution. The exception occurred in the early 1970s as the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) was conceived by some jurists and law professors as a way of reforming an “overly-litigious” justice system in the US and unburdening court dockets.

Proponents of ADR, which includes mediation, facilitation, arbitration and other informal or quasi-judicial processes, looked to “tribal” dispute resolution systems—the classic example being the Kpelle moot described by James Gibbs—as a model for a more humane, organic, therapeutic and non-adversarial judicial process. Such ethnographic romanticism was fiercely criticized at the time (especially in the journal Law and Society), both for its misreading of the ethnography and its potentially nefarious substitution of a therapeutic discourse for the “real remedies” available under a formal rule of law.

Early Journals in the Field
This exception aside, neither anthropology nor anthropologists were prominent in the earliest days of conflict resolution’s emergence as a separate and increasingly recognizable field of study. In neither of the first journals in the field were anthropologists prominent.

The first US journal dedicated to the field, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, was begun in 1957, dominated then and now by positivist, statistical, game-theoretic, large-N, hypothesis-testing and formal modeling research and scholarship, mainly from international relations, economics or social psychology.

The first major European journal, tellingly called the Journal of Peace Research, began in 1964 partly as an explicit response and counterweight to what many Europeans saw as an American overly behaviorist, and methodologically-obsessed approach to issues of peace, an approach the Europeans felt was epitomized by the apolitical, technocratic term “conflict resolution.” The Europeans preferred to strive for a positive peace characterized by equitable social relations; they were concerned with deep structural change and social justice. This journal was dominated by sociologists and historians.

Sources of Field Development
The field of conflict resolution (the extent to which it is a unified field is a matter of continuing debate) coalesced in the early 1980s from, not surprisingly, a number of different sources. The advent of ADR was one of them. Another was a reinvigorated peace movement built around the Nuclear Freeze movement of the Reagan years, together with a national campaign to have the US Congress create a “peace academy” on the model of the military service academies. This failed, but resulted in the creation, under President Reagan, of the United States Institute of Peace in 1984.

Another impetus came from the creation of university programs offering post-graduate degrees in conflict resolution. George Mason began offering an MS degree in 1982, with a PhD in 1988. The earliest graduate program began in 1973 in the UK—naturally in peace studies—at the University of Bradford. (Nova Southeastern has offered an MS degree since 1992 and PhD since 1994.—MD) Strong degree-granting or research centers could be found in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and a number of other universities, many sustained by large, multi-year institution-building grants begun in 1984 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support work in conflict resolution theory and practice.

Inserting Culture Into Conflict Resolution
It was in this period, the 1980s–1990s, with the proliferation of programs in universities, that anthropologists began to contribute, joining scholars mainly from law (around ADR), social psychology (oriented around negotiation research particularly), and political science and international relations.

Most of this early involvement—and I’m including here work by Peter Black, Sally Merry and by me, among others—was dedicated to the problem of getting the field to take the idea of culture seriously. We faced two main hurdles.

First, the political scientists and international relations folk—even when they argued against the policy implications of neo-realism and machtpolitik—took power to be the only “variable” that counted. Power was conceived simply as the ability to apply force or to coerce (how many submarines? how many warheads?). States were autonomous “actors” that “calculated” their interests and behaved rationally to achieve them. In this constricted sense of power (neither Hans Morgenthau nor Kenneth Waltz could pass muster as Foucauldians), culture all but disappeared from view. If it mattered at all, then we understood it in its essentialized and totalized form of “national character.”

The second obstacle to taking culture seriously came from our colleagues in social psychology. The psychologists assumed that given the biogenetic unity of the human brain, we must all think and reason in the same way, and so, say, decision-making (as in negotiation) must look the same everywhere: “Everyone negotiates the same way; just speak louder and slower!” Once again, culture disappeared or—if the cross-cultural psychologists down the hall were allowed entry—was to be understood in such constricted senses as individualist vs collective cultures; high context vs low context, and so on.

The epitome of this, which brought together scholars (and their assumptions) from psychology, economics and political science, can be seen in the amount of work devoted to game theory in general and the prisoner’s dilemma game in particular, as a way to model conflict and conflict resolution processes in the real world.

Recent Anthropological Contributions
Much of my own work over the years has sought to bring a post-national character conception of culture and culture theory to scholars and practitioners in the developing field of conflict resolution.

Other anthropologists have brought a critical lens to the field, notably Laura Nader, who has argued (as against ADR) that conflict resolution can be seen as an ideology that subverts access to “justice”; the critical work of John Conley and William O’Barr, examining the discursive strategies (and unintended consequences) of mediation in divorce cases, is in this vein as well.

The beginnings of work by ethnographers on the field of conflict resolution itself as a new profession or “globalizing legal formation” has just begun—a 2004 University of Michigan dissertation by Christopher Timura takes this perspective.

As compared to the state of the field in the early 1980s, anthropologists and some sort of take on culture—nowadays often one in explicit contradistinction to the Samuel Huntington version—are now somewhat represented in conflict resolution programs and curricula.

Kevin Avruch is presently professor of conflict resolution and anthropology in the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, and faculty and senior fellow in the Peace Operations Policy Program (School of Public Policy), at George Mason University. His most recent publications are Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Religion and Government (1997), Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998) and Information Campaigns for Peace Operations (2000).