What's Good About Conflict?

Laura Nader
UC Berkeley

Laura Nader

At the outset it must be noted that conflict or confrontative behaviors and harmony or reconciliation techniques are not antithetical. Any theory of cultural control would merge conflict and harmony as part of the same control system albeit at different ends of a continuum.

We need also recognize that Anglo-Americans (including Anglo-American anthropologists) have difficulty understanding the ideologies that value harmony as neutral rather than as a forum for an ideological marketplace deeply embedded in religious premises related to Western Christianity.

So at the outset, let us agree that harmony comes at a price, and so too may conflict. Both may escalate into violent behaviors. The context for the following remarks revolves around violations of law.

Case of Consumer Protection
Arguing a positive case for conflict in relation to efforts made in the righting of wrong is not difficult. In my 1978 book No Access to Law—Alternatives to the American Judicial System, we dealt with the settlement of minor disputes of the sort found in mass and industrialized societies—specifically the protection of unwary consumers from being duped by unscrupulous sellers. We argued that effective redress of consumer grievances, by shifting risk of product and service defects to business, would give manufacturers a stronger incentive to invest in improving quality.

We devised a complaint-handling chain for individual consumer cases—from internal mechanisms set up within a company to nonbinding third-party mechanisms to mechanisms for adjudication that would make binding decisions. We worked our way through the process much as a complainant might do and concluded that as more complaints are adjudicated (rather than mediated), more also will be settled by in-house mechanisms and intermediaries. We also made the argument for class action suits and suing on the public’s behalf.

None of the solutions we discussed were new: negotiation, mediation, arbitration, adjudication, aggregate techniques have all been written about for decades. Justice for the consumer meant that all these solutions needed to be considered at once. The conflict was over the monopolization of and exercised distribution of power. Justice has its price.

Looking back on our study of consumer justice makes me realize that conflict, confrontativeness, adversarial law would have produced much more benefit for our society than the harmony and reconciliation industry, in terms of improved products, citizen participation (rather than apathy), and an investment in our judicial system appropriate to a country that espouses democratic rule.

In fact, what has happened since the 1970s is a loss of citizen rights to protest in court. The number of cases that ever get to court in the US at the outset of the 21st century is at an all-time low—dangerously low if we use access to law as a measure of a vibrant democracy. The subaltern plaintiff makes modern history by contesting injustice, and in US society it is by means of plaintiffs and their lawyers that labor laws, civil rights and environmental problems were advanced.

In making an argument for the need of a populist revolution to save the world, British Prince Charles notes: “With increased business transparency we as individuals and consumers can pick the products that last the longest, that have been produced at minimum carbon rates, that have enriched a poor community, and that have sustained a forest or a fishery rather than helped exhaust it.” It will take debate and conflict to bring such about, given present governmental apathies nationwide.

Confronting Injustices
Injustices often invite conflict. The American Revolution, the Civil War, the Vietnam War and now the Iraq War—conflict between new world settlers and the British monarchy, between the abolitionists and those pro-slavery, between empires and colonized civilians, and in Iraq between sovereignty and imperialism, over scarce resources and military bases. At the heart of these national and international conflicts are various forms of plunder—of taxes, of land, of labor, of oil. In each of the above-mentioned instances of conflict the republic has won over the empire in the end. Where there are no opposition voices, the empire wins.

But injustices that generate conflict are not always states. In the present moment of globalization, conflicts are increasingly between corporate capitalists and the preyed upon. In India, the issue was Coca-Cola, where manufacturing soft drinks required extraction of groundwater that deprived poor people of access to clean water. The toxic waste that Coke factories spewed out threatened both health and environment. In India, human chains surrounded Coca-Cola and Pepsi factories across their country highlighting that pillaging of water resources could only happen with the complicity of the state. And the struggle against water theft is not limited to India. Wherever corporate globalization moves so too does discontent. Reports on corporate capitalists in China involve not only water and air pollution, but land plunder and labor plunder, biopiracy and more.

For those who have read this far, it may be obvious that conflict, adversarialness, dissent, confrontativeness are tools used in asymmetrical situations to right a real or perceived wrong—the collision of force with opposing force. In the absence of such opposing force there is acquiescence, subordination, passivity, apathy—features associated with Brave New World or 1984 societies.

The search for justice is both fundamental and universal in human culture and society. Thus, as long as there is power asymmetry one can expect conflict, leaving to one side the issue of whether the consequences are heroic or not. Ethnographies of conflict increasingly include the conjunctions of people and corporations, technological process and decisions of power embedded in history. Issues need to be clarified through reasoned arguments in lieu of violence.

The 21st century is already a century preoccupied with problems of toxics, scarce resources and garbage—the residue of 19th and 20th century industrializations. Adversarial dealings with oil companies, like Texaco in Ecuador, could result in a compensation as repayment for damages to life and environment in the Amazon—the aftermath of Texaco’s violent extraction policies. Thus in relation to a sense of injustice conflict takes on heroic meaning because of grossly unequal power relations.

Laura Nader is professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her current work focuses on how central dogmas are made and how they work in law, energy science and anthropology. Critical publications include: Energy Choices in a Democratic Society (1980); Harmony, Ideology, Injustice and Control in a Mountain Zapotec Village (1990); Naked Science, Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power and Knowledge (1996); The Life of the Law: Anthropological Projects (2002). In 1995 the Law and Society Association awarded her the Kalven Prize for distinguished research on law and society.