Racial and Ethnic Conflict Management

RACIAL / ETHNIC CONFLICT MANAGEMENT

The Conflict Management Goal and an Enabling Setting:
"What we try to facilitate is not the process of negotiation itself, but communication that helps the parties overcome the political, emotional, and at times technical barriers that often prevent them from entering into negotiations… ." (Kelman, 1992)
--What is an example of a technical barrier?

"An academic setting is a good place to set into motion a process in which parties that do not trust each other begin to communicate in a non-committal framework, but gradually move to increasing levels of commitment as their level of working trust increases" (Kelman, 1992).
--Why is an academic setting a good place to "set in motion" racial and ethnic reconciliation processes?

Community-Based Dialogue for Racial and Ethnic Reconciliation
Community-based dialogue (CBD) is methodology that seeks to help manage and resolve conflicts based on ethnicity and race.
CBD involves the following steps:
1. Telling the story and providing recognition
2. Building cross relationships in order to be with one another
3. Acknowledgment
4. Apology at all levels with the expression of regret
5. Acceptance of the apology
6. Compensation
7. Treaty to establish a new order

Two Challenges to the Rigidity of these Steps:
Challenge #1: Compensation Based on Mutual Gain (Step 6) Must be Integral to Building Cross Relations (Step 2): Introducing joint development as early as possible allows the parties to:

Understand the more full terms upon which their relationship may evolve (self-reliance, reducing alienation, and promoting flexible markets)
Know the potential of generating new wealth based on their mutuality
Have incentive against abandoning the reconciliation process
Have additional dialogue closer to the outset

("Parties must first perceive the benefits that may be derived from cooperation and joint-problem solving. Integrative and position sum solutions to shared problems, which can build confidence, enhance mutual safety, and protect identities, are likely to be necessary pre-conditions for successful distributive bargaining and compromise intense ethnic conflict" (Baskin, 1993).)

Challenge #2: Create successful examples of mutual accommodation before drafting a final treaty: Why?
A sustainable treaty embodies an "emerging reality."

The treaty may then embody the qualities of the new relationship and the societal consequences it has brought about--which must first be arrived at and experienced.
Drafting a treaty before the unfolding of their new relationship could invite its revision, and at worst limit the flexibility of the parties (communities).
CBD treaties (and institutions) must reflect local determinations. This may require withholding their drafting until those local realities develop.