Intractable Conflicts: Socio-Psychological Foundations and Dynamics

INTRACTABLE CONFLICTS: SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS AND DYNAMICS Daniel Bar-Tal Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 579 pages, hardback, $88.00Intractable Conflicts: Socio -Psychological Foundations and Dynamics is a veritable gold mine. Its organization is intelligent and coherent, and its range and coverage is appropriately encyclopedic. This book deals with the theoretical issues around the concepts of intractable conflicts. It analyzes the socio-psychological foundation and dynamics of intractable conflicts and their peace-building on the basis of a particular conceptual framework that Daniel Bar-Tal developed with his cumulative years of experience in living with the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.This framework provides a holistic, comprehensive, and integrative view that sheds an illuminating light on the "psyche" of the society members involved in intractable conflicts as individuals and collectives. The conception focuses on the shared socio-psychological repertoire that evolves in societies in intractable conflict and plays a definitive role in its dynamics. Specifically, this repertoire underlies the evolved culture of conflict and influences the nature of social reality about the conflict that society members construct, the involvement with and mobilization of society members for the conflict, and the direction of action taken by them. Although this conceptual framework serves as a basis of this book, it presents many other theories and empirical evidence to illuminate these complex topics and also draws from every relevant discipline related to this type of conflict. In this regard the author provides numerous examples through the book that are taken from different cases of intractable conflict.The book is divided into four comprehensive parts. The first part, "Evolvement of Intractable Conflicts," analyses and characterizes the nature of intractable conflicts and describes the challenges that they pose to societies. This part also elaborates on the societal process of conflict eruption and its escalation. The second part, "Societal Psychological Repertoire of Conflicts," presents the socio-psychological infrastructure that develops in order to adapt to the conflict conditions. This includes collective memories, the ethos of conflict, and collective emotional orientations. This infrastructure serves as a pillar of a culture of conflict. In the third part, "Maintaining Conflicts," Daniel Bar-Tal highlights functions that the socio-psychological infrastructure fulfills for a society and later focuses the institutionalization of the socio-psychological infrastructure and development of the culture of conflict.The last part, "De-escalation and Peacebuilding" examines the barriers that hinder peacemaking and then elaborates on the profound consequences of the culture of conflict on socio-psychological behavior on both the individual and societal levels. One chapter discusses the beginning of the long process of peacemaking that might start with a minority and gradually lead to peaceful conflict resolution (p.348). Then two chapters describe the long peace-building process that sometimes takes place after the conflict settlement; the first presents the concepts of stable and lasting peace (p.370) and the culture of peace and reconciliation (p.376), and the second outlines various methods that needed in order to assure its success. Finally, an epilogue provides Bar-Tal's thoughts and lessons learned from his long journey of living with, studying, and reflecting on the seemingly intractable Israeli-Arab conflict. …