When speaking before audiences about nonviolent conflict resolution, I ask two questions. A few isolated hands go up. Nearly all hands go up. Yet most of us are conditioned to fear the street criminal, even though for many people there is more to fear walking in the house at night than walking out. Whether it's across a living room or across a border, conflicts will be settled either through violent force or through nonviolent force.
Conflict is a neutral term, neither positive nor negative.
It's almost always a signal to get another way of dealing with a disagreement. Since 1982, I have been teaching high school, college, and law students the methods of nonviolent conflict resolution. No nation has so vast a literature on nonviolence as America. Yet, judging from our history of wars, our high rates of homicide, spouse and child abuse, abortions, the killing of animals for food, our death row executions, it's as if the art of resolving conflicts nonviolently were as hard to learn as astrophysics in Urdu. It isn't that hard.