Conflict, Change and Conflict Resolution - Berghof Handbook for ...

Christopher R. Mitchell
first party to achieve its own objectives. Usually, this process involves an increase in coercive
actions that impose costs on the adversary, and ultimately involves violence and physical harm.
In this narrow sense, the use of the term escalation for this particular process seems more than
justified. Moreover, the process often involves thresholds (use of threats, cost-imposing coercion,
physical violence), which, once crossed, fundamentally change the nature of the conflict.
5.2
Other Intensifying Dynamics
If the label escalation is most usefully applied to changes in the intensity and frequency of
coercive and violent behaviour directed at the other party, what other changes might be involved
in the intensification of protracted conflicts? At least five other dynamics seem commonly to be
involved in such intensification processes: mobilisation, enlargement, polarisation, dissociation
and entrapment.
The first of these processes, mobilisation, refers to the process whereby intra-party changes
take place once a group, community or nation finds itself in a relationship of protracted conflict
with another, so that time, effort and resources are devoted to the conflict, and the various ways
(frequently coercive) being employed to find “an acceptable solution” – defined, at least in the
early stages, as one that enables all goals to be achieved and interests defended.
Too often, this process ultimately arrives at a point of deciding that the only way of attaining
one’s goals is “all out war” against the adversary. This can then involve a mobilisation of
resources, the sacrifice of which in the course of the struggle often comes to outweigh the value
of the goals originally sought. One other aspect of mobilisation, as Dean Pruitt and Sung Hee
Kim (2004) point out in their own study of conflict dynamics, is the frequent change in the
balance of decision-making power within embattled parties, which results in much more
influence accruing to those in charge of the instruments of coercion at the expense of those in
charge of alternative conflict resolution mechanisms. (Ministries of “defence” rather than
foreign ministries make policy, and warriors replace diplomats in planning councils.)
An equally conflict intensifying process involves the – sometimes gradual, sometimes rapid
– “widening” of the conflict in two distinct senses. Firstly, through a process of enlargement,
many conflicts “pull in” other parties to the conflict who become embroiled via the practice of
ally-seeking on the part of the main adversaries, or by deliberate intervention in order to support
one side or the other, to pursue interests of one’s own on another’s territory or turf, to maintain
a local position of advantage or to indulge in “proxy wars”. Whatever the objectives or the
means by which enlargement occurs, the end result is to make the conflict more complex (more,
and often widely different, interests become involved) and – to anticipate a later argument –
change in the direction of resolution becomes much more difficult.
Something similar can be said about the process of polarisation, a conflict exacerbating
dynamic which involves a “widening” of the issues on which adversaries come to confront one
another, beyond the initial goal clash that led to the formation of the conflict situation in the first
place. There are both psychological and behavioural aspects of this dynamic, and they are
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