Heidi and Guy Burgess have long focused on how society – and our field – can deal with intractable conflicts. They publish a newsletter, Beyond Intractability, that includes lots of thoughtful articles about this.
The latest issue features an article they co-authored with Sanda Kaufman, Applying Conflict Resolution Insights to the Hyper-Polarized, Society-Wide Conflicts Threatening Liberal Democracies, published in Conflict Resolution Quarterly. Here’s an excerpt describing the central issues they see:
Our Executive Summary of the article that frames the hyper-polarization discussion starts by asserting that political hyper-polarization and the resulting political stalemate is the number one problem facing the United States and a great many other countries. We believe it is more important than climate change, inequality, health, race relations, immigration—or any of the other so-called “existential” problems, because none of those problems are going to be successfully addressed, unless we can fix the hyper-polarization that has driven effective problem analysis and problem solving into the ground. This raises at least three questions:
The newsletter includes links to lots of other provocative articles and posts.
Take a look.
Read John Lande’s Blog, Click Here
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