Process Work and Mainstream Conflict Resolution Paradigms

Conflict is as old as humankind; ever since two protohumans fought over the same carcass, or stole food from another tribe's encampment, people have fought and argued over one thing or another. And as such conflicts could and often did turn deadly, it has been a primary concern of human beings to find ways of resolving them with a minimum of death, injury, pain and material loss. On the whole, these efforts have not been terribly successful.

While many attempts at conflict resolution are based on a common-sense, pragmatic approach, it appears that this only works when all of the parties to the conflict share the same version of common sense, and concur on what is practical. This is seldom true, particularly when the conflicting parties come from differing ethnic, language or religious groups. Pragmatic solutions all too often need to be backed up by force to get everyone to "agree" on a solution.

Process Work has, over the past seven years or so, concerned itself with research into ways of processing conflict. Historically, process work had it origins in individual psychotherapy. Its development in the direction of Worldwork came about in part from Arnold Mindell's studies of Jungian psychology, with its emphasis on the psychoid (collective) unconscious, and of modern physics, with its challenge to the classical boundaries between an object and its environment.

Although the process oriented conflict resolution approach has developed its own rich repertoire of interventions and practical experience, the following is a brief (and rather one-sidedly intellectual) synopsis of the elements of the theory:

A collective is defined by roles as well as by individuals. Leaders, followers, outsiders, haves and have-nots, topdogs and underdogs, majorities and minorities, the privileged and the underprivileged are all roles in the collective field which can, in principle, be occupied by any individuals in that field.

Conflicts arise between roles as well as between individuals. An individual's satisfaction with a given state of affairs will depend in part on his or her ability to occupy different roles within that field. Put another way, when someone is stuck in a given role, this predisposes that person to conflict with other individuals stuck in contrasting roles.

Occupying different roles requires processing the conflict; it cannot occur satisfactorily by simply saying that one has changed roles. For role change to be congruent and therefore convincing, all parts of the individual's experience must at least momentarily agree with the role he or she is occupying. Successfully changing roles therefore is done by noticing where a person's

unintentional signals, actions and experiences already belong to a role different from the one with which the person identifies, and then encouraging the person to assume that new role intentionally.

The facilitator role in a conflict situation belongs to the person who can help the other parties to notice the diversity of their signals, behaviors, attitudes and feelings and to use these to experiment with occupying alternative roles in the field.

As in the case of an individual who is attempting to integrate conflicting parts of her or his personal process, certain roles in a group will tend to be disavowed by a majority of the group members. The group itself will therefore have an edge, a boundary which separates it from those roles which appear to it to be dangerous, risky, socially forbidden or otherwise undesirable. The ability of individuals to change roles within the group will depend to some extent on the group's ability to process its edges against unpopular or disavowed roles.

An example of a satisfactory outcome of such a procedure is a situation in which each participant experiences compassion for each of the roles in the conflict, and can cooperate with the other participants in resolving the situation which has brought the roles into conflict with one another.

Acentral feature of process oriented conflict resolution is its emphasis on the interaction of the individual and the collective of which she or he is a part. The nature of that interaction remains to be discovered anew in each individual situation. As in individual therapy, the fewer assumptions the facilitator makes about the situation the better. The role of the facilitator, like that of the process worker-therapist, is to be aware of impending role changes and help the group to process these, even in the presence of strong edges against such role changes.

Where, then, does this approach fit into the main stream of theory and practice which people have evolved over the centuries for the purpose of dealing with greater and smaller conflicts? It is the goal of this article to take a regrettably general and incomplete look at these methods, and to attempt to situate the Process Work approach in their midst.

In Burton, John and Frank Dukes, eds., Conflict: Readings Press, 1991).

My goals are twofold:

To understand the similarities and differences between current mainstream tendencies in conflict resolution and the process work approach to Worldwork.

To determine where Process Work can be used more efficiendy in the service of approaches which are currently being used, in the hope of placing Process Work tools at the disposal of conflict resolution practitioners who might find them useful.

The source material for my analysis of the Process Work approach will be my own understanding of and experience in the field; any misrepresentations I may make are my own. This understanding is, in turn, based on Arnold Mindell's books, The Year One and The Leader as Martial Artist. In addition, I have used some newer material concerning the role of abuse and revenge in individual and group conflict situations which Dr. Mindell presented in lectures at the Process Work Center of Portland in the autumn of 1992.

For the analysis of current approaches to conflict resolution, I must thank an article entitled "Paradigms in Conflict: the Strategist, the Conflict Researcher and the Peace Researcher" by A. J. R. Groom,1 who has undertaken the impossible task of boiling down the main directions in conflict resolution research into a short and understandable synopsis. My more general comments on the so-called conflict research approach to conflict resolution I have taken from John Burton's book, "Conflict: Resolution and Provention."

Groom's article puts forth three theoretical approaches toward understanding the genesis of conflict, and then describes three conflict resolution paradigms which are based on these theories. I will first briefly describe these theories and their associated paradigms, and then look at where Process Work fits into these frameworks.

Power, Realism and Strategic Studies

According to the realist, conflict on an international level arises out of an inherent striving for power and domination of one group by another. It is fueled by a desire to win, whether the spoils be

in Management and Resolution (NewYork: St. Martin's

territory, material wealth or the enslavement of one nation by another. This struggle is driven by an innate tendency toward dominance and aggression in human beings. The absence of overt conflict can only come about through a balance of power, where the cost of conflict would be too high when weighed against the benefits and risks of winning or losing.

Who are the conflicting parties in the realist model of the world? Conflict is conducted by major powers, nation-states in general, of which the inner workings are of but secondary importance. The individual person does not enter the picture. This means that legitimacy of leadership is not factored into the realist's analysis of conflict. It is immaterial whether the conflicting governments are autocratic or democratically elected. In practice, this simplification has proven to be untenable; the practice of espionage agencies in "destabilizing" opposing governments by covert terrorist and internal political action underscores the importance of internal social forces even in a power-realist model of conflict.

Conflict resolution under the realist view is concerned with maintenance of a balance of power which is sufficiently robust as to make outbreaks of overt violence unacceptable. This is the business of the Strategist and the discipline of Strategic Studies. The nuclear arms race between the superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States of America of the preceding four decades is an example of such a strategic balance of power. The cost of overt aggression was, in principle, nothing short of global destruction. The fighting of smaller, "conventional" wars which directly involved the superpowers during this period challenges the notion that a balance of power is sufficient to maintain world peace.

The World Society and Conflict Research

A second view of the genesis and resolution of conflict is presented by the so-called "World Society" model. According to this view, the world is one single society, with many different actors participating in and generating its events. States, although they may empirically carry more weight in certain situations, are not the natural units of analysis. At various times, and in various circumstances, individuals, interest groups, ethnic groups, language groups and states may all play significant roles in conflict. At times the significant interaction may be between two superpowers; at other times, it may be between a national government and a minority group within that nation. The World Society model acknowledges that the analysis of conflict must begin with an empirical

determination of who the actors are. It cannot be assumed that they are the identified heads of the power hierarchy.

The legitimacy of identified leadership becomes an important issue under this view. If leadership is not legitimized by those it purports to lead, then revolution and terrorism will be the ultimate result. As obvious as this seems, current practices in conflict Resolution often ignore this fact, at the cost of failure. In hot spots such as Israel and Northern Ireland, the conflict is kept going by disavowed sections of the populace who belong to organizations which have been deemed illegal by the leaders of the power hierarchy. But it is just those factions that keep the pot boiling. It is only recently that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has been invited into Middle East peace talks, while the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) remains an illegal and unwelcome outsider to the futile and eternal attempts at a resolution of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The discipline of Conflict Research (according to Groom's system of designation) is the analysis of the sources and dynamics of conflict in a World Society. It makes no assumptions about who or what the actors are in the conflict; it sees conflict as a systemic phenomenon to be found in the interactions between actors. John Burton, one of the leading proponents of the World Society model, sees the individual as being just as important as the most powerful nation-state in understanding the sources and motivation of conflict.

Adherents of the World Society model see conflict as arising out of interaction between individuals, groups and states, rather than out of any inherent aggression or power-hierarchical tendency in human beings. They believe that conflict is a rational response to systemic conditions which are incompatible with the needs of the individuals in that system. They believe that conflict cannot be resolved by coercion, but by addressing the issues which the participants themselves see as the basis of the conflict.

The systemic nature of conflict under the World Society model means that conflicts and their resolution are complex phenomena, depending as they do on social, psychological, economic and political factors. Solutions must take this complexity into account through a thorough analysis of all relevant factors. In addition, the solution must be acceptable to all participants in the conflict. If just one party is coerced into accepting a solution by another party, then the resulting peace will not last.

Use of the Conflict Research/World Society model requires a high degree of sophistication on the part of third parties who are helping adversaries to resolve a conflict. This is constantly emphasized in the writings of Burton and others, who stress that successful application of analytical conflict resolution methods depends on having an adequate model of human behavior and motivation. Otherwise, it is not possible to get at the root cause of a given conflict situation.

One model which Burton and others have found useful is Human Needs Theory, developed by Paul Sites. Human Needs Theory postulates the existence of a group of fundamental human needs which are in themselves non-negotiable. If these needs are not fulfilled, then the attempt to have them met will inevitably lead to conflict between those whose needs are not being met, and those who are perceived as keeping them from the fulfillment of these needs. Sites has identified such basic human needs as need for security (both physical and emotional), need for a distinct identity, need to have this identity recognized by others, and need for personal development. These needs are non-material; their fulfillment or lack thereof is therefore subjective. Since they are not needs of a physically scarce commodity, a conflict around such basic needs does not have to be a win-lose proposition.

According to this view, for instance, a certain ethnic group's demand for return of a piece of territory which it claims for its own may be found, on analysis, to be motivated by the group's need for recognition by the ruling majority. This majority group may, in turn, feel that its security would be threatened by relinquishing this territory. If a solution can be found where the majority group's security can be guaranteed, it may then find it possible to recognize the smaller ethnic group's claim of a distinct identity. According to this model, the actual question of who owns the land should then retreat into the background. The fundamental needs for identity recognition and for security are non-negotiable; the status of the territory, once it is freed from its symbolic status as a satisfier of these needs, becomes a freely negotiable topic, deprived of the emotional charge it had previously carried.

Structuralism and Peace Research

Structuralism is the discipline which attempts to find the deeper structures underlying the manifest behavior and perceptions of individuals and groups. Theories of the unconscious mind as a motivator of

human behavior are structuralist in nature: they attempt to find an organizing principle, itself abstract and invisible, which can account for the observable facets of human nature. A distinct feature of structuralist models is that they posit the existence of objective structures which can only be inferred from their behavioral and cognitive manifestations. In this sense, what people say about their feelings and motivations must be taken with a grain of salt; such statements are at best windows onto these deeper, more abstract structures. Thus, Freud viewed the manifest content of dreams as completely irrelevant; only analysis under the Psychoanalytic model would yield the "true" meaning of the dream, which might make no reference whatever to the images or feeling states reported by the dreamer.

Marxism is a distinctly structuralist theory. It traces the sources of social unrest to fundamental inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power in society. Poverty, social unrest and crime are seen as consequence of the inequality of this distribution. People may appear to be satisfied with their lot not because the system is just, but because the injustice which they suffer is not overt; it is disguised as an intrinsic, and therefore largely invisible, part of the very fabric of their social structure. Thus, someone who has grown up as a worker in a working class family, in a working class neighborhood, will not know any other style of life; subjugation to unsatisfying labor has become such a comprehensive and invisible part of his or her life that it is no longer the object of awareness. Such covert and pervasive violations of human freedom and dignity are termed structural violence.

Peace Research, in Groom's terminology, is the sharp end of structuralism. It sees as its goal the discovery of structural violence in the social system, and the restoration of a more just social order. One of its goals is, through social action, to provoke the purveyors of structural violence into making it overt, in the hopes of bringing it to the public eye and precipitating a revolutionary response to it.

Because structural violence is structural, it is not always perceptible to those most injured by it; the job of the Peace Researcher cum social activist is to attack structural violence, perhaps even using physical violence as a tool. In this the structuralist and revolutionary positions converge. It has been a repeated pattern in some of the most difficult trouble spots in the world that the organizations representing conflicting parties will not speak out against violent revolution against the status quo power hierarchy.

They claim that the real violence is being done to them by the tacit inaction of the power majority. It is for this reason that the Sinn Feyn, or political branch of the Irish Republican Army, and, until recently, the African National Congress (ANQ in the Republic of South Africa have been excluded from any peace talks: because they refused to repudiate violent social action as an attempted solution to the perceived inequalities in their respective countries.

The Structuralist/Peace Researcher is not interested in theories of human behavior and motivation per se. The theory of structural violence is ready at hand; the real research comes in bringing instances of structural violence to public awareness. This approach is therefore value laden. It tends to take the part of the perceived underdog in a conflict, who is seen as the victim of structural violence. One difficulty with this approach is that the values of the Peace Researcher become important but generally tend to go unnoticed or are simply assumed. Because structuralist Peace Research does not attend to the experience of the more powerful party in a conflict, it runs the risk of generating solutions which will later lead to retribution by the now injured power majority.

Where is Process Work?

The first question to concern us is, which of these paradigms does the Process Work approach to conflict resolution most resemble?

Although it appears that the Process Work approach is most similar to that of the conflict re-

searcher, it contains elements of all three of these paradigms.

First I will consider how each of these paradigms plays a role in the Process Work approach, and then I will consider more detailed similarities.

Process Work and Power Politics

There is a often a stage in process oriented conflict resolution which resembles a cold war. The parties face off against one another, each standing strongly for his or her position. The facilitator may actually encourage both parties to do this. This serves several functions:

It gives each party a sense of his or her own power. This provides each with a basis for self-defense in the event that the other party becomes too abusive. As long as each party can defend itself against the other's attacks, the proceedings may become animated, but no one will suffer the shock and silencing that accompanies injury against which one cannot defend oneself.

It serves to amplify the conflict. Many conflicts are implicit in the sense that they are carried out through veiled threats and the terrorist tactic of aggressive weakness. Encouraging both parties to stand their ground, if only temporarily, serves to clearly delineate the nature of the conflict.

In cases where both parties have no difficulty in taking their own positions strongly, encouraging this phase may enable clear identification of the role which each party occupies.

In the case of a strong and symmetrical escalation of power positions, one or both parties may gain a sense of the absurdity or futility of such symmetrical processes and opt for a process based on a more differentiated awareness of the issues and roles.

In a group conflict resolution process, the strategic approach would encourage the identified leaders to enter into a balance of power. This is often necessary in a process oriented conflict resolution procedure because the identified, powerful leaders are the ones who have hired the facilitators. They often represent the primary process, or avowed identity of the

Arnold Mindell, in his autumn 1992 lecture series, defined an abusive situation as one in which an injured party cannot defend him- or herself. A person who has been subjected to abusive treatment typically is in shock; he or she will appear to be in a trance.

group and its subgroups. Encouraging and supporting an initial power standoff may be essential to gaining consensus from the group on continuing the procedure. Acknowledging emergent leadership too early may cause the identified power actors to fire the facilitators, thereby bringing the proceedings to an untimely end.

The initial phase of a process oriented conflict resolution procedure therefore often resembles the beginning of a classical power struggle. The facilitator will, however, see this as simply one stage of a much more complex and interesting process. It is a way of honoring the primary process of the conflict so that this hopefully will not return to destroy the procedure in a later phase.

Process Work and Peace Activism

Although one of the avowed goals of Process Work is to practice deep democracy, in which each party has an opportunity to present its case, there are times when the role of the facilitator may resemble that of the peace researcher who actively takes the part of the underdog in a conflict; As in the case of peace research, the purpose of this may be to support awareness of structural violence and intrinsic, unconscious privilege among members of the group.

Uneven distribution of economic and social privilege is a form of structural violence. Working out disputes between individuals may, under certain conditions, actually perpetuate the inequities which are the initial underlying cause of the dispute.

Consider a situation in which the tenants in a shoddily-built housing development constantly fight with one another because of excessive noise which filters from one apartment to another. They know that if they complain to the landlord, who lives in an upper-class suburb many miles from the inner city in which the housing development stands, the chances are their complaints will go unheard. There is even a veiled threat in the air that if they complain too vociferously, they may be evicted and their apartment given to someone who behaves more timidly. So they fight with one another in an attempt to relieve the immediate pressure. If this situation is handled through dispute mediation in which the tenants are encouraged to work out some sort of mutual living arrangement in which they are more considerate of one another, day to day life becomes more acceptable, but the underlying conflict, which is between aggrieved tenants and an uninterested landlord who gets rich off their rent, is built into the structure of the

system. This comes close to what the peace researchers mean by "structural violence."

If this dispute were subjected to a process oriented conflict resolution procedure, the facilitator might notice at one point that the disputants were engaged in a symmetrical conflict: each complains about the same thing in the other. Each is having approximately the same experience, projecting the "perpetrator" onto the other. The facilitator might at that point notice that the explicit role of the landlord is un-filled...the landlord is an absent, or "ghost" role which affects both parties but is not explicitly occupied by anyone.

One way of dealing with a ghost role is to encourage the disputants to experiment with role-playing it themselves - to present their own version of what it is like to be this evil landlord. This often has an enlightening effect on the disputants, giving them access to their own power, authority and detachment. But if this technique is applied too early, it may be abusive in the sense that no one has really appreciated the grave power and economic asymmetry of the actual situation. In that case, someone must stand on the side of both disputants against the landlord; someone must take a stand for righting the inequity as one phase of the process. Again, at one point it may be possible for the facilitator to do this as a role-play, particularly if the facilitator feels her or himself to be privileged by comparison to the disputants. Once the disputants feel themselves heard and appreciated, it may motivate them to develop the self assurance to confront the actual landlord out of a sense of their own right to justice.

There is therefore a phase of the process oriented conflict resolution procedure in which the underdog may need to be supported because, as in the case of structural violence, the party which has the greatest effect on the system is physically absent from the scene of the dispute.

A second way in which the process oriented conflict resolution procedure resembles social activist-style peace research arises when the socially or economically more privileged or more powerful party is present at the scene of the conflict but refuses to be drawn into it. At such times, the weaker or less privileged party may need help in amplifying the dispute by provoking the more privileged party into reacting. But again, this, under the Process Work paradigm, is viewed as a particular phase of the work; eventually, once the polarization has been established, it will be the responsibility of the facilitator to come to the aid of the more privileged party, lest that

party be scapegoated or otherwise subject to public abuse. In this case, structural violence is viewed not as something remote and abstract, but as a disavowed part of the immediate experience of those present at the scene of the conflict The immediate experience is disavowed by the underdog, who often feels too weak to confront actual representatives of the more powerful or privileged position, and by the topdog, who is able to hide his or her own feelings of guilt or inadequacy behind that position of power and privilege. The ultimate privilege is, after all, the privilege of not having to react, or to say anything. It is the privilege of just maintaining the status quo, with no apparent personal loss.

When Paradigms Become States...

Each of the extremes of conflict resolution paradigms, the strategist and the activist-peace researcher, may arise as phases of the process oriented conflict resolution procedure. Taken as a paradigm, however, each resembles one fixed state rather than a component of a larger experiential process. The strategic approach seeks to establish a state of detente where power is forever balanced. Disturbances of this power balance are looked upon as pathological conditions to be remedied by restoration of the previous balance or creation of a new one. The peace research approach sees structural violence as an undesirable state which should be redressed through revolution; it sees its own

job as establishing the necessary conditions for such a revolution.

The ideal of process oriented conflict resolution is to permit each state to happen, to bring it to awareness, and to keep the conflicted system aware of its own tendency to change. Indeed, the process view actively seeks indications that change is already happening, and attempts to make its perceptions available to the conflicting parties in a way which could make it acceptable for them to accept and embrace this change.

Process Work and the World Society / Conflict Research Model

Of all three paradigms, the World Society model and its attendant Conflict Research discipline appear to be closest to the process oriented conflict resolution procedures.

They are alike in that:

1) Both emphasize the importance of interaction as the basic element of conflict and its resolution.

Identified structures are but one piece of data in the total picture. How individuals, groups and subgroups interact with one another determines the course which the procedure follows.

2) Both stress the need for awareness in analyzingthe nature and basis of the conflict. Neithersystem assumes that the most powerful identifiedleaders are the relevant parties to the conflict;

■ both systems must discover who the relevant actors are at each stage of the proceedings.

3) Both emphasize the need for an understandingof human behavior and motivation as the basis ofsustainable interventions in conflict situations.

4) Both recognize the fundamentallynon-negotiable nature of the issues whichunderlie deep-seated conflict.

5) Both rest on an ideal of deep democracy in whicheach and every party to a conflict, no matter howsmall, weak or insignificant, must be heard beforea lasting resolution can be achieved.

And yet, for all this similarity, there are deep differences between the two systems.

The World Society/Conflict Research model sees the possibility of a lasting peace developing through proper analysis and treatment of conflict. It sees the absence of conflict as a desired end goal of its procedures.

Process Work, by contrast, sees conflict as a natural and even necessary way for a system to become aware of its own growth tendencies. The goal of Process Work is not to eliminate conflict, but to use it as a tool for awareness. The ideal behind the process approach is to sharpen our awareness of this function of conflict to the point where emergent conflict can be recognized and processed rapidly enough that pain and destruction are minimized.

The World Society/Conflict Research model emphasizes analytical conflict resolution procedures, in which all of the parties to the conflict meet and discuss the underlying structure of the conflict in a cool and analytical atmosphere. The creation and maintenance of this atmosphere is the responsibility of the facilitation team.

By way of contrast, Process Work focuses on the emotional component of the conflict, based on the repeated experience that analytical solutions cannot be successful in an atmosphere filled with mistrust, anger and the thirst for vengeance. Process Work therefore provides explicit procedures for addressing these emotional issues directly, in the faith that the drier procedural issues will be much easier to work

on cooperatively once these emotional factors have been worked out.

Where the World Society/Conflict Research model sees a more or less fixed set of unmet human needs as being at the basis of all deep-seated conflict, Process Work is open on this topic. Although process workers recognize a myriad of typical experiential patterns underlying conflict, it remains an open question which particular patterns dominate in a given situation. A practical consequence of this is that the process worker attempts to remain open to new patterns which she or he has not yet seen. This is a distinct advantage in working with diverse ethnic groups whose value systems may seem strange or even abhorrent to one another and to the facilitators.

What Process Work Has to Offer Mainstream Conflict Resolution

It appears to me that there are at least two areas where Process Work has something to offer proponents of these paradigms:

Process Work can offer a process view of conflict which validates the view of each mainstream paradigm, while showing how each of these paradigms may fit into a bigger picture. This may meet the needs of each discipline by giving a framework for coping with anomalies which cannot be handled under each paradigm's conceptual framework. For instance, proponents of the Realist/Strategic Studies paradigm have a great deal of difficulty accounting for phenomena like terrorism, revolution and intervention of one nation in the internal affairs of another. Process Work may be of use in building a conceptual bridge for proponents of a single paradigm which is beginning to break down in certain areas.

Process Work can provide a model of human behavior and cognition which can serve as a valuable adjunct to any theory of conflict resolution in which the behavior, needs and motivation of the individual are of importance. The concepts of primary and secondary process,

and of edges appear to be acultural in nature; as such they offer the possibility of a durable intercultural theory of human nature which can be applied under many different conflict resolution paradigms.

3) Process Work provides explicit tools for dealing with the emotional component of conflict. As such, it should be useful in any conflict resolution procedure which gets hung up on emotions.

Conflict Resolution and Beyond

This article is by no means comprehensive; it is meant to suggest what I hope are useful ways of comparing contrasting conflict resolution paradigms in a constructive manner.

The conflict resolution paradigms I have selected are limited in being representative of mostly Western approaches; I am aware of the vast wealth of Buddhist and other Eastern knowledge and practice in the approach to conflict. It would be a useful exercise to perform a similar comparison of the process oriented conflict resolution approach with these and other methods.

Joe Goodbread practices and teaches Process Work in Portland and throughout the world. He is the author of The Dreambody Toolkit.

Bibliography

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5. Press, 1990. Mindell, Arnold. The Year I: Global Process Work with
6. Planetary Myths and Structures. New York and London:
7. Viking-Penguin-Arkana, 1989. . The Leader as Martial Artist. San Francisco: Harper
8. Collins, 1992.