Problem-solving Model		Attractor Landscape Model
Assumptions		Assumptions
•	Short-term, outcome focus (agreements)	•	Dynamic, long-term change in patterns
•	Rational decisions	•	Emotional context of decisions
•	Linear change processes	•	Nonlinear dynamics
Orientation		Orientation
•	Identify presenting conflict issues and underlying needs	•	Map links and feedback loops between elements
Objectives		•	Identify actionable hubs
•	Satisfy underlying needs, resolve conflict	•	Visualize manifest and latent attractor landscape
Approach		•
•	Conflict analysis, intervention, and	Objectives
	agreement	•	Accuracy, agency, possibility, sustainability
Tools		•	Reconfigure attractor landscape
•	Problem solving, negotiation, mediation,	Approach
	consensus building, compensation, logrolling, pressure, coercion	•	Case study (loop-mapping), visualization, address probabilities and read feedback
		Practices
		•	Complicate to simplify
		•	Build up and tear down
		•	Change to stabilize

THE PRACTICES

There are three basic practices for addressing the 5 percent constructively. These practices are all informed by the ALM model, principles and research presented in part 2 of the book. Together they constitute both an ancient and modern approach to conflict. Ancient in that they are rooted in thinking on complexity, coherence, dynamism, and conflict first presented by the Taoists in the third or fourth century BC. Modern because they are informed by contemporary research and methods in psychology and complexity science.

Like most everything associated with conflict, these practices involve tension and process. They are not tools or techniques for intervention. That would reflect linear cause-and-effect thinking. They are dialectical practices that incorporate the psychological principles of change, contradiction, and holism outlined in chapter 4.¹ They are ways of thinking and acting that can enhance our capacity for addressing the 5 percent and thereby increase the probability for constructive change. Each practice addresses basic contradictions: complexity/simplicity, creation/destruction, and change/stability, which are opposing human needs, tendencies, or processes.² At their core, the practices involve an iterative process of managing tension, contradiction, inconsistency, and change.

1. Complicate to simplify. This entails breaking through the press for coherence and oversimplification that is so forceful and constraining with the 5 percent, while attempting to identify the actionable hubs, gateways, and patterns otherwise disguised by the complexity of the conflict.

2. Build up and tear down. This is the practice of stirring or creating a sense of hope and possibility for more constructive relations in a conflict, while simultaneously deconstructing the traps for enmity and destruction that lie in wait to recapture the dynamics of the system.

3. Change to stabilize. This practice views adaptation and change as critical to stability and sustainability. It is about leveraging opportunities for change in a manner mindful of long-term dynamics and the need for adaptation in nonlinear systems.

ALL THREE PRACTICES WORK TOGETHER in a cyclical fashion. The first, complicate to simplify, constitutes a framework for conflict analysis and mapping; it can allow for new understandings and insights to emerge for addressing difficult conflicts. The second, build up and tear down, is the main category of strategic action; it involves an array of tactics, both old and new, for altering the conflict attractor landscape over time. The final practice, change to stabilize, highlights the importance of leveraging change and adapting effectively to changing circumstances in order to achieve sustainable solutions. Of course, any conflict could benefit from these practices. However, the 5 percent, which drag us, often unwittingly, into the depths of their attractors, require them.

What follows are more detailed discussions of each of the practices and their associated actions and skills. Whether or not you find value in any particular action for addressing conflict, remember it is the practices and the science behind the practices that really matter. This is what you should take with you and use as you see fit. In other words, think of these practices as the basic equipment you need when setting out on your own expedition to discover your 5 percent solution.

The Conflict in the Middle East—at Columbia University

For years, students in the Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures Department (MEALAC) at Columbia University had complained about what they saw as intimidation of Jewish students by pro-Palestinian professors in the department. The university, for a variety of reasons, had been generally unresponsive to these complaints. Everything changed when an Israeli advocacy group released a documentary film called Columbia Unbecoming, presenting student testimonials alleging incidents of academic abuse and intimidation by MEALAC faculty.

Students flocked to see the film in which several professors were identified by name. The testimonials claimed that Jewish students had been mocked and marginalized by these and other “pro-Palestinian” Columbia professors. The faculty members implicated in the film denied the allegations, but nevertheless events escalated.

The accusations grew, from initial complaints about the actions of a few professors at MEALAC, to claims of pervasive bias in the university curriculum and a general anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian culture among university faculty. The debate also spread to the news and editorial pages of several newspapers and to the blogs of several prominent Israeli and Palestinian commentators. The New York Daily News published a special report headlined “Poison Ivy: Climate of Hate Rocks Columbia University.” It stated: “Dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.” In response, one of the implicated faculty responded by writing: “This witch-hunt aims to stifle pluralism, academic freedom, and the freedom of expression on university campuses in order to ensure that only one opinion is permitted, that of uncritical support for the state of Israel.”

Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, responded by establishing a high-level faculty committee to investigate the claims of bias put forth in the film. But members of a student group immediately protested this move. They charged that the committee itself was biased because of personal and professional connections to the implicated professors, and due to some of the committee members’ own prior anti-Israeli statements. Nevertheless, the committee continued its investigation and tensions spread. One of the professors named in the film abandoned his signature course for that term for fear of reprisals (he was pre-tenure). There were several instances of nonenrolled hecklers attending the implicated faculties’ courses, and insults and death threats were left on their answering machines. It was also reported that the conflict began affecting alumni funding and student admissions. Then the Israeli ambassador to the United Sates withdrew under protest from an international conference scheduled to take place at Columbia.

When the faculty committee released its report, it issued a harsh condemnation of university grievance procedures, but offered little clarity on the many other issues linked to the dispute. While the report was clear on the need to reform grievance processes, the initial allegations of bias and intimidation remained unresolved, and the student, faculty, and public response was indignant. The controversy has continued for years. It has been particularly contentious around tenure decisions for the implicated faculty, and around related issues of classroom behavior and the limits of academic freedom. Further, the conflict was touted by some as merely one example of a problem that festered at many other campuses as well, and the filmmakers expressed their intention to release new documentaries made at other colleges and universities.

PRACTICE I: COMPLICATE TO SIMPLIFY

Imagine you are the president of Columbia University when the exposé documentary Columbia Unbecoming premieres at Columbia’s Lerner Cinema, accusing your university of flagrant anti-Semitism. Within minutes the calls and emails start flooding in. Angry parents, furious faculty, student activists, the media, bloggers, the mayor of New York City, the New York Civil Liberties Union, alumni donors, members of your own family, you name it, call and demand action. But of course the actions they demand are all over the map, extreme, and often in direct contradiction to one another, or completely irrelevant to the issues as you see them. The pressure on you to act decisively is extraordinary.

Alternately, imagine that you are one of the students at Columbia. You feel you were publicly humiliated by a faculty member for asking a straightforward question in class. You were thrown out of class and later told by your peers that your professor called you a “Jewish spy.” Said professor then reportedly went on a “paranoid rant” about people like you. And you know all too well that this is not an isolated incident. Other students have been treated this way by Columbia professors and subsequently complained to the university. Yet they got a less than satisfactory response from the administration. You are also aware that this is happening not only at Columbia, but at other colleges and universities as well.

Or imagine that you are one of the accused faculty members implicated in the MEALAC case at Columbia. For years now, despite being cleared of any wrongdoing by the university’s investigatory panel, every paper you publish, every comment you make, every glance toward a student, even the things you do not say are scrutinized, documented, and taken as more evidence of your obvious anti-Semitism. You know that a well-organized network of pro-Israel activists outside the university is working tirelessly against you; manufacturing falsehoods, inflaming opinions, and lying in wait for you to misspeak.

What’s a disputant to do?

The attractor has you. You are now lying on your back at the bottom of a wide and deep crevice of conflict. Whether you are the beleaguered university president, or the aggrieved student, or the accused faculty member in this scenario matters, of course. But everyone is now constrained and controlled by a powerful constellation of mostly unseen forces.

Of course, our natural impulse in these situations is to fight or flee. To lash out, blame, attack, or challenge someone, or otherwise try to get out and avoid the situation altogether. These responses make perfect sense in the short term, but likely will have little effect on the 5 percent. In fact, they may make matters worse in the long term.

So if escaping or resolving this conflict is your goal (and we do not assume this is always the case), we suggest a different approach. And it begins with complicating your life.

CONFLICT-MAPPING 1: COMPLICATE THINGS

See the System

When you find yourself stuck in an oversimplified polarized conflict, a useful first step is to try to become more aware of the system as a whole: to provide more context to your understanding of the terrain in which the stakeholders are embedded, whether they are disputants, mediators, negotiators, lawyers, or other third parties. This can help you to see the forest and the trees; it is a critical step toward regaining some sense of accuracy, agency, possibility, and control in the situation.

At the moment, the 5 percent conflict is in charge. It is shaping what you and others see, think, feel, and do. So it is important to first regain some sense of accuracy in your perceptions. This is not easy. It is swimming upstream against what you and others in the conflict feel to be certain. However, because of the dramatic pull of the 5 percent attractor, achieving a better sense of the different independent but interrelated elements of the conflict is an essential fist step. As Columbia president Lee Bollinger stated at the time of the MEALAC crisis, “Many people, perhaps understandably, do not grasp what’s at stake. They see one side of it, one aspect of it. This can’t be reduced to a single line of thought.”³

Recall that the collapse of complexity that accompanies 5 percent conflicts happens along many dimensions:

• A very complicated situation becomes very simple.

• A focus on concrete details in the conflict shifts to matters of general abstract principle.

• Concerns over obtaining accurate information regarding substantive issues transform into concerns over defending one’s identity, ideology, and values.

• The out-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals; now are all alike.

• The in-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals; now are all similar.

• Whereas I once held many contradictions within myself in terms of what I valued, thought, and did; now I am always consistent in this conflict.

• Whereas I used to feel different things about this conflict—good, bad, and ambivalent; now I feel only an overwhelming sense of enmity and hate.

• I’ve shifted from long-term thinking and planning toward short-term reactions and concerns.

• Where I once had many action options available to me, I now have one: attack.

This is the bad news about the 5 percent, but it’s also the good news. The collapse of complexity occurs on so many levels, all leading a similar state of “us versus them” thinking, that reintroducing a sense of complexity and agency can also be achieved in a wide variety of ways. There are therefore many places to find points of leverage to rupture the certainty and oversimplification that rules in these situations.

The question is how to find them.

Most standard approaches to conflict analysis begin with making lists for this very purpose. They start with a negotiator, lawyer, mediator, or other third party who listens to the disputants, identifies the main issues, lists them on a piece of paper, prioritizes them, and then gets to work. This is exactly how I was trained by the New York State criminal courts to be a community mediator. The standard lists look like this.

UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION	UNIVERSITY STUDENT
Inflammatory accusations	Public humiliation
Importance of free speech	Importance of free speech
Protection of CU’s reputation	Protection of personal reputation
Respect grievance procedures	Unresponsive procedures
Faculty’s and students’ rights	Students’ rights
The plight of Palestinians and Israelis	The plight of Israelis

Although listing issues can be a useful tool for organizing the discussion, and has proven helpful with many types of disputes, it presents two problems in addressing the 5 percent.

Problem 1: Subjectivity, bias, and spoilers. Analyzing conflicts is an active cognitive process where the analyst perceives, interprets, shapes, and articulates the pattern of events in question. This flies in the face of traditional notions of third-party neutrality and objective fact-finding in conflict resolution, which are pervasive in the field today.⁴

Typically during analysis, conflict interveners make a set of critical choices, often under severe constraints, which help determine the future pattern of conflicts. For instance, if invited to intervene in the Columbia University conflict, we would typically have a say in determining which stakeholders, out of the multitude of possibilities, are especially relevant to the conflict and therefore need to be included in assessment and resolution processes.

Immediately, several questions arise. Shall we work with key group representatives or with all stakeholders in a large-scale consensus-building process? Shall we involve more radical agitators inside and outside the university community, or focus on mainstream insiders with broad spheres of influence? These are often necessary and practical choices that carry powerful symbolism; they signal which parties are legitimate and central and which are not. This legitimization can ultimately contribute to the unintentional development of “spoilers”: parties who become motivated to undermine what they perceive to be an exclusive and misguided peace process.⁵

A similar process occurs when identifying and prioritizing the issues and grievances in a conflict. As certain problems gain in salience (such as concerns over the university’s grievance procedures), they tend to capture the attention of the intervener and main stakeholders, often at the expense of other issues. Over time the neglected issues and parties can regain importance and challenge the integrity of prior agreements. (This, incidentally, is what many believe led to the collapse of the Oslo Accords in the Middle East conflict.)

The point is that the choices interveners first make help to set the initial conditions and subsequent pattern of conflicts.

Problem 2: Linearity and premature simplification. The second problem with using simple lists of issues as a way of organizing the conflict resolution process is that it once again compares fluid things to fixed things. It typically involves a process of listening to complex, contradictory stories—multiple, nuanced, subjective narratives of ongoing escalatory dynamics—and then using terms or short phrases to capture the main points.

So what is an alternative? Loops.

Conflict Feedback Loop–Mapping

Rather than making lists, it can be fruitful to sketch the evolving system of 5 percent conflicts through a series of feedback loop analyses. Loop analysis was developed decades ago by the mathematician and cultural epistemologist Magorah Maruyama.⁶ It is particularly useful for mapping different aspects of a conflict and identifying reinforcing and inhibiting feedback loops that contribute to the escalation, deescalation, and stabilization of destructive conflicts.

This method not only helps to recontextualize our understanding of a conflict, but also helps to identify central hubs and patterns in the conflict unrecognizable by other means. This is achieved by capturing the multiple sources, links, and complex temporal dynamics of such systems.

Mapping any of these aspects of an evolving conflict can help to tease out and disentangle the morass of grievances and misperceptions that make up the coherent and oversimplified world of the 5 percent. It can help to simply take the time to see how complex these problems can become, which is one reason mapping is used increasingly by conflict practitioners working on the ground in complicated situations.

However, I must offer one caution. It is very important when using a conflict-mapping methodology that everyone involved be clear about the degree of objectivity versus subjectivity of the exercise, and of whatever elements are being mapped. This can be thought of along a continuum.

OBJECTIVE-SUBJECTIVE CONTINUUM

Objective	Subjective
(Externally verifiable elements of conflict)	(Psychologically perceived elements of a conflict)

Mapping Objective Structures. On one end of the continuum are conflict maps that can be generated of actual, empirically verifiable entities, structures, processes, and events. For example, the communications networks—phone traffic, email correspondence, Internet traffic, physical visits together and time spent speaking—of disputants and stakeholders in a conflict setting could be mapped, as could the physical locations of events, such as crimes or conflictual encounters or group violence. These maps can employ sophisticated network analysis and visualization tools; they can be very helpful in visualizing temporal and spatial patterns of relationships and events. This type of mapping is less common in the conflict and peace field today (with the exception of police and peacekeeping activities, disaster relief, and covert intelligence gathering), but its use is increasing in emergency situations. For example, humanitarian observers of the political violence in Kenya in 2009 used GPS tracking of cell phone data from hundreds of locals to pinpoint and communicate the location of hotspots of political violence.

CONFLICT MAPS ARE VERSATILE TOOLS

A variety of different aspects of conflict can be mapped.

• People and social networks. How allies and opponents relate to one another in conflict situations. Who talks to whom in the conflict? Who avoids whom? Are there possible communication links through various parties for linking negotiations between key adversaries? Are the social networks stable or changing over time?

• Cultural beliefs, social norms, and community institutions. How macro elements of the conflict work together or against one another to perpetuate destructive (or constructive) intergroup relations. For example, how group beliefs in the utility of violence, political rhetoric about past atrocities committed by the out-group, cultural norms dictating distrust of outsiders, school curricula that present biased historical accounts of a conflict, and the presence of rituals and monuments honoring slain warriors operate together to reinforce the need for ongoing group struggle. Or alternatively how strong advocates for human rights, a free press, an attentive and responsive international community, and an impartial judiciary system can operate to inhibit destructive dynamics.

• Issues, needs, and interests. How the different concerns and goals of the disputants relate to one another. Are they a set of relatively unrelated and loosely coupled issues, or a tight constellation of needs and interests? Which issues are more basic and pivotal to each party? Are these concerns shared by different stakeholders? Have the primary concerns shifted in importance over time?⁷

• Visions, hopes, and dreams. What does an ideal solution to this conflict look like for each stakeholder group? What are the activities, events, and structures they would like to see in place that would help resolve the conflict and sustain more tolerant or constructive relations? How do the different stakeholder maps compare and contrast? What potential problems or unexpected consequences may result from these activities, events, and structures?

• Individual thoughts, feelings, and actions. How different aspects of any individual stakeholder’s experience of the conflict link together and collapse into a coherent attractor or not. These aspects may include its past history, perceptions of the in-group and out-group, feelings of loss, guilt, and so on. Where are the strongest and weakest links?

And most important:

• A chronology of events. How a series of events transpired over time to increase the intensity and destructiveness of a conflict to maintain it in its current state and/or to deescalate it. What are the specific events? When did they occur? How did they reinforce or inhibit the escalation, stalemate, or deescalation of the conflict? Did any elements in fact do both: escalate and deescalate the conflict simultaneously or over time?

Mapping Subjective Aspects of Conflict. On the other end of the spectrum, conflict maps can also be generated of disputants’ and other stakeholders’ perceptions of relevant parties, issues, norms, institutions, etc. in a conflict. This is typically known as concept-mapping or mind-mapping. It is an excellent exercise for unearthing assumptions, perceptions, and misperceptions in understanding; for providing context and nuance to the perceiver’s sense of a conflict; for exploring temporal dynamics in people’s understanding of the chronology of events; and for identifying areas of shared or contradictory meaning for different stakeholders.

This more subjective version of conflict-mapping is used more frequently by peace practitioners today. However, even though this exercise can generate complex conceptual maps of important and relevant aspects of a conflict, and show the reinforcing and inhibiting links between these elements, it must be understood to be a purely subjective tool. These maps are not maps of external structures or of objective facts; they are simply expressions of each individual’s or group’s perception of what has transpired in the conflict, which is typically biased in the 5 percent.

This distinction is not meant to devalue subjective conflict-mapping; on the contrary, it can be immensely useful. However, it is important to be clear that there are significant differences between the value and utility of more objective conflict-mapping exercises and more subjective mapping processes.

This is one reason why we recommend beginning with stakeholder mapping of the chronology of events of the 5 percent. Although the reason why particular events occurred is often hotly disputed in 5 percent conflicts, the facts of where, when, and sometimes how they occurred are usually somewhat less so. That means that conflict event chronology-mapping falls somewhere between purely objective (fact finding) and purely subjective (perceptions, memories, and interpretation) exercises. This is because some events will be documented formally and may be easier to agree upon (for example, Columbia Unbecoming had its first public showing on Columbia’s campus on Friday, January 18, 2003), while others may be much more ambiguous and contested. Thus, event chronologies are usually good starting points for stakeholder mapping. They can help disputants unpack and visually express their shared and contradictory understanding of the history of events and of how each event may have affected the next set of events.

Conflict Event-Mapping: Four Steps. The process of event-mapping involves four basic steps.

Step 1: The stakeholders clarify which dynamic they are trying to understand. Do they want to know why a conflict escalated so quickly and so aggressively? Do they want to understand why the conflict is stuck and has remained at a stalemate for years (key to the 5 percent)? Or do they want to understand why the conflict seems to follow a periodic pattern of escalation and deescalation over time without ever really changing course? This point of focus must be defined at the start of the exercise, as each of these dynamics may require mapping somewhat different aspects of the conflict.

Step 2: The stakeholders identify the chronology of events relevant to the dynamic of interest, as far back as they feel is important, leading up to the present circumstances. Again, what is seen as “relevant” will be determined subjectively by each stakeholder involved and by the specific focus of the exercise (mapping escalation, stalemate, periodicity, etc.). We suggest this step first be conducted with independent stakeholders or small constituent groups; in-group differences in perceptions and values can then be explored before moving on to compare and contrast maps with members of out-groups.

Step 3: The stakeholders begin to map and connect the different events in chronological order. They use two criteria: (1) how each event triggers, feeds, or reinforces other events in such a way that more leads to more, or less leads to less (reinforcing feedback), and (2) how each event constrains, inhibits, or reverses other events so that changes in one direction are associated with changes in the opposite direction (inhibiting feedback). This activity can be done most simply using flip-chart paper or a whiteboard, or by using PowerPoint or any simple concept-mapping software available online, like Mindjet or iMindMap.

Step 4: Once the event maps are drafted, we have several options. One option is to work with each individual stakeholder or group to explore their map; we identify missing elements and links, surprising connections, and generally work to enhance the diversity and complexity of their understanding of the conflict. A second option is to compare maps across stakeholder groups with the expressed goal of thinking different, of seeing the conflict from a fresh point of view. A third option is to go on to the next phase of practice 1, which is to simplify things before engaging stakeholder comparisons or discussions.

Conflict Event-Mapping: An Illustration. Below we illustrate this exercise by walking through a preliminary subjective event-mapping of the exponential escalation of the Columbia University MEALAC case over five phases of its escalation. These events were compiled from several newspaper accounts and personal communications.⁸

Phase 1: The MEALAC conflict at Columbia seemed to escalate quite rapidly in 2002–2003. Whether or not it was a coincidence, reports of bias and abuse at MEALAC first surfaced around the time of the intensification of the second intifada in Israel; they also came in the wake of a quashed movement by students and faculty at Columbia to divest from companies that manufactured and sold weaponry to Israel. The MEALAC department had been formally constituted at Columbia in 1965 and some of the accused faculty had been there for decades. However, the 2001–2002 escalation of events in the Israel-Palestine region may have triggered past traumas, resentments, or guilt of Columbia faculty and students, contributing to their actions at this time.

Events probably went like this. Reports of discriminatory behavior at MEALAC became associated with reports of similar acts of bias at other universities (for example, at the University of Chicago in 2002). The existing grievance procedures at Columbia offered a limited response to the grievances. The sense of outrage among students intensified. At this point members of Columbia’s LionsPAC student organization were likely motivated to approach the David Project, a pro-Israeli advocacy group. The film Columbia Unbecoming was conceived, setting the stage for escalation. Note how all the mapped events are connected by reinforcing links, with no inhibiting loops to slow things down. This contributed to the rapid escalation of the conflict on and around campus.

TEMPORAL PHASE

Initial Phase of the MEALAC Conflict at Columbia

Phase 2: In December 2003, the David Project released Columbia Unbecoming, which presented student testimonials of academic abuse and intimidation in MEALAC. The documentary named three professors: George Saliba, Hamid Dabashi, and Joseph Massad. Students claimed that in recent years they had felt mocked and marginalized by these and other “pro-Palestinian” professors. Two allegations received the most attention. One involved a sidewalk encounter between a former student and her professor at the time, Saliba. The student claimed that Saliba told her that because she had green eyes, she was not a Semite and could therefore not claim ancestral ties to Israel. The second allegation was made by a student who had served in the Israeli army. He said that when he tried to question Massad during an off-campus lecture, the professor responded by asking him, “How many Palestinians have you killed?” The implicated faculty members denied the accusations. The allegations became officially public in October 2004, when Barnard College president Judith Shapiro referenced the film in a speech at an alumni event.

These events began to link together, reinforcing one another in the minds and conversations of the Columbia community and beyond. They intensified the conflict, connecting directly with peoples’ varied experiences of the long and troubled history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During phase 2, once again no significant events that served to dampen the escalation of tensions were identified.

Phase 3: Soon after President Shapiro’s comments, the New York Sun printed the first of many inflammatory articles about the events at Columbia; within two weeks hundreds of students packed Columbia’s Lerner Cinema to view the film. Then, early in December 2004, a group of fifty students, faculty, alumni, and community members held a press conference to protest what they felt was the stifling of voices critical of Israel. This group, the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Academic Freedom at Columbia, accused the university of failing to protect freedom of speech; it also accused the David Project of misrepresenting facts. These accusations may have lessened the escalatory impact of Columbia Unbecoming by questioning its legitimacy (a rare inhibitory link), but they also sparked increased tension and controversy evident in editorials and blogs (which served as reinforcing loops).

TEMPORAL PHASES

Phases 1 to 2 of the MEALAC Conflict

Events swiftly escalated further. Accusations expanded to include claims of anti-Israeli bias in the MEALAC curriculum and a general anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian bias among the entire Columbia faculty. The debate continued to spread through the news and editorial pages of several newspapers and to the websites of several prominent pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian commentators. The New York Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education issued strongly worded statements.

It wasn’t just the media—things were becoming personal. One professor in Columbia’s medical school sent an email to Professor Massad, saying “Go back to Arab land where Jew hating is condoned. Get the hell out of America. You are a disgrace and a pathetic typical Arab liar.”⁹ Professor Massad was compelled to abandon one of his signature courses, Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies, that spring term. There were several instances of classroom heckling, and insults and death threats were leveled at the faculty. Concerns that the conflict would affect Columbia’s alumni funding and student admissions arose.

Phase 4: On December 8, 2004, Columbia president Lee Bollinger responded to the controversy by announcing the creation of a high-level faculty ad hoc committee to investigate the claims of bias put forth in Columbia Unbecoming. This strategy might have temporarily mitigated the conflict. However, members of a student group then sent a letter to Bollinger charging that the ad hoc committee was itself biased: there were alleged personal and professional connections among members of the committee and some of the implicated professors from MEALAC, and some of the committee members had allegedly made anti-Israeli statements. For instance, one committee member had advised Professor Massad on his PhD thesis, and two others had signed the 2002 divestment petition demanding that Columbia withdraw economic support from Israel. This sparked even more outrage. Nevertheless, the committee proceeded as originally constituted, hearing testimony and deliberating for two months. Then in January 2005, in response to the controversy, the Israeli ambassador to the United Sates, Daniel Ayalon, withdrew from an international conference scheduled to take place at Columbia.

TEMPORAL PHASES

Phases 1 to 3 of the MEALAC Conflict

On March 31, 2005, the ad hoc committee released its conclusions in a twenty-four-page report, issuing a harsh condemnation of Columbia’s grievance procedures but offering little clarity on the many other issues in dispute. The report stated that, for years, students’ complaints about Middle East studies professors in MEALAC had been ignored or mishandled. In this climate, the report continued, the complaints festered and the department became riddled with “suspicion, incivility, and an unhealthy, highly politicized atmosphere.”¹⁰ The report also said that the committee found no evidence of anti-Semitism, although it did find that Professor Massad had on one occasion violated “standard norms of acceptable professorial conduct.”¹¹ The report served to validate many of the complainants’ concerns (reinforcing loop) and ameliorate some of the due process issues (inhibiting loop). However, it was seen as an insufficient response by many (once again, a conflict-reinforcing loop).

Phase 5: In April 2005, a group of students claiming they were in Professor Massad’s class on the day of the alleged misconduct wrote a letter denying the incident had taken place. Also in April, the New York Times editorial board wrote that Columbia had “botched” the investigation by involving professors on the panel who were perceived as biased; it also accused Columbia of limiting the committee’s mandate so narrowly as to constrain the implications of its findings.¹² President Bollinger was assailed by some faculty members for defending the rights of professors too weakly and failing to contain the controversy. All these are conflict-reinforcing elements. Mr. Bollinger responded by saying that he found the dispute “very painful”¹³ and that he was trying to protect both faculty and student rights.

TEMPORAL PHASES

Phases 1 to 4 of the MEALAC Conflict

In the midst of the controversy, despite campus programs like Turath’s and LionsPAC’s joint Project Tolerance and an announced million-dollar grant to start dialogue to increase multicultural awareness (inhibiting feedback loops), the campus remained divided. While the ad hoc committee’s report brought a measure of closure to the need to reform Columbia’s grievance procedures, the initial allegations of bias and intimidation remained unresolved. The accused MEALAC professors all took leaves of absence in 2005–2006. High faculty turnover and a climate of cautiousness and gloom reportedly continued to mark the department. One student called the professors’ absence “a brilliant political move” and remarked, “People are naive if they think we’re just going to kind of let things lie.”¹⁴

The MEALAC controversy continued for years and is likely latent today. At times it has become particularly contentious over tenure decisions regarding one of the implicated faculty members and around related issues of classroom behavior and the limits of academic freedom. As mentioned, the controversy at Columbia is regarded by some as only one example of a problem that festers on many other college and university campuses.

AS THIS EXERCISE ILLUSTRATES, conflict event-mapping allows us to begin to capture how a complex set of events in a conflict unfolds over time. We can then see how this set acts in concert to trigger and reinforce other events and/or to constrain and inhibit other events. It all works together to escalate, perpetuate, or deescalate conflict. These maps can be generated alone as a prenegotiation exercise (with minimal training), with the help of facilitators or mediators, or in small groups of stakeholders. Again, with concept-mapping the goal is not necessarily to get it right. The goal at this stage is to get it different: to try to reintroduce a sense of nuance and complexity into the stakeholders’ understanding of the conflict. The goal is to try to open up the system: to provide opportunities to explore and develop multiple perspectives, emotions, ideas, narratives, and identities and foster an increased sense of emotional and behavioral flexibility. To rediscover a sense of possibility.

TEMPORAL PHASES

Phases 1 to 5 of the MEALAC Conflict

A note to third parties: It is important for the conflict specialist to be mindful of her or his own dominant frames when helping to construct these maps. Which perspectives does the specialist tend to use and not use, and is anything important missing? A political scientist might focus primarily on what roles politics and power play in establishing the current attractor at MEALAC. To what degree is Columbia being played as a pawn by external political groups to bring attention to their cause? Are internal groups playing up ethnic differences to mobilize altogether different agendas?

Alternatively, a social psychologist would likely emphasize how social conditions on campus contribute to malignant relations between groups such that they maintain the problem. Given that some Jewish and Arab faculty and students may have been raised to hate, fear, and suspect the other, has Columbia done enough to establish conditions for respectful tolerance and dialogue on campus? Specialists with training in communications or linguistics might emphasize meaning-construction around the events, suggesting that we pay special attention to the stories being told about MEALAC in newspapers, official documents, and coffee houses on campus. Those trained in epidemiology might focus on the often overlooked roles that the individual and collective trauma of Israeli and Palestinian faculty and students, exacerbated by current threats of violence, play in the unfolding patterns at Columbia. How does past exposure to atrocities and human suffering affect their current responses to the situation at Columbia?

Of course, any of these perspectives on the problems at Columbia may be accurate and useful. That’s not the point. The issue is that they are all aspectual; they focus attention on some aspects of the problem and away from others. So whatever their training, it is often helpful for specialists to actively seek out varied and contradictory sources of information, to aim for increased accuracy in their understanding, and to try hold the temptation for premature simplification at bay.

In summary, complexity matters. And learning to effectively map 5 percent conflicts is one approach to capturing their complexity. It requires us to both see the problems in new ways and to attend to aspects of the problems we are not used to seeing. Of course, the degree of complexity of 5 percent conflicts defies comprehensive analysis. But that is not the objective of practice 1. Feedback loop–mapping can allow contextualization, discovery, and insight to emerge; our sense of the issues and events in a conflict can take on new meaning when seen from such a “field” or relational perspective. These exercises also highlight the value of cross-disciplinary collaboration; we need distinctly trained individuals working together with stakeholders in these settings in order to better comprehend the problem sets, both specifically and systemically.

CONFLICT-MAPPING 2: SIMPLIFY THINGS

Help!!!

In early 2010, NBC reporter Richard Engel uncovered a wildly complicated PowerPoint map depicting U.S. strategy to increase popular support for the Afghan government. It involved over 100 elements, each with multiple links or loops to other nodes. It was characteristic of the U.S. military’s current approach to counterinsurgency and what some officers refer to as a “fur ball.” Upon first seeing the map, General Stanley A. McChrystal, leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan at the time, remarked, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”¹⁵

At the heart of much of what we’ve discussed so far is the double-edged sword of complexity. If the story of a conflict has lost complexity and become overly simplistic and polarized, we must reintroduce nuance into our understanding of the situation. But adding too much complexity can easily make an already complicated situation overwhelming, even immobilizing. Or it can lead to increased resistance and an even stronger push to oversimplify and choose sides.

It’s vital to employ a few general tactics for managing complexity. This will permit us to see both the forest and the (more important) trees in the 5 percent. Each tactic is informed by our model and in particular by the approach of dynamical minimalism, whose goal is to make use of the complexity of a problem in order to find the minimal set of mechanisms that can account for its evolving pattern, its character. Once again, the goal of dynamical minimalism is simplicity informed by complexity.¹⁶

In this section we outline five actions for harnessing the complexity generated in phase 1 of conflict-mapping; they will help us to develop more focused strategies and insights for understanding and leveraging change in 5 percent conflicts. They are (1) identify hubs, loops, and energy in the system, (2) identify local actionables, (3) locate what is already working, (4) identify integrative agents, and (5) visualize the attractor landscape.

1. Identify hubs, loops, and energy in the system. Once you sufficiently map a conflict system, you can begin to employ basic ideas and tools of network analysis to further explore the dynamics. Network analysis comes from work on network theory and has applications in areas of study including particle physics, computer science, biology, economics, operations research, and sociology.

Formal network analysis tools are most appropriate for conflict maps of a more objective nature: mapping communications networks, social networks, formal authority structures, and so on. However, the feedbackloop structure of subjective concept maps can also benefit from the application of network analysis tools. This is especially true when the maps have been generated and therefore validated by different stakeholder groups representing diverse points of view on the conflict.

There is value in focusing in on a variety of different aspects of conflict maps. For example: identifying central hubs of activity, elements that link with many other elements; key reinforcing loops, elements that stimulate themselves through links with other elements in an ongoing fashion; and the ratio, or balance, between conflict-reinforcing and -inhibiting feedback, which can determine whether a conflict is escalating, deescalating, or stuck in a stalemate.

Or you can look to see differences in levels of in-degree of different conflict elements, as in how many links feed into each element; outdegree, which elements serve as key sources of stimulation or inhibition in the conflict for other elements; and betweenness, which describes the degree to which elements are located between and therefore link other elements. These are all useful lenses that can focus our attention and clarify our understanding of complex maps.¹⁷

Identifying central hubs and strong feedback loops in the system is particularly important for locating centers of energy in the system, gateways for high-impact intervention, strategic targets for introducing conflict-inhibiting feedback (such as early-warning systems that deter escalation), and peace-reinforcing feedback (like high-stakes common interests that motivate reconciliation). They also help to focus the analysis of conflict-mapping and to manage the anxiety associated with the overwhelming sense of complexity of the system. However, they do so in a manner informed by its complexity.

In mapping our analysis of the Columbia conflict, I highlight the reinforcing feedback loops that operate to intensify the conflict in an ongoing fashion (with solid lines) to illustrate two reinforcing loops: one between the reporting of acts of bias and the ineffective grievance procedures, and the other between the reporting of bias and the high level of turnover and dysfunctional work climate in the department at the time of the analysis.

When students’ complaints about bias at MEALAC were left unaddressed by officials at Columbia, it fostered student resentment and hypersensitivity to future abuses at MEALAC, leading to more complaints to the university, which when neglected increased resentment and so on. This is a conflict-reinforcing loop.

Similarly, word of the complaints of bias at MEALAC negatively affected the morale and work climate in the department, which led to higher turnover of experienced faculty and staff, resulting in fewer well-trained personnel and therefore a higher potential for student dissatisfaction, leading to more complaints against MEALAC and so on. Another loop.

Alternatively, I use dashed lines to highlight the various sources of inhibiting feedback operating to lessen the intensity of the conflict in the system. This map would be of particular interest to those invested in deescalating tensions and maintaining relative calm on campus. (Of course, it might be equally interesting to activists, anarchists, and other agitators interested in fanning the fires at Columbia as well.) This focus can help identify the current sources of conflict-inhibiting feedback as well as possible targets for introducing new sources.

For instance, strongly worded statements issued by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education challenging the accuracy of the accusations made in Columbia Unbecoming and in the New York Daily News reporting, contributed to an easing of the initial hysteria triggered by the film. The press conference held by the Ad Hoc Academic Freedom Group had a similar impact. Of course, the investigatory panel’s report helped mitigate tensions over the ineffectiveness of grievance procedures at Columbia, but it triggered other concerns due to the narrow nature of its mandate and findings. Most important, ongoing initiatives like the Joint Project on Tolerance and the campus dialogue project likely provided the strongest inhibitory feedback loops for decreasing the intensity and negativity trends of the conflict.

Another alternative is to highlight the many in-degree links that feed conflict intensity with dotted lines to support the sense that there is considerable energy and tension associated with the reporting of bias, and also to help provide a more detailed understanding of the myriad sources of this energy, in addition to the acts themselves, feeding these tensions.

Various factors worked in concert with local concerns of inadequate grievance procedures and biased investigatory panels to intensify not only the significance but also the likelihood of perceptions of bias at MEALAC. It was a multiply determined phenomena that culminated in high levels of tension at MEALAC. This is not to suggest that acts of bias did not occur at MEALAC. It merely accounts for the level of sustained tension surrounding the events.

This analysis simply provides more options. It suggests that it may be more than ineffective grievance procedures driving the conflict, and that much more could be done to address these tensions—for instance, by addressing the climate at MEALAC, working across universities to stem acts of bias, and broadening the mandate of the investigatory panel beyond the grievance system.

The point to stress here is that the burgeoning area of network studies has begun to provide us with a new grammar for characterizing, exploring, analyzing, and ultimately learning from the science and art of conflict feedback loop–mapping. These maps and analyses can help us to become more aware of the context of problems—and to work within their complexity to identify key levers for change. Such an approach can help stakeholders regain a sense of efficacy in situations that tend to elicit hopelessness.

Once dynamics are identified, it becomes possible to home in on what’s most important: increasing probabilities for resolving the conflict.

2. Identify local actionables. Once you have mapped and explored the broader view of the feedback structure of the conflict, it can be immensely helpful to focus in on more local elements and links that are actionable. ¹⁸ This means those things that can feasibly be addressed. If you are the president of Columbia University, there isn’t much you are going to be able to do about the intifada, the Israeli pullout from Gaza, or the actions of the Israeli ambassador. So it simplifies your task if you eventually drop the nonactionable elements (dashed-line ovals) and focus in on those you might be able to do something about, such as directly refuting untruths and inflammatory claims in editorials, blogs, and the documentary; enhancing tolerance through support of new and ongoing campus projects; joining with other university presidents to address these issues nationally; and cracking down on class hecklers and issuers of death threats. These are all feasible actions, informed by the complexity of events, that can affect the probabilities of constructive change on campus. But they should only be targeted after a fuller mapping of the system has provided a sense of the context in which these elements are operating.

3. Locate (carefully) what is already working in the system. Laura Chasin is former director of the Public Conversations Project and facilitator of the Boston dialogue over abortion. When she enters a new community she is working with, which is deeply divided over a difficult conflict, she first tries to identify the existing “networks of effective action.” These are the individuals and groups that somehow manage to stay connected to parties on the other side of the conflict; they work effectively and constructively to keep relationships and dialogue going, even under stressful and dangerous circumstances. These social networks can often be found in conflicts within families, communities, and between nations. In more threatening environments, they may be forced to go underground. But typically they are there, despite the danger, working carefully to keep communications open.

From the perspective of complexity science, these individuals and their networks are evidence of latent attractors for constructive relations operating within these families and communities. Given that they are usually locally motivated, well networked, and typically well informed, they often present a vital resource for bolstering alternative approaches to destructive conflict in the system; they provide hope and possibilities in an otherwise impossible situation. However, they must always be identified, approached, and supported carefully, as their covert status is often a necessary defense against alienation or direct attack, typically from members within their own groups or communities.

But these constructive networks are merely an illustration of a larger point—that there are usually processes and mechanisms already operating in every conflict system, no matter how entrenched, that are functional and constructive. Think of them as antibodies in the body of the conflict, quietly fighting against the spread of the 5 percent infection. These constructive forces can often be overlooked in conflict analyses, as the suffering and crises associated with the 5 percent grab our attention and make the problems salient, usually at the expense of existing buffers or remedies. But a thorough scan of the system can help to locate its more functional components; these include local norms and practices that prohibit aggression and violence beyond certain levels, indigenous grievance systems or other regulatory mechanisms considered impartial and fair, or widely respected members of families or communities that might be able to play a more actively constructive role in addressing disputes.

Returning to the MEALAC case, we can now see that the Columbia community had many constructive resources already operating around the time of the initial intensification of the conflict. The Office of the Ombuds, the Office of Student Affairs, two well-known conflict resolution centers on campus,¹⁹ student-based conflict resolution groups, interfaith religious figures and organizations, and interethnic tolerance-focused student organizations are just some of the well-known entities functioning at Columbia during this time. And it is likely that a more thorough scan of the social-political networks in the community would identify many other less obvious resources. Identifying, engaging, and supporting such groups and resources, even in a low-key manner, takes advantage of the existing infrastructure for enhancing constructive dynamics and respects the local knowledge and expertise of these actors.

4. Identify integrative catalysts. Another tactic for managing the overwhelming nature of complicated, evolving conflict systems is to attempt to identify integrative catalysts. Typically these are individuals who, for reasons of their own personal or professional development, somehow embody the different conflicting identities and tensions inherent to the conflict. They may simply be trusted friends or family members, or have multicultural or multiethnic identities, but typically they hold a special status that allows them to stay above the fray and not get forced onto one side or the other. Here is a quote from one such individual:

I decided to go to the march to protest the complicity of the Israeli government in that massacre and the complicity of the Israeli army and calling for a commission of inquiry . . . As I got down to the march . . . there were a lot of Arabs that were marching with signs that said “Jewish star = swastika” and had pictures of the massacred babies that said “Israel has blood on its hands.” Now I felt all of the sudden, “whoa—I cannot join that march.” I really feel something wrong has happened here, that it should be investigated, I feel that students have a right to speak out, but that message didn’t resonate with me. It went right to the place of blame without even looking for facts or collecting information. I can’t go there. On the other side of the street were all the Jewish student groups protesting the Arab student groups and responding to their messages saying “Israel right or wrong” and “Israel shouldn’t come under anyone’s scrutiny” and “Israel is above the law” and I thought “crap, I can’t go over there either. I have nowhere to walk.” And so at that moment some friends and I formed a third group.

—a Jewish Israeli, 2002

These integrative agents can present important opportunities for boundary spanning and peacemaking. They personify an integrative solution. In the history of the Middle East peace process, individuals like Yitzhak Rabin (a military hero and general in the Israeli army who turned peacemaker as prime minister), Anwar el Sadat (Egyptian president, Arab, former revolutionary, and peacemaker with Israel), and Amos Oz (Jewish Israeli writer and journalist, founder of the “land for peace” NGO Peace Now) have played such integrative, boundary-crossing roles. In intractable identity-based conflicts these roles are vital. They are at times fraught with danger—Rabin and Sadat were both assassinated by members of their own groups—and so need to be engaged and supported with proper caution and care.

5. Take time seriously: visualize the attractor landscape of the conflict. The many different conflict elements and networks of reinforcing and inhibiting feedback loops that make up the 5 percent ultimately work together to constitute the conflict’s attractor landscape. In other words, the conflict maps provide a sketch of the process architecture of the conflict: how the skeleton, tissue, circulatory, and nervous systems of the living, evolving body of the conflict operate together. Conflict-mapping is like taking an X-ray of the internal workings of the body, an excellent tool for diagnosis and treatment planning.

Ultimately, however, we have found it useful to move from mapping to working with a simple visualization software program to begin to see how the different elements of a conflict interact together over time. This is critical for focusing our understanding on how the conflict system evolves and establishes temporal patterns or attractors across time.

THE ATTRACTOR SIMULATION: OVERVIEW

As described, a conflict system can be characterized on three dimensions: its current state, its potential for positive interactions, and its potential for negative interactions. But characterizing conflict on these three dimensions is not straightforward for most people. Moreover, any factor influencing a conflict system may affect each of the three aspects in different ways. For example, an increased police presence during a student protest at Columbia may decrease the momentary state of violence on campus. But it may also decrease the strength of the attractor for future positive interactions between the administration and the community, and at the same time increase the strength of the attractor for future negative interactions. Therefore, understanding the multiple consequences of an action can be a daunting task for anyone involved in a dynamic conflict.

The Attractor Software platform has been developed to assist disputants, conflict practitioners, policy makers, and other stakeholders in addressing conflicts without neglecting the dynamic properties and complexity of the systems in which they work. It allows them to see how all the pieces of their 5 percent puzzles fit together and evolve, and ideally how they can be changed.

The Attractor Software is a visualization tool designed to help users see the three dimensions of systems described above. It prompts the user to specify the key factors influencing the conflict (ideally generated from their mapping exercises), the actions that can be undertaken, and to estimate the consequences of these actions with respect to three types of outcomes (current state, potential positive, potential negative). By evaluating each factor, the user estimates the strength and the direction of the influence of each factor on the whole conflict system. The software merely visualizes the understanding of the user; it is a tool for describing what parties and interveners have identified, based on their own expertise, experience, and mapping of a case.

Research on the use of Attractor Software in conflict resolution trainings has shown promising effects.²⁰ Two studies conducted at the University of Warsaw in Poland compared the effects of training in Attractor Software to standard integrative negotiation training. All participants were trained in integrative negotiation; however, only one group learned to negotiate with the help of Attractor Software and the integrative negotiation model. Participants who worked with Attractor Software found it much easier to communicate with their negotiation partners and reported a better understanding of the negotiation process. But the most interesting finding was that although the groups did not differ in terms of their sense of satisfaction with the resolution of the conflict, there were significant differences in the long-term stability of the agreements the groups generated. In fact, each pair that negotiated with the help of Attractor Software achieved durable long-term solutions, whereas the majority of the other pairs failed to achieve such results. These findings speak to the fact that even a highly satisfying outcome may be not be durable; this fact may go unnoticed by the parties until the consequences of their actions come back to haunt them. Attractor Software can serve as a nontrivial yet simple tool that potentially increases the durability of agreements.

To date, the Attractor Software has been used in a variety of settings, including in New York City public schools, at the West Point military academy, at a state-level genocide prevention institute at Columbia University (Engaging Governments in Genocide Prevention), and in negotiation and mediation trainings in communities and at universities and conferences around the world. It is also being used by Dutch UN peacekeepers and FARC leaders in the Colombia conflict.

But don’t let that intimidate you! The software was developed to be easy to use. Thousands of individual users have logged on to our website (http://www.iccc.edu.pl/as/introduction.html) to access and work with the program. I invite the reader to go to the appendix to read more about working with the Attractor Software.

In the next two sections we discuss the actions available for shaping the long-term potential patterns in conflicts. We move from the discussion of understanding the past and the present in a conflict to acting on the future. We do so by describing the practices and actions involved in working incrementally to transform the attractors themselves.

PRACTICE II: BUILD UP AND TEAR DOWN

Finding and implementing sustainable solutions to intractable conflicts essentially comes down to altering the system’s attractor landscape. This may sound abstract, but it simply means thinking and working long term.

The film American History X provides an excellent illustration of some of the key principles of the Attractor Landscape Model, and in particular the role the future plays in changing intractable mindsets. It presents a disturbing yet compelling portrayal of a young man, Derek Vinyard, a brutal and charismatic neo-Nazi skinhead. Derek is a rising leader in the skinhead movement in the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles.

The film shows us how a constellation of factors—trauma from the early loss of his father, adolescent angst, inadequate parenting, racism, hard economic times, unemployment, peer modeling, idle time, manipulative adults, and a strong neo-Nazi ideology and propagandistic rhetoric—can combine to send a youth down the path of extreme hate and violence.

It also effectively portrays how the youth’s attitudes, in-group and out-group perceptions, identities, politics, and behaviors collapse together; they form into simple, all-encompassing “us versus them” world-views that focus on the annihilation of out-groups (minorities, gays, and immigrants are seen as insects that deserve to be exterminated). Most important, it artfully captures Derek’s transformation. He suffers severe ruptures in his ultracoherent worldview; in prison, Derek is attacked by a group of skinheads, and later he is rescued from another gang by a young black man. Coupled with a latent alternative identity and a raison d’être—his deep love for his younger siblings and mother, who need his protection and leadership—these experiences lay the groundwork for his transition from a violent attractor to a man leading a dramatically more constructive life.

This laying of groundwork for constructive relations and peace is the primary aim of practice II. The main objectives here are to support and enhance latent positive attractors and make them more attractive, and to inhibit and deconstruct negative attractors to make them less attractive. To build up and tear down.

BUILD UP: GROWING HIDDEN POSSIBILITIES

Here the idea of latent attractors discussed earlier comes into play. We have found that the malignant thoughts, feelings, and actions that characterize a person’s or group’s dynamics in a 5 percent conflict represent only the most obvious attractor for the conflict. In particular, where there is a long history of interaction between people or groups, likely other potential patterns of mental, emotional, and behavioral engagement exist, including those promoting positive relations.

Take Ukraine and Poland. Relations between these countries had been hostile and tense for decades, going back to atrocities committed by both sides during World War II. However, their dealings go back many decades before the war, during which time they shared mutually beneficial trade and cultural relations. In fact, the strained relations that developed during and after World War II can be considered the exception rather than rule. Presumably, then, there existed an attractor for positive relations between Ukraine and Poland that was supplanted by a negative attractor during the war. It is therefore not completely surprising that the mutual antagonism, which had lasted for decades, gave way in a dramatic fashion to mutual solidarity during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004–2005. In social relations, these types of “flips” from one attractor to another are more common than one might think. But they require the presence of a sufficiently robust latent alternative for the relational dynamics.

But latent dynamics are hard to see. Some changes in a system can be easily observed because they affect the current (overt) state of the system. Other changes, however, may only affect the possible states of the system and thus not be immediately apparent. Such changes may remain latent for extended periods of time, yet manifest rapidly in response to external influences and events that seem relatively minor. Although movement between attractors may be rapid and abrupt (back and forth between constructive and destructive patterns), the change of attractors themselves is likely to be far slower and more gradual. Thus, when a specific policy or intervention does not produce a visible effect, this does not mean that it is futile. Rather, such activities may be creating, deepening, or destroying latent attractors in a system. In other words, they may affect the range of possible states rather than the current state.

With this in mind, identifying and reinforcing latent positive attractors—“traps” for peaceful or constructive relations—should be among the principle aims of both conflict prevention and intervention. With the 5 percent, the identification, support, and initiation of constructive forces within the system (common projects, citizen exchanges, dialogues, etc.) are critical for increasing the long-term chances that peaceful relations will resurface—whether they show short-term results or not.

Below we outline a few of the many actions available for creating and bolstering positive latent attractors. They include (1) stop making sense, (2) alleviate constraints on constructive networks, (3) circumvent the conflict, (4) employ weak power, (5) construct chains, (6) build on serendipity, (7) identify superordinate goals and identities, (8) rebuild social capital, (9) protect experiments and prototypes, (10) leverage the irony in impossible conflicts.

1. Stop making sense. As discussed earlier, rational decision making and game theoretical strategies for maximizing outcomes typically have little to do with the long-term tendencies of enduring conflicts. Certainly, vested interests and calculated decisions play a role, but it’s nothing like the bedrock role that affect (feelings of fear and hate, of loyalty and loss) plays in establishing the context for conflict dynamics. Emotions are the glue: the cement that holds attractors together. Some emotions also constitute a primary source of reinforcing feedback for the 5 percent. Feelings of anger and disgust, for instance, have been found to enhance a sense of certainty (coherence) in situations, thus bolstering attractors and future feelings of enmity.²¹ Therefore, rational appeals for peace and tolerance will often fall well short of their objectives with the 5 percent.

With this in mind, we suggest that the main task involved in creating or enhancing latent positive attractors in the 5 percent is to help develop, foster, and trigger positive feelings between the parties. This may seem simplistic, but it’s everything. In fact, the more distant these attempts are from rational persuasion, from obvious attempts at swaying emotions, the better.^g

The good news is that if the parties had any type of constructive relationship prior to the conflict, or if they have had opportunities to experience each other’s’ humanity under better circumstances, likely there is some reservoir of positivity for their relationship, albeit latent. The bad news is the negativity effect: the finding that negative emotions have something like a five-to-one stronger impact than positive emotions on relationships.²² This usually makes it much, much harder to foster positivity in a 5 percent relationship.

In his Love Lab, one of the methods psychologist John Gottman employs with couples in conflict is to assign positivity exercises.²³ He will give one partner in an estranged couple the task of noticing ten positive things the other partner does during a week. This tends to elicit positive behaviors from one partner, and make them salient and noticeable to the other. By reminding both partners of this potential in their relationship, this activity triggers and reinforces the positive attractor latent in their dynamic. Of course, this method assumes that parties are willing and able to engage in the task, which is often not the case in the 5 percent. Nevertheless, simple initiatives like cultural and citizen exchanges, sharing of medical technologies, and disaster relief programs can go a long way in increasing positivity in an otherwise hostile relationship.

2. Alleviate constraints on constructive networks. As mentioned, virtually every conflict system, even the most dire, will contain people and groups who, despite the dangers, are willing to reach out across the divide and work to foster dialogue and peace. There are countless examples of this in the international arena: among Germans and Jews during the Nazi campaign in Europe during WWII; blacks and whites in South Africa in the 1980s; and today in places like Darfur, Somalia, Iran, and North Korea. These networks are often the centerpiece of latent constructive attractors for people and groups. However, the actions of these constructive agents are usually tightly constrained by the dynamics of the conflict. During times of intense escalation, these people and groups may become temporarily inactive; they may even go underground. But they are often willing to reemerge when conditions allow, becoming fundamental players in the transformation of the system. Thus, early interventions should engage with these individuals and networks, carefully, and work with them to help alleviate the constraints on their activities in a safe and feasible manner.

3. Circumvent the conflict. Recognizing that players in a conflict who have strong, negative 5 percent attractors often view peacemakers themselves as also being players in the theater of conflict, some interveners attempt to work constructively in these settings by circumventing the conflict.

The idea here is that a main reinforcing feedback loop of 5 percent conflicts is the conflict trap. This is a situation where the destructiveness of the conflict exacerbates the very negativity and strife that created the conflict conditions in the first place, and thereby perpetuates it. However, attempts to address these circumstances directly, in the context of a peace process, typically elicit resistance; they are seen as affecting the balance of power in the conflict (usually by supporting lower-power groups most affected by the conditions). Interveners recognizing this will work to address these conditions of hardship, without making any connection whatsoever to the conflict or peace processes. To some degree, this is what many community and international development projects try to achieve. The difference is that this tactic targets the conditions seen as most directly feeding the conflict, and requires that every attempt be made to divorce these initiatives from being associated with the peace process.

This approach is employed in some of the work of the Ashoka Fellows, social entrepreneurs working in zones of armed conflict. Typically, they are local people working in innovative ways to help rebuild social capital and provide a sense of efficacy in struggling communities. They address basic needs destroyed or neglected during a conflict, such as building community latrines in slums, organizing dances for idle youth, providing local phone networks to allow isolated people to better communicate with neighbors, etc.²⁴ This unconflict resolution strategy can help address some of the negativity and misery associated with conflicts, without becoming incorporated (attracted) into the polarized “good versus evil” narrative of the conflict. This is an important idea that has widespread implications for our understanding of peacemaking in settings with ultracoherent destructive attractors.

4. Employ weak power. Sometimes more direct intervention into a conflict is necessary. Employing weak power has proven effective at fostering positivity and eliciting less resistance.²⁵ Strong conflict systems, with wide and deep attractors for destructiveness and narrow and shallow attractors for peace, will often reject out of hand most strong-arm attempts to force peaceful relations. History provides countless examples of strong outside parties’ failure to forge peace in such systems. Consider the relatively ineffectual role of the United States in brokering Middle East peace.

Nevertheless, sometimes peace does emerge out of long-term conflicts, and we suggest that one reason may be the power of powerlessness; that is, the unique influence people and groups with little formal or “hard” power (physical strength, military might, wealth) but effective “soft” power (trustworthiness, moral authority, wisdom, kindness) can have in these settings.²⁶ Weak-power third parties are at times able to carefully introduce a sense of hope for change in the status quo; a sense of doubt or dissonance in an ultracoherent “us versus them” meaning system. And they can also begin to model and encourage other more constructive means of conflict engagement (shuttle diplomacy, mediation, negotiations).

This is the extraordinary role that Leymah Gbowee and the Women’s International Peace Network (WIPN) played in the early 2000s, when they helped end Liberia’s decades-long civil wars.²⁷ This ordinary group of women—mothers, aunts, and grandmothers—organized amid the grueling armed conflict in Liberia, with no formal authority and few “hard” resources, and helped mobilize and shepherd the peace process between the government of strongman Charles Taylor and the rebels. For example, at one point in the war, UN peacekeepers were stuck in a protracted gun battle with rebel forces in the jungle and could see no way out. They contacted the WIPN, who arrived at the scene in their white T-shirts and headdresses. The women then entered the jungle with hands raised, dancing and singing. After spending two days there, feeding and speaking with the rebels, the women brought the rebels out of the jungle, ending the stalemate. Weak power can be powerful.

5. Construct chains. An increasingly popular tactic, designed to break through deadlocks and initiate peace talks in protracted conflicts, is the use of negotiation chains. This practice involves a sequence of actors in the exploration of more formal talks. Actor A speaks directly to actor B; A is not politically constrained against speaking to B, but B has contacts further down the chain with the other side. Talks transpire through a series of encounters that allow for communication between parties who (1) need to be able to maintain deniability in the talks, and (2) would otherwise not be able to communicate.

Such chains have been employed in a variety of 5 percent conflicts, including with Nelson Mandela in South Africa during apartheid and between leaders of Sinn Fein and the Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. ²⁸ They are clearly one way of fostering or bolstering latent, positive potential under threatening conditions.

6. Build on serendipity. Sometimes good luck helps. Despite the effectiveness of some planned interventions, sometimes unexpected encounters can be much more effective. This is what we found in our research on attitudes of Palestinians and Israelis regarding the Middle East conflict: the lasting impact of early, serendipitous positive encounters with members of out-groups. It seems that the unexpected nature of these encounters made them distinct from planned encounters. For example:

. . . but what happened when I went to Natanya I saw a different face of the Israelis than I saw from the ones at the bridge . . . I mean on the bridge all I saw was soldiers who searched me and humiliated me and made me wait and then like, you know, you have female soldiers who strip searched me and made me totally naked and leave the cubicle where I am . . . she wouldn’t close the curtain . . . like I’m not even a human being . . . you now humble enough to be seen by everyone . . . so for me that is the only image I know. But when I went there it was a normal life people were sitting at the beach, you know, teenagers kissing and mothers babysitting and scholars sitting by the café so I’ve seen a different face and so I said no matter how I feel and no matter what it means to me I’m not going to but I’m not going to hate something that was done to us. I don’t think I want to resolve a problem by creating another. There are some people here who are already established and I don’t see them leaving . . . but now am looking for a solution that gives people the right to exist side by side. That’s my first time to think about a two-state solution, before that time I always thought Palestine, the whole country is for Palestinians and nobody else but . . . so this was a transformation for me in 1972, and since then I have been working towards a peaceful solution that gives the rights of both people to live in their own separate states . . .

These surprising incidents were described as providing constructive motivation over long periods of time. Such experiences provided a buffering effect over the long term because they resided in the emotional memories of our participants and were a lasting reminder of the diversity and humanity of the enemy.

7. Identify superordinate goals and identities. This is a classic approach to addressing intergroup conflict. It involves the identification or introduction of joint goals or superordinate identities between parties in conflict, in an attempt to establish a foundation of cooperation and eventual trust between them. In fact, this strategy was the centerpiece of UNESCO’s Culture of Peace Project, a notable initiative aimed at establishing peaceful relations in pre- and post-conflict settings like El Salvador, Mozambique, Burundi, Congo, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

Seen from the perspective of attractor landscapes, finding common ground between parties, emphasizing shared goals and concerns, facilitating trust-building activities, and incentivizing cooperative conflict resolution initiatives—although they may appear to be largely ineffective in situations locked in an ongoing protracted struggle—may in fact be acting slowly and indirectly to establish a sufficiently wide and deep attractor basin for moral, humane forms of intergroup relations. One day, these initiatives may provide the foundation for a stable, peaceful future.

8. Rebuild social capital. Five percent conflicts affect a broad swath of families and communities, often pervading even mundane aspects of their lives. This can include affecting decisions about where to shop and eat, who to play and visit with, and when it’s safe to travel or even go outside. This degree of impact impairs the basic conditions for trust, cohesion, support, and functioning in family and community life.

Thus, in contrast to the formal peace-building strategies of track-one diplomacy (official negotiations), or even the less formal track-two initiatives (semiofficial activities), track-three activities have been developed to work from the bottom up in conflict zones. They involve working with the most directly affected members of groups and communities to address the day-to-day consequences of the ongoing conflict. As Louise Diamond, originator of the concept of multitrack diplomacy, has suggested, it is these types of local bottom-up initiatives that must occur if an infrastructure for peace is to be built and sustained.²⁹

9. Protect experiments and prototypes. One strategy for cultivating and sustaining positive systemic change is through the identification or establishment of strong but isolated prototypes of the desired change; prototypes that can survive long enough to test and then facilitate the transfer of changes throughout the broader system.³⁰ These experiments can be used as systemic probes to explore and learn about a system’s reactions to the proposed change.

For instance, it could serve Columbia University to identify and communicate its best examples of departments on campus, where interethnic relations are constructive and healthy, emphasizing the specific conditions and processes that maintain such relations. Alternatively, Columbia could provide support and political cover to groups of Palestinian and Israeli students and faculty able to design and implement innovative or exemplary approaches to coexistence. (Turath’s and LionsPAC’s joint Project Tolerance is a likely candidate.) These types of experiments, when successful, can help create a new sense of possibility.

This is essentially what Laura Chasin and her organization, PCP, were able to do with the pro-life and pro-choice dialogue group in Boston. The initiative was launched in secret, and PCP was able to protect the anonymity of the group for several years, until the members themselves felt confident enough about their process and outcomes to go public. What was critical here was the facilitator’s capacity to protect the boundaries of the experiment (and in this case the lives and livelihoods of the participants) as long as was necessary.

10. Leverage the irony in impossible conflicts. Finally, we suggest that the growth of latent positive attractors may in some cases be an inevitable consequence of developing a strong, negative 5 percent attractor. That’s right. In other words, the stronger the dynamics of self-organizing intractable conflict, the higher the likelihood that a latent potential for peace is growing. Why? Because in emphasizing the negative aspects of a relationship while ignoring or downplaying its more positive elements, people often have to suppress or discount particular thoughts and behaviors. These suppressed elements may themselves become self-organized to promote their own more positive attractor. Under certain conditions, the latent attractors formed in this way may suddenly become manifest.

Research on thought suppression supports this idea. It has found that many types of thought become hyperaccessible after attempts to suppress them.³¹ In one study, people were asked to write essays about a day in the life of a skinhead; some were to use stereotypes and others not. The participants instructed not to use stereotypes were found later to have these stereotypes more in the forefront of their minds.³² Scholars believe this occurs because of a mental monitoring process that scans our conscious thought for the presence of unwanted content: for instance, “That was a lovely gesture my enemy just made.” As this thought-suppression process occurs, it repeatedly activates this information in our memories, making it even more pronounced.

This scenario has some surprising consequences. Very strong attractors will often exclude a wide variety of information discrepant from our main point of view. An explicitly peaceful overture by an out-group, for example, is difficult to reconcile with the in-group’s negative attitude, and thus may be discounted as an anomaly. Should enough incidents like this occur, however, they may begin to coalesce into a new or latent attractor reflecting benign or positive attitudes toward the out-group. At this point, if an event or intervention temporarily defuses the conflict, the newly formed latent attractor could suddenly become manifest and redirect the in-group’s thoughts, feelings, and actions vis à vis the out-group. More research needs to be conducted to investigate this potential.

To summarize, if a 5 percent conflict represents a strong attractor for a system, then any deviation from this state of conflict will result in the system activating its mechanisms to return to the attractor. This is especially likely if the system lacks or has lost attractors for positive interaction. So while the severity of conflict may be related to the intensity or amount of violence between individuals or between groups, the intractability of conflict may be understood as the loss of alternative sustainable states of positive interaction. In complexity-science terms, an intractable conflict landscape lacks attractors for stable positive relations.

However, the gradual and long-term construction of positive attractors may be occurring imperceptibly, preparing the ground for a future stable positive state. Of course, short-term emergency programs often need to focus on eliminating the triggers that fuel catastrophic conflict or violence in the system. However, these types of initiatives will be insufficient and ultimately ineffective if they are not supported by long-term incremental work on growing latent positive attractors.

TEAR DOWN: DISMANTLING DESTRUCTIVE TRAPS

This is the mirror opposite of building up. It emphasizes the importance of working actively to break down destructive conflict attractors, which are usually still operating in a latent manner even after more constructive relations have re-emerged. The objective here is to make negative attractors less attractive.

Of course, the most obvious need in difficult conflicts is to quell the hostilities or violence and do what you can to contain destructive processes. This is often done by separating the disputants by introducing authority figures, third parties, or, in the case of large-scale community disputes, police or peacekeeping troops or other forms of regional or international military support.

However, even when conflict intensity diminishes and disputants appear to move into a state of relative calm, it is critical that we recognize that the lure of destructive interactions still exists. Attractors often remain as potent and alluring as ever when latent, even at times increasing in strength. It is critical, then, that we recognize when coming out of a conflict that the current state of peace is most likely temporary and therefore work actively to deconstruct and dismantle the infrastructure of negative attractors.

There are a variety of actions useful for dismantling negative attractors, including (1) work down below, (2) honor emotion, (3) decouple reinforcing feedback loops, (4) introduce inhibiting feedback loops, (5) awaken the third side, (6) institutionalize more nuanced conflict narratives, (7) limit the spread of negativity through movement, and (8) foster repellers for violence.

1. Work down below. Generally speaking, breaking down attractors most readily occurs from the bottom up. Social psychological research shows that global mental states such as strong identities or attitudes, or even fervent beliefs regarding “truths,” can be effectively disassembled into their lower-level elements; that is, into the different component parts that constitute the attitude or belief. Doing so can create the potential for a wholesale change in people’s understanding of their own and others’ actions.³³ For example, pointing out multiple exceptions to a negative out-group stereotype can degrade the influence of the stereotype on behavior. We call this reverse engineering.

With conflict, this means calling attention to specific actions, events, and pieces of information without making the connection to the global pattern in which they are embedded. When decoupled in this fashion, these lower-level elements can become reconfigured into an entirely different pattern (e.g., a more positive view of the out-group and benign interaction pattern). It is like making small adjustments in the mechanics of a tennis stroke or a golf swing that lead to radical changes in the player’s overall game.

Psychological research provides clues regarding this “disassembly process.” It suggests that disruptions to ongoing action tend to make people sensitive to the overlearned details of the action, as do instructions to focus on the details of a narrative rather than on the narrative’s larger meaning. For instance, the instruction “Drive the car” will elicit a more automatic, global response from experienced drivers. But when asked to “Grasp the steering wheel, turn the ignition key, place the car into drive, put slight pressure on the gas pedal with your right foot,” the driver will have a less familiar or coherent experience, and become more vulnerable to reconsidering how best to drive.

This occurred in the abortion case in Boston, when the shock of the violent shootings at family-planning clinics forced pro-life and pro-choice leaders to carefully reexamine their rhetoric and actions, and to forge new approaches to their activism. They moved from their global action of “fighting for a righteous cause” to a more careful consideration of the consequences of their specific actions. When habitual actions are made salient in this way, people become vulnerable to new interpretations that can lead to a different, coherent perspective. In effect, the tack is to recapture the complexity of a conflict attractor and reconfigure the elements to promote a more benign form of coherence.

For instance, assume that Columbia University’s administration had been prepared early on to publicly refute, with data, each new “anti-Israel bias” accusation, showing each to be false. This type of specific information, unlike general claims of innocence, might have inhibited the links political agitators were attempting to forge in people’s minds: links between individual actions (a classroom altercation) and a broader political agenda (a concerted anti-Israel campaign at Columbia). But as the details of each incident were left unaddressed, it became easier for them to add up in people’s minds and link to broader conspiracy theories.

In a similar vein, the deconstruction of what had become a onedimensional conflict at Columbia (pro-Palestinian versus pro-Israeli) into a multitude of smaller issue-specific conflicts (regarding professional respect, freedom of speech, grievance processes, and so forth) would be another approach to breaking down the attractor by increasing complexity from the bottom-up. For instance, round-table negotiations could be implemented that center on a large set of independently defined issues, with “subtables” for each of the many issues in dispute. This growth of complexity, brought about by decoupling important issues, may not only provide solutions for the specific issues at stake, but also start a self-organizing process that lowers the intensity of the conflict and paves the way for the development of a more constructive attractor for the parties.

The important point is that attacking a destructive (global) pattern in the 5 percent directly is likely to intensify rather than weaken the pattern, because of the tendency for attractors to resist change. Therefore, one should focus instead on isolating and addressing lower-level elements, thereby weakening or eliminating the reinforcing feedback loops between them and matters of general principle.

2. Honor emotions. Establishing conditions that enable people to accept and navigate intensely negative emotions is pivotal to deconstructing destructive attractors. Being able to move on with one’s life after experiencing traumatic losses due to conflict is a daunting task. The inability to forgive oneself and others, as well as becoming psychologically paralyzed by feelings associated with conflict are common. However, research has identified a few adaptive strategies for managing such emotions in the context of ongoing conflict, including compartmentalization and channeling.³⁴

Compartmentalization entails psychologically separating one’s potentially disabling emotions from one’s current actions and reactions. For example, one Palestinian-Israeli remarked:

I mean, it is really unreal what is happening . . . I don’t know how people under curfew, no food for children, people can’t go to work, people even who have money can’t go to buy . . . can’t go to buy food . . . Well, regardless of how I feel about this . . . I’m really being just open and frank and giving my . . . this is a study and I don’t want to just gloss it over . . . so this is how I feel, these are my feelings . . . but at the same time I’m working to establish an equal solution and that is where I am at . . . Like I say, sometimes I give a metaphor . . . it’s like if I have in my house a piece of furniture that are my family heirlooms but they don’t fit anymore in my living room, I may put them in the attic but it doesn’t mean I’m going to throw them away . . . I could go up there and visit them and remember them, but you know I settled to the fact that they are not in my living room and that it is how it is . . .

Alternatively, channeling involves tapping strong emotions as a source of motivation for constructive change. For example:

Mostly because I don’t do well with hopelessness. It doesn’t sit well with me. It’s a theme in my life. I definitely go there sometimes, but I don’t want to live there. I think my antidote to hopelessness is to figure out ways to take action . . .

Okay, so you get angry . . . what you do with it, that is the question I always ask myself . . . lately I have been trying to gather this energy of being angry and channel it into productive steps and measures, and that is very difficult to do . . . you know we are all human beings . . . I’m no Dalai Lama here . . . okay, I’m not the Dalai Lama . . . there is a lot of compassion but I’m not somebody who reached a point that when every time he is angry can do something positive about it. It’s a tough process . . .

Respecting the emotional terrain of 5 percent conflicts must be the centerpiece of change initiatives. These strategies are not without their own long-term consequences, but they are often necessary conditions for destabilizing destructive traps.

3. Decouple reinforcing feedback loops that feed destructive conflicts. Conflict attractors develop as separate issues, events, people, and other aspects of conflict become linked by reinforcing feedback to promote a global perspective and action orientation. In the Columbia case, the global message was that “all Columbia faculty are anti-Israeli and must be exposed and thwarted.” Reverse engineering entails decoupling some of the feedback loops, thereby lowering the level of coherence in the system.

There are a variety of strategies for delinking reinforcing feedback loops that contribute to complexity collapse and escalation. These are best determined through the initial mapping of the escalatory system. After identifying the relevant elements and the nature of their linkage, one is in a position to disrupt the most important linkages and thereby decouple the elements and issues. To some degree, this is what occurs in the context of many mediations and problem-solving workshops; although typically with a more narrow focus on the issues, not on how the issues and other elements in the conflict feed or inhibit one another. By itself, decoupling does not guarantee the solution to the conflict, but it does pave the way for disassembling the conflict structure so the issues can be addressed separately.

Depending on the nature of the conflict, disassembling its feedback structure may take different forms. Recall that the collapse of complexity associated with the 5 percent happens along many dimensions, and thus opportunities for decoupling are many.

• From “this is all very simple” to “it is in fact a very complicated situation.” The National Issues Forum, a not-for-profit organization that works to ebb the tide of polarization over hot topics in communities, takes this approach.³⁵ It provides community groups with a variety of different perspectives on current hot-button social issues, and then facilitates small-group learning dialogues aimed at reintroducing nuance into overly simplistic discourse on the issue. Conflict mapping, counseling sessions, interethnic dialogue groups, and other methods of exposure to less simplified, polarized narratives and media reporting can also help here.

• From a focus on matters of general principle to concrete details in the conflict. The approach taken to the seeming intractable conflict between the Soviet-backed communist government and the pro-democracy Solidarity opposition in Poland in 1989 illustrates this tactic. Verging on civil war, the deadlock between these factions was broken by the implementation of the Polish Round Table Talks, which involved a variety of “subtable” talks focusing on specific elements of the negotiated new system, such as education, unions, the media, political institutions, the economy, and health care. These negotiations initiated the first free elections in Poland since World War II, the implementation of a new democratic system, and the collapse of the communist regime. Such a peaceful revolution was made possible by the transformation of the previous dynamic, where intractability over political rule was at a stalemate, to a new lower-level dynamic where in-depth discussions over the multitude of issues concerning the nation could be addressed. Significantly, this change did much to eliminate the conflict that had defined the political situation in Poland for almost half a century.

• From concerns over defending one’s identity, ideology, and values to concerns over obtaining accurate information regarding substantive issues. Research shows that under certain conditions, important decisions will be made more systematically (thoughtfully) than heuristically (automatically), with a particular concern for obtaining as accurate information as possible.³⁶ These conditions include low physical threat, high psychological safety, low noise, few cognitive demands, comfortable temperatures, and little time pressure. These conditions are typically provided in ongoing citizen exchanges like the interactive problem-solving workshops developed by John Burton, Chris Mitchell, Herb Kelman, and others ³⁷ and the Dartmouth Conference, the longest sustained bilateral dialogue between American and Soviet citizens; the conference began in 1960 and contributed to a peaceful transition between their countries after the Cold War.³⁸

• From “they (out-group) are all alike (evil)” to “they are made up of many different types of individuals.” If the structure of conflict binds together perceptions of all the out-group members, then showing positive examples of specific out-group members (particularly more than one) can increase complexity, since a single judgment cannot accommodate all the out-group members. This is what occurred in the serendipitous encounter between a Palestinian boy and a kindly Jewish man described in chapter 4. Another tack is to identify a set of issues for which the structure of self-interest is shared by the in-group and out-group. Acceptance of a cooperative structure of interests is usually not consistent with the simplified assumption of overall out-group incompatibility.

• From “we (in-group) are all similar (saintly victims)” to “we are made up of many different types of individuals.” On the other hand, if the structure of conflict binds together perceptions of all the in-group members, referencing questionable or negative examples of specific in-group members can increase complexity, since a single judgment will no longer be able to accommodate all the in-group members. This is one of the main factors that led to the awakening and transformation of the skinhead leader depicted in American History X. Another tack is to work with high-status ingroup members who do not share the in-group’s view of the conflict. If these individuals are sufficiently central that they cannot be marginalized within the group, the homogeneity of the in-group will be destabilized.

• From “I am always consistent in this conflict” to “I hold many contradictions within myself in terms of what I value, think, and do in this conflict.” Under conditions of high psychological safety such as those facilitated by Laura Chasin and PCP during the Boston dialogues, people are much more able to reflect, explore, and identify their own internal contradictions (I am pro-choice and I respect a pro-life leader). Recognizing their own discrepancies fosters more tolerance for out-groups; this can open disputants up to taking more responsibility for their role in the conflict and its solution.³⁹

• From “I feel only an overwhelming sense of enmity and hate” to “I feel many different things about this conflict: good, bad, and ambivalent.” The research from our Intractable Conflict Labs shows that even relatively minor cognitive interventions that introduce more complexity into disputants’ intellectual understanding of difficult conflicts can create a dynamic where their emotional experiences open up; they experience more vacillation between positive and negative emotions, which is associated with more constructive encounters. This is one of the most surprising findings from this research: that minor changes in the complexity of information lead to substantial changes in the ratios of positive-to-negative emotional experiences in these moral discussions.

• From immediate short-term reactions and concerns to longer-term thinking and planning. There are several methods for reorienting disputants from immediate toward future concerns. One such practice, developed by Elise Boulding, is called focused social imaging.⁴⁰ It begins by identifying some of the social concerns shared by stakeholders regarding the conflict (such as reducing community violence or improving community health services). The participants are then asked to temporarily disregard the current realities of the situation and to step twenty to thirty years into the future, when their concerns have been effectively dealt with. As the participants begin to develop some sense of the social arrangements and institutions in this idealized future, discussion ensues. Together, they begin to create a vision for a community that has the institutions and relationships necessary to effectively address their shared concerns. Then the participants are asked to move slowly backward in time, and to begin identifying the steps that would precede the establishment of such institutions and relationships. This is both a creative and a critical process of examining the achievement of their ideal future in the context of the circumstances likely to exist between the present and such a future. Ultimately, this process results in both a vision and a plan for making the vision a reality. It can also serve to open up the participants’ awareness of options and approaches to the conflict that they previously found impossible to imagine.

• From employing very simple rules (if X, then Y, period) to using more nuanced, flexible rules of conflict engagement (if X, then Y, unless A, B, C, or maybe even D are true). In tightly coupled complex systems, rules rule. Very basic rules for behavior, if followed by most people, can have profound emergent effects on the system’s dynamics. Our lab research has found that more simple and inflexible rules for conflict engagement (if you cross me, I must harm you) lead to much more destructive dynamics than more nuanced rules (if you cross me, I must harm you, unless it was unintentional, or you were forced to do it, or you were simply messing around, or . . . ). Thus, identifying the underlying rules for conflict (such as honor codes, different rules for in-group versus out-group members, rules for responding to moral digressions) and working to introduce more nuance into them can have widespread long-term effects. Again, this is also what occurred in the Boston community between 1994 and 2000, as the leaders’ rules for engagement and public discourse with the other side relaxed considerably, resulting in the emergence of more civil community discussions regarding abortion.

• From only encountering members of the out-group in conflict or never encountering them directly to encountering them in many different settings (at work, at play, at worship). Research shows that enhancing and increasing the number of integrated or crosscutting social structures is one of the most effective ways of making intergroup conflict manageable, because it creates structural conditions that make it difficult to collapse into “us versus them.” These socials structures include ethnically integrated schools, playgrounds, houses of worship, business associations, trade unions, professional groups, political parties, and sports clubs. A comprehensive study of Hindu-Muslim violence in India found exactly this. Interethnic communities in India that had separate institutions for employment, shopping, education, etc., for Hindus and Muslims were significantly more likely to engage in violence against members of the other group, when conflicts arose, than were communities that had more integrated groups and institutions. ⁴¹

• From “these conflicts are all linked” to “this one stands alone.” Studies of long-term international conflicts have shown their tendency to become strongly interconnected with other enduring conflicts, which increase their potential for escalation and intractability. ⁴² The delinking of these different conflicts has also been found to be related to the termination phase of these enduring rivalries. For instance, the decline in intensity of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR happened around the same time that tensions between the United States and China declined.

• From having one action option available (escalation) to having more. Sometimes simply modeling or introducing new action strategies—increasing a disputant’s sense of options in a seemingly overly constrained situation—can go a long way in alleviating the stress associated with being trapped by a 5 percent; it can therefore open disputants up to more nuanced perceptions, emotions, and actions. This is essentially the strategy that Charles Osgood proposed in his GRIT theory (graduated reciprocation in tension reduction) for deescalating the arms race between the USSR and the United States during the Cold War. It simply presented unilateral deescalation, by way of offering good-faith initiatives to one’s opponent, as another feasible option. This is also what reportedly occurred in the context of the Northern Ireland peace process, after observing how a negotiated settlement was reached in South Africa between the African National Congress and the De Klerk government. Options.

4. Introduce inhibiting feedback loops that interrupt escalatory spirals. Once the reinforcing feedback system of conflict escalation is mapped, it can help to target specific links for the introduction of inhibiting feedback mechanisms. This includes tactics such as establishing early-warning systems to notify officials when ethnic or racial tensions heat up, increasing the presence of “neutral” monitors or observers in areas where conflicts tend to be triggered (for instance, at school bus stops around urban schools where violence is prevalent), and increasing the number of crosscutting structures (such as joint sports teams, political clubs, and workgroups described above), which tends to discourage intergroup polarization.

At Columbia University for example, negative feedback could be institutionalized in the form of an early-warning system operated through the Ombuds Office. The office could monitor college-wide patterns of claims of disrespect, academic abuse, discrimination, and interethnic tensions on campus, and report back to the community in a timely and transparent manner. Many human rights groups use a similar technique of “naming and shaming”—publicly outing individuals, groups, and nations engaged in egregious violations of human rights—as a method of curtailing behaviors. This is a clear example of the use of data collection, public reporting, and shame to provide inhibiting feedback in order to decrease or end destructive policies or activities.

5. Awaken the “third side.” William Ury of the Harvard Program on Negotiation coined the term third side to characterize the invaluable roles community members can play in preventing, resolving, and containing destructive conflict.⁴³ Too often, majorities in communities relegate peacemaking and peace-building to a select few: public officials, diplomats, mediators, and other conflict professionals. This is a fatal mistake with the 5 percent. The successful transformation of these landscapes requires all hands.

Engaging multiple sectors is a strategy also advocated by former U.S. ambassador John McDonald of the Institute for Multi-track Diplomacy. ⁴⁴ He has worked for years to engage the business communities in India and Pakistan to become active proponents of peace in Kashmir. Ambassador McDonald emphasizes the bottom line for business; he presents cost-benefit ratios of the impact of violence on tourism and other aspects of the economy and offers evidence of what could be gained in a peaceful Kashmir. In a study we conducted, he stated:

Historically the business community has always disassociated itself from the conflict . . . I said, what do you think about trying to get the business community of India and Pakistan involved? . . . if a business takes a longer-term vision of the whole thing, supports what we’re trying to do over the next four or five years, they can then go in and invest in Kashmir because there will be a reduction in violence . . . and so we went there and did our training.”⁴⁵

And this is just one track of their nine-track approach to peace-building, which includes government, professional conflict resolution, business, private citizens, research and education, peace activism, religion, and funding organizations. They believe no single track, like diplomacy, can effectively sustain peace in these situations. It takes awakening and mobilizing a community.

6. Institutionalize more nuanced conflict narratives. Five percent conflicts typically result in (and are perpetuated by) biased narratives in families, schools, communities, and the media about the history of the conflict; who played the roles of hero and villain and what is still at stake. Mechanisms to monitor and revise such one-sided narratives are essential for preventing future generations from returning to the same destructive patterns.

Monitoring these institutionalized forms of bias is the primary activity of IMPACT-SE (Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education). It examines school curricula worldwide, especially throughout the Middle East, to determine whether the material conforms to international standards, and to analyze what is being taught with regard to recognition and acceptance of the “other.” Typically, it conducts annual analyses of the official-history curricula of schools in conflict zones, to identify the degree of bias in the presentation of polarizing historical events (wars, revolutions, freedom fighters versus terrorists, etc.). It then publicizes the findings in an attempt to put pressure on education ministry officials to correct biased or unnecessarily inflammatory accounts.

7. Limit the accumulation of negativity through movement. Negativity is a potent force. Possessing the impact of about five times that of positive experiences, it can have an overwhelming effect on social relations. Negativity resulting from violence will have an even greater impact. We have learned from trauma research that negative encounters have a tendency to accumulate, both psychologically and socially, over time. However, our research on conflict conducted through computer-based modeling of the spread of negativity in 5 percent conflicts has led to the paradoxical finding that movement is key to dissipating negativity in community relations.⁴⁶

Typically, dominant powers will attempt to ghettoize their opponents during periods of open conflict, in an attempt to better monitor and control them. We have found that these are the ideal conditions for the intensification of malignancy in conflict; hostilities are more likely to fester and grow when groups are constrained in one location. This is exactly what occurred during the independence struggle in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, when the French limited the movement of non-French Algerians to the Kasbah. This constraint led to the festering of resentments and the organization of insurgents. Alternatively, systems where negativity is relatively unconstrained, and where members of groups are allowed to travel and disperse, will tend to show a dissipation of negativity over time. This is a counterintuitive finding with substantial implications for policy and practice.

8. Foster repellers for violence. Violent acts often represent a tipping point in conflicts, a threshold very difficult to return from. Fortunately, most communities have laws and other prohibitions against physical violence, establishing what we call repellers in complexity parlance. In fact, archeological research suggests that communal taboos against violence have existed for the bulk of human existence, and were a central feature of the prehistoric nomadic hunter-gatherer bands. Indeed, a key characteristic of peaceful groups and societies, both historically and today, is the presence of nonviolent values, norms, ideologies, and practices.⁴⁷

Although nonviolent norms are practiced in many communities around the globe, they are often overwhelmed by more violent ideologies and social modeling. Yet there exists a wide variety of parenting and educational methods for fostering more nonviolent, pro-social attitudes and skills in children: violence prevention, tolerance, cooperative learning, conflict resolution, and peace education curricula, to name a few. The socialization and indoctrination of constructive, nonviolent methods of problem solving for both children and adults is a central force for dismantling the war-system of the 5 percent and sustaining peace.

TO SUM UP: work on building up and breaking down latent and manifest attractors is the cornerstone of the ALM approach. This is the case for both negative (undesirable) and positive (desirable) attractors in a social system. Campus riots, for example, are usually initiated in a very rapid fashion, but are invariably preceded by a series of incidents, such as the humiliation of individuals, discriminatory acts, or the denial of basic rights. Since each of these specific instances is not necessarily dramatic in itself, group opposition to them (inhibiting feedback) may be fairly minimal and contained. Each incident, however, creates and deepens a latent attractor for hostilities that can subsequently determine the pattern of interaction. Once an attractor for destructive conflict has been firmly established, relatively small provocations may move the system into this attractor, thereby dragging the whole system into full-blown conflict.

At Columbia University, the screening of Columbia Unbecoming served as this trigger. But even more minor events may trigger a “tipping point,” if they move the system into a different attractor. By the same token, positive acts by one group toward another (as is occurring in the joint tolerance initiative on the Columbia campus) may not have any immediate observable effect. Nonetheless, such acts can pave the way for the sudden escape from a negative attractor by building or bolstering a positive attractor into which the system can move. It is important to emphasize that latent attractors not only provide a foundation for conflict resolution, but also pose the risk of a rapid return to hostile feelings and actions. The resolution of a conflict, then, does not necessarily mean that no further effort is required. As long as the attractor of destructive conflict remains, it holds potential for recapturing the dynamics of the system.

PRACTICE III: CHANGE TO STABILIZE

But what about right now?

Practice II provides a wide range of actions for altering the potential landscape of the disputants’ relationship and therefore can affect the possible future states of the 5 percent conflict. But what about today? What can we do now to get unstuck from the depths of an attractor and get on with our life?

Practice III is about change and stability. It is about the things we need to do in order to produce a qualitative change in the current state of the conflict (moving the conflict between attractors) or in the character of the landscape. It is about knowing when social conflicts are ripe for change; it is about discovering those few things that change everything (altering attractor landscapes). And it is about understanding the difference, in terms of time and impact, of various change strategies. But it is mostly about fostering stability through sustainable change. This comes from enhancing our abilities to adapt.

1. Leverage Instability. Remember that coherence and stability in social conflicts are not the enemy until they become the enemy. But when absolute certainty about “us versus them” and “good versus evil” take over in a conflict and provide the foundation for understanding and the platform for action, then you are likely operating in the grips of the 5 percent. And it’s probably time to change things up. Here the challenge becomes what the organizational theorist Gareth Morgan calls “opening the door to instability.”⁴⁸ This entails either capitalizing on existing conditions or creating new conditions that in fact destabilize the system.

For instance, imagine that you are a consultant called in to work with a company on the ongoing tensions and declining productivity of a previously top-functioning R&D team. After an initial investigation, you learn that the team has been run for years by a very efficient but somewhat brutal boss, who typically enjoys berating and publicly humiliating members of the team and staff. As this is “business as usual” on the team and to some degree in the industry (entertainment), and as they were functioning as one of the more effective R&D teams in the firm, everyone went along with his style of leadership for years. Despite mounting resentment, this was the status quo of the attractor of this team.

Then something happened. One of the newer hires reported being sexually harassed by the team leader. And then it became clear this type of behavior had been going on for years. The other women had all simply been too fearful and concerned about losing their place on the team to go public with accusations. Once word got out, everything changed. Upper management came down on him, and the other members of the team began refusing to accept his hostility; in meetings, they started calling him out on his behavior. The climate of the team meetings became very contentious, and their productivity declined precipitously.

There are many ways to understand what happened at this firm—legal, moral, psychological—but from a complexity-science perspective, the leader broke the boundaries of the attractor. The entire team had been captured by a destructive attractor of conflict: abuse and fear at work that had become commonplace and seemingly tolerable for most. However, when the leader preyed on a new hire insufficiently socialized by the system, she blew the whistle. And when others on the team learned about the sexual harassment, they considered it outside the bounds of their (implicit) agreement of acceptable behavior. This transgression destabilized the system and sent it into free fall.

This was an opportunity to challenge the status quo of abusive work norms (the attractor) in the team and at the firm. Such challenges to “business as usual” will certainly meet with many forms of resistance: established mind-sets (this is the way it is and probably the best way to get things done in this business), ensconced power relations, vested interests (such as other higher-ups who may employ similar practices), even simply habits; automatic codes of behavior difficult to break. Nevertheless, this phase of instability presents an important opportunity for change.

And these destabilizing opportunities can be created as well as discovered. If you as a consultant investigate the team and uncover the business-as-usual abuses, you could act unilaterally to destabilize the system. For example, you could inform the leader’s superiors that his abusive style is costing the company in turnover, absenteeism, and productivity. Or you could inform his employees of their right to protect themselves, as established by company policy, in order to change their understanding of the acceptability of his behaviors. If the acts you uncover are illegal, you could inform outside authorities. These are often difficult ethical and professional decisions. They are also risky choices, as the defensive forces operating in the dominant attractor may react by chewing you up and spitting you out. And you could also jeopardize the employees’ positions as well. But destabilize, they would. The point is that whether they are happenstance or intentionally triggered, periods of instability can provide important opportunities to shift out of attractors and to begin to alter conflict landscapes.

2. Ride Shock Waves. One leading way that instability occurs in 5 percent conflicts is through major shocks to the system. In fact, research on international conflict has found that significant political shocks are associated with both the onset and the resolution of the 5 percent.⁴⁹ The shock may be a world war, civil war, a significant change in territory and power relations, regime change, an independence movement, or a transition to democracy. In the personal realm this translates to a loss of employment, a weather-related disaster, or a family crisis.

In a study of the approximately 850 enduring conflicts that occurred throughout the world between 1816 to 1992, over 95 percent began within a ten-year period following at least one major political shock. ⁵⁰ From the ALM perspective, these shocks created fissures in the previous system, eventually leading to the establishment of the necessary conditions for the major restructuring and realignment of conflict landscapes—for catastrophic conflict.

But the reverse also occurred. Over three-quarters of the enduring conflicts ending within this period also did so within ten years of a major political shock. Again, such shocks destabilize conflict systems and allow for the deconstruction and reconstruction of the attractor landscape. This may take years to become evident, as the initial shock most likely affects factors that affect other factors and so on, until overt changes occur. It is important to note, however, that such ruptures to the coherence and stability of sociopolitical systems do not ensure radical change or peace. It must therefore be considered a necessary but insufficient condition.

3. Grow Ripeness. In standard conflict resolution parlance, ripeness is defined as the willingness of disputants to negotiate peace that is motivated by two conditions: a mutually hurting stalemate between parties, where both are losing and neither can win, coupled with a mutually enticing opportunity to gain a more favorable outcome in the conflict.⁵¹ Ripeness has been the focus of much attention in the thinking about motivation and change in conflict and conflict resolution.

In our research, we found this perspective on ripeness to be only partially valid; it misses something important, especially when it comes to the 5 percent. That is the fact that the ripeness of a conflict is not only determined by the perceptions and motives of the parties, but also by the often vast constellation of forces that make up the attractor in which they are trapped. In fact, in 5 percent conflicts it is quite possible that all the parties are sufficiently hurting and hoping, yet find themselves so constrained by the attractor dynamics that their every attempt at resolution fails. Thus, we have suggested that the time is ripe for rethinking ripeness systemically.⁵²

According to the ALM model, when intractable conflicts become organized into strong destructive and self-perpetuating attractors, ripeness, or the willingness to engage positively with the other side, appears absent. However, it is important to remember that in most conflict systems several attractors often coexist.

Conflict is only truly unripe for resolution if the attractor representing destructive conflict is very potent and no alternative attractors exist. A conflict begins to ripen for resolution when an alternative attractor develops, corresponding to some form of peaceful engagement that may eventually capture the dynamics of the system. As long as the state of a system remains in the domain of a destructive attractor, conflict will be maintained or will intensify. But if the system moves to a state close to a more peaceful attractor, it may capture the dynamics of the system. Such transitions can be triggered by rare events, as when natural disasters mobilize disputants to work together, or by intentional conciliatory initiatives from parties or third parties.

Thus, the conditions and processes that can increase the probabilities of ripeness and constructive engagement in long-term conflicts include (1) the many psychological, social, and structural factors that strengthen positive attractors for thinking, feeling, and acting between the parties, (2) the many factors that can weaken negative attractors, and (3) the factors that can tip the state of the system from the attractor of destructive conflict to the attractor of peace. Although these components of ripeness are somewhat interrelated, they must be understood as independent contributors to constructive engagement and sustainable peace.

4. Work the Edge of Chaos. Mathematicians and computer scientists have identified moments in complex systems when they are particularly vulnerable to phase transitions; that is, forks in the road that can lead to qualitatively different futures. For example, the moment when a very slight increase in temperature turns water to steam or a decrease turns water to ice. Similar phenomena have been called the “edge of chaos” because they are thought to be located in the area of a system somewhere between order (the pull of attractors) and chaos (high states of complexity). It is in these edge-of-chaos states that systems seem particularly sensitive to even very small changes.

A family system in crisis, for example, might find itself on the edge of chaos. The sudden announcement of divorce by the parents, a child’s diagnosis of terminal illness, or the need to quickly uproot and move out of state for work could all place a family system into a tenuous, high-anxiety state. They might then be poised to either (a) revert to the same old patterns of behavior, (b) transition into a new, formerly latent pattern of interaction, or (c) remain in a state of confusion and disarray for a while, until a new attractor develops and restabilizes the system.

The Edge of Chaos

This idea has two main implications for leveraging change in 5 percent attractor landscapes. First, it’s useful to learn to read and recognize these edge-of-chaos states. Anomalies in systems—unusual incidents of tension, hardship, stress, aggression, violence, success, luck, or despair—may all be possible indicators of the presence of such states. Pay attention to these. Second, as these states usually represent bifurcation points, transition states between two possible states or attractors, it would be important to be familiar enough with the system to have a sense of what the latent and manifest alternatives might represent, and then work to tip the system in a more constructive direction. This can be done by searching for feasible, high-impact initiatives that might help trigger the transition from one state or attractor to another.

For example, in 1989, South Africa stood at the brink of civil war. The Afrikaner government was being pressured to change its apartheid policies from many sides, and younger, more militant factions within the African National Congress were gaining strength and threatening to take to the streets. The country was at a bifurcation point between the status quo and the chaos of war. It was under these conditions that President De Klerk reached out to begin negotiations with Nelson Mandela for his release from prison after twenty-seven years of incarceration. Mandela’s release was a profound gesture that signaled a new path for South Africa. This highly symbolic act helped to avert civil war and eventually led to the dismantling of apartheid and the establishment of a multiracial democracy in South Africa.

5. Identify the Small Things That Change Everything. This practice goes beyond altering the existing manifest and latent attractors of the conflict to trying to change the landscape; that is, the number and types of attractors in a particular relationship. In complex systems, many different factors interact to create attractors, but usually only a small subset of variables promotes really noteworthy changes in them. Even slight changes in these variables (called control parameters) can produce qualitative changes in the system’s attractor landscape. These can take many forms, but the result is often dramatic changes in the conflict landscape.

But finding the control parameters in any specific conflict is no small matter. To translate this into a specific strategy for conflict resolution, it is necessary to identify the relevant control parameters with the potential to change the attractor landscape constraining the behavior patterns. They are typically determined by the specific form and history of a conflict, and identifying them usually entails both an intimate knowledge of the situation and a bit of trial and error.

For example, would constituting a standing committee of members of the Columbia community, elected by members of Jewish and Arab student associations at Columbia to address the broader issues in the conflict, qualify as an action that transforms the pattern of thinking and behavior of the community regarding the issues surrounding the MEALAC controversy? Or drafting a Columbia University faculty and student bill of rights? How about mandating a yearly multicultural training for all students, faculty, and staff? Or establishing an independent interuniversity grievance panel to hear serious disputes of an interethnic nature? And if these changes affected the patterns at Columbia, would they promote the emergence of a new attractor (e.g., more positive intercommunal relations), or would they introduce movement between very different attractors (e.g., oscillation between positive and negative relations)?

The identification of control factors and their effects on the attractor landscape of a system characterized by intractable conflict are daunting tasks, but the potential payoff can be substantial.

6. Take Change Seriously. Change comes in all shapes and sizes. And especially when working with complex, tightly coupled nonlinear systems, change is often perplexing and unpredictable. Nevertheless, when it comes to leveraging change, there are a few distinctions we have found useful for categorizing and understanding change initiatives in 5 percent conflicts.

Systemic Change Initiatives

Change initiatives can have three basic types of effects in social systems: (1) episodic effects, which are direct and immediate but typically short term or superficial, affecting for instance the intensity, pain, or misery inherent in a particular situation but not necessarily altering the pattern; (2) developmental effects, which take time, perhaps years, to unfold in a system but can have substantial influence on the quality of the patterns of interaction (width and depth of attractors); and (3) radical effects, which are often dramatic, altering the attractor landscape or moving the state of a system from one established attractor to another.⁵³

Change initiatives can also differ categorically by the level of change. Three general levels are (1) top-down, involving leaders, policies, and other elite decision makers; (2) middle-out, involving midlevel leaders and community networks, structures, and processes; and (3) bottom-up, relating to grassroots organizations or addressing the masses directly.⁵⁴

Episodic initiatives at all three levels are typically responses to crises associated with conflicts that attempt to quell outbreaks of violence or suffering and reinstate a sense of safety and stability. These initiatives, such as military or police intervention, calling for calm from community leaders, or direct crisis aid, can lessen the intensity of the destructiveness of the conflict, but typically do little to interrupt the strong hostile patterns that characterize protracted conflicts. An investigation by police of the death threats to MEALAC faculty and a strong security presence employed at campus demonstrations over the controversy are examples.

Developmental initiatives can have an eventual impact on the pattern of a conflict, but such effects are typically gradual, particularly when they are introduced at lower levels of the system. One bottom-up strategy, teaching, is aimed at fostering changes in the fundamental beliefs and assumptions that form patterns of meaning for stakeholders in a conflict.⁵⁵ This is often accomplished by encouraging critical reflection, bringing to the surface taken-for-granted assumptions that constitute the basis of understanding of conflicts. Another approach is socializing, aimed at altering the character of relationships in a conflict. This targets behavioral and communication interactions, which can lead to new beliefs, values, and cultures.⁵⁶ Such strategies require a moderately long time to bubble up and impact the broader system, through lower-level interactions between local members of the community, but they can have a lasting impact on establishing new constructive patterns of interaction.

A popular midlevel developmental approach to initiating change in conflicts involves working with “middle-range leaders.” These are influential, unofficial representatives (members of the media, former or potential officials, leaders of business, educational, religious, union, and other local institutions) from opposing sides of a conflict who represent the mainstream of each community.⁵⁷ Ongoing workshops are convened with these leaders, who attempt to reintroduce nuance, compassion, and complexity into their understanding of the other and the conflict, and then rely on their individual spheres of influence and social networks to affect change. If implemented at Columbia, such a strategy could involve representatives from different ethnic and religious student groups, university and local media, alumni, and other key stakeholder groups.

Finally, radical initiatives can trigger extreme shifts in attractor patterns through small but targeted changes. For example, Connie Gersick, professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management, suggests that such changes can be brought on by the attraction of influential newcomers to a system. Typically, these are young or unsocialized outsiders who are drawn in by a crisis in a system; they are less resistant to change and thus better able to initiate frame-breaking changes in the mind-sets of stakeholders.⁵⁸ This is the role Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. played in introducing strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience to their respective independence and civil rights movements. This type of radical leadership could emerge from anywhere within the Columbia community—new students, faculty, administrators, local community leaders—and reorient the discourse around MEALAC. In fact, the creation of a new Israeli Studies Chair in the MEALAC department provides an excellent venue for such leadership.

However, it is important to remember that simply triggering a change in pattern does not guarantee either positive or lasting change in dynamic systems. Change initiatives can result in anything ranging from no change in pattern, to a slight reorientation of the system’s structures, to a radical recreation of the system where the “core values that govern decision premises are also transformed.”⁵⁹

7. Humility, Please. Given that complex systems are often highly unpredictable, that change initiatives can operate in different ways and at different time scales across an attractor landscape, and that 5 percent conflicts are in fact defined by the fact that they resist many good-faith attempts to change them, we encourage humility.

Remember, when intervening in a tightly coupled system, we are in fact perturbing a system that already has its own strong internal dynamics. Also, we rarely have just one effect in these systems. Almost anything we do will have multiple effects because the problems we are addressing are always embedded in the context of other problems. Our objective with practice III is to try to move the state of the conflict into a latent attractor, or to reshape the attractor landscape to increase the probabilities of constructive relations. Ultimately, however, the resulting attractor will find its own form. In other words, we can try to shape and guide attractor dynamics, but in the end they are in control. Which is why the next action is so critical.

8. Adapt to Change. In his influential book The Logic of Failure: Why Things Go Wrong and What We Can Do to Make Them Right, Dietrich Dörner presents his research on decision making and initiating change in complex environments involving “simulated communities.” Dörner created a variety of different computer-simulated planning games of community life. One community was the Moros, a seminomadic tribe in Tanaland, a small region in West Africa; another was a small town of 3,700 people in Greenvale, in northwest England. He equipped them with all the itinerant problems that come with small African villages (drought, disease, tsetse flies, sparse population) and small British townships (unemployment, insufficient tax base, demand for housing). Dörner then brought research participants into his lab and gave them ample resources and dictatorial powers over the inhabitants of the communities. He tasked them with the objective of promoting the well-being of the population. The participants were told they could essentially do anything without opposition—impose hunting regulations, fertilize fields, irrigate, electrify villages, improve medical care, introduce birth control, you name it. Dörner then observed the participants’ activities over a period of ten years in the life of the computer simulation, where years sped by in minutes.

A typical scenario follows. A well-educated and well-intentioned participant gathers information about Tanaland; he then sets out to improve life there by increasing the food supply with new tractors, fertilization, and irrigation; he sets up vaccination programs and medical clinics to improve medical care. As a result, the food supply in Tanaland improves, the number of children grows and the number of deaths decline. Life expectancy improves. Problem solved. Except that long about the 88th month of the 120-month experiment, the population suddenly, exponentially outruns the food supply; an irreversible famine breaks out and eventually kills off the Moros population. This is a pretty standard dynamic found in Dörner’s research: existing problems are solved with insufficient thought given to repercussions or new problems the solutions might create.

Dörner’s research tells us a lot about decision making, change, and leadership in complex systems that raises important considerations for fostering sustainable solutions with the 5 percent. His findings suggest that well-intentioned decision makers working in complex systems typically commit a standard set of errors.

• They act without prior analysis of the situation, or clarification and prioritization of goals.

• They fail to anticipate the side effects or long-term repercussions of their actions.

• They assume that the absence of immediately obvious negative effects means their correct measures have worked.

• They let overinvolvement in subprojects blind them to emerging needs and changes on the ground.

Why? Because this way of thinking and acting is usually more efficient in the short run and helps bolster people’s self-esteem by letting them feel in control. Human processes of systematic thinking and memory retrieval are slow, and we tend to neglect problems we do not see happening. We also tend to employ what Dörner terms methodism, seeing new situations through old paradigms, and ballistic decisions, making a decision and sticking to it, damn the consequences (these were also discussed in chapter 2). This tends to culminate in a self-organizing type of thinking, planning, and problem solving: basically, recapitulating the same decisions and behavior over and over regardless of their effects. Sound familiar?

The good news is that Dörner’s research also sheds light on more effective methods of decision making and problem solving with complex systems. The research participants able to improve the well-being of the simulated communities did the following:

• Made more decisions. They assessed a situation and set a course, but then continually adapted, staying open to feedback and to reconsidering their decisions and altering their course. They were found to make more, not fewer, decisions as their plans unfolded. They found more possibilities for enhancing their community’s well-being as the situation evolved.

• Acted more complexly. They seemed to understand that the problems they were addressing were closely linked with other problems and so their actions would have multiple effects. Therefore, they made many more decisions and actions when attempting to achieve one goal (I’ll increase revenues in Greenvale by creating new jobs, investing in product development, and advertising). This was in contrast to those who failed, who would typically make one decision per goal (I’ll raise taxes in Greenvale to raise revenues).

• Focused on the real problems first. They took the time to gather enough information to determine the central problems to address, and did not jump into action prematurely or simply focus on the problems they could solve because it felt good.

• Tested hypotheses more. They tested their solutions in pilot projects and assessed the effects before committing to them.

• Asked why? more. They actively investigated the why behind events: the causal links that made up the network of causation in their community.

• Stayed focused on the prize. Ineffective decision makers got easily distracted and diverted; they hopped around a lot from problem to problem as each arose. Effective decision makers identified the central issues early on and stayed focused on addressing them.

• But not on one solution. However, effective decision makers did not develop a single-minded preoccupation with one solution. If the feedback data informed them that a solution was too costly or ineffective, they altered their approach.

This approach to solving difficult problems is simply more open, flexible, and tolerant of ambiguity. It requires more reflection on how we are thinking and solving problems, as well as a keen recognition that data matters. It means recognizing that when feedback on the result of our actions comes in, that is the time to pay more attention, not less. And to make more decisions, not fewer. It involves starting wisely, making corrections in midcourse, and always learning from our mistakes. Because every situation is unique and circumstances are always changing, we must stay online in real time if we are going to continue to effectively navigate 5 percent problems. Especially when we think they are solved.

How can we do this? Complicate, simplify, build up, tear down, leverage change, and adapt.