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Over the long term, the problem of destructive, intractable conflict poses one of the most serious threats to human welfare. In the coming
The catastrophic conflict threat is as serious as global warming or infectious disease. It deserves comparable levels of attention.
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decades, catastrophic conflicts involving genocidal civil wars and weapons of mass destruction threaten tens and, quite possibly, hundreds of millions of people, while destructive conflict dynamics sharply limit society's ability to deal with other serious threats to our health, economy, environment, and democratic institutions. All of this is in addition to our chronic inability to deal with routine, but still very costly and deadly, "everyday" conflicts.
In the course of its 15-year effort to catalog what is now known about strategies for constructively handling destructive, intractable conflict, the Beyond Intractability project and its parent, the Conflict Information Consortium,* have identified a great many areas in which innovative, new approaches are desperately needed. This has led us to identify 20 broad challenges that we believe lie at the "frontier" of the conflict, peace, and security fields. While some of these challenges involve the acquisition of new knowledge, others focus on overcoming obstacles to the utilization of existing knowledge. After all, great ideas are of little value unless obstacles to their implementation can be overcome.
This is a project for skeptics -- people who recognize the seriousness of the conflict problem, but believe the popular solutions don't address the tough issues.
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Society's ability to limit the terrible costs of chronic conflict and reduce the risks of truly catastrophic conflict is ultimately dependent upon the progress that it is able to make toward meeting these challenges. The making of such progress will, in turn, require: 1) a genuine commitment to tackle the tough issues, 2) sustained and significant increases in the resources devoted to the quest for solutions, and 3) an ability to synthesize insights from many socio-cultural traditions and conflict-related institutions (including many that have historically resisted working together).
This is a project for skeptics -- people who recognize the seriousness of the conflict problem, but believe the popular solutions don't address the tough issues. Society must also move beyond its current practice of approaching conflict strategy as a political contest in which the various sides continually compete for power over one another. Instead, it must be able to forge broad, bipartisan support for a series of real improvements in the way that conflicts are handled. Success will not come quickly or easily. But it will never come unless we start grappling with the hard problems.
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The Conflict Frontiers Project
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