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In an effort to encourage more attention to and work on these "Frontier Challenges," the Conflict Information Consortium has, with support from the Hewlett Foundation and the Smith Family Foundations, just completed the first phase of its Frontiers Project. This work has involved four interrelated activities:
- Identification of the 20 "Frontiers" challenges,
- Inventory of current, "starting points" knowledge related to each challenge,
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The posting of all project information on a new, Frontiers section of the Beyond Intractability website (see above link), and
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Initial development of a public education program highlighting the importance of addressing these challenges.
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1. Identification of Frontiers Challenges
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To identify the challenges, the Consortium built on the knowledge it collected during its 15-year inquiry into the special problems posed by intractable conflict and, especially, the work of its Intractable Conflict Knowledge Base Project. This project, which was supported by a series of grants totaling over $1.5 million from the Hewlett Foundation, involved over 200 contributors from around the world and documented current knowledge on about 350 conflict-related topics. The resulting knowledge base integrated insights from over a thousand practitioners and scholars, cataloged tens of thousands of Web- and print-based references, and produced thousands of pages of original material. (Everything is freely available at www.beyondintractability.org.)
We can't keep rediscovering solutions to the easy parts of the problem. We need to build on these solutions and start grappling with the tough and, as yet, unsolved problems.
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Having collected and assembled this information, it was pretty easy for us to identify gaps -- questions that are frequently asked, but are not yet answered by conflict practitioners or scholars. These gaps became the basis of the 20 key challenges (and associated sub-challenges) that are the focus of the Frontiers Initiative.
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2. Inventory of Current, "Starting Points" Knowledge
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One of the biggest obstacles to persuading people to invest in and work on the conflict challenges is the widespread (and, we believe, inaccurate) belief that these problems are insoluble. To address this, a primary activity of the first phase of the project was the creation of an inventory of existing knowledge to identify promising "starting points" for efforts to address the challenges.
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3. Posting of the Frontiers Website |
All products of the project have been posted to this new "Frontiers" section of the Beyond Intractability website. Available information includes:
- A description of the overall project,
- A list of the challenges with short descriptions of each,
- "Meters" indicating the degree to which each challenge involves knowledge availability and/or problems with the utilization of existing knowledge,
- Links to information about current, "starting points" knowledge on each topic, including:
- Relevant Beyond Intractability and new "Frontiers" materials,
- Summaries or abstracts of selected print publications (books and journal articles),
- Links to other especially valuable Web and print documents, and
- Continually updated search results on key topics from our databases of Web, news, and scholarly articles.
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3. Public Education Program (Initial Conceptual Design) |
The last element of the initial phase of the Frontiers project involved initial conceptual design for a broad public education program. We believe that the importance of addressing the catastrophic conflict problem must be recognized far beyond the relatively narrow circle of the conflict, peace, and security communities. To build the necessary public support, a broad education effort is needed–one similar to An Inconvenient Truth's effort to promote awareness of the global warming problem. As a first step toward this longer-term goal, we produced, in a simple, "movie-trailer" format, a PowerPoint slideshow keyed to the website and designed to show how one might build interest in a Frontiers documentary or popular book.
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