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1. Introduction and Summary Vol. 1: The Dynamic Psychological Field
The Conflict Helix: Principles and Practices... Democratic Peace page |
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It is evident ... that a conflict is always concerned with a distribution of power. Indeed, an exertion of power is prerequisite to the retention of a share in the determination of future relations--as well as for the acquiring or retaining of other benefits perceived as the "reasons" for conflict.
---- North, Koch, and Zinnes, 1960 |
My concern here, however, is social conflict. By definition, social is intentionally taking into account other selves, power is a capability to produce effects, and social power is an intentionally directed capability to produce effects through another person. Social conflict is then the confrontation of social powers.
What does this view imply? First, social conflict is exclusively an aspect of social power. To understand such conflict we must deal at the level of social powers and their dialectics, as power or conflict social theorists have done.
Second, social conflict is not limited to hostile or antagonistic opposition; it is not wholly a clash of coercive powers as often is implied, but of any opposing social powers.
And third, the existence of violence does not presume an underlying social conflict. To clarify this, some analysis of the concept of violence is required.
What about violence between people--killing, fighting, beating, rampaging, warring? Are all such manifestations reflections of social conflict--a balancing of social powers? No, and here lies a source of confusion in the literature. We may intentionally try to produce effects through either another's self or his body. We may use threats of force or apply actual deprivations such as torture or a beating to coerce another's will to do what we want. Or we may ignore the other's will and simply use physical force on his body, such as dragging him struggling into a jail cell. Whether it is a case of coercion or of physical force depends on the intent of the user. Violence directed towards coercing another's will comprises either a threat or deprivation, and is the application of coercive power.
Physical force is not social, in that it is not oriented towards another self. Insofar as violence is involved in physical force, then, violence is not social and does not manifest social conflict.
Social conflict is an engagement of selves. Violence directed only at objects or bodies is not social. Insofar as violence is a means towards coercing another, it is a manifestation of social conflict.
As a phenomenon, therefore, human violence is fundamentally ambiguous; whether it constitutes a reflex behavior, physical force, or coercion, whether it manifests social or nonsocial conflict, can be determined only by reading the associated field of expressions, by assessing intentionality.
With this understanding, I can relate more specifically my treatment of conflict to prevailing definitions in the literature. Within the psychological field an interest consists of situation, actor, goal and object--an "in this situation I want to do this with that." An interest is part of the dynamic motivational calculus.
Fundamentally, an interest is an "I want x," where x can refer to a positive good (I want to end poverty), which involves positive interests, or a negative good (I don't want to die), called negative interests. Coercion, for example, inextricably links two negative interests (I don't want the robber to kill me, but I don't want to give him my money).
Now, definitions of social conflict vary as to whether they emphasize antagonism, tests of power, competition, incompatibility of interests, or mutual awareness of incompatibility. Either part of or implicit in such definitions, however, is the idea of some mutually exclusive good for which two people are consciously competing against each other. The good may be a potential marriage partner, a choice piece of land, a position such as president, or the top grade in class.
There are three kinds of conflicts of interests and, recognizing conflicts as a balancing of powers, seven conditions for a balance. One kind of social conflict occurs when both individuals i and j want some x that is a mutually ungratifiable positive interest, that is, the satisfaction of the interest by one excludes the other (such as conflict over who will be mayor).
A second kind of social conflict consists of i wanting x and j wanting not x. A politician may want to increase social welfare payments, another to decrease them. A child may want candy; her mother may want her to have none. And a scientist may want to publish his findings in a particular journal; but the editor may want to reject them. I will call this a conflict of inverse interests, since the positive interest of one is the negative interest of another.
Finally, a third kind of social conflict occurs when i wants x, and j wants y, where x and y are incompatible. For example, one American may want the United States to remain capitalist while another may want it to become socialist; a husband may want to stay home and rest while his wife wants to go on a family picnic; a student wants to become a poet but his parents want him to be a lawyer. This is a conflict of incompatible interests.
The common ingredient of these three types is the opposition of interests, of capabilities to produce effects, and what discriminates between them is whether the interests involve the same, inverse, or incompatible goods or goals.
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How can conflict end in a balance? To use a more popular phrase, how is conflict resolved? Presented in Table 27.1 are seven ways to balance conflicts of interests. The table should be clear by itself, but some elaboration on Modes I, II, and VII will be useful, since these will be significant in later discussions of conflict in the social field. One way of bringing opposing vectors of interest into balance is if both parties connect these vectors to other interests which are in conflict. That is, some other opposing interests y may also be in conflict. Resolution, or balance, is obtained if the interests are then exchangeable: j gives x to i in exchange for y, or vice versa. Barter systems are based on this fundamental linkage between positive interests, and modern money market systems are exchange systems in this sense. Through any society there are innumerable conflicts of positive, inverse, and incompatible interests between individuals, crosscutting and segmenting individual motivations in diverse directions. The market system, in its ability through exchange to facilitate the easy resolution of individual conflicts, helps prevent their crystallization into system wide cleavages.
A second mode (II) of resolving conflict is through threats. One party links disjunctively the positive interest (such as "I want to keep my wallet") to some negative interest. If you don't let me have x, then I will kill you, burn your house down, or continue twisting your arm. The threat of imposed or continued deprivation, constituting the negative interest, also transforms the positive one ("I want to keep my wallet") into a negative one ("I do not want to give up my wallet"). For it is no longer a question of the power with which i wants x, but rather the power with which i does not want to give up x to j.
These two are not the same. A desire not to give up x upon demand may be quite stronger than the desire to have x to begin with. For one thing, our natural pugnacity and self-esteem are engaged by a threat, thus increasing the power of wanting not to yield x. Secondly, one realizes that giving up x under such circumstances is a sign of weakness which may encourage other such threats in the future. This strengthens the will to combat or endure the threat. Nonetheless, coercion is a time-honored way to resolve conflict, for if the threat of force is disproportionate to the negative interest of i in not giving up x, i will yield. It is thus that governments have always extorted taxes from their citizens.
Coercion is a polarizing solution. In an exchange, however, both parties satisfy positive interests. The resolution is satisfactory to both, otherwise an exchange could not have been voluntarily concluded. The resulting balance of powers thus stable and specific in being limited to the interests and people immediately involved. With coercion, the resulting balance is unsatisfactory to one party, who continues to harbor an interest in overturning it, and is maintained only by the continued threat of the other. The use of this threat to win x now implies its possible use against other positive interests of i. Indeed, the successful use of coercion against i creates the potential for i to ally his interests with others similarly coerced to jointly oppose j. Of course, j is encouraged to increase his power to coerce this group, which would mean also aligning with others interested in opposing i's group. Thus, coercion carries within its use the tendency to divide, to polarize society. It is the agent of class struggle.
As Table 27.1 shows, there are many ways of resolving conflicts besides exchange and coercion. However, for one reason or another these may be undesirable or unworkable. One can then abdicate the interest. If success does not seem worth the cost, x may be left to the other person. On the other hand, one can resort to naked force. For example, if persuasion, negotiation, and threat of war do not settle a boundary dispute, then the territory may be militarily captured. While coercive power balancing and balances do not necessarily involve force (witness the complex everyday social behavior called driving, regulated by governmental coercive power, without force), the intentional use of force is usually
I have classified the confrontation of interests--social conflicts--into those of positive interests, inverse interests, and incompatible interests. There are two other taxonomies of conflicts, aside from types of manifest conflict such as strikes, riots, arguments, and so on. One classifies conflict into the realistic and the unrealistic. Realistic conflict is that of interest, of power, between parties who are aware of the conflict and are intentionally trying to gratify their opposing interest. As I define it, all social conflict is realistic, involving an intentional orientation towards other selves.
Unrealistic conflict is antagonistic behavior resulting from individual frustration, aggression, or pugnacity. It is reflex behavior released along lines of antagonism, such as a family brawl, a race riot, or a wild shooting spree. Unrealistic conflict is not social, and I will have little concern about it in this book.
A second taxonomy divides conflicts by their subject. There are conflicts of facts, of practices, of goods, and of ideas.
Conflicts of practices or rules, what is sometimes called conflicts of rights, concern the correctness or applicability of formal or informal norms. Do regulations governing television apply to cable TV? Are anti-pornography laws constitutional? Is a part-time worker eligible for unemployment compensation? Should a significance test be applied to a correlation coefficient based on a population of cases? Disagreements as to the answers to such questions also can be decided in a disinterested fashion. However, questions of practice often are imbedded in normative frameworks, such as whether government ought to be more involved in regulating society or whether a scientist ought to be governed by methodological rules. Thus, such disagreements become conflicts of interest--conflicts between the wants, desires, and needs of the opposing parties.
Conflicts of goods are conflicts of positive, inverse, or incompatible interests. Two people want the same office; two disagree over a debt; or one wants the Democrats to win an election while the other wants the Republicans to win.
Conflicts of ideas, or ideological conflict, concerns what is right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust. Often, what is meant here is conflict between systems of values or norms which underlie a person being Buddhist, communist, egalitarian, materialist, hedonist, and so on. Such conflicts are always conflicts of interest. They always involve needs, sentiments, the superego, and a person's superordinate goal--always engage a person's motivational calculus and his integrated personality. Conflicts of ideas are pure conflicts of social power.
* Scanned from Chapter 27 in R.J. Rummel, The Conflict Helix, 1976. For full reference to the book and the list of its contents in hypertext, click book. Typographical errors have been corrected, clarifications added, and style updated.1. "A distinction between conflict and hostile sentiments is essential. Conflict, as distinct from hostile attitudes or sentiments, always takes place in interaction between two or more persons. Hostile attitudes are predispositions to engage in conflict behavior; conflict, on the contrary, is always a trans-action" (Coser, 1956, p. 37). See also Bernard (1957, pp. 38-39).
2. "The threat of violence, and the occasional outbreak of real violence--which gives the threat credibility--are essential elements in peaceful social change not only in international, but also in national communities" (Nieburg, 1962, p. 865). See also Long (1965), who argues that violence is a means of establishing credibility and capability, and therefore communication.
3. This distinction between coercive violence and force is similar to Thornton's (1964, p. 77) distinction between symbolic and instrumental violence. Symbolic acts are directed at persons for their psychological effect, as is terrorism. "The symbolic concept of the terrorist act enables us to make two crucial distinctions: between terror and sabotage and between terror and assassination. Although sabotage is virtually always directed against objects rather than against people, while terrorism is generally directed against people, a distinction cannot be made solely along these lines--for terrorism is occasionally used against objects. The proper distinction--which coincides with the person versus objects distinction in most cases--is to be found in the psychological, rather than the physical objective of the act. If the objective is primarily the removal of a specific thing (or person) with a view towards depriving the enemy of its usefulness, then the act is one of sabotage. If, on the other hand, the objective is symbolic, we are dealing with terror.
"In distinguishing between terror and assassination, the contention again is the symbolic nature of the act. An assassination (or murder) may or may not be carried out publicly. If it is considered desirable merely to remove a certain public figure, a discreet poisoning win fulfill the requirement adequately, but it would not be terroristic."
4. Arendt (1969, p. 56) makes the same point, but in a different language. "To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance. "
5. It is this understanding of violence that underlies Clausewitz's famous saying that "war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with an admixture of other means" (1962, p. 255).
Some, however, have interpreted war as force (in my terms) and therefore have taken him to task. For example Friedrich (1969, pp. 165-66) says: "And yet, Clausewitz's own most famous proposition, namely, that war is the continuation of politics by different means, is itself false, or, is not the continuation of politics but rather its abandonment in favor of violence. It would indeed be more correct to say that diplomacy (politics) is the continuation of war by other means. It is when men despair of finding political solutions that they take to arms. This aspect is particularly patent in civil war situations."
The problem here is that war like all violence has two faces. It can be either coercive or force, and which face is manifested depends on a specific war and one's perspective.
7. Using a concept from game theory, this has been called zero-sum conflict, where one's gain is the other's loss.
8. Government as the central coercive Power in contemporary societies has thus become the center of conflicts of interest. As Truman (1951, p. 506) asserts, "The institution of government are centers of interest-based power; their connections with interest groups may be latent or overt and their activities range in political character from the routinized and widely accepted to the unstable and highly controversial. In order to make claims, political interest groups will seek access to the key points of decision within these institutions. Such points are scattered throughout the structure, including not only the formally established branches of government but also the political parties in their various units and other interest groups."
See also Key (1953, p. 174): "The principle driving forces in politics are class interests and group interests; they make themselves felt regardless of the kind of government or social organization that exists."
9. At the individual level force may occur in an exchange relationship. A person, frustrated over his inability to work out an acceptable exchange of his x for the other's y, may simply grab y and run.
10. Some, such as Aubert (1963), consider conflicts of interests as different from conflicts of values or facts. It should be clear from my definition that in my terms values and facts infuse interests, and some interests (such as those involving the superego and self-esteem) are pure value-interests. Thus, for me conflicts of interests are of value and facts as well. This is not to deny an important distinction between conflicts over scarce resources, values, and facts but to assert that the distinction is not between interests and values or facts, but between types of interests.