Conflict Mediation and the Postmodern: Chaos, Catastrophe, and Psychoanalytic Semiotics

There is no way to peace, peace is the way. - A.J. Muste Peace work is not a means. Each step we make be peace. Each step we make be joy. Each step we make be happiness. We don't need the future. - Thich Nhat Hanh (Peace Is Every Step, 1992) Introduction Recent indications of renewed hostilities in countries not unfamiliar with ethnic, religious, geopolitical, economic, and cultural struggle (e.g., America/Iraq, India, Pakistan, Peru, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, the South China Sea, Burundi, and the Arab/Israeli conflict) once again give rise to methodological concerns regarding the efficacy of contemporary conflict intervention strategies. Similarly, with the U.S. prison population well over 1.5 million inmates, with prison construction booming, and with some five million Americans under some form of supervision, alternative thought is surely needed that more adequately deals with the crisis and particularly with conflict intervention approaches. In this essay, we contend that conventional conflict resolution methods - those articulated by Fisher (1991) as conciliation, consultation, arbitration and mediation with muscle, and peacekeeping - will continue to prove to be only partially effective in calming disquiet and new directions must be sought. There are five primary reasons for the shortcomings: the privileging of hierarchical representations, the supposition of order, the celebration of the ideal speech situation and consensus dynamics, the continuous encroachment of legal discourse at the expense of alternative discourses, and, finally, the lack of connected strategies between the macro and micro domains. First, contemporary conflict resolution strategies generally rely on hierarchical representation of conflicting groups, neglecting the complex composition of phenomenological and group identification. Political, economic, and cultural beliefs, interests, and concerns intersect within the lifeworld(1) to create and recreate modes of subject and group identification that may or may not be adequately represented by elected, appointed, or declared representatives during conflict negotiation sessions. This point has recently been made by Timothy Sisk (1996) of the United States Institute for Peace (USIP). In a manuscript meant to guide policy-makers through the conflict negotiation process, Sisk contends that power-sharing arrangements should be based primarily on the political will of the parties in conflict and not be the result of excessively heavy pressures from the outside (Ibid.: 11). The second, related concern in this essay is the privileging of order in much of the literature. We wish to resituate the discussion in order to cultivate methods of conflict resolution that privilege both instability and difference, within a more stable whole. That is, rather than viewing conflict and instability as anomalous and uncharacteristic of human behavior, they be viewed as an inevitable product of human interaction. Most radical and potentially contentious in our proposition is to explode the boundaries constituting previous conceptualizations of conflict resolution to eliminate morphological efforts that privilege intervention at the state level. Therefore, the linearity implied in conflict negotiation (Prein, 1984) will be called into question here. To establish an alternative to established modes of conflict resolution, we will turn to the theoretical insights of chaos, catastrophe theory, and psychoanalytic semiotics. Our third concern with much of the conventional literature is the assumption of an underlying metaphysics celebrating rational arguments tending toward ideal speech situations (Habermas, 1984) and consensus (Lyotard, 1981). It is not that we cannot come up with tentative conclusions, positions, viewpoints, standpoints, binding resolutions, etc.; rather, following the dynamics implied by chaos theory, with its notion of dissipative structures, along with the close nexus with postmodern feminist positions of universalities, contingent positions can be developed that become the basis of relatively stable forms of action and lifeworlds. …