Kick-off conference NWO theme Conflict and Security

At Thursday 29th of May the kick-off conference of the NWO- theme Conflict and Security took place at the Peace Palace in The Hague. The conference introduced this strategic theme to the scientific community along with various other stakeholders, and the general public.

The conference featured four presentations. Carsten De Dreu, chair of the conflict and security committee, briefly introduced the main goals of the theme, and also provided some information about the way the research programs will unfold in the coming years. Subsequently, three outstanding international scholars gave a presentation about their scientific work.

Marc Howard Ross pursued an analysis of conflict from a cultural perspective, focusing on the way culture affects the framing and structuring of conflict, and serves as a tool in the escalation and de-escalation of violent conflicts. He focused especially on statues and other cultural representations in public spaces. Cultural identities are both barriers to, and opportunities for, the mitigation of ethnic conflict, he remarked. Peacemaking and peacebuilding involves more than just signed agreements. Inclusive cultural expressions and enactments can reframe ways former opponents view and behave towards each other. In his presentation he showed many examples of both reconciling and disputed cultural representations that either added to the peacebuilding process, or stimulated the polarization processes.

Jeanne Brett presented her work on cross-cultural influences on interpersonal negotiation and dispute resolution. Based on empirical analysis on cases in which she examined differences between Asian, high context culture, and western, low context culture, she came to several interesting conclusions. In the first place that there is good progress in understanding culture, information sharing, and joint gains. The second conclusion was that more research is needed on culture, influence and individual gains – either in distributive negotiations or in dispute resolution negotiations. The third point she made was that more and better understanding is needed about if the thin trust is the underlying cause (mechanism) distinguishing negotiators from some cultures being willing and other cultures being unwilling to engage in direct information sharing.

Nicholas Sambanis presented a critical analysis of current work on civil wars, and discussed new avenues for research at local and more global levels of analysis. In the end of his presentation he clearly formulated the need to develop a theory of the organization of political violence (why civil war?). The causal coherence of the concept, by breaking down civil wars into sub-categories, such as separatist war, and developing new theory. He suggested that in future research there should be looked at cases to suggest theoretical fixes to existing models and that the data should be disaggregated (to sub-national region and groups) for quantitative hypotheses tests. About the big ongoing debate (are civil wars due economics or politics?), Sambanis observed that preliminary evidence for separatist wars is that economic factors are not the key. Sambanis states that the outbreak of war depends more on politics (state-group interaction), conditioned by cultural differences (ethnic concentration; nationalism).

The conference was closed by a short roundtable discussion in which questions were raised about the micro-macro gap, the behavior of nation states and the relevance of cultural differences in conflict situations.