To browse Academia. It's the people who make a field. This book draws on the thought-provoking, diverse, delightful, sometimes painful, and ultimately beautiful personal histories of some of the thinkers, inventors, influencers, reformers, disrupters, and transformers who have created-and continue to create-the field of conflict resolution. The authors of the essays in this book play a variety of roles: mediator, facilitator, arbitrator, ombuds, academic, system designer, entrepreneur, leader of public or private conflict resolution organization, researcher, advocate for conflict resolution, critic of conflict resolution.
They represent the various waves of people who have populated our field, the founders, the institutionalizers, and the leaders of change. In his chapter, Peter Adler writes, "Stories are ancient and enduring avenues of human exchange and one of the ways we make discoveries.
Stories create hypotheses, explain things, and sometimes connect us to each other and older enduring narratives. The narratives of our contributors allow us to understand the conflict resolution field's real, on-theground reason for being, the beating heart underlying its principles. This article describes findings from sixty interviews with leading conflict resolution scholars and practitioners about their experiences studying and intervening in intractable conflicts.
Both diversity and commonalities were found; some of the most prevalent and important themes are reviewed here. I n her interview on www. Although apparently obvious, this very powerful statement gives reason for hope if we can identify moments in apparently intractable conflicts when people have managed to overcome their differences.
If these moments ever occur, we can learn from them and eventually transform difficult and apparently intractable conflicts more effectively. This article offers a small glance into an oral interview project whose aim was to find the best practices in addressing intractable conflict the world over.
