The book offers a comprehensive framework for understanding and addressing large-scale social and political conflicts. It guides readers through the lifecycle of conflicts—from emergence and escalation to resolution and potential resurgence—highlighting strategies to disrupt and reverse destructive cycles of contention. Through analytical and empirical insights, it equips readers with the tools to effectively intervene in complex disputes.
In this book, author Louis Kriesberg draws on the constructive conflict approach to assess American involvements in foreign conflicts since the onset of the Cold War. He looks at what went well and what went poorly in order to derive ideas for engaging in conflicts more constructively in the future.
"This original and wide-ranging book examines how conflicts may have been more or less constructively conducted and affected the changing class, status, and power inequality in America since 1945. Initially, it assesses how some conflicts destructively contributed to increasing class inequality, with its many unfortunate consequences. It also assesses other conflicts that contributed or might have contributed constructively to fostering less class inequality. Then the book examines conflicts that contributed to some increases in status equality, notably of African Americans and women. Finally it goes on to analyze many specific conflicts that yielded varied and uneven changes in power inequality for different kinds of people. This book indicates how the destructively conducted conflicts contributed to the many contemporary antagonistic divisions currently threatening U.S. democracy. Throughout, possible constructive ways of fighting are noted or suggested, providing hopeful future options This book analyzes numerous conflicts at the national and local levels, both hidden and violent, including constructive conflict transformations. These social science analyses enable judgments to be made of better ways of contending that might have avoided the adverse consequences of many destructive conflicts in the past. The core ideas of the constructive conflict approach are tested as they were varyingly applied to struggles relating to class, status and power inequalities in America. Moreover, and importantly, the book suggests how persons applying the core ideas of the constructive conflict approach can help transform the current political and societal distress in the U.S. and avoid and overcome its many destructive outcomes"-- Provided by publisher