7 More Ways to Turn Down the Heat

Newsletter 133, July 11, 2023

Jul 11, 2023

by Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

This is the fourth and last in a series of posts we have recently done on escalation. The first one, posted on May 22, 2023 as Newsletter 117, focused on the causes and consequences of destructive escalation. The second, published on June 8, 2023 as Newsletter 122, focused on ways of avoiding or reversing destructive escalation. We continued that discussion in Newsletter-124, posted on June 15, and we finally end this series here by sharing seven more ways to "turn down the heat."

De-escalating Gestures and Breaking Stereotypes

De-escalating gestures or disarming behaviors are behaviors undertaken by one side of a conflict that are unexpected, and show a greater willingness to compromise or to listen to or respect the other side than is generally expected. One of the best-known examples of such a gesture was the October 1978 visit of the President of Egypt, Anwar al-Sadat, to Israel. Sadat's visit ran contrary to all other Arab policy. Until then, all Arab governments had refused official recognition of Israel and had avoided direct official contacts. But when Sadat offered to come to Israel and speak to the Israeli Knesset (the Israeli legislature), his offer was quickly accepted. Sadat was warmly greeted by Israeli officials and by enthusiastic crowds.[1] Bilateral negotiations between Israel and Egypt then began, but they soon reached a stalemate. Nevertheless, with the mediation of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, a peace treaty was reached and signed in 1979 and it has held ever since.

The key element of such de-escalating gestures is that they breakdown the "evil other" stereotype, and make "the other" seem like a person or group of people that you could actually work with. Sometimes such gestures are made overtly and publicly, as was true with Sadat's visit to Israel, or South Africa's unconditional release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. Other times they are private. Before Mandela was released, for example, white leaders from South Africa met with leaders from the outlawed black African National Congress outside the country. This facilitated Mandela's release, and also led to the willingness of the ANC to proclaim (as explained by Ebrahim Rasool) that "South Africa belonged to all who lived there."

If de-escalating gestures can be linked together, they can enable what Charles Osgood referred to as GRIT -- the Gradual Reduction in Tension. With GRIT, one side announces and initiates a series of small cooperative moves, and invites the other side to reciprocate. If the opponent responds positively, the first party makes a second concession, which sets a "peace spiral" in motion. If the first initiative is ignored, on the other hand, it can be followed by a second or even a third attempt. These concessions should be designed to build trust and indicate a willingness to cooperate, but should not be terribly costly. If they succeed, everyone will be better off. If they fail, not much is lost.

Trust Earning / Confidence Building

In intractable conflicts, trust between disputants is usually completely absent, and rebuilding trust is a much longer and slower process than losing trust in the first place (which can happen very quickly). To re-earn trust, one must engage in a lengthy series of confidence-building measures and other steps to prove that one is worthy of being trusted. Among these are both sides indicating a desire and willingness to rebuild the relationship, recognizing and working to make amends for the harms done, and both sides taking slow steps to regain each others' confidence. When this is done successfully, the previously hostile parties can begin to develop a working relationship and can, over time, work to mend the emotional scars built up over years of conflict. Ideally, disputants can start to build what Lewicki and Tomlinson call "identification-based trust," which is not just based on rational calculations about whether the other party is good to it's word, but an emotional connection between the parties, based on a sense of shared goals and values.

Respect and Face

I (Heidi) used to teach a semester-long undergraduate conflict skills class. At the end, I told the students, if they only remembered two words from the class five or ten years later, the two words should be "respect," and "listen." I talked about listening above. Respect I'll talk about here.

Respect can be defined and enacted in a variety of different ways, but most importantly, it means treating others with dignity. It is the opposite of humiliation and contempt. As William Ury writes in his book The Third Side: "Human beings have a host of emotional needs—for love and recognition, for belonging and identity, for purpose and meaning to lives. If all these needs had to be subsumed in one word, it might be respect." When respect is absent, when people are humiliated, they tend to lash back. Evelin Lindner, probably the world's leading expert on humiliation has long called it "atom bomb of emotions," as it blows relationships up. Respect, on the other hand, builds relationships. People respond positively when treated positively, and they are much more likely to treat you with respect if you treat them that way.

But, as I taught in my class, even if respect is not reciprocated, even if people have engaged in bad behaviors and do not deserve respect, it usually helps to give it to them anyway. It goes a long way towards stopping the escalation spiral, and may even, over time, get the bad actors to change their approach to you, as they see you more as a worthy human, and less as a worthless opponent. Now, whether such is true of the most manipulative and cynical bad-faith actors is a matter of dispute, and we do not have room to discuss that here. Certainly there is value in calling out bad behavior, and working to stop it where it occurs. But even that can usually be done in a respectful way, rather than in a humiliating way which is almost certain to drive the escalation spiral higher. Here, one of Fisher, Ury, and Patton's principles from their long best-selling book Getting to Yes, applies, "focus on the issues, not the people." Or, in this context, attack the unacceptable things that people are doing, rather than attacking the people themselves.

Face is a concept that is very closely related to respect—it is one's self image, and the image one tries to project to the world. All people, I would argue, have a strong desire to "save face," meaning they want to look good to others, and not look foolish, weak, or mistaken. Cultural experts often assert that "high-context cultures" (such as Korea, China, Japan, as well as some Middle-Eastern and Latin American countries) place a higher value on face than do "low-context cultures" (such as the U.S. and other Western countries). Losing face before one's group in high-context cultures, says Raymond Cohen in Negotiating Across Cultures. Communications Obstacles in International Diplomacy, can be "a fate worse than death" (p. 30). Losing face in low-context cultures (such as the United States and Western Europe) isn't that bad—but it still isn't good. Hence people do a lot to avoid that.

So "giving face," not humiliating people, allowing them a face-saving way out of a mistake, rather than making a big deal about it, or insisting on massive retaliation, is also much more likely to result in mutually-acceptable outcomes and de-escalation of the conflict. Plus, the willingness to acknowledge and correct mistakes is a virtue that we should all have an interest in cultivating.

Giving Everyone A Future They Can Live With

We will talk about this in a future post when we talk about visioning, but briefly, if you want to convince the other side to stop fighting, you need to give them hope that, if they work with you, they will be able to get a future in which they would want to live. The most clear example of the importance of this is the difference between the end of World War I and the end of World War II. The Treaty of Versailles, at the end of World War I was so punitive against the Germans that it left them angry and vengeful. While certainly not the only factor that led to World War II, it certainly was a major contributing factor to the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. World War II, on the other hand, ended in Europe with the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe, and a similar program which was implemented in Japan. Though Germany was still forced to pay reparations, they were not as severe as those after World War I, and were off-set by the assistance they got from the Marshall plan, which enabled economic, political, and social recovery. This facilitated growing cooperation within much of Europe (excluding areas controlled by the Soviet Union, which were not part of the Marshall Plan), which eventually lead to the formation of the European Union, instead of a third world war.

Using the Optimal "Power Strategy Mix"

This is another topic that we wrote about earlier (in Newsletter 95 from March 16, 2023, and Newsletter 102, from April 6, 2023). Reviewing those posts, power is usually thought of as force—the way the stronger party can use coercion to force the weaker party to do something they otherwise wouldn't want to do. But power can take other forms too: In his book, Three Faces of Power, Kenneth Boulding referred to coercive power (a threat: "you do that or else!"), exchange power (negotiation: "if you do that, I'll do this") and integrative power (respect: "I'll do that for you because I respect you or I care about you."). Integrative power, he explained, is actually the most powerful of the three, because neither of the other two work without it. At the societal level, oppressors can only continue their oppressive actions if loyal people help them carry those actions out. As renown nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp pointed out, the widespread non-cooperation of followers can undo any tyrant. And exchange only works if people have enough respect for the process and the other side to abide by their promises. If they don't, the exchange or negotiation will quickly break down.

So the key notion here is that these three power strategies are always used in some combination. In order to de-escalate conflicts, disputants are well advised to use as much integrative and exchange power as possible, and as little threat or force as they can. As we explain in the video on the power strategy mix, it helps to analyze the character of the parties you are trying to influence. Are they "persuadable"? If so, they will likely respond best to integrative power. Are they willing to negotiate? If so, they will likely respond best to exchange power (with a dash of integrative power mixed in to hold the negotiation together). A relatively small number of people are what we all "incorrigibles"—people who absolutely, positively refuse to budge. Those people will need to be persuaded with threats, but again it helps to use as little coercion as possible and mix in with it exchange and respect (integrative power) as we talked about above in the sections on Constructive Confrontation and Gandhi's step-wise escalation. Finding the optimal mix of power strategies will help get what you want/need while creating as little backlash as possible.

Conclusion

All of these strategies (the ones listed here along with the ones shared in Newsletters 122 and 124) can work together to help reverse overly simple and inaccurate us-versus-them framing of the conflict, and the resulting conflict polarization and escalation. As we noted at the beginning of our first post on escalation, it is most destructive force on the planet. So figuring out how to avoid it, when possible, and reversing it once it has started, is of the highest importance. As we have shown, there are also many ways to do this.¹ We just have to decide that we want to these things, learn more about how to do that if we don't know, start working on one or more of them, don't give up as we face obstacles (because there WILL be obstacles), and bring as many people as we can along with us.

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¹It is telling to note that what we thought would be one post with 5-10 ideas grew into four posts with sixteen different approaches, some of which were many approaches rolled into one title (for instance "play a third side role" which alone is ten ways to de-escalate conflicts.) So, really, there are 30-40 or even more ways to de-escalate conflicts.

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