.Note: All our newsletters are also available on the BI Newsletter Archive.
Longtime readers of this newsletter (and followers of Beyond Intractability) will be familiar with our argument that today's simplistic, hyper-polarized, us-vs-them thinking lies at the core of the vast majority of today's most difficult and intractable conflicts and problems. The key to overcoming the challenges posed by this intractability, we argue, lies in cultivating a "massively parallel" effort to develop and then implement more constructive approaches to the many different aspects of these staggeringly complex conflicts. The success of such a massively parallel effort will depend upon society's ability to fill over 50 key conflict roles with people who are able to bring a wide array of sophisticated conflict-handling skills to their specialized tasks.
Over our 35+ year history, we at Beyond Intractability have been working to assemble and make freely available materials that would help these people move up the learning curve more rapidly. Unfortunately, because of the vagaries associated with the history of the BI project, we have had trouble building a system that truly delivers on this vision. Over the past couple of years, however, we have developed an ambitious plan for restructuring BI in ways that we think will make the conflict and peacebuilding field's collective insights into better ways of addressing intractability more readily available.
We are now excited to announce the completion of the first major phase of this effort. The new system is now available at the same familiar url: https://www.beyondintractability.org.
While the new system includes a lot of new material and an easier-to-navigate structure, it also retains all of BI's previously available content (and its original URLs) as well as a version of the original home page (for those who don't immediately have time to learn the new structure).
The biggest change is the addition of a new Constructive Conflict Guide (described below) which reorganizes BI's internal and external resources around a comprehensive framework for thinking about conflict problems related to societal-level hyper-polarization and related threats to democracy, and then mobilizing a massively parallel effort to address those problems.
The New Beyond Intractability Constructive Conflict Guide
After a short "Start Here" Section, the first substantive section of the new Guide (given a number 2 on the Guide landing page) highlights materials that we have collected that explain the many threats associated with hyper-polarized intractable conflict and the learning potential of constructively handled conflict. Put another way, this section explains why it really is in our collective best interest to walk away from our hyper-partisan rhetoric and join the movement to build a society in which most everyone would like to live.
The Guide goes on to explain the complex factors that make intractable conflict so difficult, including: 1) the difficult core disagreements that lie at the center of our conflicts, 2) "overlaying" conflict-handling problems that complicate efforts to reach reasonable compromises on the core issues, 3) the astonishing scale of society-wide conflict with its millions of actors, 4) complexity arising from the independent way in which these actors operate, and, finally, 5) the challenges posed by bad-faith actors who deliberately try to undermine democracy and collaborative self-government efforts.
While this part of the Guide, with its focus on the enormity of the stakes and the difficulty of the challenges, is inevitably depressing, it is essential. We can't solve problems if we don't understand their nature. And, we can't mobilize the necessary resources to do so unless people understand the consequences of failing to address those problems. That said, the remaining sections of the Guide focus on solutions. We try very hard to avoid leaving readers with a sense of hopelessness and despair that comes from just talking about problems and not solutions. Rather, we try to cultivate the optimism and involvement that comes from seeing a realistic and workable path forward.
In the next section of the Guide (Part 4) we outline the key components of this hopeful strategy — something that we call a Massively Parallel Strategy for Dealing with the Scale and Complexity of democracy building and peacebuilding (i.e. building a society that constructively handles intractable conflicts). We go on (in Part 5) to identify eight principal goals of this massively parallel effort.
These materials are further developed in Part 6 on Civic Knowledge and Skills, which brings together the most useful articles and videos from BI's catalog on the full range of conflict-handling strategies. In addition to providing lots of useful information for people working to diminish political polarization and repair (and improve) democracy, this section also contains many resources useful for tractable and intractable conflicts in other, smaller-scale settings.
The term "massively parallel" refers to the fact that the strategy revolves around many different people, in many different roles, pursuing many different projects that all, in a division-of-labor-based system, contribute to strengthening democracy. The Specialized Massively Parallel Roles / Tasks section (Part 7) lists over 50 roles that need to be fulfilled if we are going to fundamentally transform our broken societies into places in which most everyone would want to live. None of us can fill all these roles, but most all of us can fill and make important contributions to at least one role. To do so, however, we are likely to want to affiliate ourselves with one of the many excellent organizations already working in the various sectors of the "democracy space." And, we are all going to need to continue developing the conflict-handling skills that our role requires.
Finally, the Guide includes a collection of information about some of today's most prominent and intractable conflicts — conflicts that lie at the core of our hyper-polarized politics. Here, we have tried to highlight information that offers fresh and thought-provoking perspectives that illuminate competing arguments and complex trade-offs.
A Work in Progress
Users will likely notice that the Guide isn’t yet done. Still, there is a tremendous amount of information already available (about 100 new essays and almost 4000 references). So, we have posted what we have now, with many updates and improvements planned over the coming months.)
At this point, we have no or too few resources on a few topics, but more often we have way too many resources listed, as we haven't had time to carefully review and cull them. We are starting to mark the recommended readings with stars and put them up front, but we have a long way to go before we are done with that. So, if you see something that should be starred and isn't (or something that isn't even listed, but is useful), please let us know. Likewise, if we have starred something that doesn't deserve a star, please tell us why you think that. (You might well be right.)
When the Guide is complete, we will have coded many of BI's approximately 5000 articles, as well as external references from our catalog of over 10,000 links, putting them into one (or more) of 300+ topical categories. We realize that this is far more material than any one person can possibly read. Everyone has to specialize, and our system is designed to support many specialties. If you know what you are looking for, use BI's search tool to find BI articles on that topic. If you want cleaner access to just our links, you might find it useful to just search the Link Archives (i.e., Links to Colleague Activity and News & Opinion Listings) by using your browser search function (Control F (for PCs) or Command F (for Macs).
If you don’t know what you are looking for — or if you just want to know, in general, how we can possibly claim to have a solution to this highly intractable problem, scroll through the top level headings of the Guide sections. Click down a layer to two to find articles or ideas that interest you. You might also look at this series of five newsletters that offer a reasonably succinct summary of the overall thinking behind the Guide.
The Guide does not link to all resources that are currently in BI, but everything will still be available through the main BI "search" (on the top menu bar) and in the other sections of the Beyond Intractability site: the Newsletter, Knowledge Base, Links, and Videos (see below).
We are still working on the Guide navigation. Right now, many Guide folders have subfolders, which open in a new window. So the back button doesn't work to go back to where you were before (though that page will still be available in an earlier browser window).
Unfortunately, because of the way the new BI system is constructed, this is something that is not fixable within our current funding constraints. To make navigation a bit easier, however, we have added, at the top of each reference list, links to the higher-level or "parent (previous) folders" under which the topic you are now looking at resides. So, if you want to go back to a previous folder, use those links. (Note: individual articles do not have such links, as they can be accessed in many different ways. But they will always open in a new window, so look in your other open windows to find the Guide folder you were exploring.)
We hope you find the Guide useful. Please send us your suggestions for improving it. Our goal is for this to be a collaborative project with lots of contributions from our readers.
Other Changes in the New BI
The other main change to BI is that we have changed the Home Page to highlight the new material much more than we did before. The Home Page now has six "boxes:"
About - which tells new users about BI, but also explains how we have changed and reorganized it, so long-time users can find what they are looking for in the new system.
Intractable Conflict Challenge - Essentially our "mission statement," this section explains why BI has been doing what it has been doing for over 25 years.
The BI Newsletter - This section has a link to the Substack Newsletter, which is also copied into a local version on BI. This section also has a list of newsletters sorted by topic, and another sorted by type (Burgess articles, guest articles, reader comments, interviews, and links).
The Constructive Conflict Guide - Described Above
The Full BI Knowledge Base - This section includes the original BI materials (such as essays, case studies, interviews, and more) together with the Conflict Fundamentals, and Conflict Frontiers Seminars, the Things to Do to Help Blog and a listing all of the BI Videos.
Colleague, News, and Opinion Links - This section has links to all of our Links Newsletters, and also has an archive of all of the Colleague Activities listings and all of the News and Opinion listings sorted by topic. These lists can be both browsed and searched. If you go to either list and search for a topic of interest using your browser's search function (not BI's), it will search all the listings as well as our short descriptions of them. (Unfortunately, we are no longer able to search the full text of these resources, as we used to be able to do, as Google is no longer providing such a service.)
A listing of our most recent Newsletter posts also appears on the right side of the home page, so they are easy to find.
NOTE!! -- Although we have reorganized the Home Page, none of the old urls have changed. In the few cases that they have, we have put in redirects, so all links that people might have saved to pages in the old BI will still work. The only exception is the homepage which has been replaced with a link to the "classic" homepage.
We hope you will check out the new BI, and particularly the new Constructive Conflict Guide, and share it with anyone who might find it useful. We also hope you will give us your feedback. Many of the changes are invisible, on the back end, and they make this edition of Beyond Intractability much easier to revise. So if you have suggestions for ways to make this better or more useful to you, please let us know! And, of course, let us know if you find anything that isn't working as you expect.
About the MBI Newsletters
BI sends out newsletter 2-3 times a week. Two of these are substantive articles. Once a week or so we compile a list of the most interesting reading we have found related to our topics of interest: intractable conflict, hyper-polarization, and democracy, and we share them in a "Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links” newsletter. These links include articles sent by readers, information about our colleagues’ activities, and news and opinion pieces that we have found to be of particular interest. Each Newsletter will be posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.
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