INSTITUTE INITIATIVES AND SPECIAL PROJECTS

The Institute continually strives to further its mission of studying and promoting the understanding of conflict processes and intervention from the transformative framework. Several new projects are underway to assist in moving our mission forward.

International Project

For several decades, the conflict resolution (CR) field has applied its resources, both scholarly and practice-based, to developing new and more effective means of intervention in ethno-political conflicts in the global arena. The results of this effort have been mixed. In some cases, CR interventions have played a major part in moving "from bullets to ballots", or in making post-conflict reconstruction more effective. Often, however, the tools offered by CR experts have had more limited impact, and the interveners using these tools are increasingly interested in understanding the reasons for these limits and the possibilities for going beyond them. The search for more effective means of dealing with ethno-political conflict has led numbers of experienced interveners to explore the value of the transformative model of intervention, a model developed by the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation (ISCT).

Over the past 18 months, ISCT has received numerous inquiries from CR practitioners in the field of ethno-political conflict intervention who are frustrated with conventional approaches, and who believe that ISCT's work might be applicable beyond the domestic contexts in which the transformative model has been implemented thus far. Based on their familiarity with our published work and their knowledge of the success of transformative practice in such settings as the US Postal Service's workplace mediation program, these practitioners have sensed that the ideas behind the transformative model might be useful in clarifying the conceptual foundations of their own work and in developing needed practice innovations. This project is an effort to respond to these expressions of interest, by exploring the relationship between ISCT's contributions to conflict intervention theory and practice, and the work already being done by dedicated interveners in critical conflict arenas throughout the world. The project is sponsored in major part by Hofstra University School of Law, Hempstead, NY.