How Intractable Conflicts End in the Real World
Hint: Ignore Social Psychology, its mostly useless
Gilad Hirschberger presented a talk at a conference,1 with an associated chapter, with the following title and theme: Burying the Hatchet: Tribalism is Essential to Peacemaking. It started with the observation that most social psychology is almost completely useless for providing guidance on how to solve intractable conflicts, and then it continued with an historical review of how such conflicts actually end in the real world. In this essay, I summarize that work.
Intractable Conflicts
The most obvious such conflict now to many will be the Israeli-Hamas war. However, history is replete with such conflicts. Northern Ireland. Kashmir. Chinese occupation of Tibet. Korea. Rwanda. Bosnia. Germany and much of the rest of Europe (conflicts that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries). The 70+ year Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Russia-Ukraine has not been going on long enough to be deemed intractable yet, but it may be on that track. Their paper (Hirschberger & Shuster, in press) identifies 32 such real world geopolitical conflicts over the last 80 years or so (although I suspect their analysis applies to conflicts going back much further in history). Conflicts can be considered “intractable” when they have gone on for a long time and have proven immune to repeated attempts to resolve them.
On the Uselessness of Social Psychology for Solving Intractable Conflicts
Quoting from the paper:
The extant literature would have us believe that hope, empathy, understanding, and forgiveness are the basic elements of turning foes into friends, of transforming bitter enemies into partners for peace. These assumptions go unchallenged and sweeping causal statements such as “empathy is important for resolving intergroup conflict” (Hasson et al., 2022) do not seem to require any further explanation or any evidence. It seems so intuitively true that processes that operate at the interpersonal level are inextricable aspects of intergroup conflict resolution, that they have been seldom contested. In this chapter, we contend that conflict resolution in the real world occurs for reasons that are vastly different from the theories proposed by many social and political psychologists.
They did not say “Social psychology is pretty useless for understanding how to end intractable geopolitical conflicts” in so many words, but that is pretty much the message I get from the paper.
Or, as they do put it earlier in the paper:
Most importantly, there is no evidence whatsoever that emotion regulation strategies or any other type of psychological intervention actually contribute to peacemaking between nations and states.
And:
When examining the operation of psychological processes to resolve conflicts, in none of the conflicts in nearly eight decades is there any indication of a change of worldviews, a regulation of negative emotions towards the other group, an unfreezing of cognitions or any of the other processes posited by social psychologists as necessary for conflict resolution to take place.2
How Intractable Conflicts Actually End in the Real World
In their analysis of the 32 conflicts they examined, they concluded that most intractable conflicts ended in one of three ways. From their paper:
1. The complete defeat of an adversary. 2. Frustration from conflict and its' price. 3. International intervention.3
These ends are not necessarily completely mutually exclusive. In general, if one side gets sufficiently frustrated, it may give up fighting altogether; similarly, high levels of mutual frustration might sometimes provide an opening for international actors to intervene to end the conflict. Nonetheless, they reported that the most common end is complete defeat of one side, as happened in WWII and the Cold War.
Consider. Germany’s bellicose history did not end after its mere defeat in WWI, which was not fought on German soil. It ended only after it suffered terrible destruction at the end of WWII. Its not just that its army was defeated. Large and medium size cities (Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and many others) were, in whole or large part, effectively leveled. Vast stretches of the country lay in ruins. Some of this might be considered war crimes by modern standards, but, descriptively, this utter destruction is what happened and controversies about the morality of such a Rain of Hell are beyond the scope of this essay. Functionally, given what we know about WWI and WWII, and their aftermaths, it is plausible to conclude that such a Rain of Hell was necessary to transform Germany into the peaceful democracy we know today. A similar analysis could be applied to Japan.
On a smaller scale, consider the Vietnamese wars. Starting with the French Indochina War of the 1940s and 1950s, it continued well into the 1970s (with the U.S. replacing the French as opponents of the communist anticolonial insurgency). These ended only after the total communist victory that came after expelling the U.S. in 1975. Or consider the Spanish Civil War, which started as a longrunning conflict between the Spanish left and right, and which only ended after a complete victory by the fascists.
Frustration can end a conflict when one or both sides concludes that continuing the conflict is no longer worth it. When one side does this, it usually results in total victory by the other side (the U.S. withdrawals from Vietnam and Afghanistan can be viewed this way). When both sides in an intractable conflict are sufficiently frustrated, international actors may be invited to step in; although such interventions are not guaranteed success (consider the aborted U.S. intervention in Lebanon), sometimes, they do succeed (U.S. intervention in the seemingly intractable Northern Ireland sectarian conflict and in 1973, to make peace between Israel and Egypt after 25 years of on and off war). Even without frustration-to-the-point-of-exhaustion, international intervention sometimes succeeds, as it did in the war involving Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia.
Furthermore, there is not necessarily an obvious “end” to conflicts (although history may reveal an “end” if the conflict never resumes). Negotiated settlements, peace deals, cease-fires and the like are sometimes merely temporary interruptions in cycles of violence that continue. Indeed, in their analysis Hirschberger & Shuster pointed out that:
conflicts ending through negotiated settlement are about three times as likely to relapse into violence as those ending through victory (Westendorf, 2015). Further, between one third to one half of all conflicts revert to warfare within five years (Doyle & Sambanis, 2006), indicating that conflict resolution should be seen as part of an ongoing process and not as the end of history.
Hirschberger & Shuster’s analysis suggests that the most likely way the Israel-Hamas conflict ends is with one side achieving total victory (with all the devastation that is likely to entail). A lesser possibility is that one or both sides become too frustrated with the conflict and walk away (although Israel tried this in 2005 when it left Gaza without a peace agreement; as such, I doubt that doing so is again on the table for them anytime soon; similarly, Hamas has never shown any willingness to just walk away so I doubt doing so is on the table for them, either). And the final possibility is international intervention to end the conflict. I can far more easily imagine international intervention to produce a temporary ceasing of hostilities; but, although this may reflect my lack of imagination or geopolitical expertise, I can see no path by which international intervention ends the conflict permanently. Still, one can always hope for an unexpectedly benevolent turn of events.
Beyond Geopolitical Conflict: Resolving Smaller Conflicts
I suspect that Hirschberger & Shuster’s analysis applies to many types of intergroup conflicts, not just those involving war or nations. Although I claim no expertise in geopolitical conflict, I do know something about political conflicts, so here I return to my “knitting.” Within academia, there is, I have argued, a longrunning conflict in the U.S. between between a radical illberal left (ascendant in academia, as I have argued here and here, with some of its manifestations described here, here, here, and here) and those from across the political spectrum who stand for liberal democratic values of free speech, academic freedom, open inquiry and due process — as I and others have described here, here, here, here, and here.
So how, according to Hirschberger & Shuster’s analysis, might this academic conflict end? One is by one side achieving total victory. If the bookburners achieve total victory, e.g., by purging all dissent, the social sciences will suffer enduring erosion of validity and credibility. In this scenario, silencing of dissent will likely mean that scientific self-correction of falshehoods on at least some topics becomes exceedingly difficult. If, however, the majority that seems to support free inquiry grows a spine and rejects bookburning, the paths to scientific self-correction will remain open.
Frustration also can produce resolution, because one or both sides effectively throws in the towel and gives up on its demands. This produces a similar pattern as total victory: if those supporting free inquiry give up fighting for it, dissent will be quashed and self-correction rendered exceedingly difficult. If the bookburners give up, free inquiry, dissent, and self-correction will remain possible.
Can Hirschberger & Shuster’s finding that international intervention sometimes end conflicts also be applied? Perhaps, but it would involve, not international intervention, but intervention from powers outside of academia. For example governments, donors, and trustees might intervene to create bedrock protections for academic freedom and free inquiry. This could be done, for example, by pressuring or mandating that universities (or, at least, for government intervention, state universities) adopt principles and implement practices that protect liberal democratic values and universities’ commitment to truth and open discourse, and sanction the authoritarians and bookburners (e.g., by considering participation in such campaigns exclusionary with respect to jobs and invitations). As of now, academic authoritarianism has no downside consequences for the authoritarians. Such sanctions might be a gamechanger that helps academia walk itself back from its authoritarian turn.
Why Tribalism is Essential to Peacemaking
I’ll end with excerpts from Hirschberger and Shuster on how to end conflicts and how to study how to end conflicts:
Group survival theory (Hirschberger, 2023) compliments social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) by positing that human groups function not only to provide social identity, but to safeguard human existence. At the individual level, humans are puny and weak and are ill-equipped to deal with the many threats facing them (Chapman & Chapman, 2000). The human ability to coalesce in large and effective tribes has allowed them to overcome their individual physical limitations and deal with threats as a group (Ein-Dor & Hirschberger, 2016). Because cultural-historical tribal groups have safeguarded individual human existence over evolutionary history, people are motivated to defend the groups that serve to protect them. The motivation to protect the group may be great to the extent that people may be willing to sacrifice other individuals from their group (Kahn, Klar, & Roccas, 2017) and even themselves (Caspi-Berkowicz et al., 2019) if they believe that this will increase the chance of group survival over time.
Intergroup conflict, according to this model, does not arise from internal psychological states and cannot be resolved by changing internal states. Existential concerns lie at the heart of intergroup conflict, and these concerns are often real and not just biases that need to be regulated or changed. The research we reviewed here suggests that the internal psychological states that accompany intergroup conflict are more often than not consequences, not causes, of the conflict and many of them serve survival goals.
We suggest that intergroup conflict resolution is first and foremost a group survival strategy, and as such is a possible (albeit not necessary) means towards the end of group survival. Thus, more research should be expended on the specific security and survival needs of specific human tribes and groups; on the reasons some groups will be motivated to resolve conflicts and others not; and on how to balance the security and survival needs of rival groups.
Footnotes
In July 2023, Joe Forgas organized a conference on The Tribal Mind: Understanding the Psychology of Collectivism. Joe has organized over 20 of these conferences, and the format is always the same in this regard: Each conference has a them; researchers present a talk on the theme; and they also prepare a short-ish chapter elaborating on the work presented in their talk. One of the presentations/chapters is particularly relevant to certain current events.
They do not dismiss social psychology entirely. They argue that there is good research that can help with reconciliation post-conflict (which may help prevent further eruptions of violence). And they argue that social science research is capable, at least hypothetically, of identifying some effective ways to end conflicts, even if such capability is, for now, more potential than actual. Indeed, they are social psychologists, and this type of paper gives me some hope that some people in my field can produce worthwhile scholarship that actually provides insights into the real world.
They actually had a fourth way conflicts end: The principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but only found a single instance of this so I do not discuss it here.
Extremely interesting study. Thank you for pointing it out.
Conflicts end one way: Carthage. Hiroshima. It’s why pre-modern man annihilated villages - not interested in the women birthing new warriors or todays children growing into tomorrow’ attackers, or for the consumption of resources by non-tribe. International intervention may put a conflict on hold. It will resume once the intervention removes itself - weeks, years or centuries. See: Islam. One side may tire and leave; the opposing side will be back, not having been defeated earlier.
The problem nearly all those evaluating the issues have is that they are unable to step outside their cultural biases. In the example of this article, Western measures and assumptions prevail rather than pre-modern, non-Western; I had hoped for the latter from the title.
Tribes go to war for resources: land, food, water, women. They do so because of lack, or out of the desire to prohibit the rise of another tribe which soon will need these resources. Women are needed as they die at high rates in childbirth among pre-modern tribes. Children are needed because half die before age 5.
As these tribes progress, the above, earlier issues are handed down as mythology, oral history, heroic stories to become part of the culture long after the pre-modern needs have evolved-away. Simply, irrational needs today were rational in the past that informs today's ideology.
Does any rational reason exist to explain Islamist terror against non-Islamic people? No.
So looking to rationality, or to expect reason - a Western reason - to inform a non-Western solution is, itself, irrational. Which is why only Carthage or Hiroshima can end a war.