Social Justice & Conflict Transformation: An Interest-Based Approach

From Power and Rights to Interests^[1]

Political conflicts can only support justice and serve as engines of constructive social, economic and political development if the means and methods by which they are resolved promote equitable, collaborative and democratic ends. Yet the principal means we have used to resolve political conflicts for thousands of years have relied on the exercise of power over and against others, triggering cascades of war, genocide, rape, terror, domination and suppression directed primarily at those seeking change, self-determination and justice.

What we now require are interest-based methods for resolving social, economic and political conflicts that integrate peace with justice and undermine the temptation to resort to aggression and war. These include, but are not limited to, informal problem-solving, prejudice reduction, collaborative negotiation, team and community building, consensus decision-making, public dialogue and mediation.

The problem with most efforts to address injustice is that they use power- or rights-based approaches that result in deeper polarizations, resistance, and win/lose outcomes that simply trade one form of injustice for another. One side then becomes frightened of going too far, tired of fighting, or willing to tolerate continuing injustices in order to settle the conflict rather than prevent, resolve, transform or transcend it.

Approaching injustice from an interest-based perspective means listening to the deeper truths that gave rise to it, extending compassion even to those who have committed evil acts and injustices, and seeking not merely to replace one evil or injustice with another, but to reduce their attractiveness by designing outcomes, processes, and relationships that encourage former enemies to work collaboratively to satisfy their mutual interests.

Injustice can therefore be redefined as a byproduct of reliance on power- and rights-based methods and failures to implement more advanced interest-based solutions. All political systems generate chronic conflicts that reveal their internal weaknesses, external pressures and demands for evolutionary change. Power- and rights-based systems are win/lose and therefore adversarial, unstable and drawn to avoid, deny, resist and defend themselves against change. As a result, they suppress conflicts or treat them as purely interpersonal, leaving insiders less informed and able to adapt, and outsiders feeling they have been treated unjustly and contemplating unjust actions in response.

As pressure to change increases, power- and rights-based systems must either learn to adapt or turn reactionary and take a punitive, retaliatory attitude toward those seeking to increase social justice, thereby delaying their own evolution. Only interest-based approaches are able to transparently seek out systemic weaknesses, proactively evolve, transform conflicts into sources of learning and change, and celebrate the dissenters who brought injustice to their attention.

Conflict and Social Change

Conflict is the principal means by which significant social, economic and political changes have taken place throughout history. Wars and revolutions can therefore be understood as efforts to resolve deep-seated and chronic social, economic and political conflicts for which no other means of resolution were recognized or accepted by either or both sides, blocking interest-based evolutionary change and systemic improvements.

When conflicts and pressure to change accumulate, even trivial interpersonal disputes can stimulate far-reaching systemic transformations. In any fragile system, be it familial, organizational, social, economic, political or ecological, genuinely resolving conflicts at their chronic and systemic source can be a dangerous, even revolutionary, activity because it encourages people to redress social injustices, collaborate on solutions and evolve in democratic ways that could fundamentally transform the system itself. Indeed, every collaborative, democratic, interest-based effort to resolve systemic conflicts is a small but significant transformation in the dysfunctional system that gave rise to them.

Collaborative interest-based processes thus broaden and “socialize” chronic conflicts, allowing us to address their systemic sources through dialogue, systemic analysis and design, collaborative negotiation, mediation and systemwide, strategic improvements, rather than by political intrigue and infighting. Responsibility for resolving conflicts can then be extended beyond a small circle of antagonists to include allies, partners, bystanders and others whose participation make complete solutions possible, including our opponents.

Yet we can go still further and develop preventative, strategic, scale-free approaches to conflict resolution that, for example, use storytelling techniques to promote understanding between hostile social groups, dialogue techniques to stimulate acknowledgment between representatives of opposing points of view, public policy and environmental mediation techniques to locate complex solutions to intractable international problems, prejudice reduction and bias awareness techniques to increase cross-cultural recognition and empowerment, heart-based techniques to promote reconciliation and redemption.

Whether our conflicts are intensely personal and between private individuals, or intensely political and between nations and factions, three critical capacities are required to spark ongoing improvement and transformational change:

1. Personal capacity for mindfulness, integrity, learning and heartfelt communication
2. Interpersonal capacity for egalitarian relationships, collaborative negotiation and democratic dialogue
3. Systemic capacity for designing preventative, strategic approaches to social, economic, political and ecological disputes and encouraging positive attitudes toward diversity, critique and change

Development in these areas will significantly improve our ability to resolve international disputes before they become needlessly destructive. It will also require us to creatively combine conflict resolution systems design with strategic planning and team building techniques; mediation with heart-based or spiritual practices; community organizing with public dialogue and prejudice reduction; and collaborative negotiation with relationship building, emotional intelligence and community empowerment.

It will further require us to recognize that interest-based conflict resolution techniques carry a price, which includes our willingness to listen to people and ideas we do not like or accept and share power and control over outcomes with people who are very different from ourselves.

Ultimately, transcending conflict means giving up unequal, inequitable, and autocratic power- and rights-based practices, and seeking instead to address the underlying, chronic reasons people adopted power- and rights-based approaches in the first place. This means surrendering our ability to use force to take from others what does not belong to us or coerce them into giving us what they are otherwise unwilling to give.

These transcendent, interest-based solutions teach us to access the power of our powerlessness, recognize that we are all members of the same human family and open our hearts to each other in ways that lead to deeper levels of truth and reconciliation, intimacy and community, peace and justice, love and happiness, democracy and dialogue. Indeed, they encourage us to recognize that each of us, whether as nations, organizations, families or individuals, can do so in every conflict. It may then be possible for us to see that it is all quite simple, as Cornel West realized, and that “… justice is what love looks like in public.”

Conflict Transformation + Social Justice = Transformative Justice

Conflict transformation looks to not simply "resolve" conflict, but to change the underlying causes of a conflict. When this interest-based approach is applied to social change efforts, social justice takes on the form of transformative justice. Transformative Justice doesn't rely upon rights-based institutions, rejects traditional forms of power, and strives to meet the underlying needs and interests of all people involved.

Transformative justice responses and interventions...

1) do not rely on the state (e.g. police, prisons, the criminal legal system, I.C.E., foster care system) though some do rely on or incorporate social services like counseling;

2) do not reinforce or perpetuate violence such as oppressive norms or vigilantism; and most importantly;

3) actively cultivate the things we know prevent violence such as healing, accountability, resilience, and safety for all involved.^[2]

Transformative justice also challenges traditional concepts of enemies, seeks to build long term growth based on healing and development of new processes that replace unjust systems. Save the Kids says the following as they define transformative justice:

Social justice activists often identify the oppressor as the enemy. While this is understandable, transformative justice actually challenges this perspective: no one is an enemy; instead, everyone needs to be involved in a voluntary, safe, constructive, and critical dialogue about accountability, responsibility, and the initiative to heal.  This means that both activists and oppressors, as well as law enforcement, lawyers, judges, prisoners, community members, teachers, students, politicians, spiritual leaders, and others, must come together.  It is for this reason that we should be willing to work with a diversity of people in our push for a better world. Transformative justice looks for the good in others while also acknowledging the complex systems within which we all live.

Transformative justice values conflict as an opportunity for growth, progress, and social justice.

Transformative justice expands the social justice model, which challenges and identifies injustices, in order to create organized processes of addressing and ending those injustices.^[3]