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International Online Training Program On Intractable Conflict |
Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado, USA |
The first phase of the International Online Training Program, funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is now nearing completion The project was designed to take advantage of the enormous improvement in information access being provided by the Internet and the World Wide Web. While high speed communication has been available to top-level businessmen and diplomats for some time, the web brings this capability to many more people. While it is still a long way from being accessible to everyone, an amazing number of people in even the poorest countries are gaining access to the Net. In Phase I of our project, our goal was to use the Internet to provide access to as much of the conflict knowledge base as possible, especially as it relates to finding better ways of dealing with destructive, intractable conflicts.
Phase I was based upon the following assumptions:
Although formal negotiations still take place between official diplomats, more and more conflict transformation is occurring between ordinary citizens-religious leaders, conflict resolution professionals, advocates working on behalf of interest groups or political groups, people with humanitarian relief organizations, non-governmental peacemaking teams, other NGOs, commercial interests, scholars, and even tourists. Sometimes these people intend to become involved in peace building or conflict resolution activities; at other times they get drawn into it rather accidentally. Or, they may get drawn into the conflicts themselves and need conflict management or resolution skills to know how to best deal with the unexpected situation. Our system is designed to provide information to these individuals.
2) Part-Time, Do-It-Yourselfers
Professional conflict intervention is expensive, so only a tiny percentage of conflicts can be mediated by conflict professionals. Most interactions are handled, rather, by either the parties themselves, or by informal intermediaries, neither of whom are likely to be skilled in the latest conflict management techniques. In the absence of such training, these "do-it-yourselfers" use common sense approaches, which often lack both scientific knowledge about conflict processes and practical experience of those who have struggled with similar conflicts in the past.
Most of these do-it-yourselfers are also "part-timers" with many other pressing demands on their time. This means that any training program must be extremely efficient or people won't have time to use it. Further, effective training must be precisely focused on the user's immediate problems--part-time do-it-yourselfers don't have time to learn how to deal with somebody else's problems. They usually don't have much money to spend either. Typical training programs are likely to be completely out of reach to most parties.
3) Windows of Opportunity
Effective dissemination programs must also be able to work within a narrow "window of opportunity." There is usually a brief period between the time that someone is presented with a conflict problem and the time when they must commit to a particular course of action. If better options can be provided during this critical window, they are likely to take them. They are also likely to return to this resource in the future as additional conflict problems arise. This, in turn, is likely to lead to long-term improvements in their overall conflict skills.
If such information is not forthcoming, however, the parties can be expected to stick with often destructive, "business-as-usual" practices. In short, information provided outside of this window is likely to be of limited utility. A major focus of the Consortium program has, therefore, been the creation of a program that works within narrow time constraints.
Strategies for Overcoming Dissemination Limits
Overcoming current limits on information dissemination will require either 1) enormous increases in the field's overall funding level, or 2) significant increases in the efficiency of dissemination programs. We believe that the most promising, currently available approach involves using the Internet to increase efficiency and provide large numbers of people with information that is:
virtually free (for those with access to the net),
instantly available,
easy to access,
largely complete (full-text online information can eliminate the need for an often futile search for print publications),
customized to the specific needs of individual users, and
sensitive to user differences in languages, culture, socio-economic, and political contexts
Our online training program is designed to pursue this opportunity.
Advanced, Internet-Based Distance Learning
The Consortium program can be used in a large variety of ways. It will be available as a complete for-credit university course (through the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Colorado), or as a free course for independent study. It will also be usable as an online consulting service capable of providing specific answers to a specific conflict questions.
The program is structured so that users can find as little or as much information as they want about a wide variety of topics. They can read the introductory theoretical material on conflict processes and conflict resolution (as they must if they are taking the course), or they can skip this material and go directly to the more practical problem-solution section. They can do the exercises and the assignments on their own, with others, for credit or not. In short, users can take as much or as little of this program as they want. Most is available for free, and even course credit is relatively inexpensive. During the initial phase of evaluation and testing, users can obtain most of the benefits of taking the course for credit (such as instructor feedback on assignments and answers to questions) in exchange for giving us their critique of the materials. The only thing we cannot give for free is formal University credit.
Material Organization
The bulk of the material provided in this program is organized in problem and solution lists. These lists are organized in a way that is consistent with on our theory of intractable conflicts (which is described in Appendix 1). Though based on theory, the lists provide very practical descriptions of what tends to go wrong in intractable conflicts, and what approaches are available for dealing with each of these problems. (Multiple approaches are given for each problem, since different contexts call for different types of solutions.)
Short descriptions of all the problems and solutions are provided for users who want a quick overview; these are linked to longer descriptions for users who want more information. The longer descriptions are then linked to real-world examples of the problem or accounts of solution as they have really been implemented. These are generally drawn from outside books and articles-not just our own experience. A concerted effort has been made to find examples from outside the U.S., although some U.S. examples are provided too (in part to acknowledge that the U.S., too, has serious conflict problems, and in part because we expect users to be from the U.S. as well as abroad).
The benefits of this approach, we feel, are several. The system provides access to a vast amount of information about conflict and conflict resolution processes, far more than is likely to be found in a few textbooks. It also is customizable-it is easy to find information on exactly what the reader needs, without having to wade through a lot of unwanted information.
Yet the information is all expandable. Since books are often hard to obtain in the third world, we have provided summaries to key books as much as possible, and have tried to provide links to other on-line sources of information where they exist. We have also provided traditional citations for books and articles and links to online sources (such as amazon.com) for purchasing these items. (Options for purchasing articles are, unfortunately, much more expensive.) For this reason, we have summarized as many of the useful articles as we could on the web site. (This is an area we wish to expand substantially in Phase II.) Also, unlike books, the project also provides participants with connections to the larger community of people who are interested in the field.
The basic training program, with its online modules, assignments, and exercises is roughly equivalent in scope to a three-hour, upper division university course. By using the course's optional additional reference materials, exercises, and assignments, the scope of the program could be expanded considerably. This allows the program to provide far more information than is available in a standard 40 hour, one-week training program. More specific information about the contents of the program is found in Appendices 2-5
Copyright ©1998 Conflict Research Consortium -- Contact: crc@colorado.edu