Recent Beyond Intractability Posts
Including Hyper-Polarization Posts
Posts by BI Section
Lists of recent posts are also available separately for each BI Section:
Hyper-Polarization Discussion Posts | Earlier Constructive Conflict Initiative Blog
Things You Can Do To Help | Conflict Frontiers | Conflict Fundamentals
Beyond Intractability in Context | Colleague Activities
- Rachel Kleinfeld's "Five Strategies to Support U.S. Democracy" -- US democracy is failing. Each moment deepens the polarization that makes its problems harder to fix. As Americans, we must start now, at scale, strategically, with a broad, cross-party coalition to save our democracy. -- Mar 20
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of March 19 -- Reader-suggested links, colleague activities to strengthen democracy, and outside the field articles on democracy, polarization, and related issues. -- Mar 19
- Planning a Constructive Confrontation Strategy: Understanding the Relationship between Negotiation and Power -- Healthy conflict resolution systems rely primary on interest-based negotiations, using rights and power contests much less frequently. US democracy currently does the opposite. -- Mar 16
- Institute for Global Leadership -- IGL provides training and consultation for leaders and teams to adapt to the changed dynamics of a post-9/11 world. They train reconciliation leaders with personal, interpersonal, systemic, and global competencies in business, community, institutional, national, and world environments. -- Mar 15
- Improve how science advice is provided to governments by learning from “experts in expert advice” -- For a complex world in which we are utterly dependent upon expert advice to keep the system running, welcome news that there are experts specializing in how to obtain advice that is genuinely trustworthy. -- Mar 13
- Livingroom Conversations' Ranked-Choice Voting Conversation Guide -- Information about how ranked choice voting works and a guide for having a constructive conversation about it. -- Mar 13
- Kevin Clements' "Authoritarian Populism and Atavistic Nationalism: 21st Century Challenges to Peacebuilding and Development" -- Are liberal, democratic capitalist states operating under the rule of law capable of meeting the economic, welfare, and identity needs of citizens in the 21st century? If not, what can? -- Mar 13
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of March 12 -- Amid all the bad news, a lot of positive things are happening to strengthen democracy. Take a look at some of them, and the storm clouds still growing. -- Mar 12
- How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions -- Damon Centola presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior — in voting, health, technology, and finance—occur and the ways social networks can be used to influence how they propagate. -- Mar 08
- Sharp vs. Fuzzy Feedback — The Distinction That Explains Why Society Can Be Both Astonishingly Smart and Incredibly Stupid -- We are good at understanding and responding to sharp feedback, but not nearly as good seeing and responding to fuzzy feedback, which is the source of many serious mistakes. -- Mar 07
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of March 5, 2023 -- Ideas from five of our colleagues, as well as observations from people in allied fields about stresses to our democracy, and how to address them effectively. -- Mar 05
- Robert Talissee, Sustaining Democracy: What Do We Owe the Other Side -- A overview of an important book that asks a fundamental and seldom addressed question: when does the victory we aspire to become unreasonable? -- Mar 05
- The Case For (Even More) Compromise -- A story about what has been gained through compromise and what our stubborn unwillingness to compromise further is costing us. -- Mar 04
- Urban Rural Action Frameworks -- ABCs of dialogue, problem trees and problem tree mapping are very simple, yet very useful tools for helping disputants better understand their conflict and decide how to approach it constructively. -- Mar 02
- Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update -- An update on the complex psychology of the cosmopolitan elite and the subtle and consequential ways in which they influence the rest of us. -- Mar 01
- National Civic League -- The mission of the National Civic League is to advance civic engagement to create equitable, thriving communities. We achieve this by inspiring, supporting and recognizing inclusive approaches to community decision-making. -- Mar 01
- Focus on Contribution, Not Blame -- Focusing on blame doesn't solve problems, it just makes them more intractable. Focusing on contribution instead encourages collaborative problem solving that stands a much better chance of success. -- Feb 28
- How Football Might Prevent Iraq's Next Civil War -- A hopeful story about a sports team that is helping span social and political divides in ways that are helping reduce tensions. -- Feb 26
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of February 26 -- More links to news articles and organizations that are, in various ways, working to help us understand and more constructively handle intractable conflict. -- Feb 26
- Meet the People Working on Getting Us to Hate Each Other Less -- A great summary, with lots of links, to the projects that are making massively parallel efforts to defuse hyper-polarization a reality. -- Feb 24
- The Polarization Spiral -- How the right's monomania and the left's Great Awokening feed each other -- "For every action, there is a disproportionate reaction" -- a look at the way in which the hyperpolarization spiral is being driven by the extremes of the left and the right. -- Feb 23
- Julia Roig Talks about Weaving a Healthy Democracy in the United States -- Julia Roig talks about her efforts to build a social movement to support democracy in the U.S. Such a movement needs to both block and build: block bad actors, and build a new pluralistic society that works. -- Feb 22
- What the Culture Wars Get Wrong -- Amid all the sound and fury over the teaching of history, reassuring news that there is broad support for and agreement on what an honest and balanced curriculum would look like. -- Feb 22
- Massively Circular Hyper-Polarization -- All complex systems are made up of multiple interlocking negative and positive feedback loops that can lead to good or bad stability or good or bad change. Understanding these loops is essential for good outcomes. -- Feb 21
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of February 19 -- Links to articles suggested by participants in BI's hyper-polarization discussion by plus more links to thought-provoking articles and things that our colleagues are doing. -- Feb 18
