AC4 and Co-Chairs Peter T. Coleman & Beth Fisher-Yoshida in Nature: “Conflict resolution – Wars without end”
…it was just this kind of blinkered thinking that led psychologist Peter Coleman to rebel. It was 2000, recalls Coleman, head of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University in New York City. He had broken his foot and decided to spend his convalescence at home delving into the research literature on intractable conflict. But what he found left him deeply frustrated. “People had their simple, sovereign theories about why conflicts become intractable,” he says. “It’s because of trauma, or social identity or a history of humiliation. We understood pieces of the problem, but not how they interact.”
Coleman discovered an alternative approach just a few years later, when he came across the work of social psychologists Robin Vallacher and Andrzej Nowak, both now at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Their work was not directly related to conflict — they were studying things such as how the human sense of self emerges, and how feelings about others can switch from positive to negative. But Coleman was impressed with Vallacher and Nowak’s use of a mathematical tool known as dynamical systems theory to analyse their results…
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