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
- The Return of History: Liberal Values and Global Realities -- A must-read essay that raises a critically important question, does human society naturally gravitate toward power-with, egalitarian democracy or power-over authoritarianism? -- Sep 07
- The Distinctiveness of Human Aggression -- A review and brief summary of the thought-provoking new book, "The Goodness Paradox -- The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution." -- Sep 07
- For Students to Change the World, Colleges Must First Teach Them to Bridge Differences -- A commentary from our colleague Shamil Idriss observing that the spring's turmoil on campuses highlights what’s not on the curriculum: Young people need conflict resolution skills to lead us to a better future. -- Sep 06
- Guy and Heidi Burgess Talk with David Eisner about Threats to Democracy and How to Address Them -- The Burgesses talked with David Eisner about what he thinks the threats to democracy are, and how (and when) we might respond to them. We agreed, citizen involvement in governance is key. -- Sep 04
- Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul -- A critique of higher education and a strategy for learning the things that you should have learned in college. -- Sep 04
- Updating Our Impartiality Discussions - Part 1 -- The Burgesses update their 2-year old discussion of impartiality, adding to it Martin Carcasson's notion of "principled impartiality" which adds in quality information and "small-d" democracy. -- Sep 02
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of September 1, 2024 -- More in our regular set of links from readers, about colleague's activities, and from outside news and opinion sources. -- Sep 02
- The West’s Next Challenge Is the Rising Axis of Autocracies -- The dynamics of hyper-polarization are also playing out on a global scale with autocracies increasingly forming alliances to help them more effectively challenge Western democracies. -- Aug 31
- Updating Our Impartiality Discussions - Part 2 -- In part 2 of this 2-part series, we apply Martin Carcasson's notion of "principled impartiality" to the Israel/Gaza/Hezbollah/Iran war, and to the political conflict in the United States. -- Aug 28
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of August 18, 2024 -- Reader suggested links, and the Burgesses selections of articles about colleague's activities and other news and opinion articles of interest. -- Aug 21
- Equality Is Good, Actually -- Contrary to popular critiques, the liberal value of equality doesn’t make you weak or nihilistic. -- Aug 21
- A Potpourri Newsletter -- Short pieces about new books, and new ideas about the challenges we currently face and ways beyond them from John Paul Lederach, Lou Kriesberg, Kenneth Boulding, Deborah Laufer, and Guy and Heidi Burgess. -- Aug 18
- Liberalism Offers a Language of Resistance Against Authoritarianism Everywhere. The West may have become complacent about defending liberali -- Thoughts on the complex relationship between liberalism and authoritarianism and why fighting authoritarianism requires a stronger defense of liberalism. -- Aug 17
- Susan Carpenter and Heidi Burgess Reflect on Susan's 40+ Years' Experience Doing Consensus -- Susan Carpenter has been working in the field of collaborative problem solving for over 40 years. She talked about the changes she's seen over those years, and the time-tested approaches she has come to rely on for success. -- Aug 15
- The Tennessee 11 -- This intimate, fly-on-the-wall document puts you in the room where eleven local leaders from across the political spectrum gathered to discuss gun rights and safety — and to achieve the impossible: find common ground -- Aug 13
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of August 11, 2024 -- Our weekly collection of links from colleagues and outside news/opinion sources on the many predicaments we are now facing around the world. It's pretty daunting! -- Aug 12
- Walt Roberts and Caleb Christian Talk about the Inter-Movement Impact Project -- Caleb Christen and Walt Roberts talk about the Inter-Movement Impact Project -- another example of massively parallel problem solving and democracy building "in the real world." -- Aug 11
- Why You Should Feel Good About Liberalism: We need to get better at standing up for the greatest social technology ever devised. -- An argument that liberal democracy is one of humanity's greatest accomplishments – an accomplishment that we ought to do a much better job of defending. -- Aug 11
- A Conversation about Partnering with Community Mediation Centers -- DG Mawn, President of NAFCM and Caleb Christen, Co-Founder of Inter-Movement Impact Project have a thought-provoking conversation about incorporating community mediation centers into local democracy hubs. -- Aug 10
- Yes, You Do Have to Tolerate the Intolerant: It has become fashionable to invoke Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” to justify restriction -- Tolerance and coexistence are key to making a diverse democracy work. This essay explores one of the big challenges facing promoters of tolerance -- the need to tolerate the intolerant. -- Aug 10
- Massively Parallel Partisanship Revisited -- Massively parallel social movements can strengthen democracy or tear it apart, and the dividers are currently much more visible (and successful) than the uniters. With effort, though, that can change! -- Aug 07
- Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of August 4, 2024 -- Reader-suggested links, colleague activities, and news and opinion articles that caught our attention this week. -- Aug 04
- Harnessing our Power to End Political Violence: 2024 Guide -- A guide for communities across the United States to organize to counter political violence. The guide is about taking action "because individuals and communities must organize in order to bring about a better democracy and country." -- Aug 03
- A Free Education Resource that Helps Students Engage Across Differences in Better Ways -- The guide includes best practices, resources, and recommendations for those working in middle school to college education to promote critical thinking, ideological diversity, empathy, respect, and tolerance of others. -- Aug 01
- The Secret Power of Using ‘We’ During Difficult Conversations -- This simple change in language and, more importantly, the way we think about conflict can have huge and quite beneficial implications. -- Jul 31
