The Importance of Conflict and Resolution - Essay Example

As can be seen from the understanding of the concept, Conflict Resolution, and the reason that led to the emergence of this discipline as a fully-fledged academic discipline, the main importance of Conflict Resolution is to keep and maintain peace among warring parties with differences that cannot effectively be solved through the court systems. Conflict resolution seeks to ensure that people co-exist peacefully with one another.

Importance of culture in the field of conflict and resolution, and its relation with the idea of peacebuilding

Culture is deeply rooted in our past experiences, and as such, it can be viewed as a derivative of our experiences (Avruch, 20). Culture, therefore, having been fashioned by our past experiences has great experience in our world view.  Our worldview is determined to a big extent by our cultures, and therefore, culture is quite important in conflict resolution.  Culture can sometimes be used as an ideology to accelerate or cause conflicts (Avruch, 16). In such a situation where a conflict arises due to the misuse of culture for egocentric gains, the most effective way to resolve such a conflict is to analyze the cultural ideology that is used to cause the conflict, and after the analysis, you lay bare the inadequacies and the fallacies in the ideology. This will help a great deal in resolving the conflict. Culture can also be used to cause what Galtung calls, cultural violence (Galtung, 39). This happens when one uses their culture to justify their violent acts against other people. This will lead to conflicts. Resolving such a conflict requires an analysis of the culture that is used to justify violence against other people, and after the analysis, the false ideas inherent in the culture should be exposed and logically critiqued. Cultural knowledge, therefore, is quite important in the field of Conflict Resolution for it helps us solve conflicts and maintain peace. It is therefore related to the idea of peace-building.

Importance of the Nested Theory of Conflict in the field of Conflict Resolution

The nested theory of conflict was propounded by Maire Dugan (Dugan, 14).  Dugan propounded the theory after realizing that some of the commonly used methods in conflict resolutions did not offer effective solutions, but rather, simplistic solutions that did not take into consideration the root causes of the problems. Dugan, therefore, came up with a nested model of conflict that is based on the structural nature of the conflicts. In the nested model, Dugan identified three levels of conflict. These levels are issue-specific level, relational level, structural subsystem level, and structural system level. The levels are interrelated and are arranged in such a way that the narrow types or levels of conflict are nested within the broader level. For instance, the level of issue specific is nested in all the other three levels, while the structural sub-system level is nested only in the structural system level only.

The issue-specific category of conflict is simple issue-based conflicts. Relational conflicts are conflicts that have their roots in our relationship patterns on our attitudes toward each other. The structural system category of conflicts refers to the conflicts originating from the structural rules of the organizations or the institutions where we work or live, while the structural system category of conflict refers to the conflicts that have their roots in the overall structure of our societies or our country.