Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution

This comprehensive and highly regarded book provides a framework for analyzing diverse social conflicts. The fourth edition of Constructive Conflicts maintains the book’s synthesis of theories about conflict, with key updates throughout. These include a more reader-friendly first chapter, new examples such as the Arab Spring, expanded discussions of recovery from violence and oppression, of reconciliation, and of moral concerns, and new discussions of social media and other ways conflicts are waged.
Constructive Conflicts draws from relevant academic disciplines and empirical analyses of diverse conflicts to discuss the emergence, escalation, de-escalation, transformation, and settlement of conflicts. Throughout, the authors examine the strategies that partisans and intermediaries can use to minimize the destructiveness of conflicts and foster constructive ways to wage and resolve them.

Louis Kriesberg is professor emeritus of sociology and Maxwell Professor Emeritus of Social Conflict Studies at Syracuse University. He is the founding director of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts and past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Bruce W. Dayton is associate professor of conflict transformation and the executive director of the CONTACT Peacebuilding Program at the School for International Training.