Are There Systemic Ethics Issues in Dispute System Design? And What We Should [Not] Do About it: Lessons from International and Domestic Fronts
This paper reviews ethical issues that occur when systems of dispute resolution are designed for organizations, institutions and situations of iterated disputing and grievances. It explores the state of the art of the field and suggests that ethics codes can be both inductively and deductively derived. After reviewing some ethics issues in both domestic (US) and international contexts, some key ethics issues are described but it is also suggested that the field is too new and under "professionalized" for the formal development of an ethics codes at this point, though some general principles of good practices can be identified.
The Historical Contingencies of Conflict Resolution
This article reviews the historical contingency of theory and practice in conflict engagement. World War II and the Cold War produced adversarial, distributive, competitive, and scarce resources conceptions of negotiation and conflict resolution, as evidenced by game theory and negotiation practice. More recent and more optimistic theory and practice has focused on party needs and interests and hopes for more party-tailored, contingent, flexible, participatory and more integrative and creative solutions for more than two disputants to a conflict. The current challenges of our present history are explored: continued conflict in both domestic and international settings, the challenge of “scaling up” conflict resolution theory and the problematics of developing universal theory in highly contextualized and diverse sets of conflict sites. The limits of “rationality” in conflict resolution is explored where feelings and ethical, religious and other values may be just as important in conflict engagement and handling.
Generalized Intergroup Contact Effects on Prejudice
The intergroup contact hypothesis is tested with self-reports of 3,806 survey respondents in seven 1988 national probability samples of France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and West Germany. With seven key variables controlled, the hypothesis is confirmed-especially for intergroup friendships and affective prejudice. Nonrecursive models indicate that the predicted friends-to-less-prejudice causal path is larger than the prejudice to-fewer-intergroup friends path. These effects generalize in two ways: to immigration polity preferences and a wide variety of out-groups. To explain this generalization, three mediating processes are proposed that can override the many cognitive barriers to generalization: empathy and identification with the out-group and reappraisal of the in-group (deprovincialization). A situation's "friendship potential" is hence indicated as an essential condition for optimal intergroup contact.