Burton 1990
Kathrine Selvage
Nearly 30 years ago, while a doctoral student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, I had the good fortune to fall in with Professor John W. Burton and his Centre for the Analysis of Conflict (CAC) at University College London (UCL). This began an apprenticeship in the development and application of knowledge relevant to understanding and dealing with deep-rooted conflicts across the wide spectrum of human relationships.
In those days, the early 1970s, attention was focussed on the East-West conflict and its spectre of thermonuclear annihilation; the endlessly intrac Middle East conflict and the Northern Irish "Troubles" the brutal Apartheid system in South Africa; the inexplicable Greek-Cypriot/Turkish-Cypriot conflict, and the like. Professor Burton and his CAC colleagues -- an interdisciplinary group of anthropologists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, international lawyers, and others -- were beginning to develop techniques for facilitating dialogue between parties to such conflicts.
By the time serendipity and good fortune brought me "up to London" from Glasgow to work with Professor Burton, he had already developed and tested his "controlled communication" problem solving workshops in the context of a conflict in Southeast Asia and had published his first book on the process, Conflict and Communication; The Use of Controlled Communication in International Relations (Burton, 1969). He had also begun to pioneer the development of an alternative vision to the dominant Realpolitik ("realist") paradigm, beginning with the publication of his Systems, States, Diplomacy and Rules (Burton, 1968), which evolved into his World Society (1972) paradigm, pre-publication proofs of which I used in my first year teaching with his students in 1971. A few years later, the concept of "world society" generated a "trans-Atlantic ... cross-cultural dialogue" among members of the International Studies Association (ISA), beginning with a rich debate between Burton and his CAC colleagues, John Groom, Christopher Mitchell and Anthony de Reuck. This led to the publication (by the ISA) of their challenge to the American [realist/state-centric] approach to the study of international relations: The Study of World Society; A London Perspective (Burton, et al., 1974; Vasquez, 1983).
Although I remained with Burton at UCL for only three years, I was "hooked" on the theory-practice-theory nexus that he and his associates were developing. By the time his initial theoretical work on the link between frustrated basic human needs (BHNs) and violent conflict appeared in his Deviance, Terrorism and War (1979), Burton, the consummate original thinker, had presented the world of human knowledge:
in World Society, a comprehensive alternative to bleak, simplistic, self-fulfilling/self-perpetuating (but always compelling) Realpolitik;
in Conflict and Communication, a method for dealing with conflicts within that alternative worldview, through problem solving workshops; and
in Deviance, Terrorism and War and in later works, a theory, of Basic Human Needs, accounting for the deep-rooted nature of protracted, intractable conflicts.
In the mid 1980's, I had the pleasure of further developing this last idea with Professor Burton during his time at George Mason University's Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR)(Burton and Sandole, 1986, 1987).
Most recently, following his efforts to institutionalise further the field of conflict and conflict resolution (Burton, 1987; 1990ab; Burton and Dukes, 1990ab), his Violence Explained (1997) makes explicit what had always been implicit in his systems approach to conflict and conflict resolution at all levels: that to deal with deep-rooted, intractable conflicts at any level, one requires a comprehensive, holistic framework to "capture the complexity of conflict" (Sandole, 1999):
In the mid-1980s, Ingrid Sandole-Staroste and I edited the first major work to emerge from the (then) recently established Center for Conflict Resolution (CCR) -- which eventually became ICAR -- at George Mason University (Sandole and Sandole-Staroste, 1987). My concluding chapter of that volume featured something that I called the "Four-Worlds' Model of the Perceptual-Behavioural Process" (Sandole, 1987). In that model, I postulated that each sentient actor, whether at the individual, group, societal or other level, receives stimuli from two external "worlds" -- the natural world (World 1) and the human-made world (World 3). When the stimuli trigger the "discharge potentials" of actors' various senses, they become information. Information then becomes progressively encoded and further processed, initially in one of the internal "worlds," the biological/ physiological world (World 4) for eventual deposition into, and decoding by the mental world (World 2) as some kind of "definition of the situation" or perception of the original stimulus (See Popper (1972) for Worlds 1-3: I have modified his World 3 and have added World 4).
Burton's work on World Society and corresponding "cobweb" model of international relations challenged the dominant Realpolitik paradigm and its corresponding "billiard ball" model. Thus, I was encouraged to conceive of the human-made world (World 3) in terms of mosaics of multiple actors at multiple levels, different elements of which are traditionally claimed by the "sovereign" disciplines as their particular domains of discourse: a fractured state of affairs which renders the individual disciplines more a part of the problem than of the solution.
Burton's work on basic human needs theory allowed me to see the interface between the biological/physiological and mental worlds (Worlds 4 and 2) as being comparable to insights found in Kenneth Boulding's (1956) classic work on perception; for example, the interdependent relationships between cognitive (belief), evaluative (value), and affective (emotional) images.
In other words, BHNs for identity, recognition and security (Burton, 1997) can influence our beliefs, the values we place on them, and the emotional impact of the frustration of those highly valued beliefs.
Burton's simple but compelling hypothesis on the link between BHNs -- no matter how subjectively experienced and culturally impacted -- and violent conflict is: the better the fit between BHNs and the means for fulfilling them in the natural and human-made worlds, the less likely are violent attempt to fulfil BHNs. On the other hand, the worse the fit, the more likely that the actor concerned will employ violent means to fulfil her or his BHNs:
At about the same time that Burton was making some of his major contributions to the developing field of conflict and conflict resolution, a pioneer in the related field of peace studies, Johan Galtung, had conceptualised that the more intense the cause of gaps between potential and actual fulfilment of somatic and mental needs, the greater the violence inflicted upon the actors concerned (see Galtung, 1969). Galtung then went on to distinguish indirect, structural violence from the more direct, physical manifestations of the term:
Galtung's contributions in this regard are compatible with the work of Ted Robert Gurr (1970) on relative deprivation: the felt gap between value expectations [resources to which one feels entitled] and value capabilities [resources one feels capable of achieving and holding on to]. The greater the perception of structural violence, the greater the relative deprivation experienced by the actors concerned and the greater the likelihood of political violence.
When a gang member says that she or he has entered and remains a member of a gang subculture because gang membership provides love, respect and security -- thereby implying the failure of the family, school, religion and community in general to fulfil those needs -- then we have at least anecdotal confirmation of the propositions inherent in Burton, Galtung, and Gurr:
Burton and others employing his, or modified versions of his problem solving approach to facilitated dialogue and conflict resolution (Azar, 1986, 1990; Kelman, 1986, 1991; Mitchell & Banks, 1996; Fisher, 1997), enter the "space" of conflicting parties to help them do what they seem unable to do alone, not for lack of intelligence but through an overabundance of emotional commitment to progressively narrower means for achieving narrowing goals. The aim is basically to improve the fit between BHNs and the means for fulfilling them for all concerned.
A third party in this regard has to do more than simply convene meetings and facilitate dialogue, presumably to change parties' perceptions of each other and of their conflict. They also have to facilitate changes in political, economic, social and other structures in the human-made world, allowing the relatively more disenfranchised parties greater access to what structural violence had previously denied them - resources in the human-made and natural worlds for fulfilling their BHNs. Conflict resolution for Burton is much more than "getting people to the table" although that may be no small feat in some circumstances. It is also a political philosophy and political system (Burton, 1989, 1993) concerned with conflict provention (Burton, 1990a; Burton and Dukes, 1990b). This involves transforming "structurally violent" structures which otherwise impact people's lives to the extent that the latter are quite prepared to explode their way into our consciousness, if not also literally into our lives. For example, note the terrorist attack on the USS Cole on 12 October 2000.
The micro (biological/physiological and mental worlds') and macro (natural and human-made worlds') interface implicit in Burton's work could be used as a point of departure for analysing and responding to conflicts of any kind at any level. Hence, the generic nature and implications of Burton's fruitful work which has come to impact my own. In recent years this includes my ambitious attempt to develop the 4-worlds' model into an embryonic unified field theory of violent conflict and war (Sandole, 1999, Ch. 8). In this work, I postulate that the four worlds and interaction within and between them, "capture the complexity" of conflicts. They do this by providing a basis for integrating the fragmented disciplines and, correspondingly, potential causes and conditions of conflicts at all levels, particularly violent conflicts. Consider, for example:
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