Conflict is competition by groups or individuals over incompatible goals, scarce resources, or the sources of power needed to acquire them. This competition is also determined by individuals’ perceptions of goals, resources, and power, and such perceptions may differ greatly among individuals. One determinant of perception is culture, the socially inherited, shared and learned ways of living possessed by individuals in virtue of their membership in social groups. Conflict that occurs across cultural boundaries thus is also occurring acrosscognitive and perceptual boundaries, and is especially susceptible to problems of intercultural miscommunication and misunderstanding. These problems exacerbate the conflict, no matter what the root causes of it—including strictly material interests—may be. In this sense culture is an important factor in many sorts of conflicts that at first may appear to be exclusively about material resources or negotiable interests.
In addition to framing the contexts in which conflict is understood and pursued by individuals, culture also links individual identities to collective ones. This fact is important in understanding the basis of most ethnic or nationalist conflicts, in which selected cultural material is utilized to constitute special sorts of social groups, those based upon putative (and primordial) ties of shared kinship, history, language, or religion.
Understanding the impact of cultural difference is especially important for analysts or practitioners of conflict resolution who work in intercultural contexts, since culture affects many of the communicational or interlocutory processes that lie at the heart of most conflict resolution techniques. Finally, because of increasing transnational exchanges, the coming century will see many more encounters among individuals of all backgrounds that are intercultural in nature.
Cross-cultural Conflict
By definition, conflict occurring between individuals or social groups that are separated by cultural boundaries can be considered “cross-cultural conflict”. But individuals, even in the same society, are potentially members of many different groups, organized in different ways by different criteria: for example, by kinship into families or clans; by language, religion, ethnicity, or nationality; by socioeconomic characteristics into social classes; by geographical region into political interest groups; and by education, occupation, or institutional memberships into professions, trade unions, organizations, industries, bureaucracies, political parties, or militaries. The more complex and differentiated the society the more numerous are potential groupings. Each of these groups is a potential “container” for culture, and thus any complex society is likely to be made up various “subcultures”, that is of individuals who, by virtue of overlapping and multiple group memberships, are themselves “multicultural”. This means that conflict across cultural boundaries may occur simultaneously at many different levels, not just at the higher levels of social grouping—for example, those that separate “American” from “Japanese” cultures.
As an example, consider the United Nations’ peacekeeping or humanitarian operation that brings together military contingents from a number of very different member nations, with international civil servants, civilian NGOs, and humanitarian aid organizations from thosesame nations. Add international media and the indigenous population, and one has a complex operation taking place in a complicated multicultural field of national, ethnic, institutional, and professional interactions. In this field, an American military officer and an American civilian aid worker may share many of the same understandings and perceptions of the world, based on shared American culture, and on many matters the ease of communication between them reflects this. However, on matters relating to security, force protection, command-and-control, or rules of engagement, the American military officer may share much more with an Indian, Pakistani, or Nigerian military colleague; and the shared premises of a transnational “military culture” will facilitate communication between them. This is the case even in the face of strictly linguistic differences that require the services of a translator. On the other hand, within the NGO community, even the English-speaking one, conflicts may arise because of differences in the organizational culture and value systems of relief workers, focused on quick response and crisis problem solving, and those of workers on the development side of aid, who have longer-term or infrastructural concerns.
Another example from cross-cultural research is that of national delegations to international treaty conferences made up of different specialists: diplomats, lawyers, scientists and engineers. Although it might be expected that differences in “national negotiating styles” will be important elements in delegates’ communication with each other, in fact for any particular issue under discussion, the scientists and engineers may more easily converse with each other “across the table” than they do with fellow nationals on their own side. What links them in this case are the shared presuppositions of their professional subculture, resulting from the commonalities of educational, occupational, or professional socialization to careers in science or engineering.
In addition to underlining the overlapping and cross-cutting character of multicultural social relationships, what these examples of cross-cultural conflict have in common is that they highlight the effects of cultural difference on communicational competence, on mutual understanding or shared “metrics” and perceptions. Note that except in the strict sense of promoting “a failure to communicate” across cultural boundaries, the mere existence of cultural difference is not necessarily the primary cause of conflict between groups. This argues against the position taken by such scholars as Samuel Huntington, who conceptualize a post-Cold War world divided into six or seven “civilizations” (Western, Confucian, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African), destined in some way to clash with one another by virtue of their respective essential differences. (Huntington sees Islam and the West in an especially contentious relationship in the future, but the scenario he envisions basically involves “the West against the rest”.) Nevertheless, while it is important not to seecultural difference per se as an autonomous cause of conflict, it is the case that culture is almost always a refracting lens through which the perceptions according to which conflict is pursued are formed.
This is because culture frames the contexts in which conflict occurs. It does so by indicating, among other things, what sorts of resources are subjects for competition or objects of dispute, often by postulating their high value or relative scarcity: honor here, purity there, capital and profits somewhere else. It does so also by stipulating rules (sometimes precise, usually less so) for how contests should be pursued, including when and how to begin, and when and how to end, them. It does so, finally, by providing individuals with cognitive, symbolic, and affective frameworks for interpreting the behavior and motives of others and themselves.(www.xing528.com)
For instance, the scholar Raymond Cohen has written about how miscommunication can occur when even elite specialists—diplomats—must negotiate across cultural boundaries. One of his examples focuses on the Egyptian-Israeli conflict through the 1970s. He questions why, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Israeli deterrence based on large-scale use of force against Egypt for terrorist attacks emanating out of Egypt against Israel, failed to actually deter attacks. A cultural analysis revealed deep differences between Israeli and Egyptian understandings relating to violence, vengeance, and vendetta. He concluded that Israel’s use of massive force violated Egyptian understandings about culturally “appropriate” vengeance and retribution. In particular, Israelis misunderstood Egyptian conventions of appropriate “proportionality” in these matters. The “cultural logic” of Israeli deterrence was that the more disproportionate the punishment the greater the compliance. But Egyptians understood matters differently. What they regarded as highly disproportionate vengeance on Israel’s part had the effect of shaming and humiliating them, leading to a serious loss of honor in a culture where honor is deeply valued. To erase the shame and regain the lost honor, Egypt supported further attacks against Israel. The effect Israelis hoped to achieve, Egyptian compliance in stopping cross-border attacks to avoid mounting reprisals, was not achieved. Israeli action produced the opposite effect, providing Egyptians with strong reasons to ensure their support of incursions into Israel. In this case cultural misunderstandings led to an intensification of the conflict, producing what is sometimes called a “conflict spiral.” Ultimately, this cost many lives on both sides.
Cross-cultural Conflict Resolution
With respect to conflict, the discourse of culture directs attention to problems of intercultural communication, interpretation, and the possibility of diverse metrics for decision-making. It makes analysts or practitioners aware that in dealing with conflict acrosscultural boundaries they are dealing with more than superficial differences in “style,” but with something foundational. It also makes them aware that in the most common “culture-type” conflicts—ethnic conflicts—they may be dealing with situations of low culture conflict no matter how politically intense the confrontations; contrariwise, some conflicts may not appear to be “cultural” at all (that is, overtly ethnic or national in nature), but in fact are deeply cultural when examined from cognitive, communicative, or worldview perspectives.
To promote better understanding of cross-cultural conflict and better conflict resolution techniques, some scholars and practitioners have sought to develop typologies for characterizing different sorts of cultures, and by extending different kinds of intercultural communication problem areas, amenable to different types of conflict resolution procedures. Most of the research on cross-cultural conflict resolution thus far has concentrated on negotiation, rather than third party processes such as mediation or facilitation, or more specialized forms such as the problem-solving workshop. A lot of this work relies on Edward T. Hall’s seminal distinction between “high context” and “low context” communicational styles. Low context styles (and by extension, cultures) are based on instrumental, direct, and unembellished use of language, with little reliance on paralinguistic cues, such as facial expression, gesture, or body-language. High context styles (cultures), in contrast, are oriented around expressive, indirect, and nuanced language use, with high reliance on paralinguistic cues. These styles are often correlated with individualistic (low context) versus collectivistic, interdependent, or communal (high context) cultures. Occasionally they are also correlated to different basic assumptions about the nature of the conflict resolution or negotiation process: a concern with outcome or “results”, on the one hand (typical of individualistic cultures); compared to a concern with the overall “process”, that is with the maintenance of valued social relationships, on the other hand. Some researchers have investigated different cultural orientations towards risk-taking or uncertainty avoidance. Hall has also done pioneering work on cultural attitudes towards time, comparing “monochronic” cultures (time is linear and nonrepetitive, and events and social action move sequentially towards some outcome) with “polychronic” ones (time here is circular or repetitive, and events and social action occur in simultaneity towards recurring or iterative ends).
The assumption underlying all of these typologies is that when individuals from polar opposite cultures (say, low context versus high context) interact with one another in the course of some dispute—or, as negotiators, in the course of trying to resolve a dispute—the effects of the differences are powerful enough to create communicational dissonance and misunderstanding. Some of this research has been criticized for over-simplifying or reducing culture’s richness and diversity, for assuming a greater degree of homogeneity in a culture thanis warranted, or for focusing exclusively on very high levels of cultural organization, such as “national negotiating styles.” These critiques have merit, but this research remains valuable for helping analysts to begin to understand the effects of cultural difference on conflict processes, and to sensitize practitioners of conflict resolution to pay attention to some of the broader ways in which cultural difference is manifested, as well as to become aware of their own cultural categories, assumptions and presupposition about the world, and the biases these may impose.
It is not necessary to accept all the dire predictions of the “clash of civilizations” way of thinking to agree that this century will see increasing contact between individuals of different cultural orientations, in the form of higher levels of transnational interaction. For this reason, it is more important than ever to understand the dynamics of cross-cultural communication so that conflicts, when they occur, can be resolved in the most effective and humane ways possible.
(Avruch, K. 1998. Culture and Conflict Resolution. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press)
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