The Crossroads Group

30/10/2024

What is the media's role in modern conflict creation, perpetuation, management or transformation?

I have been asked to do a rather comprehensive essay on the topic, I hope to be able to publish that during the course of next week.

17/10/2024

Do we have a similar organization in South Africa?

On Friday night I am one of the guest speakers at the EucA Master Meeting, where we will have an in-depth and long form discussion on conflict resolution and negotiation with a group of students.

The European University College Association (EucA) is a Brussels-based NGO that represents colleges in the promotion of skills through discussions like these, boot camps and other mechanisms. It is therefore more than just individual campuses putting together their own programs in aid of their students. I think it is an absolutely excellent idea, and if it does not exist here in SA it should be explored.

14/10/2024

In my column in this Friday's Herald newspaper we start a series on management/union workplace conflict strategies

02/10/2024

It is good to see the scholarly treatment of emotion as an important part of complex conflicts in this important volume. The article, by Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, argues for the recognition and inclusion of emotion in reconciliation processes - not the cheap emotion of manipulation or sentimentality, but the emotions caused by lived experiences, the emotions that create, shape and guide our identities, our pasts and our futures. This is overdue and a good development

30/09/2024

In my conflict column in this Friday's Herald newspaper we look at the consequences of a rush to resolution in our conflicts, when we fail to get all the puzzle pieces on the table during the differentiation phase

25/09/2024

This is one of the important reasons why the conflict concept of agonism needs work and application in our South African conflicts:

When each party has fortified its self-representation as a victim and depicted the other(s) as the perpetrator(s) attached to narratives of past wrongdoings, inequitable economic conditions and political dynamics, all efforts, including peacebuilding, to transform these emotionally loaded roles generate anxiety and increase ontological insecurity

Marko Lehti

11/09/2024

School governing bodies and leaders should ensure timeously that they have debated and implemented a range of necessary responses, processes and strategies for the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) consequences. It will undoubtedly cause a range of very local and specific conflicts, at the personal and group level, and this is one of those conflict scenarios where you need to be ahead of developments, as opposed to trying to catch up later

09/09/2024

Complex political, professional or personal conflicts certainly require skilled professionals to deal with the conflict dynamics, processes, strategies and outcomes, but we can all be better at conflict at an entry level. That is one of the goals we seek to achieve at The Conflict Conversations - no subscriptions, no fees, just a cutting-edge database of modern conflict best practices available to you for study and incorporation into your own professional or personal conflicts.

Have a look

The Conflict Conversations

09/09/2024

In my column in this Friday's Herald newspaper we look at one of the most effective conflict strategies to use when we need to criticize someone

08/09/2024

As a result of recent consulting and more academic research work I have increasingly started using a range of modern conflict multidisciplinary tools in my work, to the point where I will be publishing a seriesof three articles on the three new areas so incorporated in that work. These articles will cover:

1. Storytelling as conflict tool;

2. Critical Systems Thinking (CST) as conflict tool;

3. Micro-sociology as conflict tool.

All three of these articles will be published in my Modern Conflict Tools series, and should be available in the next two weeks.

02/09/2024

The stunning cover and final chapter detail of this conflict classic, edited by the formidable Roger Mac Ginty. My chapter (Ch. 19) on mediation is, with the exception of my own books, the most interesting and richly rewarding academic work that I have done

26/05/2024

With various coalitions and their largely unexplored conflict dynamics probably heading our way, it is time that we start looking at the risks and potential of this political reality in greater depth. My article of a few months ago

Our conflicts are our teachers and liberators because they invite us to wake up and become aware of what we have not yet learned how to handle skillfully.