JERUSALEM — The academic study of conflict resolution has existed for years in Europe and the United States. But here, where there is certainly no shortage of conflict, it is very much a newcomer.
The pioneer is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where students have completed the first year of a two-year graduate teaching program. Bar-Ilan University started a graduate program on conflict management and negotiation during the last academic year, and Tel Aviv University will introduce the subject as part of its newly inaugurated Graduate School of Government and Policy. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is also considering setting up such a course.
The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Higher Education said it was not aware of such programs at Palestinian universities. “We don’t have the money to deal properly with basics like medicine and law,” a ministry official said. “What you’re talking about is a luxury for us at this stage.”
At the Palestinian Birzeit University, although there is no separate program on conflict resolution, it is a subject that is taken very seriously in its graduate teaching.
“We teach it as courses, not as a program,” said Roger Heacock of Birzeit.
“It’s something that we’re very interested in, something the students are very interested in, but it’s not something we’re planning to make into a program.”
Heacock said his students were taking seminars in ethnic conflict and its resolution, hearing lectures from visiting experts and, once a year, running a simulated international peace conference, in which conflict resolution plays a major role.
He said students may get better value from a course structure such as Birzeit’s rather than a full-scale program, given the limited budget.
“We don’t have a good Israeli studies program, for example,” he said.
While the Israeli programs give intensive interdisciplinary exposure to groups of 18 to 25 students, Birzeit’s international studies program gives around 100 students some teaching in conflict resolution.
“It’s always in the air, we deal with it all the time,” Heacock said.
The Israeli programs typically deal with techniques for preventing, managing or resolving a wide range of conflicts. The conflicts can be between states, ethnic groups, religious and secular, or they can be labor disputes.
Professor Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov is the founder of the Hebrew University’s program.
“Unfortunately this is almost the world’s best laboratory for conflict,” he said. “Internal conflicts, external conflicts, negotiations, mediation — there’s a whole sea of issues.”
Given the need, it seems surprising that it has taken so long for this type of study to catch on in Israel. Bar-Siman-Tov believes this is partly because, for a large part of its history, Israel was absorbed in survival, with few resources to spare for preventive strategies. “We have become experts in warfare; now we need to be negotiators,” he said.
While this field is only one strand of the courses being taught here, it could well result in a new generation of politicians and diplomats with better tools for the job, said Bar-Siman-Tov. “That is the hope.”
In one of his classes, for example, students with backgrounds in law, psychology, political science and a range of other disciplines looked at precedents from a number of overseas conflicts and discussed America’s role as a global policeman.
Sharon Rosenberg, a first-year student, intended to concentrate her career on research.
“I come from political science and I didn’t want to go on to something like business administration. This course fits my interests very well: It’s political science, it’s international relations. That was my main concern.” Rosenberg suggested that the belated boom in these types of courses had less to do with the plethora of conflicts here, and more to do with the growing acceptance of mediation as a social and legal tool.
“I think the course started not because of the closeness to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but more because of the flourishing mediation area.” Still, she said the seeds of conflict prevention, and the ability for one cultural group to understand another, should be planted in the elementary schools rather than universities.
“If we were to have more meetings between Israelis and Arabs at the age of 8, 10, or 12 years, you’d see a difference,” she said.
Chris Cantor, a doctoral candidate, said the interdisciplinary approach is the academic wave of the future. “These days, subjects are not dealt with in such an exclusive way. There is a trend toward interdisciplinary research, so that was the first characteristic of this program that attracted me.
“There is increasing understanding that the main characteristic of society is interaction between people. When barriers start to come down, when concepts of pluralism, free markets and globalization start to appear, then patterns of negotiation — how to deal with ‘the other’ — are the main subjects with which we have to deal these days.”
The program includes not only theoretical classes, but also workshops, including a mediation workshop. Said Cantor: “I practiced mediation in a private mediation center and one of the most beautiful things, I think, is that it gives you new glasses with which to see the world — not only at the ethical level, not only at the political level, but also at the interpersonal level — with your wife, your neighbor, your community. I think that these understandings are very important, not only for the diplomats,” he added.
Professor Moshe Semyonov of Tel Aviv University said his course will deal with practical aspects of mediation and negotiation, but the thrust will be toward research.
“We need practitioners and we need researchers. We shall be focusing on a graduate program and a research school,” he said. “We want to be a center of academic excellence.”
Like Rosenberg, he sees one factor in the new enthusiasm for these kinds of programs being the growth of private courses in mediation, which is becoming a popular alternative to the traditional, adversary system of fighting out every dispute in court. It’s a trend being encouraged by those at the top of Israel’s overloaded court system.
The diplomatic aspects of conflict resolution are also important. In fact, the Hebrew University program was able to get off the ground only because of the financial support of Swiss benefactors who wanted to make a contribution to the peace process.
A local example of an attempt at preventive diplomacy was the so-called London Channel, in which Palestinian and Israeli experts met in Jerusalem under the auspices of the British government to talk about practical aspects of jointly managing the city in the event of a peace agreement.
The series of meetings, put on hold in light of the current intifada, was to a large extent an attempt to pre-empt problems and arguments before they actually occurred.
Bar-Siman-Tov stressed that it’s important to incorporate psychological and cultural understanding of the other side, into the negotiating process. “We need to be aware of the importance of culture in negotiations and also of personalities. If you look, you see that there is, for example, an Arab culture, but personalities make the difference. How [Anwar] Sadat negotiated, King Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Hafez Assad, you find four different styles.”