Publications

Commemorating Morton Deutsch’s 95th birthday, this book presents ten major texts by this highly respected social psychologist on war and peace. This second volume presents Deutsch in his role as a leading social science activist on issues of war and peace – writing papers, making speeches and participating in demonstrations. After serving in the U.S. Air Force during World War II and being awarded two Distinguished Flying Cross medals, as a psychologist he was determined to work for a more peaceful world. Influenced by Kurt Lewin, who believed that nothing was as practical as a good theory, Deutsch pursued theoretical work on such issues as cooperation-competition, conflict resolution and social justice with regard to issues of war and peace. As President of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the International Society of Political Psychology, he helped to foster social science efforts to make for a more peaceful world.

Morton Deutsch: A Pioneer in Developing Peace Psychology

Morton Deutsch: Major Texts on Peace Psychology

Every workplace is a minefield of conflict, and each day brings new challenges. How do you launch a new product when your team can’t agree on a basic concept? What do you do when a promotion turns your peers into your direct reports? How do you move ahead when you and your boss don’t see eye-to-eye? Peter T. Coleman and Robert Ferguson, leading experts in the field of conflict resolution, argue that every conflict is shaped by the same inescapable force: power. To turn any conflict to your advantage, you must first understand the true power dynamics at play. Making Conflict Work teaches you how to identify the nature of a conflict, determine your power position relative to your adversaries, and enact the best tactical approach for achieving your goals.

Making Conflict Work

Written for both the seasoned professional and the student who wants to deepen their understanding of the processes involved in conflicts and their knowledge of how to manage them constructively, this book provides an understanding for managing conflicts at all levels—interpersonal, intergroup, organizational, and international. Each chapter focuses around a central case or illustration of the practice with a discussion for both training and direct intervention. This new edition includes companion downloadable chapters and new information on conflict resolution and IT, social networks, schools, families, environment and much more.

The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, 3rd Edition

This is a book about conflict. But it is also a book about essential features of human nature that are expressed in every type of human interaction. In an even broader sense, this is a book about the basic processes that link conflict to a vast array of phenomena in the physical world. These seem like incompatible agendas. Conflict is not the only way humans interact, after all, and the conflicts that define human interactions would seem to have little in common with things like weather patterns, landslides, or bacterial growth. But as we shall see, science in recent years has exposed a set of basic operating rules that connect processes of all kinds in physical and social reality. This synthetic view is more than an abstraction; to the contrary, breakthroughs in mathematics, empirical methodology, and computer simulations have enabled scientists to identify the ways in which common processes and properties are manifest in very different phenomena. Our aim is to describe this new perspective and shine its concepts, methods, and tools on the recurrent and all-important issue of conflict in interpersonal, intergroup, and international relations.

Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations

Scholarship on the psychology of peace has been accumulating for decades. The approach employed has been predominantly centered on addressing and preventing conflict and violence and less on the conditions associated with promoting peace. Concerns around nuclear annihilation, enemy images, discrimination, denial of basic human needs, terrorism and torture have been the focal points of most research. The Psychological Components of a Sustainable Peace moves beyond a prevention-orientation to the study of the conditions for increasing the probabilities for sustainable, cooperative peace. Such a view combines preventative scholarship with a promotive-orientation to the study of peaceful situations and societies.

Psychological Components of a Sustainable Peace

One in every twenty difficult conflicts ends up not in a calm reconciliation or tolerable standoff but as an acute and lasting antagonism. Such conflicts—the five percent—can be found among the diplomatic and political clashes we read about every day in the newspaper but also, and in a no less damaging and dangerous form, in our private and personal lives, within families, in workplaces, and among neighbors. These self-perpetuating conflicts resist mediation, defy conventional wisdom, and drag on and on, worsening over time. Once we get pulled in, it is nearly impossible to escape. The five percent rule us.

The Five Percent

Morton Deutsch is internationally known for his pioneering theoretical and research contributions relating to cooperation, conflict resolution, prejudice, social justice, and peace. This book collects six of Morton Deutsch’s most influential papers, which together analyze essential issues in social relations and identify conditions necessary for addressing them constructively. Complementary chapters by top contemporary scholars in the conflict resolution/social justice/social interdependence field imbue these works with particular relevance for today. In addition, Deutsch’s introduction reflects on the wartime milieu and social reform era that set him on the path toward his penetrating insights, and his concluding essay reveals implications of his work not only for training, mentoring, and research, but also for promoting a larger culture of sustainable peace and justice.

Many practitioners of conflict resolution dismiss the contributions of theorists and researchers, particularly when the research challenges their own opinions or methods. At the same time, scholars often fail to utilize the expertise of highly skilled practitioners in their development of theory, and research designs often fail to take into account what practitioners and policy makers want or need to know. In response to the growing concern in the field of conflict resolution over this “gap” between theory and practice, in 1999 the ICCCR began convening an informal seminar on conflict resolution theory and practice. The lively discussions from this seminar inspired the development and publication of The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, edited by Professors Morton Deutsch and Peter T. Coleman (Jossey-Bass, 2000). Many of the chapters of the book are organized by first presenting the theoretical ideas in the substantive areas being discussed, then drawing out the implications of these ideas for understanding conflict, and concluding with the development of these ideas for educating or training people to manage their conflicts more constructively. This book was the recipient of the Center for Professional Responsibility (CPR) 2000 Award for Excellence. The new second edition, with Eric Marcus joining the editing team and coordinated by Kathryn Crawford, was published in 2006.

What moves people to work with each other rather than against each other when locked-into destructive, long-term conflicts? This two-part series, part of our ongoing practice-to-theory project, presents the findings from a study that explored various methods of eliciting constructive engagement from stakeholders – through interviews with 17 expert scholar-practitioners working with protracted conflicts. A grounded-theory analysis was applied to the interviews to allow new insights into constructive conflict engagement to emerge from the data. Our objective was to enhance our understanding of the phenomenon of constructive engagement in settings of protracted conflict for the purposes of developing more robust theories and practices.

Peter Coleman, Barbara Gray of Pennsylvania State University, and Linda Putnam of Texas A&M University have edited a new special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist on intractable conflict. Intractable conflicts are characterized by intransigence, longevity, complexity, and serious trauma for the disputants and often for bystanders as well. In this special issue we explore the nature of intractable conflicts, their root causes, and innovation approaches for reversing or ameliorating them.

Features papers from a conference on interrupting oppression sponsored by the ICCCR (2006).  This series of papers provides a framework for thinking about oppression and how to overcome it. It considers the value premise underlying the use of the term “oppression.” It then discusses the nature of oppression, the forms it takes, and what keeps it in place. In its final two sections, it focuses on awakening the sense of injustice and the strategies and tactics for overcoming injustice.

Featuring Pioneering Work of Morton Deutsch Honored
The career of Morton Deutsch, Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of ICCCR, was honored Fall, 2008 in a special issue of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. The issue contains a biographical article on the decades of prominent work by Deutsch on conflict, cooperation, and social justice. It also includes articles by several of his former students, including Kenneth Kressel, Susan Opotow, and Peter T. Coleman.

This special issue of Peace and Conflict will present a series of theoretical articles that approach the study of conflict and conflict resolution from the perspective of dynamical systems theory. This perspective has been employed to conceptualize and investigate complex, dynamic phenomena in many areas of science (Weisbuch, 1992; Johnson, 2001; Strogatz, 2003) from cancerous cellular mutations to catastrophic global climate shifts. It includes six papers; an introductory article which answers questions about the utility of the dynamical-systems perspective for understanding and addressing conflict, and five conceptual papers which employ the metaphors and methods of the perspective to critical issues of conflict and peace.

Dr. Peter T. Coleman and Dr. Morton Deutsch wrote Chapter 19 of this book. The purpose in editing this volume is to bring together in one place international perspectives on key concepts, themes, theories, and practices that are defining peace psychology as we begin the twenty-first century. The editors share with our international colleagues a broad vision of peace psychology, covering a wide range of topics such as ethnic conflict, family violence, hate crimes, militarism, conflict management, social justice, nonviolent approaches to peace, and peace education. In addition to providing a useful resource that integrates current research and practices for scholars and practitioners, they wanted the book to be accessible enough to introduce a new generation of students, both graduate and upper-division undergraduate, to the field. When organizing the topics in the book, they have tried to capture the four main currents in peace psychology: (1) violence, (2) social inequalities, (3) peacemaking, and (4) the pursuit of social justice.

Free online access here.

This book is concerned with the social psychology of distributive justice.  The concept of distributive justice centers on the fairness of the distribution of the conditions and goods that affect individual well-being.  Issues of distributive justice pervade social life.  They occur not only at the societal level but also in intimate social relations.  They may arise whenever something of value is scarce and not everyone can have what he wants, or whenever something of negative value (a cost, a harm) cannot be avoided by all.  They also may be brought into play whenever there is an exchange in a relationship.
Click here for a pdf of this book.