Communication and Conflict Studies

Disciplinary Connections, Research Directions

Adrienne P. Lamberti, Anne R. Richards, Adrienne P. Lamberti, Anne R. Richards

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030327453
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030327460
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores relations between communication and conflict. How one thinks about communication is demonstrated as shaping how one approaches conflict, and vice versa. Individuals engaged in conflict transformation apply the tools and strategies of their field while communicating to widely divergent audiences. Professional communicators not only create an infinite range of documents to help ensure that work is accomplished effectively, efficiently, and safely, but also address conflicts in the workplace and in the public sphere. Thoughtfully exploring connections between communication studies and conflict studies, this collection engages with research and practice on topics including the potential of social media during revolution, the role of gender during mediation, and the importance of critical genre usage during industrial crisis.

© The Author(s) 2019

A. P. Lamberti, A. R. Richards (eds.)Communication and Conflict Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32746-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Dynamic Connections: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Conflict and Communication

Anne R. Richards¹ and Adrienne P. Lamberti²

(1)

Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA

(2)

University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, USA

Anne R. Richards (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Adrienne P. Lamberti

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter illustrates that how one thinks about communication must shape how one approaches conflict, and vice versa. Individuals hoping to transform conflict not only must apply the tools and strategies of their field but must do so in the context of communicating to specific and often widely divergent audiences. Likewise, not only must communicators create documents to help ensure that work is accomplished effectively, efficiently, and safely, but they must deal with their own and others’ conflicts. This chapter highlights research and practice in a range of contexts, including the roles of social media in war, of gender in alternative dispute resolution, and of genre during times of industrial crisis.

Keywords

Communication StudiesConflict StudiesInterdisciplinarityIntersectionalityTechnologyConflict Resolution

End Abstract

Communication and Conflict Studies: Disciplinary Connections, Research Directions has been edited by communication studies (ComS) and conflict studies (CS) scholars who believe that substantial insights are possible when scholars from our disciplines deeply converse. We share Bray and Rzepecka’s (2018) assumption that how one thinks about communication shapes how one thinks about conflict: Their Communication and Conflict in Multiple Settings, which characterizes the connection between the fields as reflexive and symbiotic, is just one of many contemporary works studying “conflict as an essential outworking of communication” (p. 1). We offer here a synthesis of representative scholarship in these mutually illuminating fields and a contextualization of the three chapters on which this book is based.

Writers in many conflict-oriented disciplines have noted the lack of scholarly attention paid to overwhelming cultural changes wrought by rapidly diffusing communication technologies. Students of sociology and criminal justice, for instance, are entreated to pay closer attention to the role of communication in transforming conflict. Collins (2012) has theorized that, regardless of scope or intensity, conflict occurs in three chronological phases: Explosion, plateau, and dissipation. Taken together, these phases constitute what others have referred to as the arc of conflict. Collins’s early research did not take into account the potentially complicating effect of social media on this model. In response, Roberts, Innes, Preece, and Roger (2017) explored the effects of cyber hate speech disseminated through social media. They cited a debt to researchers whose studies of the grisly murder of fusilier Lee Rigby by Islamic extremists in Woolrich, United Kingdom employed “high resolution empirical evidence to warrant their claims through collecting and analyzing social communication from an array of social media platforms” (p. 435). Collins’s explosion phase was present in the early aftermath of Rigby’s murder, and this phase was fueled by public use of social media to ascertain facts about the event.

Simultaneously communicating on social media, ideologically oriented groups were more likely to remain active on social media after the first phase of conflict had passed. The plateau phase was interrupted by “surges” and “upswings” in relevant social media activity that accompanied additional related conflicts and focal events such as Rigby’s funeral (p. 441). Although the murder of Rigby was carried out by Islamic extremists, the violence that followed was generated, in the main, by extremists of the far right. Roberts and his colleagues concluded that “[c]ontemporary criminological accounts of the workings of informal social control, certainly need to accommodate [the] digital dimension” (p. 452).

Lee, Gelfand, and Kashima (2014) explore the role of communication in conflict acceleration, specifically in the context of third-party conflict contagion, or the spread of conflict “[b]eyond the initial disputants to involve a multitude of others” (p. 68). In this framework, individuals who affiliate with a party to conflict but are not themselves directly involved may share distorted information in order to gain support for their positions. The resulting effect is magnified as inaccurate information is shared repeatedly, and such sharing is made exponentially more possible through social media.

Individuals producing traditional media (newsprint, radio, television) have been obliged to gather much of their material from social media sites in the case of the Syrian Civil War, for the region is a fatal one for journalists. According to Herrero-Jiménez, Carratalá, and Berganza (2018), social media have also influenced European parliamentary agenda-making with respect to that conflict. Such sites can provide access to sensational material and have been mined for news not only about the Syrian Republic, but about the Syrian opposition and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In the first phase of the integration of social media and the Syrian conflict, social media were useful to European parliament members with an international agenda who leveraged electronic discourse to gain traction in traditional media. In the second phase, however, social media became increasingly disruptive as ISIL and other terrorist organizations used them to coordinate attacks, including some on European soil.

The Internet has played an expanding role in disseminating news and information about war since Kosovo, the first “internet war” or “web war” (1988–1989; Terzis, 2016), and it is difficult to imagine a major conflict in the early years of the twenty-first century that would not be at least partly mediated and shaped through information and communication technologies (ICTs). “Engagement in virtual interaction rituals seems to be an important component of conflict dynamics,” writes Roberts et al. (2017). “In this sense, the contemporary ‘arc of conflict’ is increasingly enabled and digitally performed” (p. 452).

Given media’s global implications, it is understandable that scholars such as Savrum and Miller (2015) have lamented the absence of a body of international relations research that would reflect the importance of traditional media as well as ICTs and social media in conflict generation and transformation. Media “not only [provide] information but [shape] the way people perceive issues,” they write. “Media not only have the ability to influence how people act in regards to issues” (p. 13) but may contribute to the deterioration of “ethnic relations, intercultural relations, and conflict resolution in situations where [they heighten] negative impressions of conflict resolution proposals” (p. 14). Introducing a special issue on communication, technology, and political conflict for the Journal of Peace Research, Weidmann (2015), too, notes that scholars of international studies “have been relatively silent when it comes to examining the effect of ICT on conflict mobilization and escalation” (p. 263).

Although communication’s centrality to conflict in our historical moment is being studied with newfound zeal because of the expanding capacities of ICTs, it is important to emphasize that the relation between communication and social change of all types is by necessity integral. That is, not only is communication by definition social, but social life and thus social change are enabled through communication. The series of historical instances discussed below, including the birth of nonviolent movements and their energizing of grassroots support, as well as specific communicative moves such as irony to calibrate social movements’ public reception, illuminates communication’s power to shape conflicting ideologies, a potential that is at the root of any political position. For instance, communication plays a central role in comparatively nonviolent social change movements—beginning with the role of consensus in achieving their aims. Thomas, McGarty, Stuart, Smith, and Bourgeois (2018) are among those scholars interested in the broad topic of the role of communication in promoting social transformation. Rather than study a specific instance of protest or a specific “real world” event, they study the role of consensus in building commitment to change.

According to Thomas et al., individuals must possess a sense of self-determination, or personal identity, before committing meaningfully to a cause. Another requisite is social identity, which takes into account an interest in beings and things outside of self, family, and friends. Without an expanded identity, there can be no meaningful commitment to a social movement. These researchers also assert that individuals must develop a sense of shared values and positions if they are to become motivated to act on behalf of themselves and others: “Such commitment is likely to be predicated on social knowledge about what relevant others think and intend to do, and this is knowledge that can only be obtained through communication” (p. 616).

Studying approximately 140 Australian students aged 15-20, Thomas and her colleagues created small groups in order to study the usefulness of consensus in developing commitment to social change—in this case, the hypothetical provision of sanitation and safe drinking water, which is among the United Nations 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. When small-group communication was able to generate consensus on the topics of what type of change to pursue and how to pursue it, participants were helped to develop a social identity. Subsequently, participants could “internalize pursuing that agenda as intrinsically worthwhile and satisfying …. This internalized motivation was associated with increased commitment to the cause (social identification)” (p. 624). Crucially, the more strongly participants felt that the discussion task was something they wished to do, for instance because it was important to them or gave them pleasure in some way, the more meaningful they felt the consensus process had been and the more committed they became to acting in the interest of social change.

Also exploring the role of small-group communication and grass-roots consensus building on behalf of nonviolent change is Holtan’s research (2019). Studying the birth control movement in mid-twentieth-century Iowa, Holton briefly discusses noteworthy leadership by Violet Spencer, a working-class woman who corresponded with Margaret Sanger (the individual most closely associated with the national movement) and was a prominent advocate at the beginning of the Iowa movement. ¹ The individual on whom Holton focuses, however, was a Des Moines socialite who was instrumental in shifting, mainly alongside other “socially well-connected white women,” public opinion about the appropriateness of discussions of family planning. According to Holtan, although national figures like Sanger were at times involved in the Iowa Maternal Health League (later Planned Parenthoo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Dynamic Connections: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Conflict and Communication
• 2. Are There Ways That Digital Technologies Break Down Walls of Communication During Conflict? Lessons from Leaders of a Women’s Movement in Egypt
• 3. Is Mediation Too “Feminine” for Him? Men and Masculinity During Mediation Communication
• 4. The Conflict of Genre: Disciplinary Terminology and Conceptual Overlap in the Context of the Annual Report
• Back Matter