One Paradigm, Many Worlds: Conflict Resolution across the Disciplines

Mitch Rosenwald, Ed.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2008)
Reviewed by Charu Gupta
Reprinted with Permission from CNY Peace Studies Journal

One Paradigm, Many Worlds: Conflict Resolution across the Disciplines has one goal and that is to demonstrate that the paradigm of collaborative conflict resolution has a broad application across the social sciences. Edited by Mitchell Rosenwald, the book is a collection of essays written by various scholars from disciplines like: human services, elementary and secondary education, higher education, philosophy, and international relations.

As it promises, One Paradigm, Many Worlds: Conflict Resolution across the Disciplines provides something that has been missing in the genre and that is a cross discipline approach. A number of books have been published about using peaceful methods to resolve disputes. But each book was focused on one area of interest. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall’s A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-Violent Conflict examines world history to demonstrate that peaceful methods brought an end to dictatorships, colonialism, and civil injustice. Colman McCarthy’s All of One Peace: Essays on Nonviolence is a collection of McCarthy’s essays from his career with The Washington Post advocating the use of peace in a variety of areas ranging from international relations to abortion. Conflict Resolution by Daniel Dana is designed for the business world and provides the tools managers need to resolve workplace conflicts. James A. Schellenberg’s Conflict Resolution: Theory, Research, and Practice is a study of classical and contemporary conflict theories. Finally, David and Roger Johnson’s book, Reducing School Violence through Conflict Resolution, educates students on how to reduce peer violence peacefully. Rosenwald has moved the genre one step forward by using a cross discipline approach to further the discussion on collaborative conflict resolution.

An added bonus is that the reader will definitely get the feel that the essays are more like a conversation among peers sitting at a roundtable sharing insightful stories and experiences or debating worst case scenarios. Undoubtedly, this is a result of the fact that an interdisciplinary conference on conflict resolution inspired the work and that most of the essays share anecdotal evidence rather than concrete research data. This reliance upon anecdotal evidence is one of the weaknesses of the book. It is most noticeable in the chapters that do not discuss human services.

As the title suggests One Paradigm, Many Worlds: Conflict Resolution across the Disciplines does attempt to apply the paradigm of conflict resolution in many different areas. In this respect, Rosenwald achieves his goal. As the essays are organized by discipline and begin with conflict resolution as a useful model at the individual level and ends with the model being applied at the aggregate level in the arena of international relations, it does demonstrate this paradigm’s broad applicability.

However, the book would have benefitted from two things that currently are missing. The first is evidence or data to support the conclusions made in the chapters about elementary and secondary education and international relations. The second is more discussion about conflict resolution at the global scale. The emphasis appears to be on the human services and higher education. In these essays, contributors describe the successes they have had following this paradigm in real world applications. But this aspect is missing on a global scale. The essay that takes on the responsibility of applying the paradigm to international relations is woefully inadequate. A few more essays about successful examples of conflict resolution on an international scale would have balanced the discussion between the individual and aggregate levels and strengthened the book’s argument. (No pun intended.)