Beyond Intractability: A Free Knowledge Base on More Constructive Approaches to Destructive Conflict

Introduction: Brazilian economist Olympio Barbanti explains how people working on development issues need to do a local conflict-assessment to determine what conflicts are being caused by the development effort and what impacts those and other conflicts are likely to have on the success of those efforts.Olympio Barbanti talks about the shortcomings of using U.S. based conflict resolution models in the developing world. He says the lack of regulatory structure is a severe obstacle to U.S. models of conflict resolution in developing countries.

This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).

The Developing World and US Conflict Resolution Models
Olympio Barbanti
Faculty in the Department of International Relations at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Interviewed by
Julian Portilla
2003

For example, in developing countries, social theory is very influenced by some kind of Marxist approach, like in Latin America... together with a Marxist approach pose some limitations to the application to the conflict resolution approach to these same countries. People do not believe that conflicts can be resolved or they are not capable of sorting out their differences in a rational or formal way. In fact, they believe that you need to increase conflicts as a way of promoting a change in society.

The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy. -- W.H. Beveridge

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Beyond Intractability Version IV
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