Content: Conflict and ChangeThis is a featured page

Below is a summary of Chapter 4 (Conflict and Change) in Lederach's "The Little Book of Conflict Transformation", published on Beyond Intractability:

Both conflict and change are a normal part of human life. Conflict is continuously present in human relationships, and the fabric of these relationships is constantly adapting and changing. Before discussing practical approaches to conflict transformation, it is important to better understand the link between conflict and change. There are four central modes in which conflict impacts situations and changes things:
  1. the personal,
  2. the relational,
  3. the structural, and
  4. the cultural.[2]
In addition, we can think about these changes in response to two questions. First, from a descriptive view, what does conflict change? And second, from the standpoint of responding to conflict as it arises, what kind of changes do we seek? In the first arena, we are simply acknowledging the common patterns and impact of social conflict. In the second, we recognize the need to identify what our values and intentions may be as we actively seek to respond, intervene, and create change.

Change Goals in Conflict Transformation: Transformation understands social conflict as evolving from, and producing changes in, the personal, relational, structural and cultural dimensions of human experience. It seeks to promote constructive processes within each of these dimensions.
  • Personal: Minimize destructive effects of social conflict and maximize the potential for personal growth at physical, emotional and spiritual levels.
  • Relational: Minimize poorly functioning communication and maximize understanding.
  • Structural: Understand and address root causes of violent conflict; promote nonviolent mechanisms; minimize violence; foster structures that meet basic human needs and maximize public participation.
  • Cultural: Identify and understand the cultural patterns that contribute to the rise of violent expressions of conflict; identify cultural resources for constructively handling conflict.


The personal dimension refers to changes effected in and desired for the individual. This includes the cognitive, emotional, perceptual, and spiritual aspects of human experience over the course of conflict. From a descriptive perspective, transformation suggests that individuals are affected by conflict in both negative and positive ways. For example, conflict affects our physical well-being, self-esteem, emotional stability, capacity to perceive accurately, and spiritual integrity. Prescriptively, (i.e., relating to what one should do) transformation represents deliberate intervention to minimize the destructive effects of social conflict and maximize its potential for individual growth at physical, emotional, and spiritual levels. The relational dimension depicts the changes affected in and desired for the face-to-face relationships. Here issues of emotions, power, and interdependence, and the communicative and interactive aspects of conflict are central. Descriptively, transformation refers to how the patterns of communication and interaction in relationships are affected by conflict. It looks beyond visible issues to the underlying changes produced by conflict in how people perceive, what they pursue, and how they structure their relationships. Most significantly, social conflict makes explicit how close or distant people wish to be, how they will use and share power, what they perceive of themselves and each other, and what patterns of interaction they wish to have. Prescriptively, transformation represents intentional intervention to minimize poorly functioning communication and maximize mutual understanding. This includes efforts to bring to the surface in a more explicit manner the relational fears, hopes and goals of the people involved. The structural dimension highlights the underlying causes of conflict, and stresses the ways in which social structures, organizations, and institutions are built, sustained, and changed by conflict. It is about the ways people build and organize social, economic, and institutional relationships to meet basic human needs and provide access to resources and decision-making. At the descriptive level transformation refers to the analysis of social conditions that give rise to conflict and the way that conflict affects social structural change in existing social, political and economic institutions. At a prescriptive level, transformation represents efforts to provide insight into underlying causes and social conditions that create and foster violent expressions of conflict, and to promote nonviolent mechanisms that reduce adversarial interaction and minimize violence. Pursuit of this change fosters structures that meet basic human needs (substantive justice) and maximize people's participation in decisions that affect them (procedural justice). The cultural dimension refers to the ways that conflict changes the patterns of group life as well as the ways that culture affects the development of processes to handle and respond to conflict. At a descriptive level, transformation seeks to understand how conflict affects and changes cultural patterns of a group, and how those accumulated and shared patterns affect the way people in a given context understand and respond to conflict. Prescriptively, transformation seeks to uncover the cultural patterns that contribute to violence in a given context, and to identify and build on existing cultural resources and mechanisms for handling conflict.

Lederach, John Paul/Maiese, Michelle, Conflict Transformation, in: Burgess, Guy/Burgess, Heidi (eds.), Beyond Intractability. Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: October 2003 <http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/transformation/> (accessed 27 July 2009).


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