The Real Origins of ICAR: An Experiment in Conflict Resolution Archaeology

Institutions come out of people and ideas, not out of other institutions, and ICAR is no exception to this rule. Its real origins go much further back than the fifteen years we are celebrating in this volume--this voluminous issue--of the ICAR Newsletter. "Great things are done when men and mountains meet," proclaimed the poet (obviously a blatant sexist), "that are not done by jostling in the street," a sentiment with which we mundane street jostlers can only agree.

To start at the beginning, two founding--how shall I say it--"originators of the male persuasion," Bryant Wedge and John Burton, can be credited (to some degree) with starting up the field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution and--much, much later--ICAR. Both had points at which they became interested in the idea that conflicts could be studied and resolved, and it was these ideas that led them to found the field and our Institute.

Bryant Wedge, ICAR's first director, was, in spite of appearances, a closet romantic. (One day I may reveal in these pages the truth about Bryant, the beautiful Muscovite, and the American Express card.) He always used to say that his moment of revelation occurred in 1954 when, in spite of the fact that his true calling lay in the field of psychiatry, he somehow found himself in the middle of the Eisenhower/Dulles administration's efforts to overthrow the vaguely left-leaning regime of Guzman Arbenz in Guatemala, an effort which involved, inter alia, many students whom Bryant had been teaching on the one hand and the United States Marine Corps (minus only John Wayne) on the other.

Bryant found himself literally "in the middle," acting as a go-between for the students and for the United States Embassy in Guatemala, which--he was only later to find out--had been heavily involved in planning this U.S. intervention, a Cold War success that set back the fortunes of most people in Guatemala by several decades. Thus, he was engaged in Track Two activity before that phrase had even been invented.

"It seemed to me," he said many years later as we sat in a Washington bar, drinking white wine and getting to know one another, "that there had to be a less wasteful way of dealing with conflicts--and maybe psychology and psychiatry could help."

Pinning down John Burton's moment of revelation is more difficult. There probably wasn't one single thing that turned him, the other major influence on ICAR, away from power politics--conflict resolution by winning--and the then widespread worship of great power manipulation and "leverage." That he was a representative of a small power like Australia in the 1940s obviously helped, but not to be forgotten was his original doctoral dissertation which dealt with the way in which Western economic policies in Asia and the Pacific had narrowed down the options open to Japan's decision makers and set them on a military road toward the then Dutch East Indies by way of Pearl Harbor. Not a popular thesis in 1942, but a signal and original contribution to the literature on how not to achieve "conflict prevention."

By the time I got to know John in the 1960s, he had at least two previous careers--diplomat, then politician--and always, as a backup, farmer. By the sixties he was reading books on social work, industrial problem solving, systems theory, and other bizarre subjects for a professor teaching in a Department of International Law and Relations and, as a result, experimenting with ideas for small-group problem solving based upon decision-making theories that had little to do with power, leverage, threats, or deterrence.

I believe that the real impetus, however, came from the rivalry that existed between two competing schools of thought in international relations: the "Realists" of the London School of Economics and the "Behaviouralists" of University College, London, where Burton taught--although there were one or two renegades and cross-overs within both camps. When challenged to apply his behaviouralist ideas to a "real" situation--using the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East was artfully suggested as a "reasonable" test case--John declined the suggested arena but took up the principle of a test. Rather than the Middle East, he returned to a part of the world he knew well where, as a young diplomat, he had won notoriety by supporting the cause of Indonesian nationalism against the returning Dutch colonialists. He traveled to Indonesia and Malaysia, then locked in a minor but protracted conflict known locally as Konfrontasi(confrontation).

Using his ability to gain entry to top decision makers on both sides (soon to become three with the breakaway of Singapore from the Malaysian Federation), John persuaded the leaders in conflict to send representatives to an informal academic forum in London to discuss the origins of the conflict and possible solutions. The first series of what later came to be called "problem solving workshops" took place in the fall of 1965 and the spring of 1966. Konfrontasi ended in the summer of 1966.

Of course, as a somewhat elderly undergraduate student, I knew very little of all this. Lecturers would suddenly cancel classes only to reappear later, smiling mysteriously and looking slightly smug. John circulated some of the documents and reactions of the panel to our senior class with names ostentatiously whited out. However, we knew that those involved had included Eric Trist and Fred Emery from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (which is why I occasionally smile sadly when reading papers that comment on problem solving's neglect of the human relations dimension of conflict transformation); a youngish State Department lawyer named Roger Fisher; and a junior minister from the British Foreign Office. (So much for not mixing Track One and Track Two!)

Later that year, I had the chance to participate, as a very junior assistant, in the second of these exercises, this time involving the communities on Cyprus. I always love it when visiting speakers talk about the pioneering Cyprus Workshops "conducted by Chris Mitchell and John Burton in the 1960s"! But even if the details are wrong, they are indeed referring to one of the seeds from which ICAR grew, planted back in London in that now distant decade and later developed by Burton and Wedge here in Fairfax, Virginia, twenty years ago.