About the Parents of the Field Project

From ICAR News, Volume 4, Issue 2:

"The Parents of the Field": Archiving Project to be Featured on ICAR's Website

Jannie Botes and Christopher Mitchell

The field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution is a relative newcomer to academia, with its roots reaching back to the era immediately after the Second World War and the onset of the “Cold War.” While many of the leading figures of that pioneering era are still contributing to the ever-expanding body of work in a fledgling field, several others are “getting on in years.” All have important narratives to share about those early days, when it was a struggle just to get a course on “Post-Conflict Peace-building” or “Second Track Intervention” into curricula that were typically dominated by balance of power theories or thinking about “the unthinkable” (aka nuclear war).

For the past seven years, there has been an ongoing effort to obtain interviews with that earlier generation, the “Parents of the Field,” who are now passing from the scene, and to make the results of those interviews available to the current and rising generations of scholars, scholar-practitioners, and students of conflict analysis and resolution. The idea for the archiving initiative was originally conceived by S-CAR alumnus, Dr. Jannie Botes, now Director of the Program on Negotiation and Conflict Management (CNCM) at the University of Baltimore. Botes, who had previously had a career in television with the South African Broadcasting Corporation, was convinced of the need to record the views and memories of this pioneering generation while they were still accessible. He approached me with the idea and enlisted my help for the project.

Supported by a small grant from the Hewlett Foundation, we spent a good deal of time, between 2002 and 2007, crisscrossing the U. S. and parts of Europe, carrying a video camera and sound recording equipment along the way, in search of our academic progenitors. Together we interviewed as many “parents of the field’ as we could persuade to talk to us for an hour or two, about the developing field of the 1950s and 1960s, about the world of the Cold War and decolonization, and about institution building (and institution collapsing) in the U.S., Scandinavia, Canada, Britain, and Europe. Once the conversations were collected, our team arranged for the videos to be transcribed and edited, and for the transcriptions to be checked for misspellings, mis-hearings, and misinterpretations. Finally the fruits of this work are becoming available, on the S-CAR and CNCM websites, and as part of Guy and Heidi Burgess’ “Beyond Intractability” website.

Christopher Mitchell