INTRACTABLE CONFLICTS: UNIQUE WHILE THEY ARE INTRACTABLE

Intractable conflicts are a subset of civil conflicts that, due to empirical and definitional complications, have not received sustained attention in comparative politics research. Social scientists who study civil conflict have produced a volume of important work—much of which uses large-N statistical methods—on what causes conflicts to endure or recur (Collier, Hoeffler, and Söderbom Reference Collier, Hoeffler and Söderbom2004; Cunningham Reference Cunningham2006; Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan Reference Cunningham, Gleditsch and Salehyan2009; Walter Reference Walter2004). Intractable conflicts may feature relatively low-intensity violence compared to other cases of civil conflict. Therefore, in cross-country datasets, they may not always meet the casualty threshold for inclusion over a continuous span of years, despite the persistence of the political dispute that drives them.^{Footnote 3} In event-based data with broader inclusion criteria, intractable conflict zones can generate thousands of observations that—when supplemented by appropriate country knowledge—allows for analysis of many types of variation (e.g., temporal, event type, location, and number of fatalities).^{Footnote 4} Intractable—or seemingly intractable—conflicts in places including Northern Ireland, Palestine, Colombia, Chechnya, and Kashmir have been the focus of several small-N qualitative or mixed-method studies, which often draw on extensive field research (see, e.g., Arjona Reference Arjona2016; Bakke Reference Bakke2015; Lustick Reference Lustick1993; Pearlman Reference Pearlman2011; Staniland Reference Staniland2012). However, anecdotal accounts—as well as the experience of this author—suggest that political science graduate students have been discouraged from focusing on ongoing, intractable conflicts due in part to valid concerns about data access, the potential for sudden political transformation, and the belief that such cases are sui generis.

In fact, intractable conflicts may not constitute an entirely distinct conceptual category. The difference between intractable and traditional civil conflicts is likely a product of the historical position of the researcher and subjective criteria about conflict duration or existential grievances. Nonetheless, conflicts that (1) span more than one generation; (2) demonstrate relatively low-intensity violence, with sporadic exceptions; and (3) whose main axis of conflict has not changed since the conflict’s inception and thus are highly institutionalized (i.e., through military occupation, state-enforced segregation, de facto borders, and other bureaucratic or legal instruments produced by the conflict) might generate some shared concerns for researchers. Despite flare-ups in violence and even territorial and demographic changes that alter the physical landscape, intractable conflicts are those that have settled into an uncomfortable equilibrium in which power disparities are relatively static. Scholars conducting research in these contexts while they are seemingly frozen or intractable face a fairly unique set of epistemological, procedural, and ethical considerations.

MANY CONFLICTS WITHIN A CONFLICT

For intractable conflicts, it is almost impossible to adequately answer the question “What is this a case of?” because these long-standing disputes often are many conflicts combined into one. The theoretical frameworks that we use affect not only the terminology in our writing but also the conceptual “baggage” we bring to our research. For example, we can examine the situation in the West Bank at the time of writing: Israel has controlled the territory since 1967, has faced at least two large-scale uprisings, and has signed a set of peace accords that led to the creation of the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA) but which failed to resolve the sovereignty of the occupied territories, West Bank included. Today, the conflict grinds on. In recent years, we have seen the cessation of any meaningful negotiations between Israel and Palestinian parties; the uninhibited growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank; the increasing divergence in the political and economic trajectories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (with intermittent, devastating wars between Israel and the militant Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, in the latter); the fecklessness and increasing authoritarianism of the PA; and, overall, a type of stagnation that led a Palestinian friend of the author’s to observe recently: “There is just no reason for hope anymore.”

Many understand the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as zero-sum: if Israel wins a share of the pie, the Palestinians, conversely, lose a share, and vice versa. For aspects of the conflict that resemble a zero-sum conflict, bargaining theory may help us to understand why the parties have not reached a conclusive settlement. However, other aspects of the conflict resemble a different type of problem. It might be possible to define certain goods—peace, basic security, and non-rivalrous rights, including religious protections—that would benefit the entire population of the West Bank, Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike, whether they are provided by one state, two states, or another institutional configuration. According to this understanding, the conflict persists not due to bargaining failure but rather to a collective-action problem. This suggests different interventions to resolve the conflict, including defining those universally desired outcomes and locking in incentive-compatible commitments from parties to those outcomes. We could examine small trust-building measures, repeated interactions, free-rider penalties, and other strategies from the toolbox of approaches to collective-action dilemmas.

Ultimately, the appropriate framework will differ depending on which aspects of the conflict we are researching, which actors we are focusing on, and which historical period we are analyzing. Whereas it is possible that multiple frameworks might apply to any given question (Fearon Reference Fearon1998), those of us conducting empirical research on more narrow questions within intractable conflict settings would be wise to examine the implications and tradeoffs of various frameworks. The frameworks we select, or implicitly assume, can affect our scholarship through the types of survey questions we write, the questions we pose during interviews, the content of the responses we receive, the observations we decide to make (and not make) over the course of field research, and—more fundamentally—the research questions we pursue.

Programs that build in support for early visits to field sites and the pretesting of survey items, interview protocols, and experimental interventions are particularly useful for these procedural considerations. In my experience conducting elite interviews in Palestine, questions regarding the origins of unpopular political institutions (e.g., the geographic and functional restrictions on the PA’s authority in the West Bank) must be crafted carefully to avoid eliciting overly pat responses or, worse, offending the subjects by implying that they bear some responsibility due to their participation in negotiations. Creating an environment in which interview subjects feel comfortable genuinely reflecting on the past—in which interviewers build trust and rapport but refrain from referencing their own theories and hypotheses—is almost an art that requires practice and, at times, failure. The more abstract issue of how theoretical frameworks and research questions are chosen is best addressed during the early stages of graduate training. As a small step, advisers can encourage students of comparative politics to read widely about their case or cases—including outside of the discipline—before committing to a dissertation question.

Furthermore, as scholars of intractable conflict, the conceptual frameworks we use affect the external validity of our findings and our audiences within mainstream political science. Overall, settings of intractable conflict call for a heavy dose of modesty in attempts to generalize. However, seemingly complex scope conditions may be more or less problematic for generalization depending on the nature of the research question. Finally, not all social science researchers are equally committed to generalizability as a primary aim. Nonetheless, many scholars may share the more modest goal of contributing to cumulative knowledge production about a single case. Because of the embedded unpredictability of intractable conflict zones—a term that is discussed more below—even generalizations to other periods, regions, or samples within the same case may require more than the usual caution. In thinking about an audience for their work, intractable-conflict researchers often face a dizzying array of possibilities. In the West Bank, for example, researchers may be trying to engage with scholarship on conflict, occupation, nationalism, state-building, social movements, terrorism, or settler colonialism. Yet, there are intellectual and strategic tradeoffs inherent in choosing a conceptual home for their work. These tradeoffs can be in tension with one another and—perhaps especially for junior scholars—can involve political costs.

INCREMENTAL CHANGE VERSUS EQUILIBRIUM DISRUPTION

Beyond conceptual frameworks, larger questions about the role of social science research loom large for scholars of intractable conflict. Research that aims to understand marginal or incremental forms of change in such settings may be more feasible than research that seeks to explain how large-scale, macro-level transformation of the conflict might be achieved. Beyond the benefit of feasibility, studies of marginal change within an existing conflict setting may provide more immediate, short-term benefits to populations living in these regions than research that works toward understanding categorical shifts in the political status quo. The important distinction is not methodological—for example, research that uses experimental methods versus observational data—but rather the nature of change that a researcher seeks to explain. Marginal and incremental changes are equally worthy subjects of study as are categorical shifts in the conflict equilibrium. Our conceptualization of change may be, but is not necessarily, correlated with the unit of analysis we choose (i.e., regular individuals, elites, parties, resistance movements, governments, or states). However, it is almost always related to the outcome of interest in our study.

In addition to any theoretical or methodological critiques it may face, research that focuses on incremental change is criticized for coming at the expense of a more broadly relevant and useful social science that would disrupt the entrenched equilibrium of the conflict, with its associated forms of violence and injustice. For example, Brownlee (2014, 19–20) encouraged scholars of Middle East politics to transition from “serving the powerful” to “addressing the vulnerable,” urging us to “identify the hierarchies and injustices that we aspire to rectify but that, without intense self-reflection and collective deliberation, we are likely to reproduce.”

This raises difficult questions for those working in settings such as the West Bank. Research that aims to understand why actors behave the way they do within a context of occupation while not sufficiently documenting the indignities and injustices of occupation may be perceived as buttressing the status quo. Furthermore, if local informants expect that the foreign researcher’s work will amplify their narratives and lived experiences and use them as the basis for advocacy, this raises ethical conundrums. Yet, the individual risks of equilibrium-disrupting work are formidable for graduate students, junior scholars, or researchers who want to be able to return to the region without invasive scrutiny—which this author has experienced personally—or endangering their local contacts.

Another challenge that arises in this context is the difficulty of dissemination. Who is meant to benefit from our research and how do we transfer those benefits to them? Disseminating research that is controversial or disrupts existing power hierarchies can present unpredictable risks to recipients. Whereas research on marginal change within a system may carry many risks throughout the research process—as with any research on human subjects—it is possible that it will present fewer risks in publication and dissemination than research that takes on larger and more entrenched hierarchies.

EMBEDDED UNPREDICTABILITY AND ETHICS

While conducting field research in an area of intractable conflict—whether it features military occupation, low-level insurgency, unrecognized borders, informal or formal governance by a non-state actor, or some combination of these—the scholar’s work is inevitably influenced by these dynamics. Because intractable conflicts have become deeply embedded in society and rooted in formal institutions to a greater degree than more nascent or quickly evolving conflicts, certain aspects of life—and therefore the research process—are more regularized. Armed violence can be relatively rare, whereas common forms of repression, exclusion, discrimination, and resistance are routinely channeled into institutions and daily life. Nonetheless, in settings of occupation, for example, the unpredictability of spasmodic violence is a central and, indeed, an institutionalized feature. Military strategies such as “mowing the grass” or resistance tactics that include knifing attacks and car rammings—although disproportionate in the casualties they produce—share this feature of unpredictability in scale and/or timing.

Because individuals approach these “predictably unpredictable” settings differently, contexts of intractable conflict introduce potential ethical concerns in principal investigators’ relationships with their collaborators and human subjects (Cronin-Furman and Lake Reference Cronin-Furman and Lake2018; Knott Reference Knott2019). In these settings, life may seem normal and stable for days, weeks, or even months before becoming violent and tumultuous without a moment’s notice. Surveillance, raids, arrests, and terror attacks are more effective when they are least suspected. Intractable or frozen-conflict environments may be characterized by relatively low-probability events that nevertheless carry with them the possibility for serious injury or harm. Foreign researchers, local collaborators, subjects, and other colleagues may respond in various ways to such environments, differently weighing their subjective risk of harm in these contexts. Who on the research team is best poised to evaluate the additional risks of harm that might result from a research intervention? These tough issues can affect any type of field research, no matter the research question or methodological approach.

The nature of these conflict spaces requires continued vigilance on the part of researchers. In nearly all circumstances, researchers must seek approval from their Institutional Review Board before a study is conducted, meaning that they must anticipate threats to ethical principles that might arise and how they will respond. However, researchers often must handle unanticipated ethical dilemmas. As described by MacLean et al.(2017, 10)—citing Fujii (Reference Fujii2012); MacLean (Reference MacLean and Mosley2013); Thomson (Reference Thomson, Thomson, Ansoms and Murison2013); and Wood (Reference Wood2006; Reference Wood, Boix and Stokes2007)—ethical research in such settings often requires “an ongoing negotiation” and thus “the consideration of potential risks and benefits at all stages of a project, from design, data production, analysis, writing and outreach.” Attentiveness to these challenges over the course of the research process is an important consideration for all researchers. Although the embedded and, in some ways, routinized nature of intractable conflicts might suggest that risks are predictable and well known, it is worth remembering how unpredictability—not always as it relates to physical violence—is a core feature of these settings.

Some areas of intractable conflict are virtually inaccessible to foreign researchers whereas others (e.g., the West Bank) feature a heavy foreign presence. In these settings, scholarly research may come on the heels of existing monitoring and evaluation exercises by international donors and non-governmental organizations or regular surveys conducted by polling organizations. To the extent that such regions experience repeated interventions collecting human-subject data, there are real concerns about subject fatigue if the same communities—or even the same individuals—are sampled repeatedly. In addition to generating issues with data reliability and validity in human-subject research, the more general problem of research fatigue can affect collaborators, translators, research assistants, and other interlocutors. Cronin-Furman and Lake (Reference Cronin-Furman and Lake2018) rightly pointed to the need for researchers to carefully consider whether their project requires new human-subject data collection in the field and whether the benefits outweigh the gains.