Despite decades of calls by the international community for the need to pivot the primary approach to cross-cultural conflict resolution education away from privileging Western, prescriptive models and methods of outside educators toward those based on the knowledge and expertise of local stakeholders, the dominant top-down paradigm persists. This article presents a new framework for cross-cultural conflict resolution education that builds on John Paul Lederach’s original distinction between prescriptive (top-down) versus elicitive (bottom-up) approaches, and extends it through grounded-theory research with expert practitioners working across cultures in conflict zones. The result is a contingency approach to working adaptively across different types of cross-cultural situations—based on five key factors—as well as insights into enacting hybrid combinations of both approaches. The implications and next steps for research and practice are discussed.

Issue Section:
Research Report
conflict resolution, cross-cultural training, bottom-up, top-down, adaptivity, optimality, qualitative study
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© 2024 Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license..
2024
Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.
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