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.

This article offers a novel framework for conceptualizing conflict-intelligent leadership, which builds on evidence-based practices for constructive conflict resolution but extends and enhances them with new insights and strategies gleaned from complexity science. It argues that the development of conflict intelligence (CIQ) requires a broadening of one’s orientation to conflict across four levels: from a focus on and awareness of the self (implicit beliefs, emotional reactions, and ability to self-regulate), to a focus on social dynamics (interpersonal, intergroup, and moral conflict dynamics), as well as situational dynamics (conflicts in fundamentally different contexts), and ultimately to a focus on the broader systemic forces that may determine and be determined by more entrenched conflicts. The article defines CIQ, outlines the competencies and skills conducive to increasing it at each level, and offers a set of “toolkits,” with links to relevant resources such as online assessments, “just-in-time” apps, and popular articles. The aim of this article is to offer leaders a road map; a common vision, language, and skill set for navigating our often dizzying, contentious new world.

Experiences of social conflict often trigger anxiety, which is associated with more reactive, extreme, and problematic responses to conflict. However, individuals respond to conflict anxiety in different ways. This article presents the findings from a series of scale development studies that sought to create and test a measure for assessing common behavioral response tendencies in interpersonal conflict. The Conflict Anxiety Response Scale (CARS) is based on a theoretical framework proposed by Morton Deutsch—a pioneering conflict research scholar and clinical practitioner—that outlines a set of tendencies identified as common manifestations of anxiety management in conflict. The present line of research aims to develop a valid and reliable scale to assess respondents on these inclinations and explore their consequences. Ultimately, we seek to offer a practical assessment tool of conflict anxiety responses to enhance self‐awareness, professional development, and well‐being.

Over the last one hundred years, conflict researchers have developed a host of theories about which competencies and skills are most conducive to the constructive management of conflict. Our standard models and methods for conflict resolution, however, are particularly challenged in the face of the world’s increasing complexity, dynamism, and unpredictability. In this article, I describe a new framework for addressing these challenges. Based on insights from research in complexity science, psychology, and peace and conflict studies, this framework comprises two meta‐competencies that help individuals resolve conflict and promote more constructive and peaceful relations in our rapidly changing world.

The field of conflict resolution is fractured. Despite many decades of fine research, we still lack a basic unifying framework that integrates the many theories of conflict dynamics. Thus, the findings from research on conflict are often piecemeal, decontextualized, contradictory, or focused on negative outcomes, which contributes to a persistent research‐practice gap. In this article, we describe a situated model for the study of conflict that combines separate strands of scholarship into a coherent framework for conceptualizing conflict in dyadic social relations. The model considers conflict interactions in the context of social relations and employs prior research on the fundamental dimensions of social relations to create a basic framework for investigating conflict dynamics. The resulting model is heuristic and generative. We discuss the theoretical context and main propositions of this model as well as its implications for conflict resolution practitioners.

We live and work in an increasingly complex and dynamic world. The demands of working in such environments require that negotiators understand situations of conflict and work with these situations in correspondingly complex and dynamic ways. Dynamical systems theory offers important insights and tools to enhance the understanding of difficult social conflicts, including the conceptualization of ongoing destructive conflicts as strong attractors: a particular form of self‐organization of multiple elements comprising the mental and social systems associated with conflict. This article describes the pedagogical use of a computer simulation of conflict attractors (the attractor software) that allows participants to visualize and work interactively with the dynamics of conflict as they unfold over time. It further describes a negotiation workshop that employs the simulation to enhance participants' understanding of complex long‐term dynamics in conflict and presents the findings of two outcome studiescomparing the effectiveness of a workshop that employed the simulation with one that employed a traditional integrative problem‐solving method. While not definitive, these studies suggest that an understanding of the dynamical approach to conflict, supported by use of the attractor software, can promote the generation of more sustainable solutions for long‐term conflicts.

Two very different contexts of the conflict resolution field — hostage negotiation and court‐connected mediation — do share many similarities, particularly with regard to roles, responsibilities, and techniques. In both contexts, the emphasis is on the short‐term “fix”, or solution, rather than attention to the underlying reasons for a conflict and long‐term societal change. This emphasis, though perhaps changing in the international relations area, permeates much of the institutionalized conflict resolution field and bears further examination by practitioners and researchers.

Negotiation training evaluation tends to be short‐term, aspectual and piecemeal; evaluations often focus on only one or two salient outcomes of training. This essay presents a model for negotiation training evaluation research that offers a broad conceptualization of the hypothesized individual and group‐level effects of training in collaborative negotiation. The model assesses change at the individual level in conflict‐related cognitions, attitudes, affect and behaviors; and at the group level in conflict outcomes and work climate. The Negotiation Evaluation Survey (NES), a timedelayed, multi‐source feedback approach to assessment and development, is presented as a means of addressing some of the conceptual and methodological problems inherent in more common methods of training evaluation. An illustrative assessment of one model of collaborative negotiation training for adults, the Coleman/Raider Model, is presented. The results, implications, and future research challenges are discussed.