Special Section:Practice in the

AcademyIntroduction: The Constraints and

Opportunities of Practicing ConflictResolution from Academic Settings

Kevin Avruch and Susan Allen Nan

In 2011, a special issue of International Studies Review (volume 13, issue1) was devoted to a symposium titled “Theory vs. Practice.” The vs. washardly surprising. The two domains are often seen to be in a tense, if notoppositional relationship, but perhaps nowhere more so than in academicsettings where the canons of scholarly research are extolled, and suchstandards as “rigor,” such dichotomies as “fact/value,” and such root meta-phors as “purity” (of science, research, and theory) and “pollution” (ofpolitics and policy), are — from the perspective of many academicians —matters of fundamental(ist) belief.

On the other side of the gap, the disdain, if not quite belligerence,oftenis reciprocated. Many “practitioners and activists,” wrote Thomas Weiss andAnoulak Kittikhoun (2011: 1),“associate ‘theory’ with abstraction and irrel-evance.” For most of the essays in the International Studies Review (ISR)symposium, “practice” referred to foreign policy analysts, consultants,pundits, or occasional activists (e.g., they work for or with nongovernmen-tal organizations), although two essays explicitly referred to peace scholars

Kevin Avruch is the Henry Hart Rice Professor of Conflict Resolution and professor of anthro-pology at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution and faculty and senior fellow in the PeaceOperations Policy Program (School of Public Policy) at George Mason University in Fairfax,Virginia.His e-mail address is kavruch@gmu.edu.

Susan Allen Nan is associate professor of conflict analysis and resolution and director of theCenter for Peacemaking Practice at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at GeorgeMason University. Her e-mail address is snan@gmu.edu.

10.1111/nejo.12018© 2013 President and Fellows of Harvard College Negotiation Journal April 2013 205

with an activist bent (Thakur 2011) and conflict resolution as a “field ofinquiry” and the extent to which conflict resolution practice has had anydiscernible impact on the policy moves of the “players” (Babbitt andHampson 2011).

A Place for Practice?The four essays that follow arise from a conference held in April 2011 atthe School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason Univer-sity. We brought together a larger group of scholar–practitioners (SPs) or“pracademics,” individuals who hold full-time, usually tenure-track ortenured academic positions who self-identify as practitioners of conflictresolution, transformation, or peacebuilding. This is not a large group. Ofcourse, many talented and productive scholars and researchers focus onconflict studies, broadly defined, whereas some skilled practitioners arehalf-way associated with universities, often as adjuncts or in short-termvisiting positions. We have also known of one or two cases in whichsenior SPs negotiated an arrangement to spend one semester teachingand one semester “off” to “do practice.” (One of these held the title of“Professor of Practice” and worked with multiyear but not tenurable con-tracts.) But far fewer people self-identify as SPs or pracademics whileresiding and working primarily as tenurable or tenured professors in aca-demic settings.

Because these birds are so rare, in the conference we understood theacademy as our “ground,” the practitioner as our “figure,” and acceptedinitially as a given that the latter must somehow come to terms with thenorms, standards, and judgment (in short, the culture) of the former, if in theacademy they were to thrive. This was the approach taken by BruceJentleson and Ely Ratner (2011) in their contribution to the ISR symposium.Internalized in graduate school and reflected in dissertation topics, theincentive structure for young academics, for example, the awarding oftenure, leads them to avoid substantive policy engagements (in conflictresolution, substitute “policy” with “practice”). They further state, and wewould agree wholeheartedly, that while such a decision may be individuallyrational, it is also — like so many individually rational decisions —“cumulatively irrational for the intellectual diversity and professional plu-ralism that a discipline such as political science or international relationsshould manifest” (2011: 7). In full agreement to this, we would only add:and perhaps even more irrational for a self-consciously normative fieldlike conflict resolution/transformation and peacebuilding.

Among the founders of our field (whether termed conflict resolution,conflict transformation or, more recently, peacebuilding) were academi-cians; these scholars and researchers were active in their respective disci-plines and departments and at the same time committed to practice. Sucha commitment was viewed by them and many who followed as something

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central to the identity of this emerging field. Often their practice took theform of being the third party in mediation, facilitation, or interactiveproblem-solving workshops.But equally often, their practice was somethingthat was, as one conference participant put it, carried out “on the side,” inaddition to their research and not always viewed by their colleagues ascentral to their disciplinary identity. Moreover, as noted, the incentive struc-ture for young academics working in strictly disciplinary-defined universitydepartments has done little to encourage active commitments to the prac-tice of conflict resolution.

Balanced against this is the growing acceptance of the field in univer-sities as evidenced by the increasing number of postgraduate, particularlymasters,programs.Most are in“traditional”departments (government,politi-cal science, or international relations) but a growing number of scholarswork in conflict resolution departments or, in our case, a school, dedicatedentirely, at least notionally, to research and practice. While we think it ispremature to speak with confidence of a conflict resolution discipline, theincreased acceptance of the field should reassure us that a new generationof university social science colleagues would be more supportive of theplace of practice in the academy.

Certainly, we would have thought that the place of practice was under-stood by all in much the same way in the faculty of our own wildlymultidisciplinary School for the Analysis and Resolution of Conflict. Thisturned out not to be the case, and the diversity of strongly held beliefsamong our colleagues made itself known — where else but — in thathothouse from whose fertile soil academic standards, canons, identities,ontologies, and egos find their full bloom: deliberations over colleagues’renewal, tenure, and promotion. Some of our colleagues have maintainedthat teaching was, after all, a form of practice; some that they did not knowwhat was and was not practice; a few that they had no way to measure itwith any authority or objectivity — unlike the standard,“reliable” metricsfor research and scholarly production.

Hence, we sponsored the April 2011 conference “Practice in theAcademy” with the usual postcolon “Problems and Prospects.” We set outthree questions for the participants to reflect on.

• What are the problems and challenges faced by conflict resolution/transformation and peacebuilding practitioners who work in academicsettings?

• How are practitioners (yourself, for example) working to address theseproblems and challenges (what works well and less well)?

• What is a possible future vision or structure for how SPs can thrive inthe academy, build their practice, and in the process perhaps eventransform the academy?

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The Pracademic ExperienceNot at all surprisingly, conference participants had much to say in answer tothe first question and could address the second partly from their ownexperience. They expressed much less assurance in answering the thirdquestion. In the essays that follow,Christopher Mitchell, Lawrence Susskind,Jayne Docherty, and Marc Gopin largely agree on a common list of problemsand challenges that many pointed to at the conference. These include:

• Time or calendrical constraints. Not only does practice often come“ontop” of doing their “regular jobs,” such that the SP feels as if she isworking two full-time jobs but, of course, conflict in the “real world”does not organize itself by semesters or on academic schedules.Conflictresolution work can be radically bifurcated: it can necessitate in-the-minute response to crisis (get on the plane tonight) or require long-term commitments to ongoing processes that are slow and can seeminterminable. In either case, its “operations-tempo,” to borrow a phrasefavored in the military, is thus very different from that of classroominstruction or a well-organized research project.

• Tenure and promotion considerations, or career advancement gener-ally, as discussed above.

• A research university culture that often devalues practice as a lesserendeavor, often classified as “outreach” or “service.”

• In some cases, social science colleagues intractably committed to posi-tivist models of research and dismissive of other “softer” approaches.

• The pedagogy of practice. Despite the growing number and diversity ofgraduate programs in the field, there are still no established standardsfor how to teach conflict resolution practice. The main site for teachingremains primarily the classroom. The main site for practice takes placeelsewhere.

• Information flow. Much of the work SPs do in deep-rooted conflicts,which are often characterized by histories of violence, is bound bycommitments to confidentiality — in fact this may be a sine qua non ofsuccessful practice. Even if the scholar–practitioner writes about his orher practice work, academic journals oriented to pure research arebiased against literature describing practice, and the relatively fewpractice-oriented journals in our field typically lack the characteristicsof top-tier journals (high rejection rates, impact factors and so on) thatare necessary for career advancement.

• Problems of assessment or evaluation. Much of the long-term workdone by SPs in protracted social conflicts — compared, say, with amediation session wherein agreement is reached or not and participants

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fill out satisfaction surveys on exit — is notoriously hard to assess withmuch confidence. This makes many donors, past or potential, uneasywith our work, and it complicates how the work can be evaluated in theacademy by nonpractitioner colleagues.

These are problems virtually all the conference participants men-tioned. As to the other two questions of how one manages despite theseproblems and what might the future look like, we turn to the four essays.Chris Mitchell brings the longest time horizon to his reflections, going backto work done by his mentor and one of the field’s founders, John Burton.What is interesting here is that Mitchell concludes by considering alterna-tive venues or models for practice and decides that, despite all the difficul-ties of basing oneself in a university, it nevertheless offers the mostfreedom, independence and, crucially, a way to teach and train the nextgeneration.

Larry Susskind’s “confessions” indicate the importance of having had agood best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) and a site forpractice separate from his academic home at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT); in Larry’s case, the alternative has been the nonprofitConsensus Building Institute,which he cofounded. The“virtuous circle”thathe describes is an attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice bygiving practitioners a way to speak about their work in terms intelligible totheir academic colleagues. Like Mitchell, he stresses the link to students’learning and virtuous, productive action in the world. Nevertheless, heexplains that he is not assured he would be awarded tenure at MIT in today’smore academically competitive world and that senior colleagues in hispractice-oriented professional school were probably more sympathetic thancolleagues at a college of arts and sciences would have been — but also thatluck had a role in building his successful career at a top-tier university.He alsosuggests:play the academic game mainly by their rules until tenure.What hecalls his own work,action research,“on its own,will not produce the kind ofacademic record that most universities require.”

In contrast, Jayne Docherty describes a successful career in an institutenot much like most other universities. She suggests that what she intrigu-ingly calls “positive deviance” may offer the fullest answer to the thirdquestion. She writes of working as an SP at Eastern Mennonite University(EMU), an institution that “rewards faculty practice.” Once again, studentsare front and center in her account, as is a university administration andcolleagues who, partly due to the school’s Mennonite commitment toworking for good in the world, understand and support her work and thatof her colleagues. Pay particular attention, here, to how she describesovercoming the constraints of academic calendars. On the other hand, evenwith support based on a particular Christian worldview, Docherty and hercolleagues recently found it necessary to engage in what she calls “strategic

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peacebuilding” to cement the support of administrators. Central to this wasnegotiating with them a set of criteria for evaluating practice and the workof practitioners, which in turn meant challenging the new provost to“reconsider what is meant by scholarship.”

“In other words,” Docherty explains,“we applied our conflict transfor-mation skills to the institution.” This seems like an unvarnished successstory. However, she also notes a few “downsides,” the main one being thatreaching tenured, full professor status at EMU, an institution with a tenureand promotion system “out of synch with most other universities,” wouldmake a lateral move to a more traditional university difficult. Deviance maybe positive, but it remains deviant, and there are costs.

Marc Gopin’s essay answers the third question with some radical ideas,including the creation of programs that separate conflict analysts from theirmore practice-oriented colleagues, with each half having different incen-tives and ways of measuring effectiveness, via a mutually respectful“divorce.” For Gopin, as for the others, the role of students — how weeducate and train them, prepare them for the world of practice, and alsorespect them for what they bring to us — is absolutely central. His projectsover the years have meant working in some of the world’s most stressfuland violent conflicts, and his model of peacebuilding or reconciliation isbased on long-term investments in building trust among those he calls“social geniuses,” local or indigenous practitioners who often work at greatrisk to themselves. Gopin looks to a future in which academic conflictresolution practices are able to meaningfully incorporate the social geniusof those indigenous practitioners into training, curricula, research agendas,and theory. For him, the SP is the person who can bridge that gap.

Academic Identity ConflictsSomething struck us in all four essays: each one shares the ethos of “par-ticipatory action research.” Susskind refers to this explicitly, but it is argu-ably applicable to all our pracademics, and several of the conferenceparticipants characterized their work in this way also. In action research,one’s main responsibility is to one’s partners in the community or theorganization that one is working with — or even working for. In Mitchell’scase, this commitment is epitomized by John Burton’s remark that “if atheory or an insight was to be seen as valid as well as useful, it had to berecognized as such by people actually entrapped as adversaries in a realworld conflict.” Susskind measures success “by whether a problem isresolved or addressed in a helpful way (in the eyes of those seeking help),not in terms of whether particular peer-reviewed journals approved of myresearch methods and findings.” Docherty writes of an institutional cultureat EMU in which“service” is not only valued but where it means supporting“programs that prepare students for lives of service to others.” The orien-tation is significantly directed outside the institution itself and to others

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who reside outside it. Finally, Gopin’s passionate extolling of indigenoussocial geniuses clearly indicates where his significant reference group is:it is not with his academic conflict analysis and research colleaguesback home.

What we get from this remarkable commonality is that in the end,these SPs or pracademics all have an important component of their profes-sional, intellectual, and moral identities that orients them away from theoften total identity (as scholars or researchers) shared by most of theirpurely academic colleagues. If the conflict between conflict analysisresearch and conflict resolution practice, between “theory and practice,” isat root an identity conflict, and we think it is, it is understandable in partwhy the theorists often appear so unwelcoming, if not outrightly hostile, totheir practitioner colleagues. The loyalties of the pracademic are not whollyor reliably to the totalizing culture of their academic social science col-leagues whose reference groups, in fact, are the peer reviewers at top-tierjournals and presses, on grant panels, and at scholarly associations andannual meetings where the culture of the research university is publiclyperformed and continually refreshed and purified. In seeking validation oftheir work mainly by others outside the university — those entrapped inconflicts — SPs challenge the core identity of their academic colleagues.They present an alternative, something often unwelcome. We know howmessy and intractable identity conflicts can be.

With these essays, the authors take steps toward identifying ways thatboth practitioners and researchers can share their talents in the academyand beyond and can best strengthen each other’s work. Ironically, to theextent that the researcher–practitioner divide is a conflict, then this specialsection of journal articles itself represents a form of conflict resolutionpractice as well as research. Research can be a form of practice, andpractice can be a form of research. We hope that by convening the sym-posium, encouraging our colleagues’ writing, and coediting this journalspecial section, we have helped to contribute to increased understandingand mutual respect among conflict analysis researchers and conflict reso-lution practitioners.

Regardless of the extent to which these essays are part of a conflictresolution dialogue or a research project, the next step is clear. We mustalso consider what researchers perceive are the advantages and disadvan-tages of locating practice in the academy. We hope conflict analysisresearchers will soon share their perspectives in a similar format afterreading here the reflections of SP colleagues.

NOTES

Participants in the conference were: Andrea Bartoli, Claudia Cohen, Tamra Pearson D’Estree, JayneDocherty, Marc Gopin, Ronald Fisher, Jacquelyn Greiff, Borislava Manojlovic, Christopher Mitchell,Joyce Neu, Reina Neufeldt, Gene Rice, Jay Rothman, and Lawrence Susskind. Ellyn Yakowenko, who

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is a doctoral student and served as Dean’s Fellow working with the Center for PeacemakingPractice, summarized the remarks in a conference report. We used this report to write thisintroductory essay, and Ellyn joins us in coediting the special section.

REFERENCES

Babbitt, E., and F. O. Hampson. 2011. Conflict resolution as a field of inquiry: Practice informingtheory. International Studies Review 13(1): 46–57.

Jentleson, B. W., and E. Ratner. 2011. Bridging the beltway–ivory tower gap. International StudiesReview 13(1): 6–11.

Thakur, R. 2011. Nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament: Can the power of ideas tame thepower of the state? International Studies Review 13(1): 13–45.

Weiss, T. G., and A. Kittikhoun. 2011. Theory vs. practice: A symposium. International StudiesReview 13(1): 1–5.

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