BERNARD MAYER, The Conflict Paradox

I almost didn’t review this book. Bernie Mayer is a close colleague and friend. But we look at conflict differently, so my spin might prove helpful–taking my biases into account.

My own work focuses on using conflict and its resolution as vehicles for social change. Mayer concentrates on how people deal with disputes themselves, especially people like himself who are called on to help out.

What he does is show the reader how seven paradoxes run through any conflict and do so whatever our own role is in the conflict. As someone primarily interested in public policy and social change, I found the ones that dealt with engagement, advocacy, principle, and realism to be the most useful, but they all matter.

And they all matter to you whether you deal with conflict as a professional the way Mayer does or as a party to conflict as Mayer and the rest of us do.

Mayer also takes us beyond the world of the mediator which is where his professional roots lie. In particular, his use of insights from neuroscience reflect a growing trend in peacebuilding, which is my part of the conflict resolution world.

This is the fourth of Bernie’s books I’ve read. Frankly, I was worried that it would cover familiar ground and not teach me much. In fact, it has made me recast the way I do my own work in terms of the paradoxes he raises and more.