CCER undertakes and sponsors theoretical and applied research to advance the practice of conflict resolution, collaborative problem solving and consensus-building. In 2001, theorists and practitioners from Carleton and Saint Paul Universities associated with the Centre for Conflict Education and Research developed a novel approach to conflict called the “Insight Approach to Conflict“.
In the Insight approach, conflict is understood to be relational, dynamic and adaptive, generated from the responsive interpretive frameworks by which parties make meaning. It arises as a result of parties’ experience of threat-to-cares, which generate attack-defend patterns of interaction. Thinking about conflict as an interaction embedded in meaning-making enables conflict interveners help parties gain insight into, and articulate, the values that are generated, advanced, threatened and realigned, within the complex interactions that define us as social beings. In doing so, parties become able to develop new patterns, solutions and contexts that limit or eliminate the experiences of threat that generate conflict between them.