Conflict Management through the Lens of System Dynamics

A fundamental concern in conflict management research is characterizing (dys)functional conflict; what is missing from this conversation is dynamics. We thus provide a systematic analysis of the ways in which dynamics have been investigated in prior conflict research and show how dynamics have been incompletely explained even when the research intended to focus on such dynamic processes. We demonstrate how the conceptual frameworks used to study conflict are not built to capture dynamic change and review a different framework, the system dynamics (SD) framework, as a means to move beyond linear causality. We next show how using the SD framework we can reinterpret and synthesize a multitude of static cause and effect findings from across levels of analysis in conflict research. We demonstrate how this framework may solve some of the Gordian knots in research on conflict utility (e.g., why task conflict may not be as helpful as it is theorized). We close with suggestions for how to use the SD framework to advance the study of conflict beyond what linear causality can provide and capture conflict dynamics in a more substantial way.