This introduction assesses a range of popular and scholarly attitudes toward the current state of American democracy, identifying in them a dominant theme of modern democratic theory, namely, an aversion to conflict. Just as John Rawls believed democratic societies to be perennially threatened by a “mortal conflict” between comprehensive doctrines and their “transcendent elements not admitting of compromise,” and so proposed a theory of liberal order aimed at preempting, containing, and resolving these conflicts, so contemporary critics perceive the intractable disagreements and polarizations of American political culture to be only corrosive and destabilizing. They propose strategies for achieving social cohesion grounded in a sense of national unity, shared history, or common identity more fundamental to difference. Many religious persons and traditions exhibit a similar aversion to conflict, believing it to indicate some form of sin, injustice, or moral error. I question this presumption that conflict is inherently vicious, ruinous, or violent, and begin to sketch an alternative view of conflict as basic to human creaturehood and potentially generative for social life.

This chapter introduces the hunting community as one rife with inter-team and interpersonal conflicts that are fought out online in deeply unpleasant ways. It also shows how COBRA are keen to differentiate themselves from other teams by professionalising what they do.

In this chapter, COBRA members enter into a confrontation with police, who accuse them of being trophee hunters and vigilantes. This happens in the aftermath of a sting on a man who was later given a long prison sentence.

This chapter of the handbook introduces dehumanization as another dark side of humanity. Humanness is a central concept in moral psychology, and whereas people normally treat other humans with moral consideration, they may turn to dehumanize others as a result of moral disengagement and moral exclusion. The author reviews recent psychological accounts of dehumanization that are grounded in empirical research and highlights the diverse forms it takes: dehumanization varies from subtle to blatant, from interpersonal to intergroup, and from simple to complex. In these theoretical accounts, dehumanizing a person or group means ascribing less of certain human attributes to the target – both attributes that distinguish humans from other animals and attributes that distinguish humans from inanimate agents. Within this general framework, the author reviews the empirical literature on how dehumanization may function to prime, facilitate, and justify harm during intergroup conflict. He also considers a number of critiques and debates over these ideas and findings that have recently surfaced.

High-Performing Global Teams. Most work in organizations today is done in teams. Teams in international management are highly complex, and leaders and members of international teams must start by excelling at the basics of teamwork. These basics include the team’s desired design including composition and roles, team processes and climate (task, interpersonal, learning, psychological safety, trust, cohesion), and outcomes. Global teams additionally have two elements that tend to affect their operations: culturally diverse composition and geographically distributed environment. Teams must be adept at leveraging diversity and collaborating virtually. They must interact to create value from the diversity and not destroy that value. Working virtually, they must maximize their effectiveness by ensuring they match the complexity of their communication with richness of the media that they use.

Promoting and adopting change is often a source of conflict in organisations. These conflicts are a result of perceptions held by the employees and managers. Employees may fear the uncertainties ahead, while managers may hesitate to take decisive action, or feel ill-equipped to implement the proposed changes. Additional factors, including the availability of resources (such as financial or staffing), may contribute to the conflict experienced during a period of transformation.

Such conflicts need to be managed professionally to ensure a positive outcome. This management process usually takes the form of negotiation, so both parties perceive there to be something to ‘win’ from the process. Recognition of the organisation’s culture – that is, awareness of understanding shared values, meanings and assumptions – can help managers communicate and enact changes.

This chapter explores navigating change, designing a change communication plan, acknowledging resistance to change, and recognising and managing conflict. It then looks at negotiation strategies to ensure conflict is managed appropriately.

After nationwide protests in 2013, Turkey was convulsed by a “clash of Islamisms” on the one hand, and the breakdown of a peace process between Ankara and the Kurdish movement on the other. Driven by the fraught interplay of charismatic personalities, rousing ideologies, and an increasingly unstable regional context, these processes exacerbated the turns to illiberal governance and religious populism. Two key results of these processes were (i) the Erdoğan-led AKP’s pivot to an alliance with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and (ii) a failed coup attempt on July 16, 2016. A critical juncture in the fullest sense of the word, the coup attempt led to the consolidation of the ruling alliance around a renewed version of Turkish-Islamist synthesis.

Chapter 2 provides background on the WPS Agenda and UN mediation. It first discusses the politics of the WPS Agenda in the UN by focusing on three main dynamics: how UN actors articulate what the WPS Agenda is, how the UN's mediation architecture has adopted the Agenda, and how actors within the UN resist the Agenda, both passively and actively. It then provides an overview of the UN's mediation role and how it is institutionalised. The chapter illustrates the different forms UN mediation can take by describing three processes that come up throughout the book: the Great Lakes of Africa (which deals with the national and regional dimensions of the conflict in the DR Congo), Syria, and Yemen. This chapter is especially useful for readers who may not be familiar with the WPS Agenda in the UN system and/or UN mediation.

Chapter 5 explores the logic of UN mediation as an ‘art’, which emphasises the fluid, contingent nature of mediation and prioritises relationships with negotiating parties. This chapter examines two core practices: emotional labour and discretion. The first section describes how UN mediators engage in emotional regulation to facilitate negotiations. The creation of emotional ties relies upon empathy and bonding in informal settings, which creates masculinised spaces that women have trouble accessing. In this case, the practice of empathy can be exclusionary. The second section examines how discretion – the choices mediators make about how to implement their mandates – is a key practice in UN mediation. How a mediator exercises their discretion is tied to their sense of political judgement. As such, using discretion unwisely can affect others' perceptions of a UN mediator's judgement. As WPS, especially the participation of local women, is often framed as showing partiality to one party over others, mediators are reluctant to use their discretion to advance the WPS Agenda. Instead, it is framed as a risk to the mediator's reputation for good political judgement and impartiality.

Chapter 4 examines how the logic of UN mediation as a science produces and disseminates technical knowledge. It focuses on the practices of conflict analysis and the circulation of ‘best practices’ in implementing the WPS Agenda in Syria and Yemen. The beginning sections argue that conflict analysis produces instrumental knowledge about conflict by fixing actors and issues in a schema that is legible to interveners. It emerges from colonial schemes of knowledge production that diagnose the local sphere as lacking in capacity. As such, ‘gender-sensitive conflict analysis’ – a common tool for implementing the WPS Agenda in UN mediation – is subject to many of the same problems. The remainder of the chapter analyses the UN's institutional learning practices, arguing that its ‘best practice’ case studies of WPS in mediation depoliticise knowledge about gender, position the UN as the protagonist of women’s participation by erasing its own resistance to WPS, and diminish local women’s agency. Crucially, these best practice cases also elide ‘participation’ with ‘consultation’, undermining the WPS Agenda’s call for the meaningful participation of local women in UN mediation.

Chapter 3 explores narrative struggles over defining UN mediation. It examines the discursive production of UN mediation as an institution, from its beginning as a series of ad hoc diplomatic engagements, to its institutionalisation in the 2000s. The chapter shows how we can observe over time the increasingly dominant construction of conflict as a technical rather than political challenge. The chapter traces these struggles by contrasting two key documents on the UN’s role in peace and security that appeared in 1992: UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s 'Agenda for Peace' and the UN Office of Legal Affairs' 'Handbook on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes between States'. The differences between these documents illustrate the development of competing logics of UN mediation: that of mediation as an art, and that which sees it as a science. The chapter compares and contrasts the narrative features of these institutional logics, and discusses how they rely upon gendered-colonial assumptions about the nature of politics, violence, and agency that shape the incorporation of the WPS Agenda.

This chapter describes the importance of studying wartime displacement, outlines several key questions that motivate the book, and summarizes the main arguments. It also briefly defines strategic wartime displacement and specifies the scope of the study, explaining why it confines the analysis to civil wars and why it focuses on displacement perpetuated by state combatants. It then describes what we know about displacement in war. This includes outlining existing explanations and discussing their limitations. It concludes by describing the methods and sources used in the book, summarizing its main findings, and outlining the structure of the rest of the book.