Conflict

In one line

Conflict is a deliberate struggle in which each side seeks to defeat, subdue or eliminate the other, and attention is on the opponent rather than on the prize.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: conflict is the dissociative social process in which persons or groups seek to attain their ends by directly challenging, resisting, injuring or eliminating an opponent, whose defeat becomes an object in itself. Gillin and Gillin describe it as the social process in which individuals or groups seek their ends by directly challenging the antagonist by violence or threat of violence. It is personal, conscious, intermittent and, unlike competition, always aware of its opponent.

Its characteristics

1. It is personal and direct. The opponent is identified, and attention is on them.
2. It is conscious and deliberate. Nobody conflicts by accident.
3. It is intermittent. Conflict has a beginning and an end; it cannot be sustained indefinitely because it is expensive.
4. It is universal, found in every society and every group, including the family.
5. The means are coercive: force, threat, obstruction, injury.
6. Rules are suspended or broken, or replaced by the rules of a fight.
7. Its aim is the defeat of the opponent, which may be sought even at cost to oneself.

Its causes

The list conventionally given: individual differences of opinion, interest and temperament; cultural differences, where groups hold incompatible norms; conflict of interests, above all over scarce resources, which is the most important; social change, which unsettles established arrangements and creates a generation gap and new claims; inequality, where a subordinated group ceases to accept its position; and the identification of a rival with a group, which converts a personal difference into a collective one.

Its types

Simmel's classification, and the one to cite:

• War, between organised groups or states.
• Feud or factional strife, an intra-group conflict of long standing, usually kin-based.
• Litigation, conflict conducted through a court under rules.
• Conflict of impersonal ideals, waged not for personal advantage but for a cause or belief, which Simmel thought the most implacable kind precisely because the parties are not fighting for themselves and can compromise nothing without betraying the ideal.

Gillin and Gillin add personal, racial, class, political and international conflict.

Other useful distinctions: direct conflict, in which the parties confront each other, and indirect conflict, in which each obstructs the other's efforts without confrontation; latent conflict, existing but not expressed, and manifest conflict, out in the open. The distinction between latent and manifest matters practically, because a society with no visible conflict may be one in which conflict is thoroughly suppressed rather than absent, which is the point made in [The Conflict Perspective].