Introduction: One of the field's long term challenges, says Carolyn Stephenson, is to figure out the proper mixture of escalation and de-escalation needed to bring a conflict to resolution.

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Escalation and De-escalation
Carolyn Stephenson
Professor of Population Studies, College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai'i
Interviewed by
Julian Portilla
2003

"What's the mixture of escalatory and de-escalatory techniques that's needed to move to a long term resolution of conflicts?" That means all the old stuff that we know about bringing in all the stakeholders and so on but it also means adopting new notions of fairness that I think may not be traditional in all parts of the conflict resolution field. For instance the notion of neutrality doesn't make sense in that kind of conflict.

Rather than neutrality, I would argue you have to be actively on the side of both sides.

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