Conflict Resolution Beyond the International Relations Paradigm Evolving Designs as a Transformative Practice in Nagorno-Karabakh and Syria

Philip Gamaghelyan is an experienced scholar-practitioner whose authentic quest to transform international conflicts has resulted in discoveries that ought to occasion a fundamental paradigm shift in the field of conflict resolution. Gamaghelyan exposes and thoroughly documents how the field of international conflict resolution unwittingly perpetuates and reifies conflicts, rather than transforming them, as a consequence of the near-universal conceptual and/or practical assumption of conflict 'sides'. The very presumption that conflicts are characterized by 'sides' generates and maintains polarized and rigid oppositions while marginalizing any voices and constituencies that do not fit this oppositional framing. The author then documents how standard practices of international conflict resolution unintentionally create counter-productive marginalization across a range of additional dimensions, as well as how an emerging 'business' of conflict resolution profits from the maintenance of conflict. Through the sensitively and humbly narrated story of his own individual and collective learning through real-life cases of international conflict transformation processes, Gamaghelyan also provides insights and guidance for stepping into a new paradigm of international conflict transformation that, when authentically and self-critically engaged, creates new capabilities for genuinely resolving entrenched conflict. Dr. Jessica Srikantia, Rhodes Scholar and an Associate Professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.