By Laurel Saiz

hen you hear the word conflict, what do you think of?” undergraduate Clyde White Jr. asked. One by one, the 15 young people (aged 15 to 21) who had gathered in this upstairs conference room at Syracuse’s Southwest Community Center called out a response.

“Drama,” said a teenaged girl.

“Fights,” responded a young man, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, with a cell phone hanging from a cord around his neck.

“Police,” exclaimed one teenaged boy, prompting the comment, “Harassment!” from another.

“Coping skills,” said someone.

“Anger management,” said a girl in a white T-shirt. “And this right here is making me angry.” The rest of the group guffawed with laughter.

“You can call it coping skills or anger management,” White told the group. “I took a class at the University two years ago in conflict management that I really feel I can use. I was a pretty reasonable guy already, but I learned some tools to handle conflict better in my life. Whether or not you use them is up to you.”

White, who is finishing his bachelor’s degree in information management, and fellow workshop leader Lisa Chice, a Maxwell M.P.A. student, explained that the group would be engaging in role-playing, skills-building, and other activities designed to help them deal with problems in their lives. The eight young men and seven young women—from some of the poorest neighborhoods in Syracuse—were all school dropouts.

“They challenge us when they say they don’t have a choice other than violence,” Chice said. “It’s important for us to tell them for an hour or two a different message than all the other messages they hear the rest of the time.”

So began, earlier this spring, the first of six weekly workshops sponsored by the Conflict Management Center (CMC), just one strand of the educational endeavors of Maxwell’s Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC), now at a vital point in its 20-year history.

Founded in 1986, PARC recently moved into new, larger offices in the Maxwell complex and its two new co-directors have used the 20th anniversary benchmark as a starting point, both to look back at PARC’s rich, productive history and to reinvigorate it with major initiatives and a re-envisioned mission: five pillars that draw on the program’s past work and look to 21st-century challenges.

PARC’s Five Pillars

ARC has grown from a 1986 foundation grant—earned on the strength of an undegraduate major in nonviolent studies and a summer workshop on conflict resolution—to become an internationally recognized, multi-faceted program with a broad agenda. It trains faculty, researchers, and practitioners from around the world. It fosters ground-breaking research. And it sponsors major conferences and other professional development activities. PARC is unique among the institutes and centers at the Maxwell School in that has both a research and teaching mission.

PARC, whose faculty associates are drawn from among the School’s academic departments, does not grant degrees. But it offers a variety of educational programs aimed at “equipping the next generation of public leaders with the skills of negotiation, bargaining, and conflict resolution,” including a certificate of advanced study, available to matriculated graduate students at SU; a stand-alone, certificate program for mid-career professionals; a minor in conflict studies pursued by about 20 undergraduates a year; and the Conflict Management Center sessions, involving approximately 100 students from across the SU campus, such as White and Chice.

PARC has two new co-directors, appointed in fall 2005: Rosemary O’Leary, Distinguished Professor of Public Administration and holder of the new Maxwell Advisory Board Endowed Chair; and Catherine M. Gerard, associate director of Executive Education. While perpetuating PARC’s teaching activities, they’ve turned a collective eye toward trends that might influence PARC’s research mission—particularly how conflict management and, more recently, collaborative governance have gained traction in the field. Under O’Leary and Gerard, PARC’s mission includes five key pillars: Education, Environmental Conflicts, Advocacy and Activism, Transnational Conflict, and Collaborative Governance. Together, they mingle new trends in public administration with scholarly emphases of the past 20 years and the program’s roots in peace studies.

The Advocacy and Activism pillar is focused on the role of grassroots action in bringing about social, political, and cultural change; it most closely resonates with PARC’s legacy in the peace movement and social and political activism of the 1960s and ’70s. As the name implies, Transnational Conflicts looks at conflict and change as an international phenomenon.

The pillar on Environmental Conflicts reflects a relatively new emphasis for PARC, recognizing that society is “at a critical juncture, where conservation and development jostle for attention and critical funds,” according to PARC’s mission statement. O’Leary, an attorney with a background in environmental policy administration and extensive consulting work for government and quasi-government agencies, emphasizes that community-minded and collaborative approaches to environmental policy are essential.

Collaborative Governance is the newest pillar, recognizing that public discourse and decision making take place in an increasingly interconnected world. It studies in part how public role-players use new technologies and media to address increasingly complex problems. While focused on new trends in communication and process, Collaborative Governance otherwise takes a near-comprehensive view of how governance is done, making it the most universal and applicable of the pillars. (See related story.)

Early Roots

ARC, with its emphasis on collaborative governance and conflict resolution, has its roots in a time of social upheaval and discord. PARC grew out of earlier work by the Program in Nonviolent Conflict and Change (PNCC), which was founded in 1970. At that time, Syracuse was one of more than 900 colleges and universities that were shut down by student demonstrations, following President Richard Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia and the death of four students at Kent State University. At SU, students barricaded campus roads, boycotted classes, and staged a sit-in in the chancellor’s office.

“A peace studies program, along with an African American studies program, was part of the student strike demands that the University decided to honor,” remembers Neil Katz, associate professor emeritus of public affairs. Katz was the peace studies program’s second director and, under his leadership, PNCC developed an undergraduate degree in nonviolent studies and attracted graduate students interested in conflict resolution.

In 1973, Katz started Maxwell’s annual Summer Institute in Creative Conflict Management, with one course and just 13 students. It is still going strong after 34 years, with Katz involved as a program manager in Executive Education and adjunct professor for PARC.

The Summer Institute was “intriguing and attractive” and PNCC gave Maxwell “a big edge,” Katz says, when an opportunity arose to secure a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Availability of Hewlett grants in the early 1980s corresponded with a rise in interest in alternative dispute and conflict resolution.

“Some of that was propelled by folks coming out of the peace movement and interested in nonviolent action,” says Robert Rubinstein, a professor of anthropology and international relations and PARC’s director from 1994 to 2005. “And some was propelled by people who were concerned about the alleged backlog in the courts.” New approaches to conflict resolution, it was thought, might help abate the trend toward litigation.

Hewlett’s initial funding, secured by sociology professor Louis Kriesberg, created PARC in 1986, and the foundation continued providing substantial support for a number of years. At the time of its founding, PARC was conceived as a center for research and the development of theory about conflict resolution.

“The Hewlett Foundation had done some studies on the role of conflict in environmental issues,” remembers Kriesberg, who was PARC’s first director. “It had become pretty evident that, whatever kind of dispute you had, if you bring all the parties together and have them exchange and think about the issues, you would come up with a better solution than going to court.”

Originally, neither Maxwell nor Hewlett thought PARC would conduct classes. “But as soon as we got funded, people started knocking on the door, saying, ‘Train us!’” Kriesberg recalls.

PARC flourished from the start, with students flocking to a variety of courses, and faculty and graduate students undertaking research projects. One led to the publication of the 1989 book, Intractable Conflicts and Their Transformation, edited by Kriesberg and faculty colleagues Terrell A. Northrup and Stuart Thorson. It was followed by Kriesberg’s Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution, now in its third revised edition and considered a leading text in the field.

In hindsight, says Kriesberg, it’s obvious how ripe this topic was for scholarly study. “I was stunned to discover there was a huge body of literature on escalation—how fights get destructive—but practically nothing on de-escalation,” he says. “How do they wind down? How do they end?

“It’s as if understanding the escalation would tell you how conflicts stopped and how they are avoided. It doesn’t,” he concludes. “You have to look at situations in which conflicts are avoided and learn from those.”

A new book project, sponsored by PARC and Maxwell’s Moynihan Institute, is under way. It examines how armed groups transition away from violent struggle toward political engagement. It explores conditions and context that nurture peaceful transformations.

Moving Toward the Future

’Leary and Gerard assumed their leadership roles in 2005 and brought a wealth of experience and expertise with them. When she was a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, O’Leary co-founded the Indiana Conflict Resolution Institute. Her reputation as a teacher and scholar of public administration is practically peerless—she recently received the Charles H. Levine Memorial Award for Excellence in Public Administration given by the American Society for Public Administration and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs. Her fluency in a variety of public-affairs disciplines makes her a natural champion for PARC’s collaborative-governance emphasis.

Gerard, as manager of Maxwell’s Executive M.P.A. program, speaks especially to PARC’s service to the professions. Prior to joining Maxwell a decade ago, she had a career in state government, overseeing statewide management development and assisting agency leaders with organizational change.

When they became PARC’s co-directors, O’Leary and Gerard undertook a strategic planning process that began with a survey-based assessment of current missions and activities.

“We saw a keen interest—and a need—in the market for what PARC does,” O’Leary says. In conversations with alumni, she adds, these are the skills that professionals list as necessary to their organizations: negotiation, collaborative problem solving, facilitation, mediation, and conflict resolution.

As part of this strategic planning process, Gerard said PARC also looked at other college and university centers nationwide. “Is there another one that has similar breadth? Is there another one that incorporates collaborative governance, environmental conflicts, international issues, and advocacy and activism?” she says. “Because we’re the Maxwell School and we have access to all the different social sciences, we have a breadth that is pretty rare.”

A significant study by a Maxwell School graduate confirms this. Brian Polkinghorn ’90 M.A. (Soc.)/’94 Ph.D. (S.Sc.), executive director of the Center for Conflict Resolution at Salisbury University in Maryland, recently completed an exhaustive five-year study of every graduate credentialing program in conflict resolution in the English-speaking world—244 programs offering certificate, master’s, and doctoral degrees. Polkinghorn characterizes PARC as a “floater” program, since it “floats” on top of departments within the School, enabling faculty, staff, and students from various departments and disciplines to take part in PARC programs, projects and events.

“The biggest reason PARC is so well placed strategically is because it can play a number of strong cards that traditional academic environments can’t,” Polkinghorn says. “PARC is at once a multi-disciplinary program and able to lock into powerhouse departments such as Public Administration. PARC has a structured independent home with the right personnel, and yet is flexible and permeable, allowing students from various parts of the Maxwell School and across the University to be a part of the larger mission.”

This overlap serves PARC, of course, but is also a tremendous draw for Maxwell’s academic programs. “The word of mouth is that students are making their choice to come to Syracuse—sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back or the pebble that filled the pail—because of the existence of the PARC program,” Rubinstein says. For example, he notes that one-third to one-half of international relations master’s students attend Maxwell because of PARC. “It brings good students and that’s really important.”

Thus far, the strategic planning process has yielded a few major changes. The M.P.A. degree program has been modified, for example, to incorporate concepts of collaborative governance. “Every student should take a course in collaborative problem solving,” O’Leary says. To this end, PARC helped create new one-credit courses, offered through the Department of Public Administration. The Executive Leadership class (required of every M.P.A. student) has been similarly supplemented. “What’s brand new this year is that at least a third of the class will pertain to collaborative problem solving, negotiation, and facilitation,” O’Leary notes. “We’re looking at the question: What are the skills needed to transition from student to professional? And we see those as pivotal skills for Executive Leadership.”

Gerard says that mainstreaming collaborative problem solving and governance in the M.P.A. program is just a start. Layer number two, she says, will be other Maxwell programs, and layer number three will be outreach to departments in other schools and colleges at the University. Students in a variety of disciplines would benefit from learning these tools to help them deal with the unanticipated “spiral of unmanaged conflict” they may face in their professional lives, she says.

“In 1972, when I started at Maxwell, mediation and negotiation were seen just in the labor management context and interested people went to Cornell,” Neil Katz recalls. “Later on, these fields grew in popularity in the United States and outpaced the social change emphasis. People recognized that great communication and interpersonal skills are essential everyday skills that they can use in professional and nonprofessional settings. Rosemary and Catherine are right that every public manager—every person—should have these skills, abilities, and concepts. There are a tremendous number of applications. This fact is a central part of PARC.”

Another initiative Gerard and O’Leary are starting is a visiting fellows program, which begins with the 2007-08 academic year. Using funds generated by the Summer Institute, one—or more—visiting scholars will make PARC his or her home each year to promote quality research and enhance the intellectual atmosphere of the program. Ideally, as the visiting fellows program grows, each of the five pillars will be represented in research they address, the co-directors say.

Also new—due this summer—is a cutting-edge, digital resource aptly named “E-PARC.” This website will be “a clearinghouse of teaching materials related to collaborative public management, collaborative governance, and collaborative problem solving,” says O’Leary. E-PARC represents one facet of the program’s growing commitment to education and the practical application of scholarship.

New Beginning

n mid-March, students and faculty gathered for a welcoming open house at PARC’s new quarters on the fourth floor of Eggers Hall. The south-facing suite has offices for seven faculty members, three bays with multiple desks for graduate students, conference rooms, and space for support staff. (Previously, PARC’s main office was on the cramped fourth floor of older Maxwell Hall and the faculty were scattered on many floors.) Outside, a warm sun was shining and starting to melt the winter ice.

Among students in attendance were Ed Cox, Gearoid Millar, and Heather Pincock. Cox, a captain in the U.S. Army, will be returning to West Point to teach undergraduates when he is done with his joint master’s degree in international relations and public administration. His colleagues at West Point include Maxwell alumni who received certificates in conflict resolution from PARC and who raved about the relevance of the program to their own experiences.

“You frequently find yourself between two factions trying to resolve a conflict. We sort of specialize in getting in between people who don’t like each other,” says Cox, who has already worked in such hot spots as Bosnia and Kosovo.

Millar, a Ph.D. student in social sciences and a native of Ireland, notes that Maxwell was the only doctoral program to which he applied that offered the combination of specialties housed in PARC. Likewise, Pincock, a Ph.D. student in political science and a native of Canada, says the flexibility of the streams offered by PARC, along with the opportunity to focus on social movements in particular, was the deciding factor for her application to the Maxwell School.

Elsewhere at the open house, Kriesberg and other senior faculty members talked about the beginnings of PARC, made possible with the Hewlett Foundation support. Gerard and O’Leary discussed plans for this June’s Executive Leadership course and an upcoming September conference on “Cutting Edge Theories and Recent Developments in Conflict Resolution.” A few interested students, perhaps attracted by the giant birthday cake, came in to ask about the academic requirements for the certificate of advanced study.

Such students most likely will volunteer with the Conflict Management Center, coordinated during the past academic year by Hannah Allerdice (a doctoral student in political science) and Amy Koler (a joint M.P.A./I.R. master’s student). In addition to the Southwest Community Center, students also work with the Young Mothers program, the Lost Boys Foundation: Syracuse Chapter, and other nongovernmental organizations to receive a rich, practical application of their Maxwell training.

“It’s really rewarding to go out and leave the Maxwell bubble,” Koler says. “The people who do it, just love it.”