Introduction

The default mechanisms, practices and mindsets we have relied upon for decades in our efforts to manage and resolve violent intra-state and international conflict, including common modes of peace mediation, may no longer be fully up to the task – if, indeed, they ever were. They often seem inadequately attuned to the drivers of our most persistent conflicts; unresponsive to the core motivations and aspirations of conflict stakeholders. This is because many of our most persistent and challenging conflicts are, and always have been, propelled by contending worldviews and their normative dictates.

Worldview conflict is not new, but the role worldviews play in conflict has not been sufficiently understood and accepted, nor have our approaches to dealing with worldview conflict met its driving logic head on. During the Cold War, and in the years following it when the conceptual and methodological foundations of the contemporary conflict resolution field were being laid, worldview differences tended to get filed either under the heading of ‘ideology’ (for example, Communism as ideology) or of ‘identity’ (see, for example, Kelman, 1997). Ideology often implies a certain misguided dogmatism, if not irrational fanaticism, rather than genuine, legitimate disagreement about a vision of the world, how it works, and principles for flourishing within it. It also has a political connotation, obscuring the fact that there are many types of worldviews which arguably are not concerned with politics in the first instance. Identity is a more fundamental and useful concept that is entwined and symbiotic with the notion of worldview, but it alone does too little to help us understand and work within and across the normative orders in which conflict stakeholders’ identities are forged and expressed, and which constrain (and also can create) opportunities for conflict resolution. As we rethink peace mediation today – in an era when the liberal worldview that gave rise to contemporary conflict resolution theory and practice, including its multilateralist (see, for example, Palacio, 2019) and ‘free world’ (Taylor, 2019) aspirations, is itself increasingly questioned – we would be wise to consider more fully how worldview collisions contribute to conflict and how we might adapt peace mediation theory and practice in order to mediate across worldviews more effectively.