Conflict Transformation and Deliberative Democracy: A New Approach for Interdisciplinary Potential

• Main Author: Kiefer, Mitchell
• Other Authors: Girvan, Erik
• Language: en_US
• Published: University of Oregon 2016
• Subjects: Conflict transformation; Deliberative democracy; Interdisciplinary
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1794/19706

Deliberative democracy and conflict management models have been given increasing attention for their potential consistency and similarities, which is useful knowledge given the opened possibilities of interdisciplinary work. I argue that this debate ought to be broadened to include how conflict transformation and a pragmatic strand of deliberative democracy are aligned with regard to orientation to conflict. First, I offer an account of why conflict transformation’s key values should be seen as valuable for democratic theory to emulate. Second, I show how a pragmatic strand of deliberative democracy is consistent and similar with respect to those key values. Together, these build a framework which offers the ability for practitioners and theorists to pursue interdisciplinary work between two particular strands of deliberative democracy and conflict management which to date have not been given adequate attention.