<p>In this master thesis, I have studied conflicts that have arisen because of a development project, in a wetland in the Lake Victoria region in Kenya. The aim of the project is to improve the standards of living for the local community by increased food production and employment, but it has developed into a conflict because of, among other things, competition over natural resources. The objective of this study is to analyse these conflicts and identify the causes behind them. A further aim is to analyse if the communication has been sufficient in Yala Swamp, from the stakeholders’ point of view, through out the implementation of the project. The stakeholders that were identified in the conflict are the local community that have been affected by the project, the county councils where the project is located, and the company Dominion, which is the exploiter. Conflict theory is the analytical tool used to identify causes to the conflict. Primary data was collected through qualitative research interviews and secondary data are various reports. The result of the conflict analysis shows that there is a conflict between the local community on one side, and Dominion and the county councils on the other side. The conflict is caused by incompatible goals. The goals that are incompatible, which depend on contested resources, have to the largest extent to do with land access and to some extent with employment. The reason for contested resources has its origin in that the local community feel they have been deprived the land they used to farm on and have not gained what they were promised. They also live in absolute poverty and therefore whish to have more land than they have now. Conflicts over land leads to environmental degradation when people are squeezed into limited areas and put more pressure on land. This issue needs immediate attention to not lead to violent conflicts and further environmental degradation. Foremost the local community is dissatisfied with how the communication between the stakeholders worked before the implementation of the development project and after. A committee was going to be set, but today it does not seem to work adequately from the community members’ point of view. A committee would, however, probably improve the communication and resolve some conflicts. This would reduce the conflict potential and lead to a more sustainable development for all stakeholders.</p>

In this master thesis, I have studied conflicts that have arisen because of a development project, in a wetland in the Lake Victoria region in Kenya. The aim of the project is to improve the standards of living for the local community by increased food production and employment, but it has developed into a conflict because of, among other things, competition over natural resources. The objective of this study is to analyse these conflicts and identify the causes behind them. A further aim is to analyse if the communication has been sufficient in Yala Swamp, from the stakeholders’ point of view, through out the implementation of the project. The stakeholders that were identified in the conflict are the local community that have been affected by the project, the county councils where the project is located, and the company Dominion, which is the exploiter. Conflict theory is the analytical tool used to identify causes to the conflict. Primary data was collected through qualitative research interviews and secondary data are various reports. The result of the conflict analysis shows that there is a conflict between the local community on one side, and Dominion and the county councils on the other side. The conflict is caused by incompatible goals. The goals that are incompatible, which depend on contested resources, have to the largest extent to do with land access and to some extent with employment. The reason for contested resources has its origin in that the local community feel they have been deprived the land they used to farm on and have not gained what they were promised. They also live in absolute poverty and therefore whish to have more land than they have now. Conflicts over land leads to environmental degradation when people are squeezed into limited areas and put more pressure on land. This issue needs immediate attention to not lead to violent conflicts and further environmental degradation. Foremost the local community is dissatisfied with how the communication between the stakeholders worked before the implementation of the development project and after. A committee was going to be set, but today it does not seem to work adequately from the community members’ point of view. A committee would, however, probably improve the communication and resolve some conflicts. This would reduce the conflict potential and lead to a more sustainable development for all stakeholders.

Can a force that escalates conflict, deescalate conflict? Historically, religion has been a force that divides and unites. While most academic research has focused on the horror of religious wars, William Ury’s concept of the Third Side offers an alternate lens. The sovereignty conflict in Hawaii is rooted in a religious narrative meeting this criterion. The purpose of this research was to investigate how the Hawaiian Kingdom Nationals view the role that religion played in the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom; and concurrently, how they perceive the role that religion played in reconciling their struggles. To understand how this force harmed and healed the Hawaiian Kingdom Nationals, a mixed method approach of ethnography and transcendental phenomenological was applied. Snowball sampling was used to identify each participant. Subsequently, the primary data were collected through interviews, observations, field notes and Queen Lili‘uokalani’s memoirs. Afterwards, the data were analyzed by implementing a descriptive phenomenological thematic structure revealing four emerging themes: the Lokahi Triangle, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, Peacemakers and the Hawaiian Kingdom Still Lives. Finally, these four evolving units illuminate the essence of each Hawaiian Kingdom National’s lived experience: There is a diamond in the Pacific, the aloha state, but it is not in a state of aloha. A storm of betrayal sent a tsunami of shockwaves through time leaving damaged souls in its wake. Yet amid the tumult a Queen’s prayer echoes in the wind. Her legacy is humility and forgiveness for all. In Paradise transformed, the aloha spirit blows in with the island breeze calming the raging seas of injustice.

This constructivist grounded theory study will explore the possibility that early socio-cultural experience in concert with innate cognitive mechanisms are essential components of a dual process of decision-making. Each element may influence conflict actors toward predictable predispositional behaviors manifest as bias. Specifically, we are concerned that these biases will influence the perceived and actual neutrality of the principle mediator thus compromising a mediation success. The presence of these predispositions in both mediators and conflict stakeholder challenges the validity of the conclusions in other research that does not consider the true impact of cultural dissonance on more than a superficial insinuation of social facts. This will be accomplished through interrogating data yielded through content analysis of the actors’ use of language both spoken and written utilizing the techniques used in grounded theory studies.

This research employed a case study approach to understand emerging themes that may be garnered through documenting the lived experiences of online Deaf activists who have used the video feature available through social media outlets, such as YouTube, as a way to overcome the language barrier typically present for linguistic minorities who are leading social movements within an English-speaking, hearing majority. The focus of this study was the members of the Deaf Community that have taken to an online podium in their fight for autonomy and equality. They champion their Deaf identity, their right to agency and autonomy in areas of language, access, education and employment, in what has exploded into the largest social movement in their cultural history. Therefore, two questions were at the center of this research: 1. "How has experiencing audism affected the lives of Deaf people?", and 2. "How has the use of social media as a platform to fight against audism through natural linguistic expression in American Sign Language impacted that experience?". The growth of individual Deaf identity has created a community action network for the Deaf Community, and access to the technology of videophones and instant access to wireless Internet has brought with it the use of video blogs, or vlogs, within the Deaf Community at explosive rates. The movement from disability to a place of diversity and cultural, ethnic and linguistic minority personhood for the Deaf is a path that is still being forged. Presented in this study is a glimpse into this journey, through a case study of their lived experience.

The international community has shied away from instituting safe havens in conflict zones since the fall of Srebreniça in 1995. However, a look at the roles of safe havens in genocidal violence provides a deeper understanding of the need for these spaces to be established in a timely fashion. The strategic use of cultural safe havens as places for mass violence, necessitates the establishment of international safe havens for the protection of the targeted population, yet an analysis of the relationship between cultural safe havens and international safe havens has not been done before. As such, this research seeks to shed light on the relationship between the use of cultural safe havens, their inherent danger in cases of genocide, and the need for better models for international safe havens in times of violence. It is the researcher’s argument that to achieve this, the very perception of safety must be reimagined. Using content analysis methodology in the form of case studies, along with historical sociology, this research analyzes accounts of genocidal campaigns – Armenia, Rwanda and Bosnia – to explain the relationship between the dangers of cultural safe havens and the subsequent need for international safe havens that are established in time to save the victimized populations.

This study applies a qualitative approach in examining the stakeholder perspectives on the causes and impacts of, and responses to, the farmer-pastoralist conflicts. The study is primarily a response to the broader stakeholder concerns surrounding the farmer-pastoralist conflicts in the Kilosa district of Tanzania. The interdisciplinary approach and, more importantly, the environmental security and political ecology theories, were used for conflict analysis in a bid to determine the gaps in the existing body of the literature. Specifically, the study aimed at determining: first, the causes of the conflicts in question driven by the growing concern around the increasing land conflicts between farmers and pastoralists in the district; second, the impacts of the conflicts and respective implications to the causes and conflict management mechanisms; third, the relevance of the conflict management mechanisms in place. The study adopted a case study design drawing from a range of qualitative methods involving semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis for collecting and analysing the stakeholder perspectives obtained from the field. The study then reveals that farmer-pastoralist conflicts in Kilosa district are mainly grounded in the broader domestic and external socio-political forces. The escalation into violence, however, depends mostly on resource scarcity driven by climate change manifesting as drought. In this regard, the lone environmental scarcity-conflict nexus is found to be less significant in causing farmer-pastoralist conflicts in Kilosa, a finding underpinning the political ecology’s structural influence. The study finds that the use of multistakeholder bricolage institutions is more relevant for addressing these conflicts in Kilosa district. / Commonwealth Scholarship Commission

The complexity of the strategic decision making environments, in which busi- nesses and governments live in, makes such decisions more and more difficult to make. People and organizations with access to the best known decision support modelling and analysis tools and methods cannot seem to benefit from such re- sources. We argue that the reason behind the failure of most current decision and game theoretic methods is that these methods are made to deal with operational and tactical decisions, not strategic decisions. While operational and tactical decisions are clear and concise with limited scope and short-term implications, allowing them to be easily formalized and reasoned about, strategic decisions tend to be more gen- eral, ill-structured, complex, with broader scope and long-term implications. This research work starts with a review of the current dominant modelling and analysis approaches, their strengths and shortcomings, and a look at how pioneers in the field criticize these approaches as restrictive and unpractical. Then, the work goes on to propose a new paradigm shift in how strategic decisions and conflicts should be modelled and analyzed. Constrained Rationality is a formal qualitative framework, with a robust method- ological approach, to model and analyze ill-structured strategic single and multi- agent decision making situations and conflicts. The framework brings back the strategic decision making problem to its roots, from being an optimization/efficiency problem about evaluating predetermined alternatives to satisfy predetermined pref- erences or utility functions, as most current decision and game theoretic approaches treats it, to being an effectiveness problem of: 1) identifying and modelling explic- itly the strategic and conflicting goals of the involved agents (also called players and decision makers in our work), and the decision making context (the external and internal constraints including the agents priorities, emotions and attitudes); 2) finding, uncovering and/or creating the right set of alternatives to consider; and then 3) reasoning about the ability of each of these alternatives to satisfy the stated strategic goals the agents have, given their constraints. Instead of assuming that the agents’ alternatives and preferences are well-known, as most current decision and game theoretic approaches do, the Constrained Rationality framework start by capturing and modelling clearly the context of the strategic decision making situation, and then use this contextual knowledge to guide the process of finding the agents’ alternatives, analyzing them, and choosing the most effective one. The Constrained Rationality framework, at its heart, provides a novel set of modelling facilities to capture the contextual knowledge of the decision making sit- uations. These modelling facilities are based on the Viewpoint-based Value-Driven - Enterprise Knowledge Management (ViVD-EKM) conceptual modelling frame- work proposed by Al-Shawa (2006b), and include facilities: to capture and model the goals and constraints of the different involved agents, in the decision making situation, in complex graphs within viewpoint models; and to model the complex cause-effect interrelationships among theses goals and constraints. The framework provides a set of robust, extensible and formal Goal-to-Goal and Constraint-to Goal relationships, through which qualitative linguistic value labels about the goals’ op- erationalization, achievement and prevention propagate these relationships until they are finalized to reflect the state of the goals’ achievement at any single point of time during the situation. The framework provides also sufficient, but extensible, representation facilities to model the agents’ priorities, emotional valences and attitudes as value properties with qualitative linguistic value labels. All of these goals and constraints, and the value labels of their respective value properties (operationalization, achievement, prevention, importance, emotional valence, etc.) are used to evaluate the different alternatives (options, plans, products, product/design features, etc.) agents have, and generate cardinal and ordinal preferences for the agents over their respective alternatives. For analysts, and decision makers alike, these preferences can easily be verified, validates and traced back to how much each of these alternatives con- tribute to each agent’s strategic goals, given his constraints, priorities, emotions and attitudes. The Constrained Rationality framework offers a detailed process to model and analyze decision making situations, with special paths and steps to satisfy the spe- cific needs of: 1) single-agent decision making situations, or multi-agent situations in which agents act in an individualistic manner with no regard to others’ current or future options and decisions; 2) collaborative multi-agent decision making situ- ations, where agents disclose their goals and constraints, and choose from a set of shared alternatives one that best satisfy the collective goals of the group; and 3) adversarial competitive multi-agent decision making situations (called Games, in gamete theory literature, or Conflicts, in the broader management science litera- ture). The framework’s modelling and analysis process covers also three types of con- flicts/games: a) non-cooperative games, where agents can take unilateral moves among the game’s states; b) cooperative games, with no coalitions allowed, where agents still act individually (not as groups/coalitions) taking both unilateral moves and cooperative single-step moves when it benefit them; and c) cooperative games, with coalitions allowed, where the games include, in addition to individual agents, agents who are grouped in formal alliances/coalitions, giving themselves the ability to take multi-step group moves to advance their collective position in the game. ....

The subject of this study is conflict management. The purpose of this paper is to examine how teachers deal with conflicts between pupils in primary education. The purpose is also to get more insight on what a conflict is and show different strategies to manage conflicts.   To learn about how teachers deal with conflicts between pupils in primary school, I chose to do interviews. I interviewed four teachers. In the interviews we talked about: their definition of what a conflict is, what kind of conflict that are most common, and how common it is with conflicts in the school which they work at, how they handle conflicts between students, how they believe that they manage conflicts, if they have received any training or education in conflict management and if the school they work at have any special guidelines for handling conflicts.   My questions are: How do the teachers think about their own involvement in students' conflict management? How do the teachers think about which types of conflicts that can be difficult to manage? The result of the study is that the teachers often let students handle conflicts themselves and they think it is good for them to do it because it is a knowledge that we humans need have. However, all the teachers says that when the conflicts that the children can´t handle themselves, they are there to help and support. Educators' perception of what type of conflict that is difficult to deal with was different. These conflicts were: personal conflicts, situations where students do not realize that there are a conflict, and just believe that the other is just wrong, ethnic conflicts and conflict situations where students are saying different versions and refuse to change their minds. To access the time to manage conflicts also emerged as problematic in some situations. / Ämnet på denna undersökning är konflikthantering. Syftet med detta examensarbete är att undersöka hur pedagoger hanterar konflikter mellan elever i grundskolans tidigare år. Syftet är också att få mer insikt om vad en konflikt är och visa på olika strategier vid konflikthantering.   För att få reda på hur pedagoger hanterar konflikter mellan elever i grundskolans tidigare år valde jag att göra intervjuer. Intervjuerna gjordes med fyra pedagoger. Med de intervjuade pratade jag om: deras definition av vad en konflikt är; vilken typ av konflikt som är vanligast och hur vanligt det är med konflikter där de arbetar; hur de hanterar konflikter mellan elever; hur de själva bedömer att de hanterar konflikter; om de har fått någon utbildning i konflikthantering och om skolan som de arbetar på har några speciella riktlinjer för att hantera konflikter.   Mina frågeställningar är: Hur tänker pedagogerna om sin egen delaktighet i elevernas konflikthantering? Hur tänker pedagogerna om vilken typ av konflikter som kan vara svåra att hantera? Resultatet av studien är att pedagogerna låter ofta eleverna sköta konflikter själva och de anser att det är bra för dem att få göra det då det är en kunskap som vi människor behöver. Dock säger alla pedagogerna att vid de konflikter som barnen inte kan hantera själva så finns de där för att hjälpa till och stötta. Pedagogernas uppfattning av vilken typ av konflikt som är svårare att hantera skiljde sig åt. Dessa konflikter var; personliga konflikter, situationer då eleverna inte inser att det är en konflikt utan anser att den andre bara har fel, etniska konflikter och konfliktsituationer då eleverna säger olika versioner och vägrar ändra åsikt. Att få tillgång till tid för att hantera konflikter framkom också som problematiskt vid vissa situationer.

This thesis uses worldview conflict theory to examine an unsuccessful lobbying campaign of the Coalition for Change for Caregivers and Temporary Foreign Workers. Using Nudler (1990, 1993), Blechman, Crocker, Docherty, and Garon (2000) and Docherty (1996, 2001), a worldview conflict analysis was developed and applied to the campaign. This research addresses two questions: 1) Is communication between the parties being impeded by the negotiation of reality? 2) Could the application of a worldview conflict analysis show the parties a way to communicate without negotiating reality? Data collected from publically available documents (Coalition, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and Minister of Human Resources and Skill Development Canada) were analyzed using content analysis, Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) metaphor analysis, and worldview conflict analysis. Similarities between the parties’ worldviews (regarding what is valuable, construction and structure of the world, and enforcement of ethic) indicated ways they could communicate without negotiating reality. / Graduate