Douglas P. Fry

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. Douglas P. Fry analyses the function and impacts of human conflict resolution through a cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary lens. Drawing on a wide range of knowledge - including non-Western and Indigenous perspectives - he evaluates the role of reconciliation in communities, highlighting the importance of justice-seeking, social equality and the restoration of relationships. Fry investigates both the positive and negative impacts of the law of reciprocity on human conflict resolution. He demonstrates how cultures generally strive to seek nonviolent paths to justice, pursuing balanced and equitable outcomes. Alongside the primary approaches - compensatory and conciliatory - this accessible book explores notions of fair and unfair punishment, including the desire for and consequences of revenge. Key Features: Covers key developments, models and theories Includes take-away conclusions relevant to handling conflicts in daily life Adopts multidisciplinary perspectives, presenting insights from anthropology, forager studies, management, psychology and sociology The Advanced Introduction to Conflict Resolution is an essential read for scholars and students across the social sciences, particularly those interested in peace and conflict studies, legal and political anthropology, multicultural and indigenous studies and psychology, conflict and cooperation.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. Douglas P. Fry analyses the function and impacts of human conflict resolution through a cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary lens. Drawing on a wide range of knowledge - including non-Western and Indigenous perspectives - he evaluates the role of reconciliation in communities, highlighting the importance of justice-seeking, social equality and the restoration of relationships. Fry investigates both the positive and negative impacts of the law of reciprocity on human conflict resolution. He demonstrates how cultures generally strive to seek nonviolent paths to justice, pursuing balanced and equitable outcomes. Alongside the primary approaches - compensatory and conciliatory - this accessible book explores notions of fair and unfair punishment, including the desire for and consequences of revenge. Key Features: Covers key developments, models and theories Includes take-away conclusions relevant to handling conflicts in daily life Adopts multidisciplinary perspectives, presenting insights from anthropology, forager studies, management, psychology and sociology The Advanced Introduction to Conflict Resolution is an essential read for scholars and students across the social sciences, particularly those interested in peace and conflict studies, legal and political anthropology, multicultural and indigenous studies and psychology, conflict and cooperation.

Nurturing Our Humanity offers a new perspective on our personal and social options in today's world, showing how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. It brings together findings--largely overlooked--from the natural and social sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hard-wired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed. Its groundbreaking new approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule. Moving past right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, and other familiar categories that do not include our formative parent-child and gender relations, it looks at where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale. On one end is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and man over nature. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system. Nurturing Our Humanity explores how behaviors, values, and socio-economic institutions develop differently in these two environments, documents how this impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, examines cultures from this new perspective (including societies that for millennia oriented toward partnership), and proposes actions supporting the contemporary movement in this more life-sustaining and enhancing direction. It shows how through today's ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, the domination system may lead us to an evolutionary dead end. A more equitable and sustainable way of life is biologically possible and culturally attainable: we can change our course.

A profoundly heartening view of human nature, Beyond War offers a hopeful prognosis for a future without war. Douglas P. Fry convincingly argues that our ancient ancestors were not innately warlike--and neither are we. He points out that, for perhaps ninety-nine percent of our history, for well over a million years, humans lived in nomadic hunter-and-gatherer groups, egalitarian bands where warfare was a rarity. Drawing on archaeology and fascinating recent fieldwork on hunter-gatherer bands from around the world, Fry debunks the idea that war is ancient and inevitable. For instance, among Aboriginal Australians, warfare was an extreme anomaly. Fry also points out that even today, when war seems ever present, the vast majority of us live peaceful, nonviolent lives. We are not as warlike as we think, and if we can learn from our ancestors, we may be able to move beyond war to provide real justice and security for the world.