On Brams' Approaches to Conflict Analysis

Studies on conflict management have been done for a long time under different names. Conflict itself deserves to be examined not only in many real sectors but in academic fields as well, and many scholars have tried to understand why conflict is inevitable in everyday life and to explore how it can be resolved. The study on how to resolve conflicts is referred as conflict management, and many other people call it in different names such as bargaining, negotiation, mediation or arbitration, although each of these has a unique characteristic distinguished from the others. The common purpose of these studies is to learn how to reach an agreement on resolving the "conflict" among the involved parties. Schelling (1960), in his celebrated book, has claimed that the strategy of conflict is not concerned with the efficient application of force but with the exploitation of potential force. Winning in a conflict is not from a competition among the parties involved but largely from bargaining. In the same line, we take the conflict management in this study. We try to answer how a conflict situation can be resolved in a cooperative way of conflict management.