Bridgebuilding and Navigating Political Conflict
This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology programme at Newspeak House, open to faculty, fellows, and fellowship candidates only.
Session by Faculty member Hannah O’Rourke
My starting point is that conflict is not a failure state: conflicts are necessary to politics, inevitable, and in fact creative. Politics is the reconciliation of paradox — it doesn't deny differences, it holds them. And conflict isn't always anger; often the worst kind is stuckness, a cycle of stasis and indecision. Most governance systems were built precisely to get unstuck: the Labour rule book exists because trade unionists and middle-class intellectuals with limited communications had to coordinate through enormous disagreement.
Over the years I've collected a toolkit of approaches beyond voting for resolving conflict and stuckness — getting concrete about interests rather than fighting at the values level; separating the minimal from the substantial; going process by process; thinking creatively about legitimacy beyond formal votes; constructing shared purpose or shared identity; building coalitions of the willing; repairing the relational; spotting when a fight is a proxy for something else; using stories; and, occasionally, harnessing constructive ambiguity. Each has different moral implications and costs, and knowing which to reach for is most of the craft.
I can help fellows think through questions like: When is disagreement useful? How do you stop groups fragmenting? How do you build consensus without flattening differences? When do you compromise versus hold the line? That includes practical approaches to facilitation, coalition governance, designing decision-making processes, and creating enough trust for experimentation. I've spent a lot of time in spaces where people care deeply, disagree strongly and still need to move together.
Recording: the whole session will be recorded.