Escalating conflicts often follow a structure similar to
that of a dramatic plot. Professor Geoff
Colvin has described a seven-stage pattern of interactions that exhibit
“Acting-Out” in conflicts that occur between teachers and students in the
classroom. Significantly, the analogy to
drama is encoded in the title of Professor Colvin’s book. The cycle of acting out he describes arises
out of an opening situation of calm, develops by means of triggers or initial
episodes, moves through agitation and acceleration, reaches a peak, and then
enters de-escalation on the way to recovery.
In the language of drama, the plot moves from exposition
(calm), to rising action / inciting incident (triggers), then moves to a climax
or crisis (peak), before reaching resolution in the denouement (de-escalation
and recovery). Just as the narrative structures of conflict theory and drama
seem to mirror each other, so do the observations that can be made about the
function of drama (conflict) in revealing the basic cultural contradictions and
pressure points in a given society.
Take Shakespeare, for example. Not only did Shakespeare dramatize the great
social conflicts of his day, he also encoded the repressed religious tensions between
the established Church of Rome (Catholics) and the new Protestant regime known
as the Anglicans or Church of England.
Shakespeare offers the perennial example of the dramatist who mediates
the great conflicts of his/her zeitgeist to the culture at large by
representing them in drama.
Do mediators and negotiators also function as dramatists in
the way they use narrative plots to structure conversations, develop what may
be painful interactions, excavate tensions and trigger points, and then offer
modes of resolution to a given conflict in the process of mediation?
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