Insight Conflict Resolution Program (ICRP)
The Insight Conflict Resolution Program (ICRP), led by Dr. Jamie Price, is the premier center for studying, developing and applying the Insight approach to conflict resolution in the United States.
ICRP is a center of thought and practice within S-CAR that employs Bernard Lonergan’s critical, reflexive philosophy as a framework for advancing research and developing applied strategies to transform deep-rooted cultural and religious conflicts that undermine human dignity, create barriers to individual opportunity, and legitimate social and economic injustice.
The Insight approach to conflict resolution explains that in order to make peace you need to understand the world of history, meaning and value that motivates action.
Sargent Shriver is the icon of ICRP
The practical idealism of Sargent Shriver that transformed US relations abroad through Peace Corps and domestically through the War on Poverty illustrates the Insight approach in action.
The call of ICRP is to develop, with the Insight approach, the analytical tools required to understand and replicate the processes of peacemaking and social reconciliation that Sargent Shriver built into his policies and programs.
What is the Insight approach?
The Insight approach attends specifically to the mind: to the dynamic structure of human consciousness and its patterns of operation; operations that create meaning and motivate action.
It looks at the way we as individuals use our minds when we lock ourselves into conflict with another person and use violent behavior to deal with it. It also looks at what is happening when we disengage from conflict behaviors and attitudes.
The Insight approach explains the cognitive patterns of conflict as a particular pattern of knowing that motivates decisions based on preserving cares that are perceived to be threatened by the decisions and cares of others. Unpacking and delinking these threats-to-cares leads to insights, where people encounter and begin to consider new information. This leads to new, authentic patterns of knowing that are no longer locked in cycles of threatened cares.
Through curiously exploring the cognitive patterns we employ to make sense of situations of conflict, we become better equipped to expand possibilities for non-conflict behaviors and interactions.
The effect is a reorientation and healing of relationships: the building of peace and reconciliation.
What ICRP does is bring the explanatory framework of the Insight approach to practical challenges of conflict and division.
CHF/ Shriver Legacy Project
CHF International, with development programs across the globe, is a prime example of the living legacy of Sargent Shriver. Its model has grown out of the participatory community development projects initiated by Sargent Shriver in Peace Corps and through the Office of Economic Opportunity.
CHF holds an extraordinary record for successful development programs, with over 90% of projects completed in some of the most war-torn countries in the world. Not only does their participatory model build successful development projects, but it brings communities together and builds peace. CHF knows its projects have made peace. They are not surprised by it, but they can’t explain why. The answer lies in the practical idealism of Sargent Shriver and his method of peacebuilding explained by the Insight approach.
The CHF/ Shriver Legacy Project is tracing the history of the legacy of Shriver in the development of CHF as an institution and evaluating CHF’s participatory programing using the Insight approach. The history, researched and written by Ted Thompson, S-CAR PhD student, will be published by CHF this fall. The Insight evaluation, work being undertaken by S-CAR students, Najuan Daadleh and Megan Price, will look into how CHF’s programming model in Iraq and the West Bank has been successful and how it has built peace.
Shriver Speeches Project
Soon over 600 of Sargent Shriver’s original speeches spanning 6 decades will be searchable. With the help of the powerful content analysis software, WordStat, scholars and students will be able to mine the heart and mind of Shriver through the words he delivered as he championed programs of practical idealism like the War on Poverty and Peace Corps; programs that built peace and community through public policy in both the US and abroad.
Retaliatory Violence Insight Project
The deep and pervasive problem of retaliatory violence in the United States – particularly the problem of retaliatory homicide – is one of the most frustrating and difficult for law enforcement to predict, prevent, and address. Retaliatory homicide is a national problem with staggering costs to individuals, law enforcement agencies, the distressed communities in which retaliatory violence is prevalent, and to American society as a whole. Retaliatory homicide also signals a disturbing devaluation of police as symbol and agent of justice and community protection.
ICRP, through a grant from the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, will develop Insight-based interventions with police departments to help tackle the deep rooted problem of retaliatory violence in three cities across the country beginning this winter.
Students are engaged in applying Insight theory and method to explore questions of conflict and resolution.
Insight Study Group
Developing Insight evaluation strategy for Armenian/ Azerbaijani dialogue workshops led by Phil Gamaghelyan, S-CAR PhD student and director of the imaginedialogue.com/
Exploring intersections of the Insight approach and Neuroscience/ Cognitive Psychology as well as the Insight approach and mindfulness practice
