conflict in literature research paper

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Front Psychol

Resolving Conflicts Between People and Over Time in the Transformation Toward Sustainability: A Framework of Interdependent Conflicts

Johann m. majer.

1 Department of Social, Organizational, and Political Psychology, Faculty of Education, Institute of Psychology, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany

Matthias Barth

2 Education for Sustainable Development, Faculty of Sustainability, Institute of Sustainable Development and Learning, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany

Marie van Treek

Roman trötschel, associated data.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material; further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Transformative and mutually beneficial solutions require decision-makers to reconcile present- and future interests (i.e., intrapersonal conflicts over time) and to align them with those of other decision-makers (i.e., interpersonal conflicts between people). Despite the natural co-occurrence of intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts in the transformation toward sustainability, both types of conflicts have been studied predominantly in isolation. In this conceptual article, we breathe new life into the traditional dialog between individual decision-making and negotiation research and address critical psychological barriers to the transformation toward sustainability. In particular, we argue that research on intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts should be tightly integrated to provide a richer understanding of the interplay between these conflicts. We propose a novel, unifying framework of interdependent conflicts that systematically structures this interplay, and we analyze how complex interdependencies between the social (i.e., conflict between decision-makers) and temporal (i.e., conflict within a decision-maker) dimensions pose fundamental psychological barriers to mutually beneficial solutions. Since challenges to conflict resolution in the transformation toward sustainability emerge not only between individual decision-makers but also frequently between groups of decision-makers, we scale the framework up to the level of social groups and thereby provide an interdependent-conflicts perspective on the interplay between intra- and intergenerational conflicts. Overall, we propose simple, testable propositions, identify intervention approaches, and apply them to transition management. By analyzing the challenges faced by negotiating parties during interdependent conflicts and highlighting potential intervention approaches, we contribute to the transformation toward sustainability. Finally, we discuss implications of the framework and point to avenues for future research.

Introduction

Human civilization stands at a crossroads. Avoiding a decline of the human species and ensuring its long-term survival requires scaling up human cooperation at all levels, from individual to global ( Dreber and Nowak, 2008 ; Ostrom, 2009 ; Dannenberg and Barrett, 2018 ). Sustainability issues such as climatic change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion can result in a conflict of interests between individuals, groups, organizations, and nations ( Hsiang et al., 2013 ; Mach et al., 2019 ). These challenges inevitably require collaborative decision-making processes (i.e., negotiations) to coordinate different interests and reach conflict solutions ( Barrett and Dannenberg, 2012 ; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2013 ). Negotiation is a pervasive communication process that is most-widely used to plan for the future, allocate resources, resolve conflicts of interests, and solve complex problems via mutually satisfying agreements ( Jang et al., 2018 ).

“[Negotiations] can dramatically reshape the social and physical environments we occupy” ( Jang et al., 2018 , p. 318). The transformative potential of collaborative decision-making processes to lead to new practices ( Asara et al., 2015 ) has long been recognized by scholars of social conflict. Indeed, Pruitt and Carnevale (1993 , p. 15) concluded that “…[negotiation] presides over much of the change that occurs in human society. Conflict often results from dissatisfaction with the status quo, and it often leads to negotiation about how to do things differently. […] [S]ociety usually prospers if negotiation goes well and the agreements reached are mutually satisfying to the parties. Conversely, society is often harmed when negotiation goes poorly and fails to produce a mutually satisfying outcome.”

Negotiation processes can trigger change at different societal levels (the Multi-level perspective; Geels and Schot, 2007 ; Geels, 2011 ). At the micro-level (i.e., niches), at which individual actors operate, negotiation processes can promote sustainability transitions. At the meso-level (i.e., regimes), diverse stakeholders and representatives of social groups (e.g., communities, firms, private and public organizations, political parties, governmental institutions) incrementally transform the current state of society via negotiations ( Geels, 2020 ). Across both levels, negotiation processes constitute an essential element of collective sense-making processes and can foster societal change ( Geels, 2020 ).

It is important to note that “the structure and processes of negotiation are fundamentally the same at the personal level as they are at the diplomatic and corporate level” ( Lewicki and Litterer, 1985 ). Indeed, negotiations are interactive human decision-making processes. In line with this reasoning, our conceptual article stands in the tradition of psychological and behavioral decision-making research in assuming that negotiators depart from rationality in systematic ways (e.g., Raiffa, 1982 ; Neale and Bazerman, 1985 ; Trötschel et al., 2015 ). In the transformation toward sustainability, negotiators are confronted with so-called “wicked problems,” which are characterized by systemic complexities, including the involvement of multiple, interdependent actors ( Rittel and Webber, 1973 ). Beyond these social interdependencies, negotiators are also confronted with the critical element of time and temporal interdependencies, as has been emphasized in the extended conceptualization of “super wicked problems” ( Levin et al., 2012 ; Peters, 2017 ).

Previous research has revealed that negotiations on sustainability issues are often ineffective and end in suboptimal solutions ( Van der Gaast, 2015 ; Weber and Johnson, 2016 ; Dannenberg and Barrett, 2018 ) and that the involved parties, external stakeholders, and – most often – societies would benefit from more-mutually beneficial solutions ( Bazerman et al., 1999 ). We argue that negotiation aimed at the transformation toward sustainability faces fundamental psychological barriers grounded in the conglomeration of social and temporal interdependencies. Given these conflicting interests both between people and over time, exactly how such transformation can be promoted remains unclear. In the psychological literature, two major lines of research have contributed significantly to our understanding of complex decision-making processes: first, the negotiation-research perspective (i.e., how parties resolve conflicts of interests between decision-makers), and second, the individual decision-making perspective (i.e., how decision-makers resolve conflicts between present- and future interests). These two research perspectives have been the focus of a long-standing dialog that has spurred innovation across and beyond lines of research ( Raiffa, 1982 ; for a review, see Tsay and Bazerman, 2009 ). In the present contribution, we seek to reinvigorate this traditional dialog between the two psychological research areas and address key barriers and drivers in the transformation toward sustainability.

Given that the transformation toward sustainability faces super wicked problems ( Levin et al., 2012 ), including conflicts between people and over time, these conflicts should be considered jointly rather than in isolation. We posit the existence of an interplay between inter- and intrapersonal conflicts (see Thompson and Gonzalez, 1997 ). Politicians, for instance, “[must] navigate political conflict over climate policy in Congress […] and within themselves” ( Van Boven et al., 2018 ). Importantly, we believe that the web of interplay between conflicts is difficult to disentangle because negotiators must simultaneously integrate their own interests with those of their counterparts and reconcile their present- and future interests. The interplay between conflicts therefore acts as a significant barrier to the transformation toward sustainability (e.g., Weber and Johnson, 2016 ). To explicitly delineate the concrete challenges that arise from this interplay between inter- and intrapersonal conflicts, we introduce the concept of interdependent conflicts. We propose that a solution to one conflict (e.g., between decision-makers) impacts the solution to concurrent conflicts (e.g., within decision-makers). Consequently, interdependent conflicts can only be resolved efficiently by considering them simultaneously (see super wicked problems, Levin et al., 2012 ).

By developing a framework of interdependent conflicts, we contribute to existing research on decision-making and negotiation in the transformation toward sustainability in various ways. First, we provide a unifying structure for complex and interdependent decision-making processes. Second, taking the negotiation perspective, we seek to expand existing research by introducing a temporal dimension (i.e., negotiation agreements with short-term and long-term consequences). Third, from a multi-level perspective, we offer a systematic link between psychological negotiation research and transition management and highlight negotiation processes at different societal levels. Fourth, from an applied perspective, we aim to provide a more-comprehensive understanding of psychological conflicts in the transformation toward sustainability and to offer potential leverage points with hands-on tools for interventions that foster sustainable solutions. In essence, we seek to encourage future research to further examine human decision-making processes in the context of interdependent conflicts with the goal of fostering the transformation toward sustainability.

The Framework of Interdependent Conflicts

Based on the assumption that conflict resolutions depend on one another in the social and temporal dimensions, we derive a basic structure for the framework by distinguishing between three psychological conflicts. The involved parties may experience (1) present interpersonal conflict between their own and their counterparts’ present interests. This type of conflict has traditionally been investigated by social-conflict- and negotiation research (e.g., De Dreu et al., 2000 ). Simultaneously, each party may experience (2) intrapersonal conflict between their present- and future interests (i.e., the conflict emerges for each party individually). This type of conflict has predominantly been studied by individual decision-making research (e.g., Frederick et al., 2002 ). Finally, the two parties may also experience (3) future interpersonal conflict between their own and their counterparts’ future interests. Very few studies have investigated outcome delays and the efficiency of negotiated agreements found in this type of conflict (e.g., Okhuysen et al., 2003 ; Henderson et al., 2006 ). The parsimonious framework focuses explicitly on dyadic, two-party conflicts of interests and on two instances over time (i.e., present- and future interests). 1 Figure 1 illustrates the proposed framework of interdependent conflicts for individual decision-makers.

The framework of interdependent conflicts at the individual level. Figure shows the integration of traditional research fields (vertical and horizontal gray-framed areas) into our unifying framework of interdependent conflicts. The framework distinguishes between present interpersonal conflict, intrapersonal conflict emerging for each party, and future interpersonal conflict. These conflicts naturally co-occur and interdependently affect one another.

Our paper is structured as follows: To establish our framework, we first introduce interdependent conflicts at the individual level. In so doing, we review the existing literature, outline characteristic psychological processes, derive propositions, and conclude with an intervention approach to addressing the proposed problems at the individual level. Second, we scale up our framework from the individual-group to the social-group level to establish interdependent conflicts as an interplay between inter- and intragenerational conflicts. We then follow the same structure as at the individual level.

Introducing Interdependent Conflicts at the Individual Level

Interpersonal conflicts.

Interpersonal conflicts emerge whenever two or more parties perceive their views or interests as being incompatible ( Jehn, 1995 ), and negotiation is the decision-making process that parties with divergent interests use to reconcile their differences ( Pruitt and Carnevale, 1993 ). Traditionally, the interest structure of interpersonal conflicts has been a central element of theorization and research (e.g., Gelfand et al., 2011 ). In general, the literature distinguishes between convergent- and divergent-interest structures: (1) When parties have convergent interests, these interests are compatible, and no interpersonal conflict emerges. By contrast, when parties have divergent interests, these interests can be (2a) diametrically opposed, resulting in a distributive-interest structure (i.e., a zero-sum structure without opportunities for exploring integrative, win-win solutions). In zero-sum negotiations, the best solution for both parties is a compromise ( Pruitt and Carnevale, 1993 ). When parties have divergent interests, these interests can also be (2b) opposed, but since the parties have different priorities, they form an integrative-interest structure, which includes mutually beneficial trade-off opportunities and allows the parties to explore integrative agreements (i.e., win-win agreements; Pruitt and Carnevale, 1993 ). In contrast to compromise agreements, integrative agreements create value for both parties and therefore leave them better off than would a compromise (e.g., Bazerman et al., 1985 ). Importantly, in order to exploit integrative potential and reach mutually beneficial, transformative solutions, parties must consider their own and their counterparts’ underlying interests and coordinate them via negotiations.

In interpersonal conflicts, negotiators typically display the detrimental psychological tendency to devalue their counterparts’ interests ( Thompson and Hastie, 1990 ; Babcock and Loewenstein, 1997 ; Curhan et al., 2004 ). Parties therefore have a biased idea of how to resolve a social conflict in favor of their own interests. Pinkley et al. (1995) demonstrated that negotiators devalue their counterparts’ interests and thus create suboptimal agreements even though the parties have complete information on their counterparts’ interests. As parties have a basic propensity toward interpersonal devaluation, resolving interpersonal conflicts is difficult and often leads to suboptimal agreements ( Schelling, 1958 ; Bazerman and Neale, 1992 ).

Intrapersonal Conflicts Over Time

The individual decision-making perspective.

Decision-makers who experience intrapersonal conflict must make a choice between different alternatives that entail consequences that occur at different times (e.g., Soman et al., 2005 ). People must weigh immediate against future utility ( Loewenstein, 1988 ) and thus make “trade-offs among costs and benefits occurring at different times” ( Frederick et al., 2002 ). In the transformation toward sustainability, intrapersonal conflicts are ubiquitous and challenging to decision-makers, for instance, when choosing between maintaining the status quo or developing an alternative with substantial long-term benefits ( Weber, 2017 ).

Research has demonstrated that people tend to temporally devalue their own future interests relative to their immediate ones (for a review, see Frederick et al., 2002 ). As individuals put a premium on immediate benefits, they often prefer smaller, immediate benefits over larger, later ones ( Weber, 2017 ). Hardisty and Weber (2009 , p. 329) describe this human tendency as a “strong desire, all things being equal, to get things now.” Decision-makers therefore have a biased idea in favor of their present interests in terms of how to resolve the temporal conflict.

The Negotiation Perspective

Social-conflict research metaphorically describes intrapersonal conflicts as two psychological states with opposing interests in which one party seeks to protect present interests and the other to protect future interests ( Bazerman et al., 1998 ). Schelling (1984 , p. 58) describes this situation with the following metaphor: “Everybody behaves like two people, one who wants clear lungs and long life and the other who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and the other who wants dessert… the ‘straight’ one often in command… but the wayward one needing only to get occasional control to spoil the other’s best-laid plans.”

Read et al. (1999) indicate that such intrapersonal conflict can have similar interest structures to interpersonal conflict. (1) When a decision-maker has convergent interests, present- and future interests are compatible, and no intrapersonal conflict emerges. When one decision-maker has divergent interests, present- and future interests can be (2a) diametrically opposed, resulting in a distributive-interest structure over time. In this case, the decision-maker prefers the diametrically opposed option now as opposed to later. Alternatively, the decision-maker’s present- and future interests can also be (2b) opposed but have different priorities, resulting in an integrative-interest structure over time. Preference-consistent trade-offs can therefore also reconcile a party’s interests over time in individual decision-making. Read et al. (1999 , p. 184) suggest that “analogously [to interpersonal conflicts], individual decision-makers can reach integrative agreements with themselves, if they consider the possibility of trade-offs across the many choices that they face.” To reach efficient solutions in an intrapersonal conflict, decision-makers must consider their own present- and future interests and reconcile them by negotiating with themselves over time ( Bazerman et al., 1998 ). Therefore, researchers argue that intrapersonal conflicts are as difficult to resolve as interpersonal conflicts ( Bazerman et al., 1998 ).

Characteristic Psychological Processes in Inter- and Intrapersonal Conflicts

In the following sections, we highlight the central psychological processes involved in the interplay between interdependent conflicts based on the reviewed literature. We remain fully aware that other cognitive, motivational, and affective processes may also contribute to inefficient conflict resolution.

Interpersonal and Intertemporal Devaluation

As parties are prone to devalue others’ present interests and their own future interests ( Babcock and Loewenstein, 1997 ; Frederick et al., 2002 ), we conclude that devaluing interests is likely the dominant psychological tendency in interdependent conflicts. Decision-makers face three distinct interests in addition to their own present interests: their counterparts’ present interests, their own future interests, and their counterparts’ future interests. Solutions to interdependent conflicts are hence impaired by either interpersonal devaluation, intertemporal devaluation, or both: In a present interpersonal conflict, a party socially devalues their counterparts’ present interests. In an intrapersonal conflict, a party temporally devalues their own future interests. In a future interpersonal conflict, a party interpersonally and intertemporally devalues their counterparts’ future interests. In line with previous research ( Wade-Benzoni and Tost, 2009 ; Charlton et al., 2013 ), devaluation should be strongest in future interpersonal conflicts due to the duality of interpersonal and intertemporal devaluation.

Outcome Interdependence and Decisional Control

In addition to the processes of interpersonal and intertemporal devaluation, outcome interdependence and decisional control play an important role in interdependent conflicts. Following Interdependence Theory ( Kelley and Thibaut, 1978 ), the structure of any given interdependence situation can be described in terms of specific features that aid in the understanding of psychological processes ( Rusbult and Van Lange, 1996 ). Outcome interdependence and decisional control differ systematically across types of psychological conflicts. Specifically, the degree of outcome interdependence varies across inter- and intrapersonal conflicts. Whereas Party A’s outcomes are interdependent on Party B’s outcomes (interpersonal conflict), Party A’s future outcomes are purely dependent on its present outcomes (intrapersonal conflict). Consequently, parties’ decisional control also ranges across conflicts, from joint control in interpersonal conflicts to actor control in intrapersonal conflicts. 2

In intrapersonal conflict, decision-makers face a situation with outcome dependence and full actor control and can decide how to resolve a conflict between their own present- and future interests independently of their counterparts. Herrnstein and Prelec (1991) describe actor control with a metaphor from the courtroom: The moment that a temporal decision is made, the actor functions as both “judge and jury.” In intrapersonal conflicts, parties have full actor control to simply overrule their own future interests and only serve their present interests, or vice-versa (see also Loewenstein, 1996 ).

By contrast, in interpersonal conflicts, parties face a situation with outcome interdependence and joint control – that is, both parties’ outcomes are mutually dependent on the decisions and actions of their counterparts. Parties thus have joint control and must therefore coordinate their decisions with those of their counterparts. Joint control has been metaphorically described by conflict scholars as the “negotiation dance” ( Raiffa, 1982 ) to highlight the coordination of decisions and actions in interpersonal conflicts.

Based on the distinction between full actor and joint control, parties could perceive of having different degrees of freedom in resolving their conflicts of interests over time and between people. Specifically, conflicts over time (i.e., outcome dependence) may be resolvable via actor control. By contrast, conflicts between people (i.e., outcome interdependence) may only be resolvable via joint control. Due to these differences across conflicts, parties may experience more constraints in resolving conflicts of interests with their counterparts (i.e., joint control) compared with resolving conflicts of interests with themselves (i.e., actor control). We therefore conclude that negotiators tend to prioritize the resolution of inter- over intrapersonal conflicts because solutions between people require interpersonal coordination, whereas solutions over time are less constrained by coordination with other parties.

Parties’ Consideration of Interdependent Conflicts

Building on the above-mentioned research, our framework of interdependent conflicts postulates how parties cognitively process the interplay between different psychological conflicts. In contrast to a rational approach in which parties cognitively process interdependent conflicts in a comprehensive, unbiased way (i.e., by considering all the consequences of their actions equally), we hypothesize that parties systematically prioritize the consideration of certain conflicts in a biased way.

Prioritizing the Consideration of Interdependent Conflicts

• Proposition 1: In interdependent conflicts, parties prioritize the consideration of present interpersonal conflicts (first priority) over intrapersonal conflicts (second priority) and future interpersonal conflicts (third priority) .

These priorities are derived both from parties’ tendency to discount their future interests ( Frederick et al., 2002 ) and to devaluate their counterparts’ interests ( Babcock and Loewenstein, 1997 ) as well as from the parties’ differences in decisional control ( Kelley and Thibaut, 1978 ). When considering present interpersonal conflicts, parties devalue their counterparts’ present interests only on the interpersonal dimension. When considering intrapersonal conflicts, parties devalue their future interests only on the temporal dimension. However, when considering future interpersonal conflicts, they devalue not only their own future interests on the temporal dimension but also their counterparts’ future interest on the interpersonal and intertemporal dimension. This devaluation should lead to a more-pronounced consideration of the present inter- and intrapersonal conflict compared with future interpersonal conflicts. However, as detailed above, in addition to devaluation, parties also experience less decisional control and more constraints when resolving inter- over intrapersonal conflicts. Together, this observation should lead to a prioritized consideration of present interpersonal conflicts (first priority) over intrapersonal conflicts (second priority) and future interpersonal conflicts (third priority; see Figure 2 ). Consequently, parties’ prioritization of interdependent conflicts should impair a balanced and comprehensive consideration of conflicts. Noteworthy, such a prioritization of conflicts should result in an unbalanced and biased way of processing interdependent conflicts.

Prioritized consideration of interdependent conflicts. We propose that parties prioritize present interpersonal conflicts (first priority) over intrapersonal conflicts (second priority) and future interpersonal conflicts (third priority).

In line with this reasoning, prioritizing the consideration of conflicts should also determine which conflict is resolved at the cost of another. 3 We postulate that conflicts with a higher-order priority (e.g., a present interpersonal conflict) are likely to be resolved at the cost of resolving conflicts with a lower-order priority (e.g., an intrapersonal conflict). This biased prioritization may have important implications for resolving interdependent conflicts and threaten the transformation toward sustainability.

Initial support for our assumptions can be found in a survey study ( Drory and Ritov, 1997 ) that investigated conflict-management strategies when parties experienced only an interpersonal conflict vs. both an interpersonal conflict and an intrapersonal conflict. Parties preferred more-cooperative strategies for resolving the present interpersonal conflict when they experienced the intrapersonal conflict simultaneously as compared with when they did not. Similarly, parties that experienced interdependent conflicts were more inclined to collaborate with their counterparts when the intrapersonal conflict between present interests and long-term adverse consequences was made explicit (vs. implicit; Ritov and Drory, 1996 ). This finding is in line with recent research revealing that parties value agreements over impasses when dealing with present interpersonal conflicts, even if the impasse would lead to more-profitable outcomes than would the achieved agreement ( Tuncel et al., 2016 ).

Effects of Priorities in the Consideration of Conflicts on the Quality of Agreements

• Proposition 2: Prioritizing the consideration of conflicts determines the extent to which parties can exploit integrative potential and reach integrative agreements .

To resolve interdependent conflicts in an integrative way, decision-makers must consider their interests in a comprehensive rather than in an isolated, prioritized way. From a rational perspective, parties can maximize the utility of a solution ( Raiffa, 1982 ) by making integrative trade-offs between their own and their counterparts’ interests (i.e., interpersonal conflict) and between their present- and future interests (i.e., intrapersonal conflict). Such trade-off opportunities can only be exploited when parties consider the conflicts in a comprehensive, unbiased way. However, the predicted tendency to prioritize conflicts should lead to a biased, prioritized consideration and therefore hinder parties in exploiting integrative potential. Specifically, if integrative potential is found in the intrapersonal conflict or even in the future interpersonal conflict, parties should neglect these trade-off opportunities and instead seek to resolve the present interpersonal conflict. Consequently, prioritizing conflict consideration can be particularly detrimental because parties do not consider all trade-off opportunities in a comprehensive, unbiased way and may thus overlook mutually beneficial and transformative solutions.

O’Connor et al. (2002) showed that responders in a simulated-ultimatum game rejected more bids (i.e., forewent favorable solutions in an intrapersonal conflict) when instructed to focus on the present interpersonal conflict compared with the intrapersonal conflict. This finding provides initial support for our assumptions on the detrimental effects of prioritizing interdependent conflicts.

An Intervention Approach to Addressing a Prioritized Consideration of Conflicts

We assume that prioritizing the present interpersonal conflict is caused – in part – by constraints in decisional control. Resolving interpersonal conflicts requires negotiating between parties to overcome divergent interests, whereas resolving intrapersonal conflict does not require negotiating to overcome divergent interests in the present or future. To balance the consideration of interdependent conflicts, we propose also applying a negotiation strategy to intrapersonal conflicts over time ( Bazerman et al., 1998 ). Negotiating “with oneself” should help parties reach integrative solutions over time and raise the priority of intrapersonal conflicts.

Social-conflict research has revealed that integrative solutions are particularly likely when each negotiator (1) has a strong concern for his or her own outcomes (dual concerns at a subordinate level; Pruitt and Carnevale, 1993 ; De Dreu et al., 2000 ) and (2) takes both parties’ common interests into consideration (common concerns at a superordinate level; Rhoades and Carnevale, 1999 ; De Dreu et al., 2000 ; Trötschel et al., 2011 , 2021). Accordingly, parties should be concerned about (1) their present- and future interests (dual concerns at a subordinate level) and (2) their common interests over time (common concerns at a superordinate level). Considering dual and common concerns over time should trigger negotiating with oneself, and this strategy should raise the intrapersonal conflict to the same level of priority as the interpersonal conflict. Simultaneously, raising the priority of intrapersonal conflicts by negotiating with oneself should also lead to an increase in the priority of future interpersonal conflicts. Overall, we posit that combining interpersonal and intrapersonal negotiation should lead to a balanced, unbiased, comprehensive consideration of interdependent conflicts (see Figure 3 ).

The negotiation-with-oneself strategy for balancing the consideration of interdependent conflicts at the individual level. The horizontal ellipses show how common concern can lead to integrative negotiation processes between parties. The vertical ellipses show how common concern can lead to integrative negotiation processes over time.

Applying the Intervention Approach to the Transformation Toward Sustainability

Negotiations play a vital role in community-led grassroots innovations that are niche spaces supporting local-scale transitions toward sustainability (e.g., Raven et al., 2008 ; Seyfang and Haxletine, 2012 ; Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013 ). Grassroots initiatives have been shown to foster change in diverse areas, such as mobility or energy ( Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2013 ). However, a crucial success factor for exploiting the transformative potential of grassroots innovations is the successful negotiation and mutually-beneficial conflict resolution. Conflicts emerge because local partners and stakeholders of such an initiative may have at least some common interests but may also have opposing interests in reaching their shared objectives. For instance, individual owners of cooperative housing apartments may share their interest in investing in energy-efficient buildings, but may have diverging interests in the potential pathways to reach this energy transition. Some of the owners may prefer to install solar panels on the rooftop, whereas others may prefer to maintain the rooftop accessible for the residents and to use other energy sources for powering the building energy-efficiently. As they can only reach their objectives jointly, the cooperative owners must negotiate strategies that lead to the intended transformation of existing structures. However, all involved actors may enter negotiations by positioning their interests in their immediate and local context that may hinder the implementation of the pathway toward innovation. Both our framework of interdependent conflicts and the suggested intervention approach of intrapersonal negotiations for reconciling one’s present- and future interests may help to facilitate successful negotiations in grassroots innovations. Therefore, implementing the proposed intervention approach in the context of community-led grassroots initiatives requires that individual actors are concerned with their dual interests in the present and future at a subordinate level as well as with their common interests at a superordinate level. At a subordinate level, future interests come into play when the involved actors formulate long-term goals, develop a vision, and specify their expectations for the transition toward sustainability. Present interests may guide decision-making when searching for pathways to implement the innovation. Additionally, at the superordinate level, actors should share the common concern that radical innovation will lead to the intended transformation toward sustainability. When actors consider their dual and common concerns, intrapersonal negotiation may be initiated, and a prioritized consideration of conflicts may be debiased. As a consequence, negotiation processes between local actors may be improved and lead to more-mutually beneficial and transformative solutions for the societal transformation sparked by grassroots initiatives.

Tools for Implementing the Intervention Approach

Tools for implementing the negotiation-with-oneself strategy can be derived from both decision-making- and social-conflict research. Decision-making research suggests that an increasing similarity between one’s present- and future self may trigger a party’s readiness to negotiate with themself (e.g., Bartels and Urminsky, 2011 ; Hershfield, 2011 ; Urminsky, 2017 ). Alternatively, changing the primary default consideration from present- to future interests may also stimulate intrapersonal negotiations ( Weber et al., 2007 ; Sunstein and Reisch, 2013 ). Social-conflict research suggests that perspective-taking of one’s own future interests may also help induce negotiations with oneself over time and balance the consideration of interdependent conflicts ( Galinsky et al., 2008 ; Trötschel et al., 2011 ). Furthermore, learning approaches that support analogous reasoning in transferring integrative insights from one type of psychological conflict to another could facilitate interdependent-conflict resolution ( Thompson and DeHarpport, 1994 ; Gillespie et al., 1999 ; Nadler et al., 2003 ; Kim et al., 2020 ).

Although interventions may support negotiators in reaching mutually beneficial, transformative solutions, reaching integrative solutions at the level of social groups has been shown to be even more challenging ( Loschelder and Trötschel, 2010 ; Trötschel et al., 2010 ). However, the transformation toward sustainability most-often requires negotiations between social groups, such as between larger institutions or organizations that represent certain interests ( Majer et al., 2018 ). Compared with interpersonal conflict, intergroup conflict stands out in terms of the distinct psychological processes involved. To further elucidate the psychological barriers to and drivers of interdependent conflicts at the group level, we next scale our framework up and focus on intergenerational conflict. Such situations include central psychological barriers that hinder us from taking dramatic action in the transformation toward sustainability ( Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2013 ).

Introducing Interdependent Conflicts at the Level of Social Groups: The Interplay Between Intra- and Intergenerational Conflicts

At the zenith of the COVID-19 pandemic in July 2020, the European Union agreed on the largest budget and financial package in its history to address the aftermath of the once-in-a-century-pandemic crisis. This negotiation had implications not only for member states within the present generation but also for their successor generations to come. The talks lasted almost 100 h because the member states’ contributions were heavily disputed. After an agreement had been reached, Chancellor Merkel was relieved that Europe had shown that it can come together after all ( Erlanger and Stevis-Gridneff, 2020 ). However, other European politicians criticized the fact that the funds for important future EU projects had been cut back to reach a deal between the member states ( DLF, 2020 ).

This example can be systematically structured using the framework of interdependent conflicts. Conflicts in the transformation toward sustainability include a social dimension between groups (i.e., intragenerational conflict between different groups within a current generation) and a temporal dimension between generations over time (i.e., intergenerational conflict between the predecessor and successor generation of a single group; Sherstyuk et al., 2016 ; Bosetti et al., 2020 ). In line with our framework, scholars have proposed that “many real-world intergenerational dilemmas [i.e., over time] are confounded by intragenerational social dilemmas [i.e., between groups]” ( Wade-Benzoni et al., 2008 ). Following this reasoning, we systematically differentiate between three types of psychological conflicts ( Figure 4 ): (1) present intragenerational conflict (i.e., between different groups within the present generation); (2) intergenerational conflict (i.e., between the predeceasing present generation and succeeding future generation of a single group); and finally, (3) future intragenerational conflict (i.e., between different groups within the future generation; see Footnote 1). 4

The framework of interdependent conflicts in the intergenerational context. Figure 4 displays the interplay between the arising present intragenerational conflict (i.e., the conflict between different groups within the present generation), the intergenerational conflict (i.e., the conflict between the predecessor and successor generation of a group), and the future intragenerational conflict (i.e., the conflict between different groups within the future generation).

Intergroup Conflicts (i.e., Intragenerational Conflict)

A group consists of two or more individuals connected by social relationships ( Forsyth, 2014 ). These relationships can be established objectively via outcome interdependence between individuals, which induces the formation of groups ( Lewin, 1948 ). Alternatively, relationships can also be established subjectively by assigning memberships to in-groups or out-groups to oneself and others based on similarity ( Tajfel, 1981 ). The conflicts between groups can be described as incompatibilities in the different groups’ values and/or goals, which may be caused by outcome interdependence and/or perceived similarity ( Boehm et al., 2020 ). This idea implies that intergroup conflict may involve not only economic interests but also categorization as an in- or out-group. In the transformation toward sustainability, the two foundations of intergroup conflict often arise in combination (e.g., Majer et al., 2018 ; Schuster et al., 2020 ).

Early theorizations on the causes of intergroup conflict focused on economic interests in (scarce) resources as the root of competition in intergroup conflict ( Sherif and Sherif, 1953 ; Sherif, 1961 ; Campbell, 1965 ). When comparing interpersonal and intergroup interactions, research found that intergroup relations are more competitive than are interpersonal relations ( Wildschut and Insko, 2007 ) and suggested that fear and greed explain this discontinuity effect in intergroup interactions ( Wildschut and Insko, 2007 ). Specifically, fear is based on the expectation that the other group will maximize its outcome, which poses a threat to the given group and increases competition. By contrast, greed is based on the expectation that the other group will tend to cooperate, which makes the other group vulnerable to the given group’s greed and increases competition. 5

However, another line of research suggests that merely categorizing oneself and others as members of an in- and out-group, respectively, is sufficient to induce intergroup conflict ( Tajfel and Turner, 1979 , 1986 ). Specifically, Self-Categorization Theory posits that individuals are motivated to make themselves positively distinct from others by comparing themselves to others on relevant dimensions ( Turner et al., 1987 ). If comparisons are favorable for the in-group relative to the out-group, people can make themselves positively distinct, with beneficial and direct consequences for their self-concept and self-esteem. Evidence shows that people strive for positive distinctiveness (for an overview, see Boehm et al., 2020 ), which can be obtained via different strategies, including social competition, for instance, by discriminating the out-group.

Overall, greed and fear as well as the need for positive distinctiveness all contribute to intergroup devaluation. Greed and fear are particularly pronounced when outcome interdependence exists. However, the need for positive distinctiveness can be explained by the psychological process of self-categorization as an in- or out-group member.

Intragroup Conflicts Over Time (i.e., Intergenerational Conflict)

In contrast to intergroup conflicts within a generation (e.g., Barrett and Dannenberg, 2012 ), much-less work has focused on intergenerational conflicts over time (e.g., Hauser et al., 2014 ). From a psychological perspective, intergenerational conflicts ( Wade-Benzoni and Tost, 2009 ) are characterized as decisions in which the interests of present decision-makers stand in conflict with those of future others. Such intergenerational conflicts have distinctive features as compared with intergroup (i.e., intragenerational) conflicts ( Wade-Benzoni and Tost, 2009 ).

Specifically, outcomes are not reciprocally interdependent in intergenerational conflicts. Instead, the outcomes of the future generation are fully determined by the present generation. Present generations therefore have complete actor control without the need to coordinate their interests with future others. Consequently, future generations have no voice in intergenerational conflicts (see outcome interdependence; Kelley and Thibaut, 1978 ). In addition, present generations do not have to bear the long-term consequences of their decisions and actions because they are not part of the generation that experiences the consequences. Furthermore, no direct or indirect reciprocity between the present- and future generation is possible ( Wade-Benzoni and Tost, 2009 ). The future generation cannot give anything back or punish the present generation. This lack of direct or indirect reciprocity also implies a lack of communication between the present- and future generations. Importantly, in intergroup conflicts between different groups within a current generation, reciprocity, and communication have been shown to increase cooperation and lead to more-mutually beneficial solutions (e.g., Tavoni et al., 2011 ; Yoeli et al., 2013 ). However, as the direct experience of consequences, reciprocity, and communication are ruled out in intergenerational conflict, cooperation, and integrative solutions between the present- and future generation are further exacerbated. In intergenerational conflicts, the future generation’s outcomes depend on the present generation’s beneficence (i.e., intergenerational beneficence), which is often lacking ( Sherstyuk et al., 2016 ; Bosetti et al., 2020 ). To increase intergenerational beneficence, it is therefore necessary for a perceived similarity between the present- and future generation to exist and for the present generation to identify with the future generation.

Characteristic Psychological Processes in Intra- and Intergenerational Conflicts

Intergroup devaluation.

Intergroup devaluation can be explained by the processes of greed and fear in intergroup relations as well as by the need for positive distinctiveness in comparison with the out-group. Intergroup devaluation has been found to be particularly prominent in present- and future intragenerational conflicts, which renders these conflicts difficult to resolve.

Intergenerational Devaluation (i.e., Intergroup- and Intertemporal Devaluation)

Intergenerational conflicts are difficult to resolve because intergroup- and intertemporal devaluation jointly impede integrative conflict resolution. The future generation’s interests are devalued temporally. In addition, intergroup devaluation arises because the present- and future generations are typically not part of the same collective. Both intergroup- and intertemporal devaluation are additive components of intergenerational devaluation, which is the major barrier to integrative solutions in intergenerational conflicts ( Wade-Benzoni and Tost, 2009 ). Although the degree of intergenerational devaluation should depend on perceived similarities between the present- and future generation, in general, the need for positive distinctiveness should be more-pronounced in intragenerational conflicts between distinct groups within the present generation. However, in the case of intergenerational conflicts, intergroup- and intergenerational devaluation can accumulate and lead to severe devaluation against the opposing groups’ successor generation in the future.

Outcome interdependence in intragenerational conflict only exists between the two different groups within the present generation. In intergenerational conflict over time, however, future generations outcomes fully depend on the present generation. Concerning decisional control ( Kelley and Thibaut, 1978 ), intragenerational conflict can only be resolved via joint control because one group within the present generation must coordinate its interests with another group of the same generation. By contrast, the present generation has full actor control in intergenerational conflicts because this generation fully determines the consequences for the succeeding future generations.

Parties’ Consideration of Interdependent Conflicts Across Generations

In line with the general assumption of our framework of interdependent conflicts, we postulate that social groups cognitively process different psychological conflicts in a biased way. This idea stands in contrast to a rational approach in which groups cognitively process interdependent conflicts in a comprehensive, unbiased way (i.e., they equally consider all consequences of their actions).

Prioritizing Interdependent Conflicts Within and Between Generations

• Proposition 3: In interdependent conflicts at the social-group level (i.e., generations), parties prioritize the consideration of present intragenerational conflicts (first priority) over intergenerational conflicts (second priority) and future intragenerational conflicts (third priority) .

Social groups have a tendency to prioritize present intragenerational conflicts because joint control with the other group within the present generation places constraints on the decision-making process and requires coordination between groups. This joint control stands in contrast to intergenerational conflicts over time, which should be given second priority because the present generation has full actor control when it comes to resolving these conflicts. In line with this reasoning, future intragenerational conflicts should be given third priority because in addition to intergenerational devaluation, the need for positive distinctiveness from the other group (i.e., intergroup devaluation) also contributes to the prioritization of these conflicts.

These priorities also determine which conflict will be resolved at the cost of another. Conflicts of higher priority may be resolved at the cost of lower-priority conflicts because present intragenerational conflicts should receive more consideration than intergenerational conflicts or future intragenerational conflicts. Prioritizing the consideration of interdependent conflicts thus has important implications for the transformation toward sustainability.

Recent research has found initial support for Proposition 3 ( Sherstyuk et al., 2016 ) by showing that adding the dimension of intergenerational conflict over time to the dimension of intragenerational conflict renders conflict resolution between parties more short-sighted.

• Proposition 4: A prioritized consideration of conflicts determines the extent to which social groups (i.e., generations) can exploit the integrative potential and reach integrative agreements .

To achieve mutually beneficial, transformative solutions at the group level, a balanced and unbiased consideration of all conflicts (rather than a prioritized consideration) is necessary. However, we assume that the involved groups prioritize conflicts with detrimental consequences. Specifically, parties consider the coordination of diverging interests in higher-priority conflicts to a greater extent than in lower-priority conflicts. Integrative potential and the trade-off opportunities embedded within lower-priority conflicts are therefore less-likely to be discovered. A prioritized, biased consideration of conflicts should thus result in suboptimal solutions for involved groups. In other words, resolving interdependent conflicts should be transformative and mutually beneficial if future generations’ interests are considered in an unbiased and balanced way.

Jacquet et al. (2013) provided initial evidence for Proposition 4 by experimentally demonstrating that when a temporal dimension is introduced in intergroup conflicts, conflict resolution is less optimal than when the intergroup conflict has no long-term consequences.

An Intervention Approach to Addressing a Prioritized Consideration of Interdependent Conflicts Across Generations

Based on research on social conflict and negotiation (e.g., De Dreu et al., 2000 ) and on intergroup conflict (e.g., Dovidio et al., 2000 ), we develop an intervention approach tailored to balance the consideration of interdependent conflicts between social groups. Research has shown that the perception of belonging to distinct, opposed groups (“us” vs. “them”) can be changed via interventions ( Dovidio et al., 2000 ). Specifically, by re-categorizing one’s own group and the other group into subgroups of one superordinate, common in-group identity (the new “we” – i.e., two subgroups within one group; Gaertner et al., 1993 , 1994 ), intergroup conflict can be reduced. Importantly, managing intragenerational conflict via negotiations requires that (1) the two subgroups consider their common concerns by creating a new superordinate, common in-group identity and (2) that each subgroup maintain its distinct group membership and consider its dual concerns (i.e., creating a common in-group identity, while maintaining dual identities). If the groups consider their superordinate, common in-group identity and common concerns, while simultaneously considering their dual identities and dual concerns, intragenerational conflicts can be resolved in an integrative, unbiased way ( Gaertner et al., 2016 ).

To balance the consideration of interdependent conflicts across social groups and time, we transfer the intervention approach from intra- to intergenerational conflict. We find the classic, common in-group-identity approach particularly suitable for stimulating negotiations with future others in an integrative way. As a prerequisite, the present generation should (1) create a common in-group identity with their succeeding future generation that includes common concerns shared by the present- and future generations and (2) acknowledge their distinct dual identities over time – including dual concerns of the present- and future generations – in order to stimulate negotiations with future others.

However, in intergenerational conflict, future generations have no voice to stand up for their concerns. As communication between present- and future generations is ruled out, a shift toward future generations’ interests is necessary to elicit negotiations with future others. We propose that present generations be held responsible for resolving intergenerational conflicts via negotiations. Contemporary representatives of the future generation may take responsibility for speaking up for their generations’ interests ( Kamijo et al., 2017 ). This negotiating-with-future-others strategy combines a common in-group-identity approach with a representation of future generations in order to foster integrative solutions. Negotiating with future others also raises the priority of the intergenerational conflict compared with that of the present intragenerational conflict, thereby leading to a more-balanced consideration of interdependent conflicts. If each present generation uses the negotiating-with-future-others strategy, a more-balanced consideration of the future intragenerational conflict should also be reached. Overall, negotiating with future others should be a particularly suitable approach to balancing the consideration of interdependent conflicts and fostering mutually beneficial and transformative solutions ( Figure 5 ).

The negotiating-with-future-others strategy for balancing the consideration of interdependent conflicts at the generational level. The horizontal ellipses show how common in-group identity leads to integrative negotiation processes at the intragenerational level between groups. The vertical ellipses show how common in-group identity leads to integrative negotiation processes at the intergenerational level over time. If both groups engage in such intergenerational negotiation processes, they should also be able to balance the consideration of future intragenerational conflicts.

Negotiations are also an integral part of the transition management approach ( Meadowcroft, 2009 ; Loorbach, 2010 ; Schreuer et al., 2010 ), which typically seeks to regulate and govern fundamental processes of societal change that may take generations to realize ( Frantzeskaki et al., 2012 ). During this transition, the sustainability value of intergenerational justice must be protected. However, the involved societal groups of the present generation may enter negotiations by positioning their interests in their direct and immediate context, thereby leading to suboptimal solutions ( Loorbach, 2010 ). In particular, the different interest groups within the present generation may experience short-term need for compromises, whereas succeeding future generations need long-term ambitions for radical change ( Frantzeskaki et al., 2012 ). Traditionally, transition management distinguishes between four types of circular-governance activities to facilitate sustainability transitions: strategic, tactical, operational, and reflexive activities ( Loorbach, 2010 ). The strategic and tactical activities in the transition-management cycle are largely interest-driven and require negotiation between representatives and delegates of larger societal interest groups, organizations, or institutions that have the capacity to contribute to the vision of the transition. Particularly during the tactical-activity phase of the transition-management cycle, the development of a concrete transition agenda requires the negotiation and coordination of interests between groups within the present generation and the alignment of these interests with those of future generations. In an exemplary innovation program on future urban mobility (e.g., urban-living labs, von Wirth et al., 2018 ), stakeholder groups of the present generation such as local residents, public transportation services, private mobility providers, and city authorities develop transition scenarios ( Sondeijker et al., 2006 ), which are descriptions of desirable future states that include alternative pathways for reaching them (i.e., backcasting). However, the interests of future generations should be aligned with these transition scenarios created by the delegates of the stakeholder groups within the present generation. According to our intervention approach, present delegates should create a common in-group identity with the succeeding future generation and also consider the dual identities of the present- and the future generations when developing the scenario for the urban mobility transition. In addition, a representative of the future generation could be assigned to safeguard the future generation’s interests during the development of scenarios for the urban mobility transition. Our proposed intervention approach may be particularly suitable for generating more mutually beneficial and transformative solutions in the management of transitions when interests within and between generations must be negotiated. As a result, the negotiation-with-future-others strategy may help to overcome a biased and unbalanced consideration of interdependent conflicts between societal interest groups and their successor generations.

Potential tools for creating common in-group identities include placing focus on superordinate-group memberships (e.g., nations, organizations, and communities), increasing affinity with future generations ( Wade-Benzoni, 2008 ; Arora et al., 2016 ), and emphasizing factors that are shared by the groups (e.g., values, fate, and goals). Alternative tools exist that may further trigger intergenerational negotiations over time by forecasting future generations’ beneficence ( Bosetti et al., 2020 ), priming present generations with the inevitability of their own mortality ( Wade-Benzoni et al., 2012 ), or providing advice to future generations ( Sherstyuk et al., 2016 ). However, these tools often neglect common in-group identities and the representation of future generations, both of which are required to elicit negotiations with future others.

General Discussion

We developed and introduced a framework of interdependent conflicts for stimulating novel research that examines individual- and joint decision-making processes in the transformation toward sustainability. The critical relevance that negotiations entail in this transformation is undisputed ( Pruitt and Carnevale, 1993 ; Loorbach, 2010 ); however, it is also unanimously accepted that “negotiation will fail to achieve fundamental change unless there is a commitment to long-term change […]” ( Kemp et al., 2007 , p. 316). Despite this conclusion, the existing literature on negotiations and decision-making treats sustainability challenges rather unidimensionally. While negotiation- and social-conflict research primarily focus on conflict resolution in the present ( Jang et al., 2018 ), individual decision-making often neglects the social interdependencies against which deep structural change must be negotiated and coordinated.

Typically, decision-makers must simultaneously consider their own interests and those of other decision-makers in addition to long-term future consequences for themselves and future others. We aimed to provide a novel perspective on why agreements reached via negotiations are often not in favor of our own or others’ long-term interests. One of the key contributions of our novel framework is that it enables an analysis of decision-making settings in the transformation toward sustainability in a more-comprehensive, unifying, and systematic way. Moreover, our framework provides a parsimonious structure for disentangling these complex conflict situations, analyzing the arising psychological phenomena, and designing interventions that tap into the psychological barriers that impede transformative solutions. At best, agreements create integrative solutions for all parties involved – not only in the present, but also over longer timespans. Our framework offers a systematic integration of the social and temporal dimensions and thereby helps in reaching these transformative and mutually beneficial solutions.

Sustainability challenges represent the largest collective-action problem ever faced by humanity ( Ostrom, 2009 ). Joint decision-making and negotiation, cooperation, and conflict resolution are therefore inevitable in making collective progress toward sustainable living in our societies. Taking the proposed psychological barriers into account, these negotiation processes may be biased toward solutions in the present. To overcome this crucial barrier, a better understanding of the underlying psychological processes may help in guiding negotiation processes that promote forward-looking conflict resolution. The European Union’s financial and budget deal closed by the different member states is exemplary in demonstrating interdependent conflicts. On the one hand, various member states of the European Union have repeatedly shown that they can come together to jointly resolve issues of the present generation that they could not deal with individually. On the other hand, resolving conflicts between member states within the present generation may lead to costs for member states’ very own long-term interests and for those of their succeeding future generations.

The described tensions may lead to a rather skeptical view of the transformative potential of negotiations. Indeed, the challenges for parties in creating transformative solutions are difficult. However, we hope that our framework and the proposed intervention approaches might help negotiators navigate toward more-transformative solutions across different societal levels and contexts. In grassroots initiatives, small groups of societal frontrunners may initiate negotiations over innovations and, in the management of the transition, representatives of larger societal-interest groups, institutions, or organizations may negotiate their interests in contributing to the transition pathway. Thereby, negotiations may also help to bridge structural changes across societal levels. We believe that existing and potential future tools for implementing intervention approaches should be tested, adapted, and refined depending on the interdependent-conflict situation. Nevertheless, we wish to emphasize the idea that interdependent conflicts are negotiable not only between individual actors and societal groups but also within ourselves and across generations. Making use of the transformative potential of these negotiation processes may open new transition pathways toward sustainability. We, therefore, remain optimistic that negotiations as collaborative decision-making approaches are most promising for reaching transformative solutions and are our only true alternative to collaboratively achieving long-term societal prosperity ( Pruitt and Carnevale, 1993 ). In acknowledging this belief, the framework of interdependent conflicts may provide innovative impulses for integrating and reconciling interests within planetary boundaries.

Data Availability Statement

Author contributions.

JM developed the theory, created the figures, and drafted the manuscript. MB, HZ, MT, and RT contributed to theory development, structuring, and revising the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Immo Fritsche, Michel Handgraaf, and Poonam Arora for their helpful and valuable comments on an earlier version of the framework. We would also like to thank Lucas Rosenbusch for creating the reference list for this article.

Funding. This research was funded by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG; MA 8577/1-1) and by a seed-money grant from Leuphana University, both of which were awarded to JM.

1 Besides the specified psychological conflicts in the framework, two other psychological conflicts might emerge for each party (i.e., an interpersonal conflict over time in which one party’s present interests conflict with the counterpart’s future interests and an interpersonal conflict over time in which one party’s future interests conflict with the counterpart’s present interests). These interpersonal conflicts over time directly reflect the unique characteristic of interdependent conflicts. Since conflicts are interdependent, the specified three different types of psychological conflicts in our framework can determine the parties’ interpersonal conflicts over time. Therefore, the framework of interdependent conflicts implicitly integrates these interpersonal conflicts over time. For conciseness reasons, the presented version of the framework of interdependent conflicts offers the most parsimonious version that may be extended in future research on interdependent conflicts in the transformation toward sustainability. Our reasoning also applies to interdependent conflicts at the level of social groups that we address in the latter part of the article.

2 Another extreme is partner control (e.g., Van Lange and Balliet, 2015 ), which is omitted here for reasons of simplicity.

3 Psychological conflicts may be either independent, positively interdependent, or negatively interdependent. When conflicts are independent of one another, one conflict can be resolved without any consequences for resolving the other. In current individual- and societal challenges, conflicts are rarely independent of one another (super wicked problems; ( Levin et al., 2012 ). By contrast, in most current social issues, interdependence between conflicts occurs: Parties’ consideration of their present interests in an interpersonal conflict usually impacts their consideration of interests in the future, and vice versa. When conflicts are positively interdependent, resolving one psychological conflict also facilitates finding a solution to the other interdependent conflict. However, positive interdependence does occur in real-world settings, albeit rarely. Most importantly, though, when psychological conflicts are negatively interdependent, parties’ efforts to resolve one conflict impede efficiently resolving the other interdependent conflict. We therefore only focus on negative interdependence between conflicts in our framework.

4 We are aware that different constellations between present- and future generations can be conceived (e.g., generations living at the same time, group representations). However, we follow the standard definition and focus explicitly on the basic situation in which the present generation (as predecessors) has no contact with the future generation (as their successors; Wade-Benzoni and Tost, 2009 ; Bosetti et al., 2020 ).

5 Various explanatory mechanisms are discussed in the fear- and greed perspective for situations in which groups’ outcomes are interdependent, but these mechanisms lie beyond the scope of this article.

• Arora P., Logg J., Larrick R. (2016). Acting for the greater good: identification with group determines choices in sequential contribution dilemmas . J. Behav. Decis. Mak. 29 , 499–510. 10.1002/bdm.1892 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Asara V., Otero I., Demaria F., Corbera E. (2015). Socially sustainable degrowth as a social–ecological transformation: repoliticizing sustainability . Sustain. Sci. 10 , 375–384. 10.1007/s11625-015-0321-9 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Babcock L., Loewenstein G. (1997). Explaining bargaining impasse: the role of self-serving biases . J. Econ. Perspect. 11 , 109–126. 10.1257/jep.11.1.109 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Barrett S., Dannenberg A. (2012). Climate negotiations under scientific uncertainty . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 109 , 17372–17376. 10.1073/pnas.1208417109, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bartels D. M., Urminsky O. (2011). On intertemporal selfishness: how the perceived instability of identity underlies impatient consumption . J. Consum. Res. 38 , 182–198. 10.1086/658339 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bazerman M. H., Magliozzi T., Neale M. A. (1985). Integrative bargaining in a competitive market . Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 35 , 294–313. 10.1016/0749-5978(85)90026-3 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bazerman M. H., Moore D. A., Gillespie J. J. (1999). The human mind as a barrier to wiser environmental agreements . Am. Behav. Sci. 42 , 1277–1300. 10.1177/00027649921954868 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bazerman M. H., Neale M. A. (1992). Negotiating rationally. New York, NY: Free Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bazerman M. H., Tenbrunsel A. E., Wade-Benzoni K. (1998). Negotiating with yourself and losing: making decisions with competing internal preferences . Acad. Manag. Rev. 23 :225. 10.5465/amr.1998.533224 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Boehm R., Rusch H., Baron J. (2020). The psychology of intergroup conflict: a review of theories and measures . J. Econ. Behav. Organ. 178 , 947–962. 10.1016/j.jebo.2018.01.020 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bosetti V., Dennig F., Liu N., Tavoni M., Weber E. (2020). Forward-looking belief elicitation enhances inter-generational beneficence . SSRN Electron. J. 10.2139/ssrn.3648287 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Campbell D. T. (1965). “ Ethnocentric and other altruistic motives ” in Nebraska symposium on motivation. ed. Levine D. (Lincoln: University of Nebrasksa Press; ), 283–311. [ Google Scholar ]
• Charlton S. R., Yi R., Porter C., Carter A. E., Bickel W., Rachlin H. (2013). Now for me, later for us? Effects of group context on temporal discounting . J. Behav. Decis. Mak. 26 , 118–127. 10.1002/bdm.766, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Curhan J. R., Neale M. A., Ross L. (2004). Dynamic valuation: preference changes in the context of face-to-face negotiation . J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 40 , 142–151. 10.1016/j.jesp.2003.12.002 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dannenberg A., Barrett S. (2018). Cooperating to avoid catastrophe . Nat. Hum. Behav. 2 , 435–437. 10.1038/s41562-018-0374-8, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• De Dreu C. K. W., Weingart L. R., Kwon S. (2000). Influence of social motives on integrative negotiation: a meta-analytic review and test of two theories . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 78 , 889–905. 10.1037/0022-3514.78.5.889, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• DLF (2020). “Den Planeten in vernünftigem Zustand hinterlassen.” Available at: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/philosophin-ueber-generationengerechtigkeit-den-planeten-in.694.de.html?dram:article_id=482019 (Accessed August 9, 2020).
• Dovidio J. F., Gaertner S. L., Kafati G. (2000). “ Group identity and intergroup relations: the common in-group identity model ” in Advances in group processes. Vol . 17 eds. Thye S. R., Lawler E. J., Macy M. W., Walker H. A. [Bingley, UK: Emerald (MCB UP)], 1–35. [ Google Scholar ]
• Dreber A., Nowak M. A. (2008). Gambling for global goods . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 105 , 2261–2262. 10.1073/pnas.0800033105, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Drory A., Ritov I. (1997). Intrapersonal conflict and choice of strategy in conflict management . Psychol. Rep. 81 , 35–46. 10.2466/pr0.1997.81.1.35 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ehrlich P. R., Ehrlich A. H. (2013). Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? Proc. Biol. Sci. 280 :20122845. 10.1098/rspb.2012.2845, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Erlanger S., Stevis-Gridneff M. (2020). Angela Merkel guides the E.U. to a deal, however imperfect. The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/european-union-coronavirus-aid.html (Accessed July 21, 2020).
• Forsyth D. R. (2014). “ The psychology of groups ” in Noba textbook series: Psychology. eds. Biswas-Diener R., Diener E. (Champaign, IL: DEF Publishers; ). [ Google Scholar ]
• Frantzeskaki N., Loorbach D., Meadowcroft J. (2012). Governing societal transitions to sustainability . Int. J. Sustain. Dev. 15 , 19–36. 10.1504/IJSD.2012.044032 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Frederick S., Loewenstein G., O’Donoghue T. (2002). Time discounting and time preference: a critical review . J. Econ. Lit. 40 , 351–401. 10.1257/jel.40.2.351 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gaertner S. L., Dovidio J. F., Anastasio P. A., Bachman B. A., Rust M. C. (1993). The common ingroup identity model: recategorization and the reduction of intergroup bias . Eur. Rev. Soc. Psychol. 4 , 1–26. 10.1080/14792779343000004 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gaertner S. L., Guerra R., Rebelo M., Dovidio J., Hehman E., Deegan M. (2016). “ The common ingroup identity model and the development of a functional perspective: a cross-national collaboration ” in The social developmental construction of violence and intergroup conflict. eds. Vala J., Waldzus S., Calheiros M. M. (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing; ), 105–120. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gaertner S. L., Rust M. C., Dovidio J. F., Bachman B. A., Anastasio P. A. (1994). The contact hypothesis: the role of a common ingroup identity on reducing intergroup bias . Small Group Res. 25 , 224–249. 10.1177/1046496494252005 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Galinsky A. D., Wang C. S., Ku G. (2008). Perspective-takers behave more stereotypically . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 95 , 404–419. 10.1037/0022-3514.95.2.404, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Geels F. W. (2011). The multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions: responses to seven criticisms . Environ. Innov. Soc. Transit. 1 , 24–40. 10.1016/j.eist.2011.02.002 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Geels F. W. (2020). Micro-foundations of the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions: developing a multi-dimensional model of agency through crossovers between social constructivism, evolutionary economics and neo-institutional theory . Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change 152 :119894. 10.1016/j.techfore.2019.119894 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Geels F. W., Schot J. (2007). Typology of sociotechnical transition pathways . Res. Policy 36 , 399–417. 10.1016/j.respol.2007.01.003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gelfand M. J., Fulmer C. A., Severance L. (2011). “ The psychology of negotiation and mediation ” in APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology, Vol. 3: Maintaining, expanding, and contracting the organization. ed. Zedeck S. (American Psychological Association; ), 495–554. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gillespie J. J., Thompson L. L., Loewenstein J., Gentner D. (1999). Lessons from analogical reasoning in the teaching of negotiation . Negot. J. 15 , 363–371. 10.1111/j.1571-9979.1999.tb00734.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hardisty D. J., Weber E. U. (2009). Discounting future green: money versus the environment . J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 138 , 329–340. 10.1037/a0016433, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hauser O. P., Rand D. G., Peysakhovich A., Nowak M. A. (2014). Cooperating with the future . Nature 511 , 220–223. 10.1038/nature13530, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Henderson M. D., Trope Y., Carnevale P. J. (2006). Negotiation from a near and distant time perspective . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 91 , 712–729. 10.1037/0022-3514.91.4.712, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Herrnstein R. J., Prelec D. (1991). Melioration: a theory of distributed choice . J. Econ. Perspect. 5 , 137–156. 10.1257/jep.5.3.137 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hershfield H. E. (2011). Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice . Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1235 , 30–43. 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06201.x, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hsiang S. M., Burke M., Miguel E. (2013). Quantifying the influence of climate on human conflict . Science 341 :1235367. 10.1126/science.1235367, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Jacquet J., Hagel K., Hauert C., Marotzke J., Röhl T., Milinski M. (2013). Intra- and intergenerational discounting in the climate game . Nat. Clim. Chang. 3 , 1025–1028. 10.1038/nclimate2024 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Jang D., Elfenbein H. A., Bottom W. P. (2018). More than a phase: form and features of a general theory of negotiation . Acad. Manag. Ann. 12 , 318–356. 10.5465/annals.2016.0053 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Jehn K. A. (1995). A multimethod examination of the benefits and detriments of intragroup conflict . Adm. Sci. Q. 40 :256. 10.2307/2393638 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kamijo Y., Komiya A., Mifune N., Saijo T. (2017). Negotiating with the future: incorporating imaginary future generations into negotiations . Sustain. Sci. 12 , 409–420. 10.1007/s11625-016-0419-8, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kelley H. H., Thibaut J. W. (1978). Interpersonal relations: A theory of interdependence. New York, NY: Wiley. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kemp R., Loorbach D., Rotmans J. (2007). Transition management as a model for managing processes of co-evolution towards sustainable development . Int. J. Sustain. Dev. World Ecol. 14 , 78–91. 10.1080/13504500709469709 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kim J., Thompson L., Loewenstein J. (2020). Open for learning: encouraging generalization fosters knowledge transfer in negotiation . Negot. Confl. Manag. Res. 13 , 3–23. 10.1111/ncmr.12163 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Levin K., Cashore B., Bernstein S., Auld G. (2012). Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change . Policy. Sci. 45 , 123–152. 10.1007/s11077-012-9151-0 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lewicki R. J., Litterer J. A. (1985). Negotiation. Homewood, IL: R.D. Irwin. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lewin K. (1948). Resolving social conflicts; selected papers on group dynamics. New York, NY: Harper. [ Google Scholar ]
• Loewenstein G. (1988). Frames of mind in intertemporal choice . Manag. Sci. 34 , 200–214. 10.1287/mnsc.34.2.200 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Loewenstein G. (1996). Out of control: visceral influences on behavior . Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 65 , 272–292. 10.1006/obhd.1996.0028 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Loorbach D. (2010). Transition management for sustainable development: a prescriptive, complexity-based governance framework . Governance 23 , 161–183. 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2009.01471.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Loschelder D. D., Trötschel R. (2010). Overcoming the competitiveness of an intergroup context: third-party intervention in intergroup negotiations . Group Process. Intergr. Relat. 13 , 795–815. 10.1177/1368430210374482 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mach K. J., Kraan C. M., Adger W. N., Buhaug H., Burke M., Fearon J. D., et al.. (2019). Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict . Nature 571 , 193–197. 10.1038/s41586-019-1300-6, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Majer J. M., Loschelder D. D., Windolph L. J., Fischer D. (2018). How sustainability-related challenges can fuel conflict between organizations and external stakeholders: a social psychological perspective to master value differences, time horizons, and resource allocations . Umweltpsychol. 22 , 53–70. [ Google Scholar ]
• Meadowcroft J. (2009). What about the politics? Sustainable development, transition management, and long term energy transitions . Policy. Sci. 42 :323. 10.1007/s11077-009-9097-z [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Nadler J., Thompson L., Boven L. V. (2003). Learning negotiation skills: four models of knowledge creation and transfer . Manag. Sci. 49 , 529–540. 10.1287/mnsc.49.4.529.14431 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Neale M. A., Bazerman M. H. (1985). The effects of framing and negotiator overconfidence on bargaining behaviors and outcomes . Acad. Manag. J. 28 , 34–49. 10.2307/256060 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• O’Connor K. M., De Dreu C. K. W., Schroth H., Barry B., Lituchy T. R., Bazerman M. H. (2002). What we want to do versus what we think we should do: an empirical investigation of intrapersonal conflict . J. Behav. Decis. Mak. 15 , 403–418. 10.1002/bdm.426 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Okhuysen G. A., Galinsky A. D., Uptigrove T. A. (2003). Saving the worst for last: the effect of time horizon on the efficiency of negotiating benefits and burdens . Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 91 , 269–279. 10.1016/S0749-5978(03)00023-2 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ornetzeder M., Rohracher H. (2013). Of solar collectors, wind power, and car sharing: comparing and understanding successful cases of grassroots innovations . Glob. Environ. Chang. 23 , 856–867. 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.12.007 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ostrom E. (2009). A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems . Science 325 , 419–422. 10.1126/science.1172133, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Peters B. G. (2017). What is so wicked about wicked problems? A conceptual analysis and a research program . Polic. Soc. 36 , 385–396. 10.1080/14494035.2017.1361633 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pinkley R. L., Griffith T. L., Northcraft G. B. (1995). “Fixed pie” a la mode: information availability, information processing, and the negotiation of suboptimal agreements . Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 62 , 101–112. 10.1006/obhd.1995.1035 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pruitt D. G., Carnevale P. J. (1993). Negotiation in social conflict. Belmont, CA: Thomson Brooks/Cole Publishing Co. [ Google Scholar ]
• Raiffa H. (1982). The art and science of negotiation. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Raven R. P., Heiskanen E., Lovio R., Hodson M., Brohmann B. (2008). The contribution of local experiments and negotiation processes to field-level learning in emerging (niche) technologies: meta-analysis of 27 new energy projects in Europe . Bull. Sci. Technol. Soc. 28 , 464–477. 10.1177/0270467608317523 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Read D., Loewenstein G., Rabin M., Keren G., Laibson D. (1999). “ Choice bracketing ” in Elicitation of preferences. eds. Fischhoff B., Manski C. F. (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer; ), 171–202. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rhoades J. A., Carnevale P. J. (1999). The behavioral context of strategic choice in negotiation: a test of the dual concern model 1 . J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 29 , 1777–1802. 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1999.tb00152.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ritov I., Drory A. (1996). Ambiguity and conflict management strategy . Int. J. Confl. Manag. 7 , 139–155. 10.1108/eb022779 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rittel H. W., Webber M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning . Policy. Sci. 4 , 155–169. 10.1007/BF01405730 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rusbult C. E., Van Lange P. A. M. (1996). “ Interdependence processes ” in Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles eds. Higgins E. T., Kruglanski A. W. (New York: The Guilford Press; ), 564–596. [ Google Scholar ]
• Schelling T. C. (1958). The strategy of conflict. Prospectus for a reorientation of game theory . J. Confl. Resolut. 2 , 203–264. 10.1177/002200275800200301 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schelling T. C. (1984). Choice and consequence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Schreuer A., Ornetzeder M., Rohracher H. (2010). Negotiating the local embedding of socio-technical experiments: a case study in fuel cell technology . Tech. Anal. Strat. Manag. 22 , 729–743. 10.1080/09537325.2010.496286 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schuster C., Majer J. M., Trötschel R. (2020). Whatever we negotiate is not what I like: how value-driven conflicts impact negotiation behaviors, outcomes, and subjective evaluations . J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 90 :103993. 10.1016/j.jesp.2020.103993 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Seyfang G., Haxeltine A. (2012). Growing grassroots innovations: exploring the role of community-based initiatives in governing sustainable energy transitions . Environ. Plan. Govern. Pol. 30 , 381–400. 10.1068/c10222 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sherif M. (1961). Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The robbers cave experiment. Vol. 10. OK: University Book Exchange Norman. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sherif M., Sherif C. W. (1953). Groups in harmony and tension; An integration of studies of intergroup relations. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sherstyuk K., Tarui N., Ravago M.-L. V., Saijo T. (2016). Intergenerational games with dynamic externalities and climate change experiments . J. Assoc. Environ. Resour. Econ. 3 , 247–281. 10.1086/684162 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Soman D., Ainslie G., Frederick S., Li X., Lynch J., Moreau P., et al.. (2005). The psychology of intertemporal discounting: why are distant events valued differently from proximal ones? Mark. Lett. 16 , 347–360. 10.1007/s11002-005-5897-x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sondeijker S., Geurts J., Rotmans J., Tukker A. (2006). Imagining sustainability: the added value of transition scenarios in transition management . Foresight 8 , 15–30. 10.1108/14636680610703063 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sunstein C. R., Reisch L. A. (2013). Green by default . Kyklos 66 , 398–402. 10.1111/kykl.12028 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Tajfel H. (1981). Human groups and social categories: Studies in social psychology. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tajfel H., Turner J. C. (1979). “ An integrative theory of intergroup conflict ” in The social psychology of intergroup relations. eds. Austin W. G., Worchel S. (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole; ), 33–37. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tajfel H., Turner J. C. (1986). “ The social identity theory of intergroup behavior ” in Psychology of intergroup relations. eds. Worchel S., Austin W. G. (Chicago: Nelson-Hall; ), 7–24. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tavoni A., Dannenberg A., Kallis G., Loschel A. (2011). Inequality, communication, and the avoidance of disastrous climate change in a public goods game . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 108 , 11825–11829. 10.1073/pnas.1102493108, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Thompson L., DeHarpport T. (1994). Social judgment, feedback, and interpersonal learning in negotiation . Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 58 , 327–345. 10.1006/obhd.1994.1040 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Thompson L., Gonzalez R. (1997). “ Environmental disputes: competition for scarce resources and clashing of values ” in Environment, ethics, and behavior: The psychology of environmental valuation and degradation eds. Bazerman M. H., Messick D. M., Tenbrunsel A. E., Wade-Benzoni K. A. (San Francisco: The New Lexington Press/Jossey-Bass Publishers; ), 75–104. [ Google Scholar ]
• Thompson L., Hastie R. (1990). Social perception in negotiation . Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 47 , 98–123. 10.1016/0749-5978(90)90048-E [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Trötschel R., Hüffmeier J., Loschelder D. D. (2010). When yielding pieces of the pie is not a piece of cake: identity-based intergroup effects in negotiations . Group Process. Intergr. Relat. 13 , 741–763. 10.1177/1368430210374608 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Trötschel R., Hüffmeier J., Loschelder D. D., Schwartz K., Gollwitzer P. M. (2011). Perspective taking as a means to overcome motivational barriers in negotiations: when putting oneself into the opponent’s shoes helps to walk toward agreements . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 101 , 771–790. 10.1037/a0023801, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Trötschel R., Loschelder D. D., Höhne B. P., Majer J. M. (2015). Procedural frames in negotiations: how offering my resources versus requesting yours impacts perception, behavior, and outcomes . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 108 , 417–435. 10.1037/pspi0000009, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Tsay C. J., Bazerman M. H. (2009). A decision-making perspective to negotiation: a review of the past and a look to the future . Negot. J. 25 , 467–480. 10.1111/j.1571-9979.2009.00239.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Tuncel E., Mislin A., Kesebir S., Pinkley R. L. (2016). Agreement attraction and impasse aversion: reasons for selecting a poor deal over no deal at all . Psychol. Sci. 27 , 312–321. 10.1177/0956797615619200, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Turner J. C., Hogg M. A., Oakes P. J., Reicher S. D., Wetherell M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. [ Google Scholar ]
• Urminsky O. (2017). The role of psychological connectedness to the future self in decisions over time . Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 26 , 34–39. 10.1177/0963721416668810 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Van Boven L., Ehret P. J., Sherman D. K. (2018). Psychological barriers to bipartisan public support for climate policy . Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 13 , 492–507. 10.1177/1745691617748966, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Van der Gaast W. (2015). International climate negotiation conditions: Past and future. Groningen: University of Groningen, SOM research school. [ Google Scholar ]
• Van Lange P. A. M., Balliet D. (2015). “ Interdependence theory ” in APA handbook of personality and social psychology, Vol. 3: Interpersonal relations. eds. Mikulincer M., Shaver P. R., Simpson J. A., Dovidio J. F. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; ), 65–92. [ Google Scholar ]
• von Wirth T., Gislason L., Seidl R. (2018). Distributed energy systems on a neighborhood scale: reviewing drivers of and barriers to social acceptance . Renew. Sust. Energ. Rev. 82 , 2618–2628. 10.1016/j.rser.2017.09.086 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wade-Benzoni K. A. (2008). Maple trees and weeping willows: the role of time, uncertainty, and affinity in intergenerational decisions . Negot. Confl. Manag. Res. 1 , 220–245. 10.1111/j.1750-4716.2008.00014.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wade-Benzoni K. A., Hernandez M., Medvec V., Messick D. (2008). In fairness to future generations: the role of egocentrism, uncertainty, power, and stewardship in judgments of intergenerational allocations . J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 44 , 233–245. 10.1016/j.jesp.2007.04.004 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wade-Benzoni K. A., Tost L. P. (2009). The egoism and altruism of intergenerational behavior . Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 13 , 165–193. 10.1177/1088868309339317, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wade-Benzoni K. A., Tost L. P., Hernandez M., Larrick R. P. (2012). It’s only a matter of time: death, legacies, and intergenerational decisions . Psychol. Sci. 23 , 704–709. 10.1177/0956797612443967, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Weber E. U. (2017). Breaking cognitive barriers to a sustainable future . Nat. Hum. Behav. 1 :13. 10.1038/s41562-016-0013 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Weber E. U., Johnson E. J. (2016). “ Can we think of the future? Cognitive barriers to future-oriented thinking ” in Global cooperation and the human factor eds. Messner D., Weinlich S. (New York, NY: Routledge; ), 139–154. [ Google Scholar ]
• Weber E. U., Johnson E. J., Milch K. F., Chang H., Brodscholl J. C., Goldstein D. G. (2007). Asymmetric discounting in intertemporal choice: a query-theory account . Psychol. Sci. 18 , 516–523. 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01932.x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wildschut T., Insko C. A. (2007). Explanations of interindividual—intergroup discontinuity: a review of the evidence . Eur. Rev. Soc. Psychol. 18 , 175–211. 10.1080/10463280701676543 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Yoeli E., Hoffman M., Rand D. G., Nowak M. A. (2013). Powering up with indirect reciprocity in a large-scale field experiment . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 110 , 10424–10429. 10.1073/pnas.1301210110, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings
• My Bibliography
• Collections
• Citation manager

Save citation to file

Email citation, add to collections.

• Create a new collection
• Add to an existing collection

Add to My Bibliography

Your saved search, create a file for external citation management software, your rss feed.

• Search in PubMed
• Search in NLM Catalog
• Add to Search

Conflict Management: A Literature Review and Study

• PMID: 30514033

"Management of conflict is extremely important for the effective functioning of organizations and for the personal, cultural, and social development of individuals. The manner in which the conflict is managed can cause more tension in the situation rather than the conflict itself. " This literature review analyzes five modes to dealing with conflict along two dimensions of behavior: compet- ing (assertive and uncooperative), accommodating (unassertive and cooperative), avoiding (unassertive and uncooperative), compromising (falls into the middle), and collaborat- ing (assertive and cooperative). " In a study, technologists preferred a cooperating conflict management style when feelings have not yet esca- lated, and a compromising conflict management style after the conflict has become heated. The study also showed education.level did not have any effect on their preferred conflict management styles.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

• Conflict management styles in the health professions. Sportsman S, Hamilton P. Sportsman S, et al. J Prof Nurs. 2007 May-Jun;23(3):157-66. doi: 10.1016/j.profnurs.2007.01.010. J Prof Nurs. 2007. PMID: 17540319
• Conflict in schools: student nurses' conflict management styles. Kantek F, Gezer N. Kantek F, et al. Nurse Educ Today. 2009 Jan;29(1):100-7. doi: 10.1016/j.nedt.2008.07.007. Epub 2008 Sep 9. Nurse Educ Today. 2009. PMID: 18783853
• Conflict resolution in healthcare management. Lipcamon JD, Mainwaring BA. Lipcamon JD, et al. Radiol Manage. 2004 May-Jun;26(3):48-51. Radiol Manage. 2004. PMID: 15259690
• Putting conflict management into practice: a nursing case study. Vivar CG. Vivar CG. J Nurs Manag. 2006 Apr;14(3):201-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2934.2006.00554.x. J Nurs Manag. 2006. PMID: 16600008 Review.
• A gender perspective on conflict management strategies of nurses. Valentine PE. Valentine PE. J Nurs Scholarsh. 2001;33(1):69-74. doi: 10.1111/j.1547-5069.2001.00069.x. J Nurs Scholarsh. 2001. PMID: 11253585 Review.

Publication types

• Search in MeSH
• Citation Manager

NCBI Literature Resources

MeSH PMC Bookshelf Disclaimer

The PubMed wordmark and PubMed logo are registered trademarks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Unauthorized use of these marks is strictly prohibited.

Conflict, Conflict Management and Negotiations: A Mini Literature Review

19 Pages Posted: 8 Aug 2022 Last revised: 18 Sep 2022

Phakamile Thwala

University of South Africa (UNISA)

Date Written: July 19, 2022

Personalities and group interests are central to conflict management and negotiations. Conflict arises out of different opinions, beliefs, and ideologies. The purpose of this study is to conduct a mini- literature review on conflict, conflict management, and negotiations. The literature review affirms that conflict is unavoidable. A significant shift has been identified from the older theories that sought to eliminate conflict to present-day learning and development perspectives upheld by modern theorists. There is a difference between conflict management and conflict resolution whilst negotiations are interrelated with conflict management and conflict resolution.

Keywords: Conflict, Conflict management, Negotiations

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Phakamile Thwala (Contact Author)

University of south africa (unisa) ( email ), do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on ssrn, paper statistics, related ejournals, conflict, negotiation, & organizational behavior ejournal.

Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic

Negotiation Applications eJournal

Social & personality psychology ejournal, political economy - development: underdevelopment & poverty ejournal, conflict studies: prevention, management & resolution ejournal, poverty research ejournal.

Subscribe to this free journal for more curated articles on this topic

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• Why Submit?
• About International Studies Review
• About the International Studies Association
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Introduction, conflict, bias, and explaining scholarly attention, data and analysis.

• < Previous

Where is Conflict Research? Western Bias in the Literature on Armed Violence

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Brian J Phillips, Kevin T Greene, Where is Conflict Research? Western Bias in the Literature on Armed Violence, International Studies Review , Volume 24, Issue 3, September 2022, viac038, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viac038

• Permissions Icon Permissions

Which countries are likely to be subjects of research in the study of armed conflict? Evidence from other fields suggests that research often focuses disproportionately on the West, but it is unclear to what extent this is true in conflict studies. We suggest that a baseline explanation of research focus is each country’s conflict experience, and we present two additional hypotheses: Western bias and research feasibility. Empirically, we count countries in the abstracts of five prominent conflict or security journals, 1990–2015. We also manually count single-country case studies. Western countries, measured by U.N. voting or geographic location, appear more than non-Western countries, even after considering conflict, wealth, and other factors. There is less support for the research feasibility argument, measured by each country’s official languages and democracy. We find French- and Spanish-language countries less likely to appear in the literature. We conclude with a discussion of under-studied countries and offer related suggestions.

Qué países son más propensos a ser objeto de investigación en el estudio de los conflictos armados? Los indicios derivados de otros campos sugieren que la investigación suele centrarse, de manera desproporcionada, en occidente, pero no está claro hasta qué punto esto es cierto también en los estudios sobre los conflictos. Sugerimos que una explicación basal del enfoque de la investigación es la experiencia en materia de conflictos de un determinado país, y presentamos dos hipótesis adicionales: el sesgo occidental y la viabilidad de la investigación. De manera empírica, contamos los países incluidos en los resúmenes de cinco destacadas revistas sobre conflictos o seguridad, 1990-2015. También contamos manualmente los estudios de caso de países individuales. Los países occidentales, determinados por votación de la ONU o por ubicación geográfica, aparecen más que los no occidentales, incluso después de que se tengan en consideración los conflictos, la riqueza y otros factores. El argumento de la viabilidad de la investigación, medido en función de las lenguas oficiales de los países y de la democracia, cuenta con menos apoyo. Observamos que los países de lengua francesa y española tienen menos probabilidades de aparecer en la literatura. Concluimos con un debate sobre los países poco estudiados y proponemos sugerencias al respecto.

Quels pays sont les plus susceptibles de faire l’objet de recherches dans le domaine des conflits armés? Au vu des travaux menés dans d’autres domaines, il semblerait que la recherche soit axée de manière disproportionnée sur l’Occident, mais il est difficile de déterminer dans quelle mesure c’est également le cas pour les études sur les conflits. Nous avançons, comme première explication, que cette orientation de la recherche est liée à l’expérience des différents pays en matière de conflits, et proposons deux hypothèses complémentaires : un biais occidental et la question de la faisabilité des recherches. Dans la pratique, nous avons dénombré les pays mentionnés dans les abstracts de cinq revues majeures consacrées aux conflits ou aux questions de sécurité, entre 1990 et 2015, et avons compté manuellement les études de cas portant sur un pays spécifique. Les pays considérés comme occidentaux ou alliés (sur la base de leur emplacement géographique ou de leur positionnement lors des votes aux Nations Unies), apparaissent davantage que les pays non occidentaux, indépendamment de leur profil en matière de conflits, de richesse ou autres facteurs. L’argument de la faisabilité des recherches, mesurée en termes de langues officielles et de niveau démocratique dans les différents pays, semble moins attesté. Nous constatons toutefois que les pays francophones et hispanophones sont moins présents dans la littérature. Nous concluons en indiquant plusieurs pays faisant l’objet d’un nombre insuffisant de recherches et proposons des solutions pour combler cette lacune.

Which countries are most likely to be subjects of research in the conflict literature? The study of armed conflict involves scholars from International Relations (IR) and Comparative Politics within Political Science, and scholars from other disciplines, including Economics and Geography. It covers a broad range of topics, such as intra-state and inter-state war, as well as latent and lower levels of violence. These phenomena occur throughout the world. Conflict scholars study many countries—either as single or small- n case studies or in larger samples. Whether picking cases for in-depth study or selecting illustrative examples, scholars must make choices. This paper provides what we believe is the first extended analysis of which countries are chosen for conflict research .

This research contributes to a recent and growing literature that identifies interesting and sometimes disturbing patterns in the countries that scholars study ( Briggs and Weathers 2016 ; Briggs 2017 ; Douglass and Rondeaux 2017 ; Hendrix and Vreede 2019 ; Pepinsky 2019 ; Song 2019 ; Wilson and Knutsen 2020 ). There are reasons to suspect that scholars give “Western” countries more attention than they do to non-Western countries—independently of the level of conflict involvement. Research suggests that Western bias exists in the study of other topics ( Erdmann 2004 ), and in Political Science and IR generally ( Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al. 2016 ; Wilson and Knutsen 2020 ). Some critical theory scholars argue that Western favoritism affects conflict research ( Buzan and Little 2000 ; Barkawi and Laffey 2006 ). This concern is generally consistent with the demands of the “decolonize the curriculum” movement, which argues in part that higher education has privileged Western experiences over others ( Malik 2017 ; Begum and Saini 2019 ). However, empirically, it is unclear to what extent country coverage in the conflict literature is based on anything other than conflict experience.

Additionally, this research raises questions about our ability to draw inferences from the broader literature. Scholars frequently summarize the state of knowledge on conflict topics (e.g., in literature reviews), and this assumes that the literature paints a representative picture of conflict globally. An alternate possibility is that the literature draws on a small and unusual set of countries. This could skew inferences. This appears to have occurred with other subjects, such as research on climate change’s effects ( Hendrix 2017 ; Adams et al. 2018 ). In conflict research, scholars have asserted that over-focus on Western cases has affected conclusions on topics such as military innovation ( Sharman 2018 ) and Chinese security strategy ( Kopper and Peragovics 2019 ). Beyond these specific subjects, it is unclear if similar biases are present broadly in conflict studies.

Conflict studies is an important topic to examine regarding questions of location bias because it seems relatively straightforward to see which countries the literature should study—those with the most, and most severe, conflict. With other topics or sub-fields, it is not as evident which countries should ideally be the focus of investigation. As a result, conflict research can serve as a laboratory to more precisely shed light on an issue that likely affects other research topics as well.

The literature already suggests various kinds of bias affect conflict research. For example, Kalyvas ( 2004 ) argues that civil conflict studies are biased toward urban as opposed to rural dimensions of civil conflict. Conflict event data seems to be affected by reporting bias, which in turn might affect inferences ( Weidmann 2016 ). Terrorism data sets appear to be under-reporting terrorist attacks, and this seems to be systematically related to regime type ( Drakos and Grafos 2006 ). Beyond these issues, should we also be concerned about systematic differences in which countries’ conflict scholars research more than others?

Until now, we have lacked substantial evidence to evaluate this question. Some studies have begun to examine the geographic areas covered in, for example, Comparative Politics or IR generally. However, most of this work only examines which regions are studied more (not particular countries), and this geographic element is only one part of a broader study (e.g., Munck and Snyder 2007a ; Douglass and Rondeaux 2017 ; Pepinsky 2019 ; Brenner and Han 2021 ). For example, Douglass and Rondeaux (2017) examine articles on “countering and preventing violent extremism,” and find that some regions, such as South Asia, are under-represented. However, geography is only one of three topics studied in the working paper. Brenner and Han (2021) examine armed conflicts and find that those in Europe or the Middle East appear disproportionately in the literature, while conflicts in South and Southeast Asia seem to be under-analyzed. They suggest that the Myanmar civil war is especially overlooked. Munck and Snyder provide a detailed analysis of scholarship in Comparative Politics, and one paragraph addresses geographic heterogeneity. Song (2019) focuses on geography with an insightful snapshot of the countries studied in Comparative Politics. The article analyzes data from two journals but does not conduct multivariate analyses. Multivariate analysis of conflict studies research is important because it can examine the impact of geography while taking into consideration other factors such as actual conflict history. Wilson and Knutsen (2020) use descriptive and regression analysis to understand research on Political Science, and find that it usually focuses on Western Europe and North America. However, since armed conflict often occurs in the developing world, it could be that the conflict literature focuses more on these countries than developed countries.

The next section discusses conflict and bias and suggests that the most natural explanation of country coverage in the conflict literature is conflict experience. We propose two additional explanations: Western bias and research feasibility. The data section presents original data on country coverage in five conflict journals between 1990 and 2015. Analyses use counts of countries mentioned in abstracts, and counts of single-country case studies. Multivariate regression results suggest countries in the West appear more in the conflict literature than non-Western countries, even after taking into consideration conflict history, wealth, and other factors. We find little support for the notion that scholarly attention is related to research feasibility, which we measure with country official languages and democracy. The conclusion discusses implications for research more broadly and offers some suggestions for how conflict scholars can mitigate bias-related issues.

“Conflict” research refers to scholarship within the overlapping fields of security studies and peace and conflict studies. 1 While the emphases of these fields are distinct, they both study many of the same topics, such as the causes, consequences, and resolution of international and civil war. Conflict is often described with the more specific phrase of “armed conflict,” suggesting that it not only refers to disagreement but violence. Conflict research generally includes work on organized violence, usually involving a government as at least one party. While conflict is generally thought of as political violence, some conflict scholars study large-scale criminal violence, like that which has occurred in Mexico, since there are substantial overlaps with more traditional civil conflict ( Barnes 2017 ; Ley 2018 ). Beyond war, conflict research covers topics such as terrorism, repression, and genocide, although these phenomena often occur within the context of armed conflict or war ( Findley and Young 2012 ). Some research also studies latent or potential conflict by analyzing topics such as nuclear proliferation.

Which countries are the most likely to appear in the conflict literature? Perhaps the most intuitive, if optimistic or naive, explanation of conflict coverage is that countries with more conflict experience should appear more in the conflict literature. Conflict experience takes a number of forms. Most directly, states participate in inter-state and intra-state conflict. Some have experienced conflict every year for decades, while others have been conflict-free since at least the end of the Second World War. These divergent experiences suggest substantial heterogeneity throughout the world. Countries experiencing any of these types of violence are likely to be discussed in conflict research. This is consistent with Douglass and Rondeaux’s (2017) finding that countries’ experiences with intra-state conflict are somewhat associated with mentions in the “violent extremism” literature. Beyond direct conflict involvement, conflict experience can include less-direct manifestations. For example, research discusses nuclear proliferation, contributions to peacekeeping missions, and discussions in the United Nations Security Council about conflict. This secondary involvement in conflict, or involvement in what could be described as latent or potential conflict, might be the subject of less research than actual war participation, but it is still important to consider.

Conflict experience would be a natural explanation of country distributions within the literature—research simply follows conflicts, or represents their distribution around the world. This would probably be a proportionate or fair representation of conflict in the literature. Other explanations for conflict coverage could be explanations based on bias. Bias can be defined as a disproportionate weight, or an unfair inclination, toward or against something. 2 Given that conflict research seems to be biased in particular ways, such as the apparent tendency to study civil war from an urban instead of rural perspective ( Kalyvas 2004 ), the distribution of country coverage in the literature could be affected as well. The following sections outline two related arguments—beyond conflict alone—for why one type of country might be researched more than another.

The Western Bias Explanation

Scholars in many disciplines have asserted that research over-focuses on Western countries. In Psychology, for example, the vast majority of participants in published experiments are from the West ( Henrich et al. 2010 ; Nielsen et al. 2017 ). 3 In another example, commentary in The Lancet argues that “widespread systematic bias” exists in medical journals, leading to less coverage of diseases that affect poorer countries ( Horton 2003 ). Similarly, it could be that non-Western countries are ignored or under-analyzed in the conflict literature, in spite of the substantial conflict experience many of these countries have.

Western bias is argued to affect IR, the field of many conflict scholars. Tickner ( 2011 ) argues that IR has long been West-centric and US-centric in particular. Thomas ( 2004 ) argues that when major IR journals study the “Third World,” they analyze it as a security threat. The argument that scholars ignore the non-Western world is related to concerns that the dominant voices in IR theorizing tend to be scholars in Western countries ( Tickner 2003 ; Zhang 2003 ; Bilgin 2008 ; Acharya and Buzan 2010 ; Gleditsch et al. 2014 ; Deciancio 2016 ; Kopper and Peragovics 2019 ). Interestingly, one recent study of five prominent IR journals found that there do not seem to be regional differences in coverage, although it did find that the United States receives more scholarly attention than other countries ( Hendrix and Vreede 2019 ). 4

The subfield of Comparative Politics, which also produces conflict research, seems to have Western bias issues as well, according to Munck and Snyder’s ( 2007a ) review of hundreds of articles in three journals. They analyze descriptive data and suggest there exists a “striking contrast” between the coverage of Western Europe and coverage of South and Southeast Asia. An investigation of case studies also finds that Western countries, and to some extent those in Latin America, were over-represented in Comparative Politics and IR case studies ( Pepinsky 2019 ). An analysis of two-country case studies in two Comparative Politics journals reports that scholars in these journals seem to “strongly favor” North American and Western European countries for research ( Song 2019 ). More broadly, Wilson and Knutsen (2020) find similar issues with research in eight prominent Political Science journals.

Western bias hypothesis: Western countries receive more coverage in the conflict literature than non-Western countries.

The Research Feasibility Explanation

Beyond the above argument, it is possible that countries are more likely to be the subject of research if it is simply easier for scholars to access them. Conflicts in certain countries might be more accessible to researchers for a number of reasons. Commonly spoken languages, for example, and open governments represent more accessible research locations. Regarding regime type, conducting research in authoritarian countries poses unique challenges for access to archives and interview subjects, as well as the personal safety of the researcher ( Morgenbesser and Weiss 2018 ; Greitens and Truex 2019 ). This is consistent with Wilson and Knutsen’s ( 2020 ) study, which finds that democratic countries and English-speaking countries appear more often in Political Science research. Regarding conflict studies, in particular, fieldwork on intrastate conflict in Colombia, Northern Ireland, or Israel is probably more accessible for most researchers than conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tajikistan, or Syria. Regarding inter-state conflict, scholars have seemed more likely to research the frozen conflict between Greece and Cyprus, for example, compared with more recent wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan or Eritrea and Ethiopia. Beyond travel to countries, many scholars get information from news media sources, which in turn are biased in similar ways ( Golan 2008 ; Jones 2008 ). As a result, it seems likely that conflict research—which often relies on such media sources—would suffer from similar biases.

The research feasibility explanation is related to, and perhaps a sub-explanation of, the Western bias explanation. The majority of the research published in “top” journals comes from scholars in North American and Western European institutions ( May 1997 ; Munck and Snyder 2007b ; Hazelkorn 2016 ). At many of these institutions, and others around the world, English is the language of research ( Choi 2010 ; Jenkins 2014 ). Therefore, one must think about what is convenient for this subset of researchers to develop expectations about the subjects of research. This bias toward feasibility probably does not only affect cases selected for in-depth study but also when researchers need anecdotes or examples. Studies of media consumption suggest that “accessibility bias” explains why people draw on the information that is most easily retrieved from memory to make political decisions ( Iyengar 1990 ). Researchers probably take similar shortcuts themselves, and this should have implications for the countries studied in the conflict literature.

Research feasibility hypothesis: Countries more feasible to research receive more coverage in the conflict literature than countries that are more challenging to access.

Our country-year dataset includes information on the countries covered in articles in five prominent conflict journals, 1990–2015. The data begin in 1990 to look at post-Cold War phenomena. The data are based on all research articles 5 from the following journals: Conflict Management and Peace Science, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research , and Security Dialogue . These five publications are some of the most visible conflict journals, and their contents represent the state of the field of conflict research.

Our journal selection process started with the journals in the IR and Political Science lists in the 2017 Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports. From these lists, we identified all the journals that seemed to focus exclusively or primarily on conflict. We chose conflict-only journals to not have to subjectively evaluate thousands of articles one-by-one to decide whether they were “conflict” or not. Of the conflict journals in this list, we looked to see which were accessible through JSTOR, which was instrumental for our search technique (see below). Of these conflict journals on JSTOR, we identified the top five by impact factor. 6 We focused on these journals to be able to analyze some of the most visible research on the subject. Note that not all journals are covered in all years. For example, CMPS did not publish any articles in 1997, and International Security stopped being available in JSTOR after 2013. This reduces counts for all countries for these particular years, although year-fixed effects should address the issue.

The journals have interesting similarities and differences. Geographically, they are all headquartered in North America or Western Europe, 7 and all are English-language—as is usually the case for the highest impact factor journals ( May 1997 ; Di Bitetti and Ferreras 2017 ). International Security is unique among these journals for its explicit focus on US national security. 8 As a result, more than other journals, it is especially likely to cover the United States and its enemies and allies. However, overall, these journals represent a broad mix of approaches to conflict studies: quantitative and qualitative, security-focused and peace-oriented, mainstream/traditional, and critical. As a result, they are a fairly diverse set of journals, containing much of the prominent research on armed conflict. These five journals during these years contained 4,171 articles.

The primary dependent variable is Abstract mentions , a count of the number of abstracts that mention a country name in any of the five journals each year. It is not a count of the total mentions within abstracts; if a country appears five times in one abstract, that is counted as one abstract mention, to avoid count inflation. To compile this count, we first downloaded all articles from the journals during these years via the JSTOR Data for Research service. 9 The data contain the counts of the words in each article, including unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams. To search for country names, we used the ISO 3166 country names, focusing on U.N.-recognized countries with populations larger than 500,000 because of likely missing data for independent variables on smaller countries. 10 With this list of countries, we used a regular expression in Python to search for total country counts in each article’s abstract. For countries that are commonly referred to by multiple names (e.g., Myanmar and Burma, Ivory Coast and Côte D’Ivoire), we searched for multiple terms. We were also careful to not combine counts of countries with similar names, such as mistakenly including mentions of Northern Ireland when searching for Ireland, or Nigeria when searching for Niger. 11 These total counts for each article were then collapsed into a total for each country year. The country-year maximum is 20, for the United States in 2005. The country-year mean is nearly zero, 0.4, since many countries do not appear in abstracts for many years. Regarding country totals for the entire period, the mean is 10 mentions.

The second dependent variable is Case studies , a count of the number of times a country is the subject of a case study in the above five journals each year. A country is considered to be the subject of a case study if the article includes an extensive analysis of this country on its own. The entire country does not need to be studied; the case study could be of a particular subnational region such as Northern Ireland (which was a common occurrence), which would be coded as the United Kingdom. We focus on single-country case studies, but of course, some articles look at two, three, or more cases. These situations should be captured in our primary independent variable. 12 Case studies is coded manually by an author or research assistant reading at least the title and abstract of every issue in the journals. Some examples include an article on US treaties ( Chayes 2008 ), a study of conflict de-escalation analyzing the Israel-Palestinian case ( Rasler 2000 ), and an article on peacebuilding in Bosnia ( Kappeler and Potter 2006 ). The country-year maximum is 19, for the United States in 2004. The mean is close to zero, 0.17, as many countries are rarely or never the subject of case studies. Regarding country totals for the entire period, the mean is around six.

Abstract mentions and Case studies are distinct ways to measure country coverage, but they are correlated at 0.69, indicating substantial overlap. Case studies captures in-depth, direct coverage of particular countries, so we find it helpful in that regard. However, single-country case studies are only part of the literature. Additionally, since many countries are rarely or never the subject of case studies, there is less variation with this variable. Abstract mentions offers the advantage of taking into consideration multiple-country case studies, including regional studies, and it shows substantial variation across countries and time. This is consistent with other studies of scholarly attention on countries ( Hendrix and Vreede 2019 ; Song 2019 ), and more broadly research that uses counts of particular words to identify trends ( Diermeier et al. 2012 ; Steger and Wilson 2012 ; Jones 2016 ).

Neither of these measures captures inclusion in global quantitative analyses, i.e., studies that seek to analyze all countries. We do not see this as a substantial problem. If global studies include all countries, then this would be comparable to adding a “1” to the dependent variable values for each country. The current distributions of Abstract mentions and Case studies would be identical after such an inclusion—if each country was included in every global study. However, related to this, if we were able to count country inclusion in global quantitative studies, this might make potential Western bias and/or feasibility bias even more apparent. Many global quantitative studies exclude countries for which data are missing, and this is most commonly poor countries and less democratic countries ( Lall 2016 ). As a result, if we were to add a “1” to each dependent variable value for each time a country appeared in a global quantitative study, this would likely increase potential evidence of Western bias or research feasibility. Thus, our measures can be seen as somewhat conservative.

Descriptive Data: Abstract Mentions

Figure 1 shows the distribution of Abstract mentions as the total (collapsed) mentions of countries during 1990–2015. The countries in at least 15 abstracts are shown for readability. The figure indicates that the United States appears in far more abstracts than other countries, 230. The prominence of the United States is consistent with some other research ( Hendrix and Vreede 2019 ; Wilson and Knutsen 2020 ). Israel is a prominent second, in 151 abstracts. A study of Political Science research shows that Israel is one of the most-studied countries, ranked 13 in coverage ( Wilson and Knutsen 2020 ), but in conflict research, it seems to be even more of a standout. Israel’s coverage in the conflict literature is at least in part explained by decades of simmering intra-state conflict and the history of inter-state disputes and wars. Other countries near the top include Iraq, China, Russia, and India. These countries are global or regional powers, and in Iraq’s case, it has been the location of multiple highly internationalized conflicts.

Most-mentioned countries in abstracts of five conflict journals, 1990–2015.

Several patterns are noteworthy in Figure 1 . First, the substantial gap between the United States and most other countries is remarkable. Second, the distribution of countries does not seem to be based only on conflict involvement or power (population, wealth, etc.). There are far more countries from Europe (broadly defined) than Africa, for example. Even Western European countries are strongly represented. This top 26 includes five countries from Western Europe (the United Kingdom, Germany, Cyprus, Greece, and France), but only two from Sub-Saharan Africa (Rwanda and South Africa), in spite of the substantial conflict in that region. Even within the most researched countries, there are substantial disparities. Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, appear in the literature almost twice as much (30 times) as South Africa (23) or Rwanda (17).

A final note about Figure 1 is that only a small portion of the world’s nearly 200 countries appear, so the tail (not pictured for space reasons) is quite long and thin. Most countries only appear in a few abstracts—across 24 years, in five journals—and this includes countries with substantial conflict experience, such as El Salvador (in three abstracts), Ethiopia (four), Eritrea (four), Georgia (three), Nepal (six), Uganda (eight), and Yemen (two). El Salvador, for example, was in civil war from 1979 to 1992 and in the years since has had some of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world due to organized crime violence. 13 Eritrea and Ethiopia, meanwhile, fought an inter-state war from 1998 to 2000, and Ethiopia has experienced many years of civil conflict. Overall, Figure 1 shows there is substantial variation in the coverage of countries in the conflict literature, and that some countries appear in the literature much more than others.

Regarding the least-mentioned countries, there are many countries never mentioned in the abstracts of these journals, and some countries that are surprisingly only mentioned several times. Countries only appearing in three or fewer abstracts, include Argentina (one), Bangladesh (one), Chad (one), Ghana (one), Ivory Coast (two), Singapore (zero), and Uzbekistan (zero). Not all of these countries have substantial conflict histories, but some do, and they all have experienced phenomena frequently covered in the conflict literature, such as protests, riots, terrorism, civil-military tension, or repression.

Figure 2 shows how Abstract mentions varies over time for several countries. The purpose is to show that the variable changes over time, and in ways, we might expect. Afghanistan does not appear much in conflict journal abstracts before 2001 (shown by the dotted vertical line), with zero mentions most years. After the US-led war against Afghanistan in 2001, however, the country appeared three-to-five times per year for most years between 2005 and 2015. Russia, meanwhile, has a less clear pattern over time. Its count slightly decreased over the years, perhaps as its influence decreased after the Cold War’s end. A spike in the early 2000s seems somewhat random, but many articles at that time happened to discuss issues such as Russia’s relationships with the European Union, Estonia, or the United States. The general pattern, however, is a slight decline. It is notable that Russia did not appear in any conflict journal abstracts in 2013–2015. Regarding Rwanda, a trend is apparent. It did not show up in any abstracts in the first half of the 1990s, but after the 1994 genocide, it became a regular subject of the conflict literature. The United States sees an overall increase over the years, especially after 2001, with the September 11 attacks and the start of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Overall, Figure 2 demonstrates Abstract mentions vary substantially over time and in ways that are generally consistent with expectations.

Abstract mentions values for selected countries, 1990–2015.

Note: Different vertical axes are used to show each country’s changes over time. Vertical dotted lines indicate key years for respective countries: 2001 (September 11 attacks), 1990 (end of Cold War), or 1994 (Rwandan genocide).

Descriptive Data: Case Studies

Regarding Case studies , Figure 3 shows the distribution of case studies per country, and the total for all years, as was shown with Abstract mentions in Figure 1 . Similarly, for space reasons, only the top 25 most-analyzed countries are shown. The overall distribution of case studies per country is similar to that of Abstract mentions . The United States is the subject of far more case studies (277) than any other country. The gap between the United States and other countries is more extreme with case studies than with country mentions. Israel is second with 116 case studies, and Russia and China come in at third and fourth with 68 and 62, respectively. Most other countries are substantially below this, the subjects of few or no case studies.

Number of case studies on each country in five conflict journals, 1990–2015.

As with Abstract mentions , the countries shown in Figure 3 for case studies are those that are globally or regionally influential in conflict or had substantial conflicts occur on their own soil. Another similarity is that Western European countries seem to be disproportionately subjects of case studies. The countries most often in single-country case studies include the United Kingdom, Germany, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Spain. Bosnia appears in about as many case studies (14) as Rwanda (14) or Nigeria (12), and far more than Pakistan (eight) or Egypt (seven).

In spite of general similarities with Abstract mentions , the counts of single-country case studies show some differences as well. Israel is in far fewer case studies than the United States, although they were mentioned in abstracts almost the same number of times. This illustrates a difference between Abstract mentions and Case studies . Israel appeared a great deal in abstracts when being discussed as part of its region or in multiple-country case studies. This type of research is not captured in the single-country case study measure. The United States, on the other hand, mostly appeared in abstracts as the subject of single-country case studies. As a result, there is a difference between the two countries when it comes to single-country case studies.

Figure 4 indicates the values of Case studies for the same countries shown previously, demonstrating interesting variation over time. Trends are overall similar to the trends illustrated with Country mentions . Russia case studies decreased over time, Rwanda case studies began after 1994, and US case studies increased after 2001. There are also some differences, consistent with what was discussed regarding Israel above. Russia shows an interesting difference compared to Figure 2 . The decline in scholarly attention is especially steep when measured as case studies. This is apparently because scholars kept researching Russia in terms of regional or multiple country studies (post-Soviet states, bilateral relations, etc.). However, conflict research on Russia on its own has clearly plummeted since the 1990s. A difference also appears regarding Afghanistan. Afghanistan does not have a substantial increase in single-case studies, unlike its abstract mentions ( Figure 2 ). The research did expand on Afghanistan post-2001 but in multiple-country case studies more than in single-case studies. 14 Overall, Abstract mentions and Case studies are similar in many ways, but also get at distinct dimensions of scholarly attention to particular countries.

Case studies values for selected countries, 1990–2015. Note: Different vertical axes are used to show each country’s changes over time. Vertical dotted lines indicate key years for respective countries: 2001 (September 11 attacks), 1990 (end of Cold War), or 1994 (Rwandan genocide).

Multivariate Regression

This section describes regressions to analyze which factors are associated with country coverage while taking into consideration alternate explanations. Regarding independent variables, we use three measures for the Western bias explanation. Our primary measure we call West (U.N. voting) , which is based on U.N. General Assembly voting. Bailey et al. (2017) use General Assembly voting data to determine the position (ideal point) of each country, each year, regarding the “U.S.-led world order.” The authors use “Western liberal order” as a synonym for this phrase (e.g., 431, 439). As a result, this is a valuable, fine-grained, and time-varying measure of Western affiliation. The variables range from −2.13 to 3.15. The countries scoring the highest for this are the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Of the countries with above-average scores, most are in Western Europe.

A secondary measure is West (Huntington) , a dichotomous variable coded “1” for the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and countries in Western Europe. This list comes from Huntington’s notion of Western countries ( Huntington 1993 ). We acknowledge that Huntington’s idea of the West is certainly debatable, and his broader arguments are widely criticized ( Fox 2002 ; Henderson 2005 ; Bottici and Challand 2010 ), but it is also a commonly used reference point for discussions about the topic. These two variables represent distinct dimensions of Westernness, since many countries that are not in Huntington’s West score fairly high on West (U.N. voting) . Examples include Israel, Japan, and South Korea. There are also countries in Huntington’s West that score relatively low on Western U.N. voting , such as Cyrpus and Greece in some years. The third indicator of the West involves including regional control variables, and the excluded categories are North America and Western Europe. 15 If the West is covered more than other regions, then we should expect negative coefficients on other regional variables.

To test the research feasibility hypotheses, models include measures for official languages as well as regime type. A primary feasibility measure is English language , a dichotomous variable coded “1” for countries where English is an official language, or de facto official and primary language. Language information comes from the CIA World Factbook. Countries, where English is an official language, should probably be more accessible to scholars working in the countries that produce the most research ( Hazelkorn 2016 ), especially given the dominance of English in academia ( Choi 2010 ; Jenkins 2014 ). Some studies find that countries using the English language receive more research attention ( Das et al. 2013 ; Wilson and Knutsen 2020 ). In addition to English, there are many countries where the official languages are languages spoken by many researchers (whether as a first or additional language), such as Arabic, French, or Spanish. 16 Countries using these widely spoken languages should be easier to research for most scholars than countries that would require scholars to learn a new language or rely on translated sources. To take this into consideration, models include the dichotomous variables Arabic language, French language , and Spanish language .

Another measure of research feasibility is country regime type, using Policy imputed with Freedom House data from the Quality of Government (QOG) project ( Teorell et al. 2019 ). Less democratic countries generally have more barriers to research, from preventing access to archives to arresting researchers ( Clark 2006 ; Krause and Szekely 2020 ). 17

In addition to the variables representing hypothesized relationships, we include variables to take into consideration other possible explanations. As discussed above, it seems intuitive that countries with the most conflict experience should appear more in the conflict literature. Consistent with this, we include multiple measures of conflict involvement. Models include Inter-state conflict history , a variable that counts the number of years in which the country has been involved in inter-state conflicts since 1945. 18 Models include a similar variable, Intra-state conflict history . 19 Both come from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program ( Pettersson and Eck 2018 ), via the QOG project ( Teorell et al. 2019 ). An alternate measure of conflict involvement is Battle deaths , a cumulative sum of the number of battle deaths (in thousands) in conflicts the country has been involved in since 1989, the year data are first recorded ( Pettersson and Eck 2018 ). 20 We do not use this as our primary measure because it does not have information on conflicts before 1989, which is likely to be influential for conflict coverage. The variable is somewhat correlated with the conflict history measures, so we do not include them in the same model.

Another conflict-related measure is Nuclear weapons , a count of the number of nuclear weapons the country had at the time. The source is the Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Notebook . Due to extreme values, a natural logarithm is used. Independently of conflict involvement as measured above, states with nuclear arms seem to be discussed substantially in the conflict literature regarding proliferation issues, the possibility of nuclear war, and because of the power that stems from possessing such weapons. 21 A dichotomous indicator of countries with nuclear weapons returns similar results.

Models also include two other control variables to take into consideration basic country demographic differences: Population ( Bank 2016 ) and Income per capita ( Bolt et al. 2018 ), both as logarithms and via QOG. More populous countries are probably studied more in the literature ( Pepinsky 2019 ; Wilson and Knutsen 2020 ). Regarding per capita wealth, it is less clear how this should be related to research coverage. Some studies find that richer countries are more often researched ( Das et al. 2013 ; Wilson and Knutsen 2020 ). Since this is conflict literature, however, and poorer countries fall into conflict traps ( Collier 2003 ; Kibris 2015 ), perhaps there should be a negative relationship.

The estimator is a negative binomial regression because of the dispersion of the count dependent variables. 22 Models include country effects because of the time-series nature of the data, to capture otherwise unmeasured differences in countries. The country effects are random effects because fixed effects cause observations with no variation over time to drop ( Baltagi 2005 ). There are 36 countries with zero abstract mentions and 75 countries with zero case studies for all years, and these are dropped from the sample if fixed effects are included. In spite of the substantial change in the sample, results are mostly similar if country fixed effects are used. Year fixed effects are included to take into consideration temporal variation. 23 Robustness tests and their results are discussed more below.

Results for Abstract Mentions

Table 1 shows the results with the dependent variable Abstract mentions . Model 1 is the primary model. Regarding the variable West (U.N. voting) , the coefficient on it is positively signed and statistically significant. This suggests that increased alignment with the West in U.N. voting is associated with increased mentions in the conflict literature. Regarding the research feasibility argument, the coefficients on both English language and Democracy are statistically insignificant, suggesting neither attribute is associated with more coverage in the conflict literature. This is surprising, but this could be seen as good news. Country coverage might not be driven by the convenience of the local language for English-speaking researchers or the openness of the country in terms of its regime type, ceteris paribus.

Negative binomial regressions of Abstract mentions , 1990–2015

Notes: Standard errors in parentheses.

* p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, and *** p < 0.001.

Regarding other language measures, Arabic language is statistically significant and positively signed, while the measures of French and Spanish are significant and negatively signed. This suggests that countries with Arabic as an official language are associated with more mentions in conflict literature abstracts, while French- and Spanish-speaking countries are associated with fewer. The divergent finding for Arabic, as opposed to other languages, could suggest researchers’ interest in the Middle East and North Africa more than linguistic feasibility. The negative findings for Spanish and French could suggest a lower interest in Latin America or Sub-Saharan Africa, in spite of a great deal of conflict in the latter region in particular. The negative finding about French in particular is consistent with the Briggs (2017) study of African politics research, which found that scholars study former French colonies less than other African countries.

To test the robustness of the primary model, we include some robustness checks in Models 2–4. Model 2 uses an alternate measure of Western countries, West (Huntington) . The coefficient on this variable is statistically significant and positively signed, suggesting additional support for the hypothesis. The results of the research feasibility argument are similar to those of Model 1. One exception is that the coefficient on Democracy is positively signed and statistically significant. This suggests some support for the feasibility argument. However, the finding is not robust.

Model 3 uses the other Western measure, regional variables, with North America and Western Europe as the omitted categories. These variables are not shown in the table for space reasons, but their results appear in Figure 5 . Incidence rate ratios are used, and values less than one indicate a negative effect. Several of the regions have statistically significant effects: Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Oceania. This suggests that countries in these regions are mentioned less than countries in North America or Western Europe. This is consistent with H1. Other regional variables are statistically insignificant, but it is noteworthy that none of the regions is estimated to receive more coverage in the conflict literature than North America or Western Europe.

Results for regional variables included in Model 4.

In Model 3’s results in Table 1 , most findings are consistent with those of Model 1. The only changes are regarding language measures. Arabic language and the Spanish language are statistically insignificant in Model 3, and French language is only significant at the 90 percent level. This suggests that findings in Model 1 for these variables might have been driven by regional variation more than linguistic convenience. Overall, the research feasibility argument remains without much support.

Model 4 includes an alternate measure of conflict involvement, Battle deaths history . The coefficient on this variable is statistically significant and positively signed as expected. Other results are robust.

Regarding other conflict measures and other control variables throughout Table 1 , two of the conflict-related variables have positively signed and statistically significant coefficients. A country’s history of civil conflict and number of nuclear weapons are associated with a higher number of mentions in the conflict literature. Interestingly, country history of inter-state conflict is not associated with abstract mentions. This could be an indicator of the field’s emphasis on civil conflict since the turn of the century. This is a noteworthy (non-)finding, but overall there is substantial support for the idea that research attention is based at least in part on countries’ conflict involvement.

The two other control variables, Population (log) and Per capita income (log) , are statistically significant in all models of Table 1 . More populous countries are more likely to receive coverage in the conflict literature, compared to less populous countries. This is consistent with expectations. Per capita income is negatively signed, suggesting less wealthy countries receive more attention in the conflict literature. The coefficient is only significant at the 90 percent level in two models, but it is highly significant in two others. The finding is interesting because it contrasts with findings in the broader literature suggesting wealthier countries are studied more ( Das et al. 2013 ; Wilson and Knutsen 2020 ). The negative relationship might seem to clash with the support for the Western bias hypothesis, but whether within the West or in non-Western countries, poorer countries are more likely to be researched. At least part of the reason could be that these countries are more likely to experience civil conflict.

Results for Case Studies

Table 2 shows results for the second dependent variable, Case studies . The results are mostly similar to those of Abstract mentions models. There is robust support for the Western bias hypothesis. Results for West (U.N. voting) are consistent across the models. The second measure of Western bias, West (Huntington) , is statistically significant and positively signed in the model in which it is included.

Negative binomial regressions of Case studies , 1990–2015

Model 7 includes regional variables for an alternate test of the Western bias argument, and results are shown in Figure 6 . They are similar to those in Figure 5 : Half of the regions have statistically significant and negative relationships with case study counts: South-East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Oceania. Countries in any of these regions are less likely to appear in conflict case studies than countries in North America or Western Europe. The only difference compared to the findings from the Abstract mentions model is that in that model, the South Asia variable was not significant. Again, however, there is no region that has a positive relationship with case studies, relative to North America and Western Europe. Overall, this suggests support for the first hypothesis.

Results for regional variables included in Model 7.

Results for the research feasibility hypothesis in case study models are mostly similar compared to those of abstract mentions. There is almost no support for the research feasibility argument. English language is never significant, and Democracy only is in the model with West (Huntington) . The measures for French and Spanish are negatively signed, with the former often statistically significant and the latter always statistically significant.

The one difference across the two tables is that Arabic language was statistically significant and positively signed for Abstract mentions , but it was never significant for Case studies . It is unclear why this difference would occur between the dependent variable types, but it could be related to research on Israel (see Figures 1 and 3 ). It could be that Arab-speaking countries appear in abstracts of articles that are primarily about Israel, but these articles do not count as case studies of the Arab-speaking countries since the measure is of single-country case studies. In other words, Arab countries are mentioned in abstracts of articles mostly about Israel, so they appear in that measure but not in the single-country case study measure. Overall, however, it is remarkable that this is the only difference across the tables in spite of such different dependent variables.

Regarding control variables in the Case studies models, results are again consistent with the Abstract mentions models. The coefficient for Intra-state conflict is statistically significant and negatively signed, while the coefficient for Inter-state conflict remains statistically insignificant. Battle deaths history is statistically significant and negatively signed. Nuclear weapons (log) remains positively signed and statistically significant across all models. Population (log) is robustly positively signed and significant, while GDP per capita (log) remains negatively signed and significant.

The results of the models are robust to many additional changes in model specification, some of which we show in the online appendix . If the dependent variable is a total count of country mentions in the entire article (excluding bibliography and author affiliation or address), and not only abstracts, results are similar. We do not use this as a primary dependent variable because we are more interested in the countries studied in-depth, which are more likely to be mentioned in the abstract. We also use an alternate measure of case studies, which includes two-country case studies instead of only single-country case studies. Online appendix models also include changes to independent variables and more parsimonious models excluding controls or other variables. We also report models excluding articles from International Security , since its explicitly US focus could be responsible for the significance of the Western variables. Additionally, online appendix  models include a measure of ongoing conflict to see if that might draw more research or deter it through feasibility. Through all these robustness checks, the general relationships for West (U.N. voting) and West (Huntington) remain consistent. The results for regional variables are mostly similar. The regions most often associated with less research attention than North America or Western Europe are Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South-East Asia. The results for research feasibility measures are mixed in these robustness checks. English language is usually statistically insignificant, while Democracy is significant and positively signed in about half of the models. Spanish language is usually negatively signed and statistically significant. Conflict variable results stayed mostly similar across these distinct modeling approaches.

Discussion: The Most- and Least-Studied Countries

The regression findings provide a profile of the types of countries that are researched most in the conflict literature, taking into consideration conflict involvement and other attributes such as population and wealth. Using the results from Tables 1 and 2 , these are countries with some conflict experience that vote with the West in the United Nations, are physically in the West as defined by Huntington, and have large populations. Countries with nuclear weapons also appear a great deal in the literature. Regionally, the most-discussed states are mostly in North America or Western Europe. These countries are relatively wealthy, but the inclusion of the per capita GDP measure suggests that, independently of wealth, other factors such as pro-Western voting behavior and location are especially important for explaining variation in coverage. Regarding the attention on nuclear-weapons states, this coverage could make sense given the potential for regional or global devastation in a nuclear war. However, since many millions of people are affected by actual armed conflicts, the apparent focus on nuclear-weapons states raises questions about priorities in conflict research.

The findings also offer hints about which countries are most likely to be overlooked in the conflict literature. These would be countries that have conflict experience but do not vote with the West in the United Nations, are not physically in the West as defined by Huntington, do not have nuclear arms (or have fewer nuclear arms), have smaller populations, and are perhaps not the poorest in the world. Regionally, these are countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Oceania. Linguistically, the under-studied countries might include those that have Spanish or French as an official language.

Some examples—which meet at least most of the above criteria, and also have below-average counts for Abstract mentions or Case studies —include Algeria, Chad, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, and Tajikistan. Algeria experienced a massive civil war in the 1990s and early 2000s, killing more than 100,000 people. Yet the country only appears in six abstracts and is the subject of one case study in the five journals we examine during 26 years. (The mean for abstract mentions over the whole time period is 10, and the mean number of single-country case studies is six.) Eritrea and Ethiopia, belligerents in a substantial inter-state war and Ethiopia experiencing years of civil conflict as discussed earlier, appear only four times each in abstracts. Regarding single-country case studies, Ethiopia is the subject of only two and Eritrea none. As far as some other countries and case studies, Chad and Myanmar appear in single-country case studies only once each, and Georgia and Tajikistan never—in spite of substantial civil conflict in each of these countries during the years of the sample. 24

By comparison, the phrase “Northern Ireland” appears in 23 abstracts, and the conflict there is the subject of 20 single-country case studies. Northern Ireland is not in the sample for our quantitative tests, since it is not a state in the same sense as others (e.g., with a seat at the United Nations), but there is a stark difference in coverage there as opposed to countries that are non-Western. Northern Ireland is the subject of more research than any of the countries listed in the first sentence of the previous paragraph. 25 Other Western countries—not nuclear powers or especially populous—that received above-average research coverage include Canada (nine abstract appearances and six case studies), Cyprus (18 abstracts, 13 case studies), Greece (16 abstracts, six case studies), and Spain (six abstracts, 10 case studies, half of which were on the conflict with ETA). In general, countries of the West seem to be studied much more in the conflict literature than non-Western states, regardless of conflict involvement.

Which countries are subject to the most attention in the conflict literature? This study provided the first attempt to address this question, using data from five journals over 26 years. With two measures of scholarly attention, we found evidence that countries from the West receive more coverage in the conflict literature than non-Western countries. We also suggested that “research feasibility” should be related to the extent to which countries appear in conflict articles. However, our measures for this argument, principally English as an official language and democracy, are not usually important for explaining country coverage. These results were consistent whether looking at mentions of country names in abstracts, or by counting how many single-country case studies each country appeared in.

If conflict research suffers from Western bias, what are the implications? One serious issue is that our general body of knowledge is potentially skewed—focused on a small and unusual set of states, yet we use the literature to generalize about all states. 26 A growing line of research illustrates the problems associated with applying US or European models to other countries ( Zhang 2003 ; Sharman 2018 ; Cheng and Brettle 2019 ). More generally, are we over-learning the lessons of Northern Ireland (for example), and ignoring the lessons of Ethiopia or Algeria? This seems likely. What are the lessons of the 1992–1997 civil war in Tajikistan? Do its dynamics raise questions about extant theories or help create new explanations of conflict or its resolution? 27 In general, it is difficult to know how much, or how precisely, this over-focus on certain countries and under-focus on others affects the body of research. However, if scholars are concerned about bias affecting individual studies, they should probably also be concerned about bias affecting the broader corpus of work.

To try to address these issues, scholars can consider analyzing cases that are studied less in the literature. The focus on such cases could be “sold” in the framing of the research, advertising that the case is important to understand because it has not received as much attention as others. Country bias probably does not only affect single-country case studies. It is likely to affect two-country comparisons, studies of several countries, and medium- n studies ( Ragin 2000 ). Additionally, researchers who conduct global analyses often discuss examples and sometimes complement them with brief illustrative case studies. These opportunities could be harnessed to draw on information from countries that are not as frequently analyzed. Beyond individuals working on their own research, more importantly, there are gatekeepers at all levels who could play a role in encouraging a less-biased body of conflict research. Journal editors and reviewers, grant decision committees, and grant peer reviewers could think more about to what extent a case is already under-covered or over-covered when evaluating research. Dissertation supervisors and graduate admissions committees could also take these issues into consideration. Of course, there are practical limitations to encouraging more geographically diverse research, such as the funding required for visiting more distant locations and the safety of field work in certain locations. But when choices are possible, hopefully, scholars and administrators can think about decisions that might help reduce the bias that is apparent in the conflict literature.

This research suggests a number of steps for future research. First, to what extent do these biases affect other areas of study? Some important work suggests the issue could be widespread ( Munck and Snyder 2007a ; Briggs 2017 ; Pepinsky 2019 ; Song 2019 ; Wilson and Knutsen 2020 ). One study looks at IR generally ( Hendrix and Vreede 2019 ), but more in-depth analyses of geographic disparities in this discipline, or specific topics like political economy, would be important contributions. Second, our measures of scholarly attention did not capture countries used in quantitative global analyses. We explained why this was probably not a problem and might even make our findings conservative. However, it could be valuable for scholars to analyze samples used in global studies—particularly, which states appear less from large- n samples—and see what patterns emerge, and how this affects findings in conflict research. This has been done for other topics, with interesting results ( Lall 2016 ). Third, scholars could try to gauge the effects of bias in a number of ways. One would be to determine some of the key findings of a commonly studied case and see to what extent they apply to less-studied cases. There might be substantial sui generis issues, suggesting the singular focus on a prominent case is problematic. Or one could do the reverse, and see how a less-studied case could help us to understand the more-researched case(s). In general, as suggested above, scholars can build on these findings by seeking out under-studied countries, such as those not in the West or not especially populous, and show how these cases offer important contributions to the literature. Overall, there are interesting and troubling patterns of country coverage in the conflict literature, and scholars can use this knowledge to help build a more representative and more informative body of research.

Author‘s note: Previous versions of the paper were presented at the University of Essex, the University of Glasgow, the University of Oxford, the University of Warwick, and at the 2019 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the European Political Science Association, and the Network of European Peace Scientists. We thank Juan Camullo, Monica Duffy Toft, John Gledhill, Sara Polo, Andrea Ruggeri, and participants at presentations for comments. We thank Ana Karina Aguilera Romo, Shiobhan Low, and Gabriela Suahil Millan Rodríguez for research assistance.

Security studies is more state-focused, usually exploring threats to governments ( Collins 2016 ). Peace and conflict studies, as the name suggests, focuses more on conflict resolution and prevention ( Gleditsch et al. 2014 ; Bright and Gledhill 2018 ; Gledhill and Bright 2019 ).

See, for example, King et al. ( 1994 , 27–28), who describe a biased procedure as one that will “tilt the outcome in one direction or another.” Similarly, other scholars use the phrase “disproportionate weight” when discussing bias ( Collier 1995 ; Berinsky 2002 ).

An acronym used to describe Western experimental subjects is WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

The visibility of the United States is consistent with research showing that the vast majority of authors assigned on IR syllabi are US-resident and US-trained scholars ( Knight 2019 ). Knight interprets the US dominance finding as evidence of Western bias, including that phrase in the title of the article.

Other content such as front matter is excluded.

There are a few other journals that would have been included if they were in JSTOR, such as Cooperation and Conflict and Terrorism and Political Violence . The exclusion of these journals seems unlikely to affect results, as they are similar enough to included journals. As a pilot test, we examined case studies from Terrorism and Political Violence and found trends similar to those reported for other journals.

JPR and Security Dialogue are based at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, while the other three journals are based in US institutions.

The short description of the journal on its website includes the phrase “ International Security has defined the debate on US national security policy...” ( https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/isec ). On the other four journals’ websites, there are no mentions of specific countries.

The service is available at https://www.jstor.org/dfr/about/dataset-services , and our data were downloaded on January 20, 2019.

The country list is here: http://blog.plsoucy.com/2012/04/iso-3166-country-code-list-csv-sql/ .

A search for the term “Ireland” will also return mentions of Northern Ireland, which is of course in the United Kingdom, not the Republic of Ireland. This would return a falsely high count for the Republic of Ireland. To correct this, we first searched for the word Ireland and then subtracted from that total the count the number of mentions of Northern Ireland. We did a similar subtraction of mentions of Nigeria from the total Niger count.

Articles that analyze three, four, or more countries cannot devote as much attention to their subjects, so we exclude this kind of country coverage to have a consistent indicator of case studies.

Regarding research looking at organized criminal violence, it seems that a disproportionate amount of English-language work focuses on Mexico instead of Central American countries, Brazil, or elsewhere.

Examples of multiple-country studies that would appear in Abstract mentions but not Case studies include articles on US operations in Afghanistan, Afghanistan–Pakistan border issues, and the US Global War on Terror generally.

This is similar to Huntington’s West, although it excludes Australia and New Zealand. This is done to look at commonly used regions, and North America and Western Europe mostly overlap with the West.

Chinese (Mandarin) has many speakers, but it is only an official language in China and Singapore. Thus a variable for this language would only represent these two countries, almost a single-country fixed effect. The other languages mentioned, however, are official languages of dozens of countries.

We had considered an additional measure, distance in kilometers from Washington, DC (or London), to indicate easier travel for researchers in the globally top-ranked institutions. However, this overlaps too much with the Western bias measures, and we prefer more parsimonious models. If such distance measures are included, they are usually not statistically significant and do not change other results.

We use 1945 to maximize the amount of information on each country. Many countries did not yet exist in 1945, but for the ones that did (e.g., El Salvador, Peru, Russia, Turkey, and the United States), their conflicts are why they are still discussed in the literature, so this should be taken into consideration. Additionally, scholarly research is often about conflicts decades earlier, not only those of the past several years. If a later year start is used, such as 1970 to have most countries included for all years, results are similar.

Another form of conflict involvement is when states are the subject of terrorism campaigns. Some countries experience substantial amounts of terrorism, and this is often coded as civil conflict given that the majority of terrorism occurs within civil conflict ( Findley and Young 2012 ). Thus the majority of terrorism should be captured by our intra-state conflict variable.

The authors report “low,” “high,” and “best” estimates, and we use the latter.

A comparable measure is a variable indicating the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council. These are highly correlated, so we do not include both in the same model. However, if such a measure is included instead of Nuclear weapons , results are similar.

For Abstract mentions , the mean is 0.4 and the variance is 1.26. For Case studies , the mean is 0.23 and the variance is 1.15. This suggests substantial over-dispersion, for which a negative binomial is suitable. We do not use a zero-inflated model because we do not expect that the explanation for zeroes is unique compared to the explanations for 1s instead of 2s. Additionally, there is no straightforward way to include random effects with a zero-inflated model. If a zero-inflated negative binomial model is estimated, most results are robust, but the goodness-of-fit is worse.

We do not include a lagged version of the dependent variable because it seems likely to introduce bias, particularly since we use country effects ( Bellemare et al. 2017 ). However, if a lagged dependent variable is included, results are robust.

Most of the countries in this paragraph experienced tens of thousands of battle deaths during the years studied ( Pettersson and Eck 2018 ). These numbers exclude many civilians killed in one-sided violence.

The focus on Northern Ireland was also noted by Silke in his analysis of 1990s terrorism research. “In proportional terms, Northern Ireland is the most intensely studied region on the planet,” wrote Silke ( 2004 ).

Some studies analyze particular countries or conflicts without an explicit interest in generalization, but a great deal and probably the majority of conflict research does assert some notion of comparability or lessons applicable to other cases.

Of course, there is some research on these questions (e.g., Tunçer-Kilavuz 2011 ; Driscoll 2012 ; Epkenhans 2016 ), and on all the countries identified as under-studied. It is a question of degree, of the amount of research on respective countries.

Acharya Amitav , Buzan Barry , eds. 2010 . Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives On and Beyond Asia . 1 edition, New York : Routledge .

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Adams Courtland , Ide Tobias , Barnett Jon , Detges Adrien . 2018 . “ Sampling Bias in Climate–Conflict Research.” Nature Climate Change 8 ( 3 ): 200 . https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0068-2 .

Andersson Irene . 2003 . “ ‘Women’s Unarmed Uprising Against War’: A Swedish Peace Protest in 1935.” Journal of Peace Research 40 ( 4 ): 395 – 412 .

Bailey Michael A. , Strezhnev Anton , Voeten Erik . 2017 . “ Estimating Dynamic State Preferences from United Nations Voting Data.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 61 ( 2 ): 430 – 56 .

Baltagi Badi H. 2005 . Econometric Analysis of Panel Data . Vol. 3 . New York : Wiley .

Bank, World . 2016 . “World Development Indicators 2016.” Technical Report 105051 The World Bank. Accessed April 27 , 2016 . http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/805371467990952829/World-development-indicators-2016 .

Barkawi Tarak , Laffey Mark . 2006 . “ The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies.” Review of International Studies 32 ( 2 ): 329 – 52 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/article/postcolonial-moment-in-security-studies/6C926733D93FF9F7B1ABD136CD6D5440 .

Barnes Nicholas . 2017 . “ Criminal Politics: An Integrated Approach to the Study of Organized Crime, Politics, and Violence.” Perspectives on Politics 15 ( 4 ): 967 – 87 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/criminal-politics-an-integrated-approach-to-the-study-of-organized-crime-politics-and-violence/B6E8E52E87FCC47B3F053BA7AF65971E .

Begum Neema , Saini Rima . 2019 . “ Decolonising the Curriculum.” Political Studies Review 17 ( 2 ): 196 – 201 .

Bellemare Marc F. , Masaki Takaaki , Pepinsky Thomas B. . 2017 . “ Lagged Explanatory Variables and the Estimation of Causal Effect.” The Journal of Politics 79 ( 3 ): 949 – 63 .

Berinsky Adam J . 2002 . “ Silent Voices: Social Welfare Policy Opinions and Political Equality in America.” American Journal of Political Science 46 ( 2 ): 276 – 87 .

Bilgin Pinar . 2008 . “Thinking past ‘Western’ IR?” Third World Quarterly 29 ( 1 ): 5 – 23 .

Bolt Jutta , Inklaar Robert , de Jong Herman , van Zanden Jan Luiten . 2018 . “Maddison Project Database, Version 2018.” Rebasing “Maddison”: New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-run Economic Development . Groningen : University of Groningen .

Bottici Chiara , Challand Benoît . 2010 . The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations . London : Routledge .

Brenner David , Han Enze . 2021 . “Forgotten Conflicts: Producing Knowledge and Ignorance in Security Studies.” Journal of Global Security Studies 7 : ogab022 .

Briggs Ryan C . 2017 . “ Explaining Case Selection in African Politics Research.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 35 ( 4 ): 565 – 72 .

Briggs Ryan C. , Weathers Scott . 2016 . “Gender and Location in African Politics Scholarship: The Other White Man’s Burden?” African Affairs 115 ( 460 ): 466 – 89 . https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/115/460/466/2195242 .

Bright Jonathan , Gledhill John . 2018 . “ A Divided Discipline? Mapping Peace and Conflict Studies.” International Studies Perspectives 19 ( 2 ): 128 – 47 . https://academic.oup.com/isp/article/19/2/128/4907910 .

Brooks Risa A . 2011 . “Muslim ‘Homegrown’ Terrorism in the United States: How Serious Is the Threat?” International Security 36 ( 2 ): 7 – 47 .

Buzan Barry , Little Richard . 2000 . International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations . Oxford : Oxford University Press . http://www.oup.co.uk/ .

Chayes Antonia . 2008 . “ How American Treaty Behavior Threatens National Security.” International Security 33 ( 1 ): 45 – 81 .

Cheng Christine , Brettle Alison . 2019 . “ How Cognitive Frameworks Shape the American Approach to International Relations and Security Studies.” Journal of Global Security Studies 4 ( 3 ): 321 – 44 . https://academic.oup.com/jogss/article/4/3/321/5533396 .

Choi Po King . 2010 . “ ‘Weep for Chinese University’: A Case Study of English Hegemony and Academic Capitalism in Higher Education in Hong Kong.” Journal of Education Policy 25 ( 2 ): 233 – 52 .

Clark Janine A . 2006 . “ Field Research Methods in the Middle East.” PS: Political Science & Politics 39 ( 03 ): 417 – 24 . http://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1049096506060707 .

Collier David . 1995 . “ Translating Quantitative Methods for Qualitative Researchers: The Case of Selection Bias.” American Political Science Review 89 ( 2 ): 461 – 6 .

Collier Paul . 2003 . Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy . Washington, DC : World Bank and Oxford University Press .

Collins Alan . 2016 . Introduction. What is Security Studies? In Contemporary Security Studies , 4th edition. 1 – 10 . Oxford : Oxford University Press . https://www.oxfordpoliticstrove.com/view/10.1093/hepl/9780198708315.001.0001/hepl-9780198708315-chapter-1 .

Crosby Andrew , Monaghan Jeffrey . 2012 . “ Settler Governmentality in Canada and the Algonquins of Barriere Lake.” Security Dialogue 43 ( 5 ): 421 – 38 .

Das Jishnu , Do Quy-Toan , Shaines Karen , Srikant Sowmya . 2013 . “U.S. and them: The Geography of Academic Research.” Journal of Development Economics 105 : 112 – 30 . https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0304387813001090 .

Deciancio Melisa . 2016 . “ International Relations from the South: A Regional Research Agenda for Global IR.” International Studies Review 18 ( 1 ): 106 – 19 . https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/18/1/106/2357830 .

Di Bitetti Mario S. , Ferreras Julián A. . 2017 . “ Publish (in English) or Perish: The Effect on Citation Rate of Using Languages other Than English in Scientific Publications.” Ambio 46 ( 1 ): 121 – 27 .

Diermeier Daniel , Godbout Jean-François , Yu Bei , Kaufmann Stefan . 2012 . “ Language and Ideology in Congress.” British Journal of Political Science 42 ( 1 ): 31 – 55 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/language-and-ideology-in-congress/1063F5509BC2ABC3F9A0E164E58157EE .

Douglass Rex , Rondeaux Candace . 2017 . “MINING THE GAPS: A Text Mining-Based Meta-Analysis of the Current State of Research on Violent Extremism.” RESOLVE Network Working Paper, Washington, DC, https://doi.org/10.37805/rwps2017.1 .

Drakos Konstatinos , Grafos Andreas . 2006 . “ The Devil You Know But Are Afraid to Face: Underreporting Bias and its Distorting Effects on the Study of Terrorism.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50 ( 5 ): 714 – 35 .

Driscoll Jesse . 2012 . “ Commitment Problems or Bidding Wars? Rebel Fragmentation as Peace Building.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 56 ( 1 ): 118 – 49 .

Epkenhans Tim . 2016 . The Origins of the Civil War in Tajikistan: Nationalism, Islamism and Violent Conflict in Post-Soviet Space . Contemporary Central Asia: Societies, Politics, and Cultures Lanham : Lexington Books .

Erdmann Gero . 2004 . “ Party Research: Western European bias and the ‘African Labyrinth’.” Democratization 11 ( 3 ): 63 – 87 .

Findley Michael G. , Young Joseph K. . 2012 . “ Terrorism and Civil War: A Spatial and Temporal Approach to a Conceptual Problem.” Perspectives on Politics 10 ( 2 ): 285 – 305 .

Fox Jonathan . 2002 . “ Ethnic Minorities and the Clash of Civilizations: A Quantitative Analysis of Huntington’s Thesis.” British Journal of Political Science 32 ( 3 ): 415 – 34 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/ethnic-minorities-and-the-clash-of-civilizations-a-quantitative-analysis-of-huntingtons-thesis/85A9699D564116ED2EC38FB0E4385B64 .

Getmansky Anna . 2019 . “ ‘Englishman in New York’: Conducting Research in the Middle East as a Foreign Scholar.” PS: Political Science & Politics 52 ( 03 ): 490 – 93 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1049096519000192/type/journal_article .

Gledhill John , Bright Jonathan . 2019 . “Studying Peace and Studying Conflict: Complementary or Competing Projects?” Journal of Global Security Studies 4 ( 2 ): 259 – 66 .

Gleditsch Nils Petter , Nordkvelle Jonas , Strand Håvard . 2014 . “Peace research “Just the study of war?” Journal of Peace Research 51 ( 2 ): 145 – 58 .

Golan Guy J . 2008 . “ Where in the World Is Africa?: Predicting Coverage of Africa by US Television Networks.” International Communication Gazette 70 ( 1 ): 41 – 57 .

Greitens Sheena Chestnut , Truex Rory . 2019 . “Repressive Experiences among China Scholars: New Evidence from Survey Data.” The China Quarterly 242 , 349 – 75 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/repressive-experiences-among-china-scholars-new-evidence-from-survey-data/C1CB08324457ED90199C274CDC153127 .

Hanania Richard . 2019 . “ Are Liberal Governments More Cooperative? Voting Trends at the UN in Five Anglophone Democracies.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 63 ( 6 ): 1403 – 32 .

Hazelkorn Ellen . 2016 . Global Rankings and the Geopolitics of Higher Education: Understanding the Influence and Impact of Rankings on Higher Education, Policy and Society . New York : Routledge .

Henderson Errol A . 2005 . “ Not Letting Evidence Get in the Way of Assumptions: Testing the Clash of Civilizations Thesis with More Recent Data.” International Politics 42 ( 4 ): 458 – 69 .

Hendrix Cullen S. 2017 . “The Streetlight Effect in Climate Change Research on Africa.” Global Environmental Change 43 : 137 – 47 .

Hendrix Cullen S. , Vreede Jon . 2019 . “ US Dominance in International Relations and Security Scholarship in Leading Journals.” Journal of Global Security Studies 4 ( 3 ): 310 – 20 .

Henrich Joseph , Heine Steven J. , Norenzayan Ara . 2010 . “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 ( 2–3 ): 61 – 83 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/weirdest-people-in-the-world/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17 .

Horton Richard . 2003 . “ Medical Journals: Evidence of Bias Against the Diseases of Poverty.” The Lancet 361 ( 9359 ): 712 – 13 . https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(03)12665-7/abstract .

Huntington Samuel . 1993 . “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 ( 3 ): 22 – 50 .

Iyengar Shanto . 1990 . “ The Accessibility Bias in Politics: Television News and Public Opinion.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 2 ( 1 ): 1 – 15 . https://academic.oup.com/ijpor/article/2/1/1/659778 .

Jackson Richard , Smyth Marie Breen , Gunning Jeroen . 2009 . Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda . London : Routledge .

Jenkins Jennifer . 2014 . English as a Lingua Franca in the International University: the Politics of Academic English Language Policy . Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge .

Jones Jennifer J . 2016 . “ Talk ‘Like a Man’ The Linguistic Styles of Hillary Clinton, 1992–2013.” Perspectives on Politics 14 ( 3 ): 625 – 42 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/talk-like-a-man-the-linguistic-styles-of-hillary-clinton-19922013/0F8189E4F3221D78C6233C2F38C72A3E .

Jones Steve . 2008 . “ Television News: Geographic and Source Biases, 1982-2004.” International Journal of Communication 2 ( 0 ): 223 – 52 . https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/252 .

Kalyvas Stathis N . 2004 . “ The Urban Bias in Research on Civil Wars.” Security Studies 13 ( 3 ): 160 – 90 .

Kappeler Victor E. , Potter Gary W. , eds. 2006 . Constructing Crime: Perspectives on Making News and Social Problems . 2nd ed. Long Grove, Ill : Waveland Press .

Kibris Arzu . 2015 . “ The Conflict Trap Revisited: Civil Conflict and Educational Achievement.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 59 ( 4 ): 645 – 70 .

King Gary , Keohane Robert , Verba Sidney . 1994 . Designing Social Inquiry. Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research . Princeton : Princeton University Press .

Knight Sarah Cleeland . 2019 . “ Even Today, a Western and Gendered Social Science: Persistent Geographic and Gender Biases in Undergraduate IR Teaching.” International Studies Perspectives 20 ( 3 ): 203 – 25 .

Kopper Akos , Peragovics Tamas . 2019 . “ Overcoming the Poverty of Western Historical Imagination: Alternative Analogies for Making Sense of the South China Sea Conflict.” European Journal of International Relations 25 ( 2 ): 360 – 82 .

Krause Peter , Szekely Ora , eds. 2020 . Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science . New York : Columbia University Press .

Lall Ranjit . 2016 . “ How Multiple Imputation Makes a Difference.” Political Analysis 24 ( 4 ): 414 – 33 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1047198700014145/type/journal_article .

Ley Sandra . 2018 . “ To Vote or Not to Vote: How Criminal Violence Shapes Electoral Participation.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62 ( 9 ): 1963 – 90 .

Loyle Cyanne E. , Simoni Alicia . 2017 . “ Researching Under Fire: Political Science and Researcher Trauma.” PS: Political Science & Politics 50 ( 01 ): 141 – 45 .

Malik Kenan . 2017 . “Are Soas Students Right to ‘Decolonise’ their Minds from Western Philosophers?” The Guardian , February 19. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/19/soas-philosopy-decolonise-our-minds-enlightenment-white-european-kenan-malik .

May Robert M . 1997 . “ The Scientific Wealth of Nations.” Science 275 ( 5301 ): 793 – 96 . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/275/5301/793 .

Morgenbesser Lee , Weiss Meredith L. . 2018 . “ Survive and Thrive: Field Research in Authoritarian Southeast Asia.” Asian Studies Review 42 ( 3 ): 385 – 403 .

Munck Gerardo L. , Snyder Richard . 2007a . “ Debating the Direction of Comparative Politics: An Analysis of Leading Journals.” Comparative Political Studies 40 ( 1 ): 5 – 31 .

Munck Gerardo L. , Snyder Richard . 2007b . “ Who Publishes in Comparative Politics? Studying the World from the United States.” PS: Political Science & Politics 40 ( 2 ): 339 – 46 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/who-publishes-in-comparative-politics-studying-the-world-from-the-united-states/E2F15A4D9F34E3DCEFABB3AADD84E7BD .

Muradova Lala , James Gildea Ross . 2019 . “ Oil Wealth and US Public Support for War.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 38 ( 1 ): 3 – 19 .

Nielsen Mark , Haun Daniel , Kårtner Joscha , Legare Cristine H. . 2017 . “The Persistent Sampling Bias in Developmental Psychology: A Call To Action.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 162 : 31 – 38 . http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096517300346 .

Pepinsky Thomas B . 2019 . “ The Return of the Single-Country Study.” Annual Review of Political Science 22 ( 1 ): 187 – 203 .

Pettersson Therése , Eck Kristine . 2018 . “ Organized Violence, 1989–2017.” Journal of Peace Research 55 ( 4 ): 535 – 47 .

Ragin Charles C. 2000 . Fuzzy-Set Social Science . Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press .

Rasler Karen . 2000 . “ Shocks, Expectancy Revision, and the De-escalation of Protracted Conflicts: The Israeli-Palestinian Case.” Journal of Peace Research 37 ( 6 ): 699 – 720 .

Sharman J.C . 2018 . “ Myths of Military Revolution: European Expansion and Eurocentrism.” European Journal of International Relations 24 ( 3 ): 491 – 513 .

Silke Andrew . 2004 . Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements, and Failures . New York : Frank Cass .

Song Yoonjin . 2019 . “The Landscape of Comparative Politics: Which Regions and Countries Have Had High Profiles in Comparative Politics Journals?” PS: Political Science & Politics 52 ( 2 ): 325 – 31 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/landscape-of-comparative-politics-which-regions-and-countries-have-had-high-profiles-in-comparative-politics-journals/8995C04E8919A5556166F9F0CBDE18C9 .

Steger Manfred B. , Wilson Erin K. . 2012 . “ Anti-Globalization or Alter-Globalization? Mapping the Political Ideology of the Global Justice Movement.” International Studies Quarterly 56 ( 3 ): 439 – 54 . https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/56/3/439/1791028 .

Teorell Jan , Dahlberg Stefan , Holmberg Soren , Rothstein Bo , Pachon Natalia Alvarado , Svensson Richard . 2019 . “The Quality of Government Standard Dataset, version Jan19.” University of Gothenburg : The Quality of Government Institute . http://www.qog.pol.gu.se doi:10.18157/qogstdjan19 .

Thomas Caroline , Wilkin Peter . 2004 . “ Still Waiting after all These Years: ‘The Third World’ on the Periphery of International Relations.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6 ( 2 ): 241 – 58 .

Tickner Arlene . 2003 . “ Seeing IR Differently: Notes from the Third World.” Millennium 32 ( 2 ): 295 – 324 .

Tickner J. Ann . 2011 . “ Dealing with Difference: Problems and Possibilities for Dialogue in International Relations.” Millennium 39 ( 3 ): 607 – 18 .

Tunçer-Kilavuz Idil . 2011 . “ Understanding Civil War: A Comparison of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.” Europe-Asia Studies 63 ( 2 ): 263 – 90 .

Weidmann Nils B . 2016 . “ A Closer Look at Reporting Bias in Conflict Event Data.” American Journal of Political Science 60 ( 1 ): 206 – 18 .

Wemheuer-Vogelaar Wiebke , Bell Nicholas J. , Navarrete Morales Mariana , Tierney Michael J. . 2016 . “ The IR of the Beholder: Examining Global IR Using the 2014 TRIP Survey.” International Studies Review 18 ( 1 ): 16 – 32 .

Wilson Matthew Charles , Knutsen Carl Henrik . 2020 . “Geographical Coverage in Political Science Research.” Perspectives on Politics 1 – 16 . https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1537592720002509/type/journal_article .

Zhang Yongjin . 2003 . “ The ‘English School’ in China: A Travelogue of Ideas and Their Diffusion .” European Journal of International Relations 9 ( 1 ): 87 – 114 .

Supplementary data

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1468-2486
• Print ISSN 1521-9488
• Copyright © 2024 International Studies Association
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• DOI: 10.54254/2753-7048/47/20240875
• Corpus ID: 268916845

The Application of Large Language Models Reducing Cultural Barriers in International Trade: A Perspective from Cultural Conflicts, Potential and Obstacles

• Zhaokai Liang , Yuexi Liu , Yihao Luo
• Published in Lecture Notes in Education… 3 April 2024
• Linguistics, Computer Science, Business, Political Science

Related Papers

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

AI tools for literature searching

Overview of ai tools for literature searching, selected tools, how to use these tools safely.

There are many new AI tools available to researchers and students which focus on academic sources (rather than general AI tools such as Copilot or ChatGPT). These tools offer a powerful new method of discovering academic literature and can be a great complement to traditional methods of searching the literature in your field.

For thorough or comprehensive searching such as for a research paper or thesis, you should still search the major academic databases in your field . These AI tools use freely available or negotiated underlying datasets. These datasets do not necessarily contain the important journals in any field, however academic databases are produced specifically to provide this coverage. You can find the databases in your field in our Subject Guides .

Some of the more popular tools you might like to explore are below. Note that there are many more, and new developments are happening all the time. You can search the web to investigate what is available.

• Use these tools as an extra technique  for research and not to replace a thorough search.
• Verify any information provided by generative AI tools with credible sources and check for missing information.
• Note that most of these tools do not have access to the full text of papers - they base their answers on titles and abstracts only. You should always access, read and cite the full papers that you use in your work.
• Don't upload materials from Library resources such as databases. This is in breach of copyright, and license agreements
• Don't upload your own sensitive or private documents. It's possible another user of the tool might retrieve your information from the underlying software
• You should acknowledge your use of AI tools to complete your work. See our guide on using Generative AI tools for assignments for more information.      
• Last Updated: Aug 26, 2024 11:33 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/research-techniques/ai-tools-for-literature-searching

arXiv's Accessibility Forum starts next month!

Help | Advanced Search

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

Title: deepdelveai: identifying ai related documents in large scale literature data.

Abstract: This paper presents DeepDelveAI, a comprehensive dataset specifically curated to identify AI-related research papers from a large-scale academic literature database. The dataset was created using an advanced Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model trained on a binary classification task to distinguish between AI-related and non-AI-related papers. The model was trained and validated on a vast dataset, achieving high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The resulting DeepDelveAI dataset comprises over 9.4 million AI-related papers published since Dartmouth Conference, from 1956 to 2024, providing a crucial resource for analyzing trends, thematic developments, and the evolution of AI research across various disciplines.

Submission history

Access paper:.

• Other Formats

References & Citations

• Google Scholar
• Semantic Scholar

BibTeX formatted citation

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Code, data and media associated with this article, recommenders and search tools.

• Institution

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs .