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Daily headlines demonstrate the importance of increasing our understanding of conflict management success in ethnic disputes. Too often, whether in everyday conversations or in scholarly discussion, we communicate despair & find few genuine successes. This article develops a more complex conceptualization of success, drawing on psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott's notion of the "good-enough mother." Winnicott's work stimulates valuable insights regarding four key aspects of ethnic conflict management: the definition of success, the importance of identity issues, the empowerment of the parties, & the importance of third parties in changing the relationship among opponents. The concept of "good-enough conflict management" emphasizes that successful ethnic conflict management is possible but, at the same time, that normal, inherent tensions will continue to exist in any relationship between actors with independent identities & goals. It draws attention to constructive conflict management as a developmental, transformative process (often a long one) involving changes in both the expressed interests & the disputants' interpretations of the conflict, & it emphasizes the importance of building institutions & practices, often with third party assistance, which allow the parties to deal with tensions & differences constructively. 43 References. Adapted from the source document.

There is a powerful tension between the context‐specific analyses which figure prominently in the social sciences in recent years and the emphasis on universal human dynamics which characterizes cross‐cultural psychology. Using the example of ethnic conflict, I seek to bridge the two and suggest that underlying the thick description of single conflicts as the parties understand them is what an earlier generation of psychological anthropologists called "the psychic unity of mankind," referring to deep structural similarities in all cultures, which make us human (Spiro, 1987). I propose that a cultural analysis of ethnic conflict can effectively build an explanation putting each conflict in a context which highlights what the parties believe is at stake; identifying both the concrete interests and threats to identity crucial to the disputants; linking interests and identities to psychocultural interpretations and the motives underlying them; and proposing that successful settlement of ethnic conflicts means that the parties themselves must actively work toward proposals which address both their competing interests and core identity needs.