Suchergebnisse

The Arab—Israeli conflict, which at first had a zero-sum, protracted nature, has changed over time because of effective conflict management that has made conflict reduction and even resolution possible. Following an adaptation process in response to the outcomes of the Six Day War, and the shifts from suppression to regulation, and vice versa, both sides experienced after the Yom Kippur War some learning process by which they became ready to transform their mode of thinking in the conflict. However, without the active encouragement of the USA, the learning process could not be developed. However, the Arab—Israeli conflict is not a single conflict, especially when analyzing and evaluating movements toward new forms of behavior in a given conflict system. The differences in the rate and scope of learning in each conflict influenced differently the shifts in conflict management, and from conflict management to conflict resolution. An initial learning process proved to be necessary for shifting from regulation to institutionalization, but this was not sufficient to move from institutionalization to resolution. There was a need for a further and deeper learning process to enable conflict resolution.

The popular undergraduate political science course on "The Arab-Israeli Conflict" at the University of Michigan has had as its focus since 1975 an enormously successful large-scale simulation game, or simprovisation in Frederick Goodman's phrase. While the four-credit upper division level course of some 100 students is of the quite standard lecture-discussion section format, the simulation game has been closely integrated into it. The game is the goal towards which the students move and is the educational structure around which the course has been organized.The concept of simulation gaming was introduced almost as an aside when Clement Henry and I were designing the course, to be taught by Professor Henry, in 1974. The games organized that year were small, short and disjointed, but they were sufficient to demonstrate the educational utility of the idea, if nothing else. The following year, with the central collaboration of Leonard Suranski, the game was moved to the fore and from that point on it has been the focus of the course.