Many of our most persistent and intense violent conflicts have an evident worldview dimension; the parties, or significant subgroups within them, make meaning and orient to the world very differently. What is less evident to many is that each of the common approaches to mediation of these conflicts is itself grounded in a particular worldview with embedded assumptions about why and how parties experience conflict, the building blocks available to construct a resolution of it, and the proper design goals and methods for assembling those building blocks. As a result, misalignments among the mediator’s and the parties’ worldview(s) may complicate efforts to resolve the conflict, contributing to the perception and reality of its intractability.

The conflict among Israelis and Palestinians, for example, has been subject to numerous, concerted mediation efforts, yet Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack and Israel’s military response are deeply painful reminders that it remains unresolved. Many proposals have been made for resolution of the ‘permanent status’ issues left unaddressed by the Oslo Accords and other points of contention, including new issues (like water) and some issues that were supposedly resolved earlier, but no comprehensive set of terms acceptable to the parties has yet emerged. Those leading mediation efforts mostly seem to have wished to sidestep or have been unable to contend with the extent of worldview diversity within each community.

Influential groups within each community embrace diverse normative visions that constrain some possibilities for resolving the conflict while pointing to others that have been overlooked or insufficiently explored. For example, it is difficult to see how a division of the land that purports to establish permanent borders could ever be acceptable to those Jewish and Muslim religious nationalists who regard their custody of it to be divinely ordained, much as that arrangement seems sensible to those mediators who have sought a full and final resolution of all claims in keeping with their modern liberal worldview, which tends to regard national borders as fixed and to favour finality in legal arrangements. Perhaps some agreement regarding each community’s long-term, provisional use of separate portions of the territory (possibly subject to periodic renewal) nonetheless might prove acceptable to all concerned.

Religion is not always a primary feature of conflicts with a neglected worldview dimension, as it is in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Current tensions between the United States and China on a range of issues (e.g. human rights, Taiwan, and industrial policy) stem, in part, from differing worldviews that offer competing conceptions of the self in relation to others, with one country (China) placing relatively more emphasis on familial and social connections and obligations and the other (the United States) placing relatively more emphasis on the interests and preferences of the individual apart from familial and social concerns, among other differences. Worldview conflict also occurs within states, threatening their stability (as seen in the United States when Congress was stormed by supporters of President Donald Trump in January 2021) and sometimes also complicating international conflicts and efforts to resolve them (as we see within both Israeli and Palestinian society, for example, where divisions between religious nationalist, liberal-secularist, and other factions complicate behind-the-table negotiations, constraining opportunities for negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians across the table).

Evidence of worldview diversity – the fact that different groups sincerely embrace different visions of the world and how best to live – and the conflict it can generate is hard to miss. Worldview conflict is not going away anytime soon, if ever. I believe mediators must accept the reality of moral pluralism, actively engage with mediation challenges presented by worldview diversity, and innovate to address the challenges.

The diversification of mediators and mediation approaches in terms of gender, political and cultural orientation, and other important developments in mediation theory and practice in recent decades help increase awareness and acceptance of moral pluralism and our potential to respond to it productively. The field has yet to meet the reality of differing worldviews head-on, however, and efforts to mediate many of the most intractable conflicts are unlikely to succeed until we accept this reality and become more proficient at mediating across worldviews.

The necessity of peace mediation across worldviews

Broadly speaking, a worldview is a way of life; a way of orienting to the universe and one’s experience within it. Our worldviews are a bit like the air through which we move, and that we breathe, usually without even noticing it. One’s worldview may evolve over time, or even be abandoned entirely; but change, if it occurs, tends to happen slowly. Our brains are wired to privilege information that confirms our existing beliefs and to interpret ambiguous information in ways that support them.

We are much more likely to expand or flex our worldview to accommodate previously unseen or rejected data and perspectives, rather than revise it fundamentally. The ways in which we conceive of our personal and social needs and how they can and should be met are influenced by the worldview we hold and share with other members of the group(s) to which we belong, so deviating from shared beliefs and social norms can be costly even if one questions them privately.

Worldview conflict emerges when values, norms, and beliefs that are core to one worldview cannot easily be reconciled with those of another worldview, and when these differences in normative orientation have practical implications. Worldview conflict can be extraordinarily intense and stubborn, because (religious and/or secular) sacred values – values core to individual and group identities – are threatened. Threats to these values feel existential, and some people will sacrifice everything to defend them.

Our deepest values and the things that symbolise them are not easily compromised. Negotiating as if they are tradeable can escalate conflict. Much as we might like to wish away worldview differences, or to proceed as if others’ worldviews can be altered easily or as if material concessions can induce others to compromise their core values, these hopes are unrealistic. We must instead accept the reality and persistence of differing worldviews and adapt our mediation approaches accordingly to be more effective as mediators.

Mediation challenges and innovations

None of our prevailing theories of conflict and its transformation adequately account for the reality of worldview diversity – how it contributes to conflict and complicates efforts to transform it. The predominant approach, interest-based bargaining, seeks to maximise joint value in utilitarian terms, but interest-based mediators struggle when parties’ divergent deontological commitments and constraints (ideas of morality and duty based on sets of rules and principles) are core drivers of a conflict. Needs-based approaches focus mediators on conflict parties’ unmet physical, psychological, and social needs, with the goal of finding ways to meet them through the resolution of conflict. In worldview conflict, however, each party seeks to satisfy these basic human needs in ways that align with its unique worldview, including its normative constraints. Needs-based approaches to mediation seldom attend sufficiently to parties’ discordant meaning-making and normative orientations and possibilities for working within them separately but in parallel.

A mediator using interest-based bargaining methods, which are grounded in a modern worldview and utilitarian moral theory, might perceive a worldview conflict to be more challenging for the reasons indicated in the first column of the following chart and be inclined to respond to these challenges as indicated in the second column. The basic obstacle negotiators face in worldview conflicts is that they explicitly or implicitly expect others to change their worldview or compromise their core values to accommodate one’s own worldview. This simply will not work.

Mediators must help parties bypass this obstacle by helping them seek a realistic, mutually agreeable outcome that works in multiple worldviews. The third column in the following chart illustrates how an interest-based mediator could adapt her approach to help parties achieve this goal.

The worldview-attuned responses above can be seen as adaptations designed to address misalignments between the standard assumptions and prescriptions of interest-based bargaining and the special challenges presented by worldview conflict. (Similar adaptations could be made to needs-based and other mediation practices.) For example, drawing again from the Israeli-Palestinian context, the 2000 Camp David Summit era proposal made by Israeli legal scholar Ruth Lapidoth and Jordan’s King Hussein that the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount complex be subject to divine sovereignty, rather than the sovereignty of one nation, was an attempt to generate an option on that issue that might work in multiple worldviews (even though some stakeholders ultimately did not favour it).

Mediating worldview collisions typically presents many more challenges than those noted above, and each demands its own innovative response. These challenges include integrating into the process more hawkish stakeholders who may contest an eventual agreement if not effectively engaged; managing both the process and expectations about substantive outcomes in ways that mitigate risk for participants, who may be perceived by members of their own communities as willing to negotiate on issues many consider non-negotiable; supporting adaptive learning about how worldviews influence the conflict and possibilities for its resolution, particularly with respect to value collisions within stakeholder groups that impede resolution of the conflict; and obtaining broad commitment to proposed outcomes within multiple, disparate worldview communities. It is also often important to designate an (external and/or inside) mediator or team of co-mediators who inhabit, or are very familiar with, the parties’ respective worldviews. Whether or not this occurs, it is imperative that each mediator is aware of their own worldview and how it tends to influence their approach to mediation.

For example, I am involved in a project in the Israeli- Palestinian context in which secular-political, religious Zionist, and Muslim nationalist actors who have little prior history of engagement meet and conduct joint research to understand how their disparate worldviews influence the conflict, both constraining possibilities for its resolution and presenting opportunities to resolve issues that are not apparent when the conflict is viewed through a single worldview lens. This initiative is exceptionally durable and productive. The participants have worked together in the aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack and Israel’s military response to try to deescalate the situation, facilitate humanitarian relief, secure release of captives, and transform the tragedy into a new push for a just and lasting peace.

Efforts like these require process innovations designed to address the special challenges identified above and others that arise when different normative frameworks collide. From a process perspective, for example, mediators may need to deviate from informal norms of symmetry in mediation practice. Intra-party work that is necessary on one side of the table may bear little resemblance to the intra-party work that is necessary on the other side of the table due to differences in the make-up of each community and differing social norms within them. On substance, for example, mediators may need to help parties devise ‘safe experiments’ to test, and ultimately promote, public acceptance of options generated at the negotiation table that may be perceived as violating existing social taboos. One way to do this is to identify a respected scholar or cleric to publish an article arguing that a new approach – even one that deviates from a longstanding norm – is consistent with cherished values and warranted and acceptable under the circumstances.

Addressing the challenges of mediating worldview collisions is more easily said than done. Intra-party work is especially important when mediating worldview conflict (and is one of the primary activities in the project just mentioned). The worldviews and associated norms around which communities cohere are not static, but parties are likely to be cautious about adjusting them sufficiently to permit an agreement to emerge at the table. Mediating worldview collisions effectively requires patient, skillful effort to support change away from the table, behind the scenes.

Looking forward

Mediators must develop greater fluency in and capacity to work within and across disparate worldviews to mediate worldview collisions effectively. The most significant impediment to progress in this direction may be the extent to which many mediators today (often relatively unreflectively) are embedded in and rigidly adhere to a liberal worldview and associated institutions and practices that, in theory, emerged to mediate among competing worldviews. The two most prevalent approaches to mediation – those premised upon interest-based bargaining and needs-based theories – both arose in the West from work in the social sciences begun in the mid-twentieth century, reflecting a modern, liberal, and largely positivist worldview.

Many who embrace these approaches today are not sufficiently cognisant or accepting of the reality of moral pluralism. They do not fully appreciate that others who embrace a different worldview (traditional, religious, post-modern, or otherwise) see the liberal worldview as competing with their own. Many mediators will need to examine and adjust their own worldviews to mediate worldview collisions more effectively.

In sum, mediating worldview collisions in violent conflict more effectively will require the following major adjustments to current practice:

• Mediators must accept the reality of moral pluralism, actively engage with the mediation challenges posed by worldview diversity, and innovate to meet the challenges.
• Mediators must become more aware of their own worldviews and how they influence their approaches to mediation.
• Mediators must help parties overcome worldview differences by helping them find a realistic, mutually acceptable outcome that works within multiple worldviews.
• Mediators must focus much more on bridging differences away from the table (intra-party negotiation) to achieve agreement across the table (inter-party negotiation).