Most negotiation assumes that both sides still want an outcome. They may want very different outcomes. They may distrust one another, believe the other is wrong, or feel deeply aggrieved. But underneath the conflict sits an important assumption: there is still some result worth negotiating towards.

Some conflicts pass beyond that point. The objective begins to change. Instead of asking, “What outcome can I live with?”, one party begins asking, “How do I make sure you do not win?” Sometimes it goes further. Preventing the other side from gaining anything becomes more important than achieving the best outcome for oneself. Punishment acquires value. Compromise starts to feel like surrender. Recognition feels like reward.

The conflict may still appear to be about money, territory, policy, power, history or resources. But something more fundamental has happened underneath it. One side has begun to question whether the other deserves consideration at all.

That is the point at which conflict resolution becomes much harder, because negotiation cannot simply resolve a disagreement when the disagreement has become a judgement about who is entitled to count.

Disagreement is not the problem

Conflict is part of human life, and a peaceful society is not one from which it has been removed. It is one that has developed the capacity to contain disagreement, including serious disagreement, without allowing it to destroy the relationships and institutions through which differences are managed.

The danger begins when our judgement of another person’s position turns into a judgement about the legitimacy of the person making it. There is a significant difference between saying, “I believe your claim is wrong,” and saying, “You have no legitimate claim.” There is an equally important difference between believing that someone has behaved badly and deciding that ordinary standards of fairness no longer need to apply to them.

Psychologist Susan Opotow described this through the concept of moral exclusion. We normally operate within a psychological boundary inside which considerations of fairness and justice apply. People within that boundary matter morally. Their welfare, rights and interests have to be considered. Moral exclusion occurs when someone is pushed outside it.

At its most extreme, this process contributes to persecution and mass violence. But it does not begin there. It begins wherever people become increasingly comfortable with the idea that another person or group is less deserving of fairness, concern or protection. The shift can be subtle.

We stop asking what is fair and start asking what they deserve.

When the objective changes

This helps explain a feature of conflict that often appears irrational from the outside. People sometimes reject outcomes that would leave them better off. Some conventional models of negotiation assume that parties are trying to maximise some form of benefit, but human beings do not always behave that way once conflict becomes emotionally charged. Relative outcomes can begin to matter as much as absolute ones.

Getting less may become preferable if the other person gets nothing. Bearing a cost may feel acceptable if the adversary bears a greater one. Continuing a damaging conflict may feel preferable to accepting an outcome interpreted as defeat. At that point punishment itself has entered the negotiation.

Punishment can eventually become an outcome in its own right. A person may accept a result that harms their own interests if the alternative would allow someone they regard as undeserving to benefit. The purpose of the negotiation has then changed. It is no longer primarily about securing the best possible outcome. Defeating, denying or punishing the other party has become part of what an acceptable outcome means.

This does not necessarily involve a conscious decision. Few people sit down and decide that hurting an adversary is now more important than solving a problem. The change is often gradual. A dispute generates grievance. Grievance becomes attached to identity. Each interaction provides new evidence of bad faith. Motives are increasingly interpreted through suspicion. The other party’s actions become proof of character rather than responses to circumstance.

Eventually the conflict becomes self-confirming. Almost everything the other side does is interpreted through what we already believe about them.

Daniel Bar-Tal’s research into prolonged political conflict examines this process at the level of societies. In entrenched conflicts, adversaries can become delegitimised. Their actions are no longer interpreted individually because the other side has acquired an overarching identity: dangerous, deceitful, immoral, irrational or fundamentally hostile.

Once that happens, information is filtered accordingly. An attempt at compromise may be interpreted as weakness or manipulation. An apology may be dismissed as insincere. A concession may be treated as evidence that greater pressure will produce further surrender. Negotiation becomes harder because almost anything the other party does can be incorporated into an existing story about who they are.

The conflict is no longer only over interests. It has become a conflict over identity and legitimacy.

When identity enters the room

Daniel Shapiro, founder of Harvard’s International Negotiation Program, has described what he calls the “tribes effect”, the tendency for identity-based conflict to produce an intense us-and-them mentality. When people experience an attack on something central to identity, rational calculation does not disappear, but it operates inside a different psychological environment.

People become more protective of their group, more suspicious of outsiders and more certain of their own moral position. Dissent within the group can itself begin to look disloyal. This matters because a mediator may think the parties are discussing options when the parties themselves are defending something much deeper.

One person may believe the conflict concerns an amount of money while the other experiences it as a question of recognition. One community may be debating policy while another believes its history is being denied. A government may believe it has offered a reasonable compromise while the people affected believe the process itself demonstrates that nobody with power takes them seriously.

If those underlying questions are ignored, improving the offer may achieve very little. The problem is no longer simply what is being proposed. It is what accepting the proposal has come to mean.

Dignity, grievance and the problem of equivalence

Donna Hicks, whose work on dignity grew from decades in international conflict resolution, has argued that violations of dignity frequently sit beneath conflicts that appear to concern something else. People react strongly to humiliation, exclusion, unfairness and being treated as though they have little value or voice.

That insight is important, but it requires care. Both sides in a dispute can believe that their dignity has been violated, and that does not mean both claims are equally justified. A person subjected to genuine injustice may experience humiliation. So may someone whose authority is being challenged. A marginalised community may experience exclusion. A group accustomed to influence may experience the loss of status or control as exclusion. Someone being held accountable may sincerely experience the process as persecution.

Subjective grievance is therefore important evidence about how a conflict is functioning. It is not proof of who is right. Peacebuilding fails if it confuses understanding an emotion with endorsing the claim attached to it.

This distinction becomes essential in conflicts involving abuses of power, violence or serious injustice. Recognising another party’s humanity does not require pretending that responsibility is evenly distributed. Accountability still matters. The question is whether accountability itself remains governed by justice, or whether the desire to punish gradually takes its place.

Standing without agreement

There is a word for what must survive even when agreement has disappeared: standing.

Here, standing is not being used as a technical legal term. It describes something more basic: accepting that the person or group across from us remains a legitimate participant in determining what happens next.

Standing does not require us to agree with them, like them, trust them or forgive them. Nor does it mean treating every argument as equally valid. A society confronting racism does not need to recognise racism as an equally legitimate point of view. Victims of wrongdoing do not need to abandon demands for justice. Governments negotiating an end to political violence do not need to approve of the violence that occurred.

Standing means that the other party remains inside the circle within which principles of justice apply. They remain human. Their interests remain part of the reality being dealt with. They remain subject to accountability, but also entitled to fairness.

Peace does not require us to believe the other person is right. It requires us to accept that they still count.

Why process matters

Once we understand this, procedural fairness becomes much more important. Research on procedural justice has repeatedly shown that people respond not only to what decisions are made, but to how they are made. Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff and Tom Tyler found that perceptions of fairness during negotiation were associated with greater acceptance of outcomes and could improve the potential for agreements that addressed the interests of both parties.

People can sometimes accept an outcome they dislike when they believe they were heard, the process was genuine and the rules were applied fairly. Conversely, even a materially reasonable outcome can produce lasting resentment if people conclude that their presence made no difference.

Governments encounter this problem frequently. Consultation processes may be technically impeccable while communities believe the decision was made before anyone entered the room. Organisations may ask employees for feedback but repeatedly disregard what they hear. Institutions may point to opportunities for participation without asking whether participants have any meaningful influence.

The message received is simple: you were allowed to speak, but your contribution did not matter. Repeated often enough, that becomes its own source of conflict.

When negotiation is not yet possible

There is another uncomfortable truth about conflict resolution. Sometimes the conflict is not ready for negotiation.

1. William Zartman’s influential work on conflict “ripeness” challenged the assumption that a sufficiently skilled mediator or sufficiently clever proposal can always produce settlement. Zartman argued that parties become more open to negotiation when they perceive themselves to be caught in what he called a mutually hurting stalemate. Neither side can obtain victory, continuing the conflict carries significant costs, and a credible way out becomes visible.

The word “perceive” matters. A situation can appear catastrophic to an outsider while one party still believes it can win. A settlement can appear reasonable to a mediator while one participant believes that holding out will produce complete victory. Someone can attend mediation without being psychologically prepared to negotiate.

Presence at the table and willingness to resolve a conflict are not the same thing. One party may be there to reach agreement. Another may be assessing weakness. Someone may participate because refusal would look unreasonable. Another may believe the process provides one more opportunity to force capitulation.

In those circumstances, conflict resolution may have to begin before negotiation. The first task may be changing the conditions that make continued conflict appear preferable to settlement.

Northern Ireland and the ability to contain disagreement

The 1998 Belfast Agreement, commonly known as the Good Friday Agreement, offers an important example of what this can mean institutionally. Northern Ireland’s conflict involved incompatible national identities and fundamentally different understandings of sovereignty, history and belonging.

The agreement did not solve those differences by determining that one identity was correct. Unionists were not required to become nationalists, and nationalists were not required to become unionists. Instead, the agreement created political structures capable of containing incompatible aspirations.

It embedded the principle of consent over Northern Ireland’s constitutional status. It recognised the right of people to identify as British, Irish or both. It incorporated commitments to equality and what the agreement called “parity of esteem” between the two communities.

This is important because peace did not depend upon resolving the underlying disagreement about identity. The institutions were designed so that disagreement about identity could continue without one community having to erase the legitimacy of the other.

They also allowed competing visions of the future to remain open. Unionists did not have to abandon the possibility of Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. Nationalists did not have to surrender the aspiration for a united Ireland. The agreement provided peaceful political mechanisms through which those incompatible futures could continue to be pursued.

That matters well beyond Northern Ireland. Institutions do not always have to settle the disagreement that produced a conflict. Sometimes their more important task is to create conditions in which unresolved disagreement can continue without violence, exclusion or domination.

The agreement has not removed division from Northern Ireland. Its institutions have faced repeated crises and suspensions, and deep social and political differences remain. That does not diminish the lesson. One of the tasks of peacebuilding is sometimes to create structures strong enough to hold disagreements that cannot yet be resolved.

Peace does not always begin with consensus. Sometimes it begins by making domination harder and coexistence possible.

Conflict begins before we notice it

This changes where we should look for the beginnings of serious conflict. We tend to notice conflict when it becomes visible: a protest, a strike, a court case, community anger that has tipped into political confrontation or civil disorder. But the deterioration may have started years earlier.

People repeatedly discover that their voices carry little weight. Communities conclude that participation changes nothing. Grievances go unacknowledged. Political leaders find electoral advantage in portraying opponents as dangerous rather than merely wrong. Public debate gradually shifts from arguments about ideas to judgements about the character and legitimacy of the people holding them.

Each side accumulates examples proving that the other cannot be trusted. Eventually a mediator arrives and asks everyone to find common ground. By then, common ground may be precisely what has disappeared.

This is why conflict prevention needs to look much further upstream.

What a Ministry for Peace could watch

A Ministry for Peace should not exist simply to intervene after relationships have broken down. One of its most valuable functions could be helping governments recognise when the conditions for peaceful disagreement are deteriorating.

That would mean tracking the early signs that peaceful disagreement is becoming something else: procedural unfairness, declining institutional trust and serious fractures between communities and government. It would require sensitivity to the moment when political language shifts, when opponents move from being wrong to being dangerous, illegitimate or undeserving of a fair hearing.

Whether consultation processes provide genuine influence or merely satisfy administrative requirements matters here. Whether communities repeatedly experience decisions being made to them rather than with them matters. So do the political incentives that reward humiliation, polarisation and refusal to compromise.

A Ministry for Peace could bring these signals together and ask a question governments rarely ask early enough: are we creating conditions in which people who disagree can continue to regard one another as legitimate participants in a shared society?

This is not an argument for avoiding conflict. Governments should make difficult decisions. Injustices should be challenged. Harm should have consequences. Powerful interests should not acquire a veto simply because they react angrily when their interests are threatened.

Peacebuilding cannot become conflict avoidance. Its purpose is to ensure that conflict remains capable of resolution.

That requires something stronger than politeness and more substantial than asking everyone to listen. It requires institutions and cultural habits capable of preserving fairness when emotions are high, protecting participation when disagreements are serious, and resisting the temptation to turn opponents into people to whom normal standards no longer apply.

The measure of a peaceful society

The test of a peaceful society is not whether people agree. It is whether disagreement can become intense, painful and morally serious without one side deciding that the other has ceased to deserve a place in the process.

That capacity can be lost gradually. It disappears when humiliation becomes politically useful, when consultation becomes theatre, when grievance becomes identity, when defeating an opponent becomes more important than solving the problem, and when people begin to believe fairness is something reserved for those they approve of.

By the time conflict reaches a negotiating table, much of the damage may already have occurred. That is why peace begins earlier.

It begins in institutions that allow people to disagree without becoming invisible, in processes that make participation real, and in the discipline of distinguishing accountability from vengeance, disagreement from delegitimisation, and recognition from endorsement.

Peace begins before agreement.

Sometimes it begins with something even more basic: refusing to decide that the other side no longer counts.