On Conflict and Understanding

When I tell people I studied international conflict resolution, they often imagine tense rooms full of diplomats, UN Security Council debates, peace negotiations conducted under enormous pressure. And yes, we studied all of that. But the most useful thing the discipline gave me wasn’t a framework for international relations. It was a way of listening.

The Assumption We All Make

When we’re in conflict with someone — a colleague, a partner, a neighbor — we tend to operate from a default assumption: that we are right and they are wrong, or at least that our perspective is the more reasonable one. This assumption is so automatic that most of us don’t even notice it. It’s just the water we swim in.

What conflict resolution theory insists on — and this took me a while to really absorb — is that the other party has an equally coherent internal logic. Their position makes sense from where they’re standing. The goal isn’t to find out who’s right. The goal is to understand why each party believes what they believe, and to find a path that takes both sets of needs seriously.

This sounds obvious when stated plainly. It is surprisingly difficult in practice.

What Listening Actually Means

The hardest skill I developed during my studies was what I came to think of as deep listening — not listening in order to respond, but listening in order to understand. There’s a difference, and most of us do the former when we think we’re doing the latter.

When we listen to respond, we’re already formulating our counter-argument while the other person is still talking. We hear the parts that confirm what we already think. We miss the nuance, the hesitation, the thing underneath the thing that’s being said.

Deep listening requires slowing down. It requires staying genuinely curious about the other person’s experience rather than rushing to evaluate or rebut it. It requires the discipline to sit with uncertainty — to not know, for a moment, how things will resolve — and to trust that understanding more fully is worth the discomfort.

The International and the Personal

I’ve worked in market research, project management, financial analysis, event coordination. Across all of these roles, I’ve seen the same dynamics play out that I studied at the international level: parties who feel unheard, assumptions of bad faith, communication that talks past rather than toward.

The methods that work for de-escalating international tensions work at smaller scales too. Create space for each party to articulate their core interests, not just their stated positions. Look for what’s not being said as well as what is. Find the shared concern underneath the apparent disagreement. Build trust incrementally.

None of this is magic. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes conflicts are genuine and zero-sum, and someone has to win and someone has to lose. But in my experience, far fewer conflicts are truly zero-sum than we initially believe. Often there’s a creative solution that neither party could see when they were locked in opposition.

A Practice, Not a Technique

What I want to say, I think, is that the approach to conflict I developed through years of study isn’t really a technique. Techniques can be deployed tactically. This is more of a practice — a way of moving through disagreement that requires consistent cultivation, that you get better at slowly, and that you never fully master.

Growing up between cultures — Swedish, Croatian, Hungarian — I was always translating. Not just languages, but ways of seeing. That early practice of standing between different worlds and trying to understand each from the other’s perspective was, I now realize, my first training in conflict resolution.

It’s still how I move through the world. Trying to understand before I judge. Trying to listen before I speak. Getting it wrong sometimes. Trying again.