Even worse, fresh information may inflame the conflict even more. On the other hand, the information may not have any real effect, either because those facts are rejected or because someone shifts tactics to avoid utilizing those facts. A fact-finding endeavor may indeed uncover important historical information, and that information may play a role in building consensus. When a conflict involves a debate over a historical fact, whether the debate be over an actual event or an interpretation of the event, it may be important to decide whether the debate is resolvable and whether resolving it will improve the situation. In this way, historical "facts" can add significantly to a conflict's intractability.Īdditional insights into historical facts are offered by Beyond Intractability participants. In such a conflict it becomes increasingly difficult to uncover the authentic history due to the continual cycle of interpretation and propaganda. The historical rhetoric becomes a cyclical part of the escalating conflict - each side holds its own biases those biases affect the way each side interprets the past these biased interpretations are repeated and circulated as if they were a fact, thus further feeding and strengthening partisan bias on both sides. Each side holds its own version of the region's history, and the respective versions are reflected in each side's rhetoric. A clear example of this is the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Historical facts do play a central role in other kinds of conflicts, for example, long-running international conflicts over territory. More important are concerns about current potential for accidents, waste disposal, and opportunities for misuse of nuclear material.
Yet in this case, these facts are not crucial to the current arguments over safety. Environmental activists interpret these incidents in ways that differ from those who promote nuclear power, reflecting the general fact that conflicting parties are likely to interpret the events of the past in different ways. For example, the ongoing environmental conflict regarding nuclear energy draws on the history of nuclear power accidents, including those at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Conflicts Involving Historical FactsĪny conflict that goes on for a long time, as intractable conflicts do, will involve historical facts. This leaves room for parties to interpret history in ways that favor them, resulting in strong resistance from those on opposing sides. These factors and others result in quite a bit of uncertainty about historical accounts. Even if authentic, the meaning of documents regarding the past can be highly unclear to any modern investigator, or can conflict with other sources. Some material is simply propaganda, intentionally containing little or no truth. Written history before the age of copiers and computers had to be hand-copied, providing similarly easy opportunities for errors or exaggeration. Each person in the chain will tend to "interpret" the story, presenting the opportunity to accidentally alter it, or worse, to slant the story to one's own tastes before passing it on. Oral accounts, or " story telling," suffer from an inherent loss of information. Many cultures have a rich oral history, but lack written documents. Much information regarding the past has been lost. Much disagreement is due to the fact that accurate history is difficult to obtain, for a variety of reasons. Yet historical accounts are subject to frequent disagreement. That laughter is the only cure for grief.Īnd I believe that love is stronger than death." That hope always triumphs over experience. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts. "I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. Neither history nor archeology is an exact science, but technique and technology improvements over the years have enabled them both to make stronger and stronger cases for their accounts of the past. Accounts are compared with archeological findings.
In an effort to get at what really happened, historians compare stories from a wide variety of sources, searching for common elements that corroborate a plausible account. It answers the very basic question, "What happened?" Yet beyond merely listing the events in chronological order, historians try to discover why events happened, what circumstances contributed to their cause, what subsequent effects they had, and how they were interpreted. "History is written by the victor." - UnknownĪ historical fact is a fact about the past.
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