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Conflict Escalation
Richard Bösch, Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche, Universität Augsburg

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.82
Published online: 20 November 2017

Summary
Even though most conflicts in everyday life manifest themselves as cursory bagatelles, there
are conflicts that end up in situations of organized, collective violence (e.g., armed conflict).
To understand how trivial contradictions can become meaningful conflicts in a broader
societal context, it is crucial to examine the process of conflict escalation. Conflict escalation
can be understood as an intensification of a conflict with regard to the observed extent and
the means used. An escalating conflict represents a developing social system in its own right,
having the legitimization of violence as a key feature. Here, a broader social science
perspective on the concept of conflict escalation is offered, outlining its intellectual history,
explaining its major perspectives and current emphases, and exploring newer avenues in
approaching social conflict.

Keywords: conflict escalation, violence, Peace and Conflict Studies, conflict, social science,

legitimization of violence, intensification of conflict

Subjects: Conflict Studies

Introduction

From a life partner who refuses to do the dishes, to a labor union striking to demand higher
wages, to a government and an opposition disputing mutual claims, conflict is an ubiquitous
element of everyday life. However, there is a large diversity of conflict in all these spheres of
social life. Most conflicts manifest themselves as cursory bagatelles, but a few end up in
situations of organized, collective violence (e.g., armed conflict). It is thus crucial to
understand how trivial contradictions can become meaningful conflicts in a broader societal
context. This evolution, referred to as conflict escalation, is understood as an intensification of
a conflict with regard to the observed extent and the means used (Pruitt, Kim, & Rubin, 2003,
pp. 87–91; Mitchell, 2014, pp. 71–75). Conflict escalation is characterized by processes of
circular interaction that “lead to the growth and restructuring of the parties, generating new
reasons and pretexts for applying additional means, thus leading to an expansion and
fundamentalization of the content of the conflict” (Eckert & Willems, 2003, p. 1183). Given its
dynamics and, to a certain degree, its autonomous nature, an escalating conflict represents
both an evolving process and a self-stabilizing structure, or, in other words, a social system in
its own right.

Richard Bösch, Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche, Universität Augsburg

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This article provides a review dealing with different perspectives on conflict escalation. For
this purpose, as an initial basis, conflicts are understood as “social facts composed of at least
two parties (individuals, groups, states) and based on differences in the societal situation/
position and/or differences in the parties’ constellation of interests” (Bonacker & Imbusch,
2010, p. 69). In addition to this rather rationalist definition, conflicts are approached as
phenomena of the social world that are produced in the processual framework of discursive
constructions of reality (Jackson, 2009). Therefore, a conflict consists of an incompatibility of
identities, interests, or values that is observed and articulated (Diez, Albert, & Stetter, 2006,
p. 565). In this sense, the respective actors’ conflict behavior (e.g., persuasive efforts, positive
sanctions, and coercive measures) is shaped by a “perceived divergence of interests, a belief
that the parties’ current aspirations are incompatible” (Pruitt et al., 2003, pp. 7–8).

Even though physical violence is not considered to be an essential element of conflict
escalation per se, understanding the legitimization of violence, or, even more in depth, asking
about what is treated as “violence” in specific discourses is assumed to be a pivotal research
interest in conflict studies (Jabri, 1996). Accordingly, before the point of organized, collective
violence is reached (e.g., armed conflict or war), conflict escalation involves discursive
prologues to violence to a certain extent (Messmer, 2003). However, as research on
constructive and nonviolent conflict management has demonstrated in many cases, violence
does not represent the inescapable final destination of a multistage and often nonlinear
process of conflict escalation (see, e.g., Coleman, Deutsch, & Marcus, 2014; Kriesberg, 2015).
Based on the idea of conflict escalation as an open-ended, discursive process, this review of
concepts and approaches is located within the broader framework of peace and conflict
studies.

Many scholars in the field posit that conflicts, in principle, cannot be prevented in the strict
sense (e.g., Pruitt et al., 2003; Rubenstein, 2008; Bercovitch, Kremenyuk, & Zartman, 2009.
On the contrary, conflicts are viewed as essential drivers of social change because they can
“induce social dynamics leading to transformation and improvements of existing deficiencies
in social relations and institutions” (Diez et al., 2011, p. 10). Hence, conflict escalation indeed
represents a broad topic that covers agendas in different research strands, from psychological
studies on interpersonal behavior, to sociological accounts on conflicts between social groups,
to the analysis of armed conflict and war in a global dimension in international relations (IR)
(Byrne & Senehi, 2009). This article presents social science perspectives on and approaches
to conflict escalation. “Conflict Escalation: A Brief Intellectual History” gives a concise
overview of the topic’s scientific history that is closely intertwined with the history of
sociology, international relations, and peace and conflict studies. Next, “Major Perspectives on
Conflict Escalation” opens up the field according to three metatheoretical dimensions.
“Current Emphases in Empirical Conflict Escalation Research” illustrates a selected focus
area in “application-oriented” research. Finally, “Exploring New Avenues: Systems Theoretical
Conflict Research” outlines an innovative approach that focuses on the potential of
sociological systems theory to advance empirical research on conflict escalation in peace and
conflict studies.

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Conflict Escalation: A Brief Intellectual History

As cited in countless introductory chapters in peace and conflict studies, etymologically, the
word conflict is traced to the Latin verb confligere, which means “fighting,” “battling,” or
“struggling.” More precisely, the verb has a double meaning, depending on its transitive or
intransitive use. On the one hand, it means intentionally clashing and assaulting each other,
thus clearly emphasizing the dimension of violent behavior and physical action. On the other
hand, confligere also stands for the abstract state of having an argument, a dispute, or an
opposition, thus indicating the structural dimension of a social phenomenon (Bonacker &
Imbusch, 2010, pp. 68–69). In comparison to these very common and elementary linguistic
statements about conflict, escalation is usually not an object of such explications. Hence, to
begin with, the word has its origins in the Latin noun scalae, which means “steps,” “stairs,” or
“scaling,” metaphorically suggesting a process of becoming greater or higher. Even more
notable, however, and analogous to the linguistic roots of conflict, there is also an explicit
transitive and intransitive meaning of the verbs that have been deduced from the Latin origin
(e.g., to scale, to escalate). In this context, escalating signifies both an action strategy and an
abstract description of a state of affairs in a dynamic social relationship (Zartman & Faure,
2005). Both meanings have played a decisive role in major scientific debates about concepts
of conflict escalation.

This section deals with those prominent forerunners in conflict theory—Georg Simmel, Lewis
A. Coser, and Ralf Dahrendorf—who not only developed a concept of conflict as a state, but
also integrated pioneering ideas about the social process of conflict escalation, even though
the label itself was not used literally. For a long time, research on social conflict was
predominantly concerned with factor-oriented studies searching for general social conditions
and specific constellations of interests/actors causing conflicts to arise (von Trotha, 1997, pp.
16–20). At the time, conflict escalation was not a field of research in its own right, either in
sociology or political science (Eckert & Willems, 2003, p. 1182). However, those classical
authors wrote about conflict as a profound social transformation with both integrative and
disintegrative functions for society. Therefore, they had at least an implicit idea of conflict as
not only being structurally given, but also as a processual phenomenon that manifests at
different scales.

According to Simmel (1992), conflicts represent forms of socialization. In his conflict theory,
he highlights both destructive and particularly constructive aspects of conflictive interaction
[e.g., relating to the development and integration of social groups (or societies as a whole)].
Against this background, Simmel distinguishes between various configurations, or “forms,” of
conflict (with increasing intensity: competition, dispute, combat), indicating that socialization
processes can take more or less intensive (not to say violent) forms. Those forms, in turn, are
characterized by the means used and by the degree to which the conflict identity is
interwoven with the issue at stake (Simmel, 1992, pp. 247–336).

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Drawing on Simmel, Coser (1956) examines the conditions under which conflicts are
functional or dysfunctional for a society. In this regard, Coser analyzes the positive aspects of
social conflicts (strengthening solidarity, cohesion, and normative integration; improving the
flexibility and resilience of institutions) and introduces the distinction between conflicts as
means of transformation (“realistic conflict”) and conflict as self-purpose (“nonrealistic
conflict”), the latter being dysfunctional for society (Coser, 1956, pp. 48–66). For him,
pluralistic societies are typically characterized by a large number of conflicts. Since
individuals have affiliations to various interest groups (and thus to multiple identities),
conflicts are generally reduced in intensity (Coser, 1956, pp. 67–86). Following Coser’s
conflict theoretical thoughts, processes in dysfunctional conflicts are particularly shaped by
the emergence of strong and focused conflict-related identities that repress the multiple social
affiliations that existed before (and thus are supposed to have a boosting influence on conflict
escalation).

Referring to Simmel and Coser, Dahrendorf’s (1959) conflict theory represents a structural
theory that also explains social change through social conflict. Partly based on the theories of
Karl Marx (though emancipating himself from Marx’s fixation on class as a crucial societal
category), Dahrendorf considers conflicts as unavoidable and universal phenomena since the
societal organization and exercise of power and authority (whatever the political constitution
of the respective society may be) constantly produces diverging interests and, hence, “latent
conflict” between individuals, groups, or classes (Dahrendorf, 1959, pp. 210–213). So, does
the latent, here understood as “structural” predisposition for power conflicts, always lead to
“manifest conflict”? According to Dahrendorf, yes. However—and this constitutes his implicit
idea of conflict escalation—there is an empirical variability in the intensity of conflict that is
essentially influenced by the social mobility of individuals. For Dahrendorf (1959, pp. 234–
236), the ultimate merit of a conflict theory depends on its ability to explain how, in
comparable situations, a power conflict escalates into a violent conflict in one case and
democratically controlled reform in the other. Hence, Dahrendorf more or less unknowingly
sketched a proto-concept of conflict escalation and its phases (i.e., a continuum from latent to
manifest conflict), which still can be considered a seminal piece for social science conflict
research.

In political science, conflict escalation was by and large associated with the realm of
international politics. As international relations and peace research entered the academic
stage in the 1930s, the question of war and the definition of peace were focal points of the
discipline. Since that period, conflict theories in international relations have basically been
dealing with two key problem areas: a nonexistent monopoly of violence on the global level
(often termed anarchy), and a lack of internationally binding norms (Stephenson, 2010).
Realist thinking about international politics as being basically conflict-prone and conflict-
driven emerged from those fundamental systemic features.

At the same time, however, the sovereignty of nation-states proved to be one of the very few
reliable global norms. Following Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant, ultimately all modern
schools of thought in international relations (i.e., neorealism, institutionalism, liberalism, or
Marxism) have been built upon these fundamental opening questions (i.e., sovereignty,

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conflict-proneness) in conflict studies (Bonacker, 2008, pp. 21–26). Given this history, conflict
escalation was certainly an IR topic right from the start, since escalation processes lie at the
heart of most state interaction (Carlson, 1995). Arms races, deterrence, armed conflict, or
war . . . escalation processes are intimately associated with situations referred to as
“international crises” (e.g., Schelling, 1960; Jervis, 1976; Lebow, 1984). In crisis situations,
actors must decide whether they want to pursue an escalating strategy (i.e., exert coercive
pressure and thus impose costs on opponents).

In this sense, escalation has to be thought of as a fine-grained game of competitive risk taking
that is embedded in an overall bargaining process. In fact, following Zartman and Faure
(2005, p. 9), parties can have various irrational motives to promote escalation: winning, not
losing; covering investments (actual and previous costs of escalations); gaining support (from
third parties); seizing an advantage or target of opportunity; feeling powerful; rewarding
oneself; or punishing the opponent. For those early and influential IR theorists dealing with
conflict development systematically, escalation represents a more or less rational foreign
policy strategy in the repertoire of states (e.g., Kahn, 1965; Deutsch, 1968, pp. 141–157).

In contrast to these rather transitive interpretations, systems thinkers, particularly in
neorealism, have highlighted structural features in which conflict escalation is understood as
a specific constellation among states in the global system. While differing in their ideas about
the effect of those constellations, Waltz (1979, 1987), Copeland (1996), and other neorealists
put forth the argument that the likelihood of conflict escalation is closely linked to the polarity
of the international system; that is, the distribution of capabilities and power between states
or, to be more precise, to the dynamic of change that alters these global conditions. In an
effort to bring together these ideas about conflict escalation in international politics (be it in
the state perspective or from a systemic point of view), as well as classical theoretical
thinking about conflict and social change, Pruitt et al. (2003, pp. 101–120) developed the
“structural change model.” This model tries to conceptualize conflict escalation independent
of any predefined level of analysis, and thus represents a model of conflict evolution that has
been very influential on the development of conflict studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor.
For Pruitt et al. (2003, pp. 88–91), processes of conflict escalation are characterized by
different simultaneous transformations, from light to heavy (means used), small to large
(material/immaterial resources needed), specific to general (issues addressed), few to many
(number of participants involved), and winning to hurting (orientations dominating) (see also
Mitchell, 2014, pp. 71–75).

Their approach is thus more interested in describing and understanding the evolution of
conflictive relations than in party-oriented strategies for getting the most out of a given
structural conflict (Pearson d’Estrée, 2008, pp. 75–77). While transcending the neorealist idea
of systemic change and reanimating classical conflict theoretical thought about social change,
the structural change model sees escalation not just as intensification, but as “a particular
type of intensification by steps across time, a change in nature rather than a simply change in
degree” (Zartman & Faure, 2005, p. 6; italics added).

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In conclusion, it can be stated that although the label conflict escalation rarely appears in
classical conflict research, its conceptual substance is quasi-omnipresent in these works. Due
to the dominant realist paradigm at the outset of the field’s emergence, international relations
limited itself to a foreign policy view on conflict escalation or, in its systemic variants, to a
structural determinism without getting into the details of specific state behavior. However,
based on an integrative approach with regard to theory and praxis, conflict resolution, as a
special subfield of peace and conflict studies (Stephenson, 2010), started to examine the
whole life cycle of a conflict, aiming at developing “ideas, theories, and methods that can
improve our understanding of conflict and our collective practice of reduction in violence and
enhancement of political processes for harmonizing interest” (Bercovitch et al., 2009, p. 1).
Therefore, conflict escalation, as a topic often referred to within the context of conflict
resolution research, has always been located between interrelated visions of academics and
practitioners.

So, in research on negotiation and mediation, for example, the spectrum ranges from rather
theory-oriented research in international relations that deals with rational or normative
motivations in arguing and bargaining processes (e.g., Risse, 2000; Müller, 2007) to practice-
oriented research with a focus on multitrack diplomacy or peacebuilding (e.g., Reychler &
Paffenholz, 2000). In sum, a truly holistic thinking about conflict escalation, conciliating
transitive and intransitive ideas, did not emerge until Pruitt et al. (2003) presented a
comprehensive concept of escalation that addresses escalation at different societal levels,
thus integrating sociological and politological thinking in favor of a common social science
perspective.

Major Perspectives on Conflict Escalation

Levels of Analysis

As hinted at earlier in this article, conflict escalation embraces a transitive and an intransitive
dimension. This fact points to a metatheoretical issue that has also been referred to,
particularly in international relations, as the level-of-analysis problem (Singer, 1961).
According to Waltz (1979), for example, there are three images that can be considered to
approach international politics: the individual level (i.e., leaders), the level of a state’s political
regime (e.g., democracies, autocracies, hybrids), and the level of the international system
(which is composed by states, understood as like units), whereas (at least in Waltz’s idea of
neorealism) the latter is regarded as the most relevant one. With reference to this thinking,
theoretical statements should not be either reductionist [i.e., drawing conclusions about
international politics from the perspective of subsystemic entities only (the first and second
images)], or holistic [i.e., explaining foreign policy solely on the basis of systemic features (the
third image)] (Schimmelfennig, 1995, pp. 258–259). Surely, Waltz’s oft-quoted idea of images
has encouraged scholars in international relations and beyond to clarify which phenomenon
they want to explain in relation to specific levels of analysis. However, when focusing on

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conflict escalation as a social phenomenon that is per se intertwined with different societal
levels at once, only a few seminal works in conflict studies have aimed for emancipating
themselves from an overly paradigmatic level-of-analysis thinking.

Galtung (1996) has probably contributed one of the most influential concepts of conflict to
social sciences in the recent past. In his work, conflict is conceptualized as a triangle that
contains contradiction, attitude, and behavior. In this context, contradiction is understood as a
perceived incompatibility between the positions of actors (e.g., aims, interests, aspirations).
Attitude, as the second vertex of the triangle, encompasses the perceptions and
misperceptions of the parties about themselves and their respective opponents (e.g.,
concerning the causes of the conflict or the allocation of blame). Finally, behavior involves
specific actions of the parties to the conflict (e.g., cooperation, yielding, problem solving,
contending, coercion, threats, destructive attacks).

In a full or “manifest” conflict, according to Galtung (1996, p. 72), all three elements have to
be present. However, conflicts are embedded in dynamic processes in which contradictions,
attitudes, and behavior constantly change and influence one another (Ramsbotham,
Woodhouse, & Miall, 2011, pp. 10–12). Therefore, by contrast, in a “latent” state, a conflict
can be constituted by contradictions only (i.e., without any negative attitudes or any
contending behavior). Much of Galtung’s work tackles the shift from latent to manifest conflict
(Galtung, 1996, pp. 70–76). This is where the question of the so-called right level of analysis
comes into play. Taking the idea of social conflict as a point of departure, it is crucial for a
contradiction to become a socially “visible” conflict that it is pronounced or, more generally,
communicated in a broader frame of reference, whether that be community disputes over
garbage disposal, labor-management struggles, class-based revolutions, civil rights struggles,
border conflicts (Kriesberg, 1998, pp. 1–2), or transnational conflicts (Weller & Bösch, 2015).
In other words, the very empirical nature of conflict escalation is characterized by a
transcending of that what is conventionally referred to as levels of analysis.

Against the background of the ideal of parsimonious theory construction on the one hand
(Waltz, 1979, pp. 60–78) and the conflict triangle on the other hand (Galtung, 1996, pp. 70–
80), the greater part of works explicitly addressing conflict escalation have limited themselves
to specific levels of analysis, such as individuals, groups, networks, social movements,
organizations, states, state dyads, and the world system, and have prevalently focused on a
single vertex of the triangle (e.g., only on the dimension of behavior). Sociobiological
approaches, for example, argue that in conflicts between small groups (e.g., youth cliques)
raising the stakes in order to achieve a goal against an opponent does not follow a rational
logic as a general rule. In contrast, violence, being a resource available at any time during a
conflict, is rather driven by biologically predetermined emotions like fear, anger, or
vengeance, and is thus an impulsive action (e.g., Eckert & Willems, 2003, pp. 1185–1186).

In sociopsychological works (see particularly Tajfel & Turner, 1979), findings from research on
interactions among individuals have been transferred to a dyadic intergroup level perspective,
suggesting that relative deprivation and discrimination are not only ordinary processes of
social comparison among groups, but also important factors in collective identity formation

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(Tajfel & Turner, 1979, pp. 40–43; Cook-Huffman, 2009). Based on the idea of social identity
formation as being a conflictive process per se, sociopsychological studies have also evoked a
strong response in research on “civil wars” and domestic conflict (e.g., Horowitz, 1985, Gurr,
2000). In this regard, conflict escalation is conceptualized as a spiral, whereby cause and
blame are reciprocally assigned, self-amplifying mechanisms that simultaneously downgrade
the out-group and upgrade the in-group, and violence against the so-called other ultimately
gets incorporated into normative belief systems. Conflict spirals represent vicious circles of
insecurity, fear, lack of information, stereotypes, deficient communication, and an endless
chain of mutual counteractions (Pruitt et al., 2003, pp. 96–100). To sum up, the analytical
focus in sociopsychological works remains on societal subgroups.

Other theories on conflict escalation are based on the paradigm of rational choice and agency.
As mentioned previously, from a foreign policy analysis perspective, escalative strategies and
violent action in conflict can be understood as the result of utilitarian calculation (e.g.,
Schelling, 1960; Kahn, 1965; Lebow, 1984). Thus, decision-makers engage in conflict
escalation purposefully as a mutually coercive or bargaining strategy (Zartman & Faure, 2005,
pp. 8–10). Rational choice and game theory approaches have also been adopted in research
about domestic conflict. In ethnic conflicts, for example, individual engagement in violent
escalation strategies has often been interpreted as a regression to atavistic instincts and
irrational hatred. By contrast, rational choice–based approaches have convincingly
substantiated the assertion that in a wide range of armed conflicts, particularly in war
economies, the individual/collective acquisition and allocation of resources (e.g., natural
resources, …