CULTURE, CONFLICT & COMMUNICATION connections

CONFLICT is unavoidable when many people live under a same roof and CULTURE embedded in every conflict because conflicts arise in human relationships. Culture is an essential part of conflict and conflict resolution. It is powerful and it often unconscious, influencing conflict and attempts to resolve conflict in imperceptible ways. When differences surface in families, organisations, or communities, culture is always present, shaping perceptions, attitudes, behaviours, and outcomes. 

Given culture's important role in conflicts, what should be done to keep it in mind and include it in response plans? Cultures may act like temperamental children: complicated, elusive, and difficult to predict. Unless we develop comfort with culture as an integral part of conflict, we may find ourselves tangled in its net of complexity, limited by our own cultural lenses. Cultural fluency is a key tool for disentangling and managing multilayered, cultural conflicts.

Cultural fluency means familiarity with cultures: their natures, how they work, and ways they intertwine with our relationships in times of conflict and harmony. Cultural fluency means awareness of several dimensions of culture, including

• COMMUNICATION,
• Ways of naming, framing, and taming conflict,
• Approaches to meaning making,
• Identities and roles

Conclusion

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to conflict resolution, since culture is always a factor. Cultural fluency is therefore a core competency for those who intervene in conflicts or simply want to function more effectively in their own lives and situations. Cultural fluency involves recognising and acting respectfully from the knowledge that communication, ways of naming, framing, and taming conflict, approaches to meaning-making, and identities and roles vary across cultures.