About the Book
The people in the United States are experiencing an extreme degree of division, political partisanship, and civic disorder. Destructive fights are waged about matters such as misinformation, voting rights, school curriculum, government spending, and personal privacy. How can these distressing circumstances be overcome? More specifically, what makes the difference between conflicts that result in progress versus those that further contribute to a greatly polarized,
extremely unequal, and distressed society? In Fighting Better, Louis Kriesberg argues that the crises confronting the US presently are the result of changes in dynamics along three
societal dimensions: class, status, and power. Those changes were brought about to a great degree by people waging conflicts constructively, destructively, or avoiding overt conflicts altogether. Assessing major domestic conflicts in the United States since 1945, Kriesberg evaluates how well conflicts were waged in terms of advancing justice, liberty, and equal opportunity for all Americans. Moreover, he offers ideas for how some of those fights might have been waged more effectively and with
longer-term benefits, connecting current US crises to past mistakes. In doing so, Kriesberg deepens our understanding of how the way conflicts are waged can help to reduce inequities in class, power,
and status, particularly with regard to gender and race.
Table of Contents:
Prologue and Acknowledgments
1. Reflecting Backward and Looking Forward
2. Class-Related Conflicts, 1945-1969
3. Rising Class Inequality, 1970-1992
4. Hyper Class Inequality, 1993-2022
5. Reducing African American Inequalities, 1945-1969
6. African American Advances and Backlashes, 1970-2022
7. Conflicts about Gender and Other Collective Identities, 1945-2022
8. Conflicts Related to Political Power, 1765-2022
9. Issues in Recent Conflicts about Changing Power Inequalities
10. Recovering and Advancing Equality in the Future
Notes
References
Index
About the Author :
Louis Kriesberg is the Maxwell Professor Emeritus of Social Conflict Studies and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Syracuse University. He has published widely on diverse areas of sociology and social conflicts, including the US-Soviet Cold War, Israeli-Palestinian-Arab relations, non-governmental organizations, and social movements. His recent work focuses on constructive ways of fighting, conflict transformation, and conflict resolution methods.
Kriesberg has been highly active in regional, national, and international associations of sociology, conflict resolution, and international peace, for which he has received numerous awards. He was also the founding
director of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) at Syracuse University.
Review :
For those who think America is, for the first time, awakening to the terrible inequities that have characterized its history, this book provides a comprehensive recounting of the long struggle to deal with class, status, race, and power injustices, primarily between 1945 -2022, examining both the successes and failures. As a new generation takes up this challenge, their prospects for success, and even progress, depends on understanding and learning from this history. This book is a tremendous help in doing that.
Drawing on convincing analyses of what has worked in the past, Kriesberg provides evidence-based pragmatic suggestions for how to fight constructively for greater equality and social justice today. At a time when we face so much division in the U.S., Kriesberg offers realistic hope and practical guidance for building a more just and equitable society. This book will be of interest to policy makers, students, scholars, and practitioners of conflict resolution.
Fighting Better examines how conflicts dividing America can be waged constructively and assesses the extent to which a number of domestic conflicts since World War II have advanced equity or sharpened inequality across the three primary dimensions of human society: class, status, and power. Kriesberg offers practical ideas for how America can recover from polarization and division and (re)build a better civic culture. Fighting Better is a must-read for practitioners, academics, and policymakers interested in learning from the past to improve the future.
Louis Kriesberg's Fighting Better is a tour de force. Building on his many decades of research and thought leadership in peace and conflict studies, Kriesberg applies his own evidence-based framework for promoting constructive conflict to a host of disputes over class, group status, and political power in the US since 1945, and in doing so offers us new insights and evidence into why how they were waged helped or harmed our common pursuit of life and liberty. He then turns his attention to the considerable challenges and internal conflicts facing contemporary American society, and here offers a menu of smart, practical, actionable tactics for transforming them constructively for the betterment of the nation. This is a wise, informed, and important read for all Americans concerned with the current constellation of threats to our democracy—it is a great gift to all of us.
In response to the fury and polarization of the current American moment, Louis Kriesberg has responded with Fighting Better. Arguing that the last 75 years have a great deal to teach us, Kriesberg reminds us that while conflict may be inherent in social life, it need not be mutually destructive, and has and can continue to be waged with goals and methods that are widely beneficial. Deeply pragmatic, this renowned scholar of the constructive conflict approach shows how a willingness to pursue shared gains, to consider trade-offs, and to reconcile offers a blueprint to transform public life and move us all from hopeless to hopeful. Fighting Better, well-researched and seamlessly written, is a crucial and pragmatic template for our day.
I am aware of no other book that is remotely comparable in approach, focus, breadth. In addition, no other book approaches this one in terms of exhibiting the fruits of a long and sustained scholarly engagement with the major conflicts of an era. There are precious few scholars in the conflict resolution field who are capable of producing a book as sophisticated, as comprehensive, and with as much potential as this one. Kriesberg is an original and leading member of that august group, as he demonstrates with Fighting Better.
Kriesberg's tour de force takes readers through an ambitious systemic analysis of over one hundred years of political power struggles based on class, race, and gender. Fighting Better asks us to 'reflect backward in order to look forward' into how a longstanding tradition of constructive conflict transformation might carry us into a more peaceful state of affairs...For scholars and students questioning what has happened in the US to place us in this present state of division, this book is both timely and urgent.
This volume is likely to interest both students and lay readers...Recommended. General readers and undergraduates.
Cleverly weaves in previously published insights on constructive conflict principles with a cogent analysis of both gains and failures in advancing equity over the past 70 years along three critical dimensions: class, status, and power.
Fighting Better, by Louis Kriesberg, is a scholarly masterpiece, unlike any other book that I have read in the conflict resolution field.
Fighting Better, by Louis Kriesberg, is a scholarly masterpiece.
This book provides invaluable guidance for how Americans can "fight better" to defend democratic institutions in the aftermath of November 2024's political earthquake in the United States.
