Understanding Conflict and Violence

Conflict as a socio-political phenomenon is inherent in any society. He is one of the manifestations of the political process, method of resolving its contradictions. The important role of conflict marked already the ancients who asserted that the source of the movement of all things lies in the formation of opposites and their struggle. Conflict as a social phenomenon was first studied in the writings of Georg Simmel, G. Hegel, Marx, A. Smith, A. Tocqueville.

Isolation of political conflicts in the separate problem of the world political science falls in the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, the political conflict studies has become one of the most important branches of theoretical and applied political science. In the national political science focuses on the study of regional and ethnic conflicts. Today's world’s problem is studying the nature of conflict and ways to resolve them is important, firstly, in terms of the overall threat that armed conflicts pose to human civilization, and secondly, by the close proximity of many conflicts on its borders, and thirdly, because of the special dangers of conflict in a multinational country, the availability of a number of persistent conflict-prone zones (Batros and Wehr 2002).

Political conflict is conflict, confrontation of different socio-political forces and political actors in their quest to realize their interests in the struggle for the acquisition or retention of power, caused the opposite of their political interests and values. Compared with all other types of conflicts inherent in public life, political conflict has its own peculiarities: it is dominated by the struggle for power. If power is not transmitted by inheritance, it is a conflict between people for the...

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