Peter T. Coleman (academic)

Peter Thomas Coleman (born September 9, 1959) is a social psychologist and researcher in the field of conflict resolution and sustainable peace. Coleman is best known for his work on intractable conflicts and applying complexity science.

Coleman is a professor at Columbia University and the executive director of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4) and the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution.

Coleman grew up in the 1960s in Chicago and experienced school desegregation, a violent anti-war movement, and a non-violent civil rights movement first hand. These experiences instilled a strong sense of macro worry: concern over the state of our society and our world. He received a B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1981. After working with violent youth in New York City in the 1980s, Coleman returned to academics to study how to use science as a tool to address social ills.

Eventually, Coleman trained as a mediator for the New York State Criminal Court system, and began his studies with the conflict resolution eminent theorist, Morton Deutsch, and a doctorate in social and organizational psychology from Columbia University.

Coleman has been a professor at Columbia University for almost 2 decades. His early work with Morton Deutsch led to the publication of the first of three editions of the The Handbook on Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, a comprehensive book designed for professionals in the field of conflict resolution emphasizing the constructive potential of conflict . Coleman has studied some of the more marginalized yet critical aspects of peace and conflict dynamics, including issues such as the use and abuse of social power, intractable conflict, humiliation and conflict, polarized collective identity formation, culture and conflict, injustice and conflict, and sustainable peace. These phenomena can manifest themselves in families, schools and other organizations, communities, and nations. They tend to be complex, long-lasting, and difficult to work with, and thus are relatively understudied by contemporary social scientists. Coleman's approach has been to develop conceptual models that address gaps in existing theory, often through eliciting insights from informed participants (local stakeholders and practitioners), and then to empirically test the models using a variety of methods. His scholarship aims to bridge the theory-practice gap in the field of conflict resolution and peace studies by bringing new insights from research to bear on important technical and social problems, and by honoring practical expertise in the development of new theory.

In the area of conflict intractability, Coleman's work focuses on the dynamics involved in seemingly unsolvable conflicts; both generally as whole systems as well as specifically through the investigation of key components of these problems. This has included research on the underlying motivational processes involved, identity formation and change under these conditions, the role moral emotions play in sustaining such conflicts, and differences in the complexity of the dynamics between more and less destructive forms of conflict. This work culminated into the book, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to (Seemingly) Impossible Conflicts.

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