On Stages of Conflict Escalation - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 67

a political debate is in a sense necessary. To use the terminology of the taxonomy in
Sect. 3.2 , it is both permitted and obligatory, as well as certain. These properties are
not the same in neighbor conflicts or work group conflicts, which very well can be
merely latent and potential/possible, actual and nonpermitted as well as conceivable
without being certain.

3.8.3 The Relation Between Activity Differences

and Stages/Steps/Phases in Conflict

In summary, the conflicts in political debates in most respects represent very
different conditions than conflict in the other two social activities they have been
compared with above. Especially the beginning and the end of a conflict episode can
be very different—the other two activity types often do not start with claims, instead
they can start with behavior from one party which irritates the other party, possibly at
first with only covert reactions. In contrast, in the political debates, there are initially
usually a number of potentially confrontative claims. The three activities also vary
in terms of what responses may be expected. If claims are made, acceptance of
the other's claim, avoidance, and prevention of conflict are suitable in the neighbor
and work group conflict cases, but not really in the political debate, because of
the different purposes of the activity types. Further, even though escalation phases
contain similarities in behavior, they also contain differences, depending on the
different conditions, i.e., especially on the presence of an audience (in the political
debate both a studio and a TV audience), which is the main addressee, and also on
the more or less ritualized overt expression of conflict in political debates.
Even if manifested in somewhat different ways, the occurrence of phases of
challenge/attack, response, and escalation seems to be common to most overt
conflicts in all the three cases, but necessary and “obligatory” only in the political
debate. The early phase can be very different between the activities, and the climax
and win-lose phases are probably more common in the political debate and have
alternatives like compromise and reconciliation in the two other cases.
Thus, the occurrence of stages in conflict as well as their labeling and description
has to be related to the social activity in which it is pursued, in order to be detailed
enough to capture stages in different types of conflict. We have also seen that
the differences between types of conflict have resulted in differences between the
different models that have been suggested to describe stages in conflict development
and that for this reason, it would be desirable for future models to more explicitly
state what type of conflict the model of stages is supposed to describe. Finally, we
have suggested a six-stage model to capture conflict escalation in televised political
debates.

Acknowledgments The research that has led to this work has been supported by the European
Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), under grant agreement no.
231287(SSPNet).