De-escalation is rapidly becoming a buzzword in contexts from law enforcement reform to business communication. But too few discussions of de-escalation begin with a robust discussion of the stages of conflict themselves. A common misconception is that violence, or even the broader notion of conflict, are binary or linear. In many of the de-escalation frameworks I’ve come across, the implicit assumption is that situations are either violent or they are not. People are either in conflict or they are not. Or, the slightly more nuanced view, conflict is either healthy or it is not. Given the superficiality of these framings, it is no wonder that people struggle with de-escalation. As we will see, it is much more reasonable to view conflict as a graduated continuum with distinct phase changes that shift the rules of the game. Just as solids behave differently than liquids, which behave differently than gases, conflict follows different rules at each of these four stages of escalation.

In this chapter, we’re going to look at the four distinct levels of conflict, what they entail, and how conflict escalates from one to the next. And we’ll set ourselves up for a productive exploration of the de-escalation and conflict mitigation strategies covered in the following chapters.

The rest of this chapter will become available following the success of this Kickstarter campaign.

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