| This dissertation develops a historical review of the inception and evolution of conflict resolution as an independent discipline within the sciences. Since the beginning of the field in the mid-1950s, a chief goal of its members has been the synthesis of knowledge from the social and natural sciences within a unifying epistemological framework to create a "science" of conflict resolution. Using a Foucauldian archeological method, the study reconstructs the regulative rules of the field's main discourses to fashion a more coherent and historically contextualized narrative describing the discursive structures that comprise conflict resolution's theoretical core. The idea that there can be a science of conflict resolution is then critiqued from a poststructuralist perspective, with the conclusion drawn that the field should largely abandon the pursuit of a positivist philosophy of science in favor of restructuring its central disciplinary grounds around the two poles of postmodern and critical theory. |
