Navigating the Landscape of Conflict: Applications of Dynamical Systems Theory to Addressing Protracted Conflict Peter T. Coleman, Robin Vallacher, Andrea Bartoli, Andrzej Nowak and Lan Bui-Wrzosinska Introduction Conflict is a fundamental feature of social relations. People commonly differ in their respective interests, values and points of view, so social contact – whether between in- dividuals or between groups – holds potential for promoting disagreement, tension and confrontation. Conflict is generally adaptive, promoting the evolution of new ideas and rules of conduct that enable individuals and groups to adjust to changing realities. But conflict can also be highly maladaptive, with the potential to destroy a relationship or undermine a social system. Some of the most pressing problems in the contemporary world – homicide, terrorism, war, genocide – are manifestations of social conflict. The destructive forms of conflict are also the hardest to explain with recourse to traditional motivational assumptions (Coleman 2003). The issue that initiated a conflict may be forgotten or even resolved without reducing the antagonism among the parties. Con- tinuation of the conflict, moreover, often works in opposition to the satisfaction of the parties’ respective self-interests with respect to resources, security and well-being. Yet, even though destructive conflicts are often self-defeating, they can become protracted to the point of apparent intractability (Coleman 2003, 2004). We suggest that these hard-to-fathom features of destructive conflict can be under- stood from the perspective of non-linear dynamical systems, an approach that has revolutionized scientific understanding of phenomena in virtually every domain over the last 30 years (cf. Gleick 1987; Johnson 2001; Schuster 1984; Strogatz 2003). Broadly defined, a dynamical system is simply a set of elements that interact over time in accordance with simple rules. The task of dynamical systems theory is to spec- ify the nature of these rules and the system-level properties and behaviours that emerge from the repeated iteration of these rules. In recent years, the dynamical systems per- spective has been adapted to investigate personal, interpersonal and societal processes under the guise of “dynamical social psychology” (cf. Nowak/Vallacher 1998; Val- lacher/Nowak 1994, 2007). The most recent extension of this approach focuses on the defining features of conflict that are invariant across levels of social reality, from inti- mate relations to international war (cf. Coleman et al. 2007; Nowak et al. 2006; Val- lacher et al. 2010). Our aim in this chapter is to present the essence of the dynamical approach to conflict, with emphasis on the added value of this approach for untangling the mysteries of intractable conflict and providing new guidelines for the resolution of such conflicts.