Since the publication of his seminal book, Deviance, Terrorism and War: The Process of Solving Unsolved Social and Political Problems (1979), John Burton has been closely identified with the theory of basic human needs, an approach to understanding protracted social conflict that he continues to espouse and to refine (see, e.g., Burton, 1990a, 1997). Burton did not invent the theory, which posits the existence of certain universal needs that must be satisfied if people are to prevent or resolve destructive conflicts, but he gave it its most impassioned and uncompromising expression.
8 stages of maslows hierarchy of human needs
In Deviance, Terrorism and War Burton acknowledged his debt to Paul Sites, whose Control: The Basis of Social Order (1973) defined eight essential needs whose satisfaction was required in order to produce "normal" (non-deviant, non-violent) individual behaviour. According to Sites, these included the primary needs for consistency of response, stimulation, security, and recognition, and derivative needs for justice, meaning, rationality, and control. Sites, in turn, recognized the importance of Abraham Maslow's conception of human development as the sequential satisfaction of basic needs, which Maslow (1954) had grouped under five headings: physiological, safety, belongingness/love, esteem, and self-actualisation. The idea that humans qua humans have needs whose satisfaction is the effective antidote to alienation is considerably older than this, of course, as Karl Marx's youthful reflections on Hegel suggest:
It can be seen how [under socialism] the wealthy man and the plenitude of human need take the place of economic wealth and poverty. The wealthy man is the man who needs a complete manifestation of human life and a man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as a need ("Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction," in McLellan, 1977, p. 94).
For Burton, the concept of basic human needs offered a possible method of grounding the field of conflict analysis and resolution (which he and a few other pioneers had essentially improvised during the 1960s) in a defensible theory of the person. Together with other peace researchers (see Lederer and Galtung, 1980; Coate and Rosati, 1988; and the writers represented in Burton, 1990b), he set out to reframe the concept in order to provide the new field with a convincing alternative to the prevailing paradigms of postwar social science: mechanistic utilitarianism, behaviourism, cultural relativism, and Hobbesian "Realism." In Burton's view, the needs most salient to an understanding of destructive social conflicts were those for identity, recognition, security, and personal development. Over time, however, he tended to emphasize the failure of existing state systems to satisfy the need for identity as the primary source of modern ethno-nationalist struggles.
The great promise of human needs theory, in Burton's view, was that it would provide a relatively objective basis, transcending local political and cultural differences, for understanding the sources of conflict, designing conflict resolution processes, and founding conflict analysis and resolution as an autonomous discipline. The importance of this ambitious project is now generally recognized by conflict theorists, whether they agree with Burton or not (see Fisher, 1997; Avruch, 1998; Jeong, 2000). This essay will suggest some ways in which the project has succeeded, some ways in which it has fallen short, and some possible avenues for further theory development.
Realism, in short, was simply not realistic. The types of social conflict most characteristic of world society since 1950 - ethno-nationalist wars and civil wars, violent struggles between races, social classes and religious groups, Great Power "police actions," terrorism, gang warfare, and crime - seemed largely immune to coercive or manipulative counteraction. In fact, people's involvement in these sorts of struggles appeared to escalate in response to attempts to deter their behaviour forcibly - a mysterious, frightening response that tempted their would-be controllers to declare these intractably disobedient actors evil, irrational, or even non-human. Faced with the near-genocidal implications of this cycle of violence, Burton and others saw the need for a theory that would challenge both brands of Realism at the level of their most basic assumptions. Basic human needs theory - a radically optimistic personalism - was their answer.
From the perspective of conflict analysis and resolution, basic human needs theory offers theorists and practitioners certain important advantages. Three virtues of the theory seem particularly notable:
Second, equipped with a needs-based map of the field, conflict analysts and resolvers can understand the contradictions inherent in general notions like "negotiation" and "dispute resolution," and the necessity to design resolution processes corresponding to a conflict's underlying generic sources. Where the conflict is generated by unsolved problems of political identity, for example, the process required will be analytical, exposing the differences between the conflicting parties' perceived interests and their underlying needs, and offering them a wide range of possible solutions to the reframed identity problem. There is thus a historical, if not logical, connection between human needs theory and the process known as the analytical or interactive problem-solving workshop (see Fisher, 1997; Mitchell and Banks, 1996).
Certain limitations of the theory, as currently formulated, can also be identified. To begin with, the attempt to establish an objective basis for socially and politically salient needs in human biology or in unalterable "human nature" has been criticized as indefensibly "essentialist," de-contextualised, and a-historical (see, e.g., Avruch, 1998). In many ways, these criticisms seem apt.
John Burton has attempted to counter them by asserting boldly that, while basic human needs themselves are universal, transcending differences in class, gender, and culture, their satisfiers are culturally determined. But such a radical separation between needs and satisfiers runs afoul of the fact that concepts like identity and security are not independently existing "universals" rather, they are ideas abstracted from a multiplicity of concrete satisfiers. If the satisfiers are culture-bound, therefore, so, too, are the needs.
Does this mean that there are no universal (i.e., genuinely "human") needs? Not necessarily. Biologizing (or "ontologizing") needs forecloses the inquiry that should be made into the extent to which certain needs are becoming universal as a global culture comes painfully and convulsively into existence. It also forecloses other necessary inquiries: for example, into the relationship between childhood and adult behaviour. Is the adult's quest for political identity, say, a natural extension of the child's needs to bond with and differentiate itself from its parents (see Clark, in Burton, 1990b, pp. 34-59)? Or is it a regression symptomatic of incomplete or interrupted child development? Similarly, does the alleged need for "sacred meaning" postulated by Mary Clark spring from human nature, perhaps as a further development of the child's need for "consistency of response" (see Sites in Burton, 1990b, pp. 7-33)? Or, as Freud suggests in The Future of an Illusion (1989), is it merely evidence of some individuals' failure to "grow up"?
A related problem concerns the definition of the salient needs themselves. While John Burton reduces the basic human needs to three or four, focusing especially on identity and recognition, Johan Galtung, grouping them a la Maslow, contends that an adequate account of needs as sources of destructive conflict must also include the drive to satisfy basic needs for "welfare," "freedom," and "meaning" (Galtung, in Burton, 1990b, pp. 301-335). From Burton's perspective, the characterization of "welfare" and "freedom" needs as basic is misleading, since people will jeopardize or surrender both for the sake of defending their identities. Moreover, extending the list of basic needs tends to blur the distinction between "wants" and "needs" to the point that every intense desire may be conceived of as a basic need. At the point that the wants/needs distinction washes away entirely, of course, so does the utility of the theory.
And we speak of needs as being "basic" when people in large enough numbers desire something intensely enough for a long enough period of time to sacrifice other desired ends for it. On this basis, Galtung may be justified in describing the need for freedom as basic, particularly when he specifies it in terms of concrete satisfiers like physical mobility. The needs that, if unsatisfied, generate destructive conflict may therefore change over the course of human history or even over the course of an individual's personal history. This fact does not prevent us from identifying and describing them or suggesting conflict resolution solutions aimed at satisfying them.
Christopher Mitchell has rightly pointed out (in Burton, 1990b, pp. 166-171) that we have no theory of satisfiers equivalent to the theory of basic human needs. One cause of this lack may be that in absolutizing basic human needs, John Burton and his fellow thinkers absolutely relativised their satisfiers. If the need for identity, say, is everywhere and always the same, but what will satisfy it is determined entirely by local histories and changing social circumstances, it becomes difficult, perhaps impossible, to predict before the fact what will "work" to terminate an identity-based conflict.
A second line of research and theory development might aim at exploring the needs and satisfiers applicable to conflicts that are not purely or primarily ethno-nationalist, but that involve other forms of group definition. It is understood that many general conflict and conflict resolution theories bear the marks of their origin in the study of particular types of conflict. Basic human needs theory was implicitly designed to throw light on the sources and methods of resolving identity-group conflicts of the sort that plagued world society during the postwar period of decolonisation, and that are far from obsolete even now. Nevertheless, especially since the late 1970s, other forms of social conflict have forced themselves on our attention. This suggests a series of questions requiring better answers: Which needs/satisfiers are relevant to understanding the modern upsurge of religious conflict around the world? What drives the revival of class struggle in nations of the semi-periphery? Which conflict resolution processes are likely to be most effective in these diverse cases? 2ff7e9595c
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