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Conflict
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What is Conflict?

Conflict is a foundational concept in communications studies, examined across courses in interpersonal communication, organizational behavior, international relations, and intercultural dialogue. It describes the tension that arises when individuals, groups, or states pursue incompatible goals, resources, or values. What makes conflict academically compelling is its presence at every scale of human interaction — from disagreements within school systems and organizations to armed struggles between nations — and the ways societies develop or fail to develop mechanisms for managing it.

The papers archived on this topic reflect a genuinely broad range of approaches. Historical and military analyses examine specific armed conflicts such as the Soviet-Afghan War, the Philippine War of 1899–1902, and the American Civil War, asking how and why certain outcomes occurred. Comparative theoretical work sets frameworks like neorealism and neoliberalism against each other to explain interstate behavior. Case studies focus on post-conflict nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan or ongoing instability in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other papers shift to interpersonal and institutional settings, exploring organizational conflict, intercultural misunderstanding, and conflict within school systems, while some take a more reflective or ethical angle, addressing forgiveness, reconciliation, and cases like the Tuskegee syphilis study.

A strong essay on conflict begins with a clearly scoped thesis that identifies the type of conflict, the parties involved, and the central argument about its causes, dynamics, or resolution. Evidence carries the most weight when it is specific — drawn from documented events, theoretical frameworks, or concrete case data rather than general assertions. The most common pitfall is treating conflict as inherently negative without analyzing the structural or cultural conditions that produce it, which leads to surface-level conclusions rather than genuine analytical insight.

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Paper Undergraduate
SOPA and PIPA: balancing copyright protection against free speech rights
File sharing involving copyright infringement began as peer-to-peer operations, sometimes with the involvement of a central server that acts as a search engine. Recently there has been a rise in file sharing where the infringing content is actually stored on the central server, such as the now-defunct megaupload.com. Consequently, there is a conflict between the rights of content owners and the rights of ordinary users of the internet. The conflict here is that efforts to eliminate sites that enable online infringing may also eliminate legitimate internet activity. In the fall of 2011 the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) proposals were introduced into the US Congress.
Thesis Masters
Race and regionalism in Snow Falling on Cedars
The paper is an analysis of regionalism in the novel and film Snow Falling on Cedars. The paper defines regionalism and explains how and where it manifests in the narrative. The paper traces the social context and symbolism within the narrative as a way to elucidate how regionalism is a thematic presence.
Essay Doctorate
Ethical conflicts between utilitarian government orders and individual soldiers
This paper discusses the philosophical theory of utilitarianism and how it is applied to military orders. When a soldier is ordered to do something which he or she finds morally objectionable then it creates a conflict. There are also dangers such as with Nazi Germany and other historic incidences where a refusal to apply individual ethics led to tragedy.
Paper Undergraduate
Martial arts training and its physical and psychological benefits
This is a "textbook" type of paper that presents the geography of martial arts. For every martial art, where are they originally from, where are they practiced (% in each country), where they most popular, where are there more practitioners, more women, more children. It is an overview, a map, of what is practiced where, why and how and by whom.
Research Paper Doctorate
Maria Bailey's misrepresentation of her business through consequentialist and deontological ethics
Maria Bailey clearly and blatantly misrepresented the size of her start-up business, but shrugged it off saying she knew what she was "capable of doing" and just wanted to show potential clients "what we were going to…
Research Paper Doctorate
Testing and accountability in Florida's A+ school reform plan
Educators today are being pulled in several directions. On the one hand, they are expected to provide ever more rigorous educational standards, and to find ways to quantify and demonstrate that both good teaching and…
Research Paper Doctorate
Joseph Plumb Martin's account of hardship in the Revolutionary War
¶ … military narrative of the American Revolutionary War is often depicted in clear, bright shades of red, white and blue, with the "Star Spangled Banner" blaring loudly in the background.
Research Paper Doctorate
James A. Michener's Caribbean: history, narrative technique, and perspective
Only Michener could so exquisitely bring the violent, exciting history of the attractive Caribbean to life. Swaying away from the European Courts of the 15th century that first claimed the area, to the Islands…
Research Paper Doctorate
Fiscal policy, taxation, and government spending's effect on GDP growth
¶ … fiscal policy is one of the tools available to the government to influence the national economy and to make an effort to bring positive changes in it. The term fiscal policy refers to the disbursement made by the…
Paper Doctorate
Black participation in American westward expansion and frontier settlement
Prior to the 1960s and 1970s, very little was written about black participation in Western expansion from the colonial period to the 19th Century, much less about black and Native American cooperation against slavery.