COM3465: Conflict Resolution

Course Description

COM3465 Conflict Resolution teaches how conflict works, why it escalates, and what communication practices actually make it productive rather than destructive.

The course is offered at approximately five Florida institutions, including Florida Gulf Coast University, the University of Florida and the University of West Florida, along with private institutions.

The University of West Florida titles it Conflict Management, places it in the Department of Communication at 3 semester hours, and describes a course focused on the management of conflict through effective communication in which hands-on student learning is emphasised, offering the theoretical investigation of communication barriers and breakdowns in interpersonal and public settings, with interpersonal, organisational, cross-cultural and moral conflicts highlighted. The University of Florida carries it as Conflict Management and Negotiation in the Professions.

The titles differ in a way that signals a real difference of emphasis, discussed in Special Information — the statewide "Conflict Resolution," UWF's "Conflict Management," and UF's explicitly professional and negotiation-focused framing describe overlapping but distinguishable courses.

The course's first and most important move is to separate conflict from hostility. Students arrive treating the two as synonyms and treating conflict as a failure. The field's foundational position is that conflict is an expressed struggle between interdependent parties who perceive incompatible goals and interference from each other — and that it is inevitable wherever people depend on each other, is not inherently destructive, and is frequently the mechanism by which a relationship or an organisation improves. The goal is not the absence of conflict; it is conflict that produces a better outcome than avoidance would have.

The second move is to separate positions from interests, which is the single most transferable idea in the course. A position is what someone says they want; an interest is why they want it. Positions conflict far more often than interests do, and a great many disputes that look intractable at the level of positions have available solutions at the level of interests. Learning to ask "why does that matter to you?" rather than arguing about the stated demand is a small technique with disproportionate effect.

The third is that this is a skills course. UWF's emphasis on hands-on learning is characteristic: the material is practised through role play, simulation and negotiation exercises rather than only read about. Understanding the integrative bargaining literature and being able to conduct an integrative negotiation are different accomplishments, and the second is what the course is for.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Define conflict and distinguish it from disagreement, competition and hostility.
• Explain the major theoretical approaches to conflict and apply them to real situations.
• Analyse the sources of conflict — resources, values, goals, roles, information, relationships and structure.
• Explain escalation and de-escalation dynamics, including the mechanisms by which conflicts spiral.
• Identify conflict styles — competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating — and assess the appropriateness of each to a situation.
• Distinguish positions from interests and reframe a dispute in terms of interests.
• Distinguish distributive from integrative negotiation and apply the strategies appropriate to each.
• Determine a BATNA and use it to assess an agreement.
• Apply principled negotiation and evaluate its limits.
• Use active listening, reflection and questioning in a conflict interaction.
• Apply assertive communication and distinguish it from passive and aggressive communication.
• Manage emotion in conflict — one's own and others' — and explain the role of face and identity.
• Analyse cross-cultural differences in conflict expression and management.
• Explain third-party processes — facilitation, mediation, arbitration — and the differences among them.
• Demonstrate basic mediation process skills.
• Analyse organisational conflict and the structural factors that generate it.
• Analyse the ethical dimensions of conflict practice, including deception, power imbalance and neutrality.

Optional Outcomes

• Complete a full mediation simulation in the mediator role.
• Analyse public and community conflict and public deliberation processes.
• Analyse family and intimate relationship conflict.
• Analyse international conflict and peace studies.
• Analyse conflict in digital and mediated contexts.
• Analyse restorative justice practices.
• Complete a conflict analysis of a real case or organisation.
• Prepare for mediation certification.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Understanding conflict. Definitions and the standard formulation — expressed struggle, interdependent parties, perceived incompatible goals, perceived interference — and the analytical value of each element, particularly perceived, since a substantial share of conflicts rest on misperception; the constructive/destructive distinction and the evidence that suppressed conflict frequently costs more than expressed conflict; sources of conflict, and the useful diagnostic of asking whether a dispute is about resources, values, goals, roles, information or relationship, since each responds to different treatment; conflict as a communication phenomenon.
• Theoretical frameworks. Systems approaches and the recognition that conflict occurs within structures that generate it; attribution theory and the fundamental attribution error in conflict — explaining your own behaviour situationally and the other party's dispositionally, which is the single most reliable engine of escalation; social identity and intergroup conflict; face-negotiation theory and the role of dignity and reputation, which explains why disputes continue after the substantive issue is resolved; game-theoretic framings, including the prisoner's dilemma, and their limits; social exchange and power dependence.
• Escalation and de-escalation. The conflict spiral and its mechanisms — reciprocation, issue proliferation, shifting from specific complaints to general character claims, and the recruitment of allies; the transformation from disagreement about an issue to a contest about the relationship, which is the point at which conflicts become hard to resolve; entrapment and sunk-cost commitment; de-escalation techniques — separating issues, acknowledging the other's perspective without conceding the point, unilateral conciliatory gestures, and timing; the observation that de-escalation usually requires someone to act unreciprocated first, which is why it is difficult.
• Conflict styles. The dual-concern model and the five styles — competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating — and the instruments that measure them; the important correction that no style is inherently best: avoidance is appropriate for trivial or unwinnable issues, competing is appropriate in emergencies and on matters of principle, and collaborating is expensive in time and unnecessary for small stakes; style flexibility as the actual competence; how styles interact when two parties use different ones; the cultural and gendered patterning of style preference, treated as a tendency rather than a rule.
• Negotiation. Distributive bargaining — the fixed-pie framing, reservation points, the bargaining zone, anchoring and concession patterns; integrative negotiation — expanding the pie, trading across issues of differing priority, and the conditions that make it possible; the positions/interests distinction as the mechanism; BATNA — the best alternative to a negotiated agreement — and the point that a negotiator's power comes from their alternatives rather than from their manner, which is the most practically useful idea in the topic; principled negotiation (Fisher and Ury) — separate the people from the problem, focus on interests not positions, invent options for mutual gain, insist on objective criteria — and its limits, which include what to do when the other party will not cooperate and when the power asymmetry is severe; hard tactics and how to respond to them; multiparty and team negotiation.
• Communication skills in conflict. Active listening and reflection, which does more to de-escalate than any argument; the difference between hearing and agreeing, which parties in conflict routinely conflate; open questions and the "why does that matter to you" move; assertive communication distinguished from passive, aggressive and passive-aggressive; I-statements, taught properly rather than as a formula, since a poorly constructed I-statement is a disguised accusation; describing behaviour rather than attributing motive; apology — what makes one effective, and why conditional constructions defeat the purpose; nonverbal communication and its effect on escalation; written and mediated conflict, where the absence of nonverbal cues reliably makes things worse.
• Emotion, face and identity. The role of emotion, and the recognition that suppressing it is neither possible nor desirable; anger and its functions; face-saving and the frequency with which disputes persist because a party cannot concede without humiliation; designing solutions that let the other side retreat with dignity, which is a practical skill rather than a courtesy; identity-based and value-based conflicts, and why they resist interest-based methods; trust — how it is damaged and what actually rebuilds it; forgiveness and reconciliation as distinct from settlement.
• Culture and difference. Individualist and collectivist orientations and their effect on conflict expression; high- and low-context communication and the misunderstandings that arise between them; direct and indirect confrontation norms, and the frequent misreading of indirectness as evasion; face concerns across cultures; the use of third parties in different traditions; the caution against applying cultural generalisations to individuals, which is where this material most often goes wrong; power distance; language and interpretation.
• Third-party intervention. The continuum from facilitation through mediation to arbitration to adjudication, and what a party gives up at each step; mediation — the mediator's role, the standard stages (opening, storytelling, issue identification, option generation, agreement), caucusing, and the practice of neutrality; the distinction between facilitative, evaluative and transformative mediation; power imbalance and when mediation is inappropriate, which includes situations involving intimate partner violence; confidentiality in mediation; arbitration, binding and non-binding; ombuds roles; Florida's court-connected mediation system, discussed below.
• Organisational and workplace conflict. Structural sources — role ambiguity, resource competition, interdependence, reward systems that pit units against each other; conflict between levels and between functions; the manager's role and the difference between resolving a dispute and coaching parties to resolve it; grievance and complaint systems; the recognition that recurring interpersonal conflict is frequently a symptom of a structural problem, and that treating it as a personality issue leaves the cause untouched; conflict in teams, including the productive/destructive distinction between task and relationship conflict; bullying and harassment, and where conflict management stops and formal process must begin.
• Ethics. Honesty and the ambiguous status of deception in negotiation, where norms differ from ordinary conversation and the boundaries are genuinely contested; power imbalance and the ethical problem of a process that appears neutral and advantages the stronger party; the limits of neutrality; confidentiality and its exceptions; the practitioner's responsibility when an agreement is unjust; when conflict should be escalated rather than managed — a point students find surprising and which matters, since "resolving" a dispute about genuine wrongdoing can amount to suppressing a legitimate complaint.

Optional Topics

• Extended mediation simulation with role rotation.
• Public deliberation, community conflict and facilitated public processes.
• Family and intimate relationship conflict.
• International conflict, peacebuilding and track-two diplomacy.
• Online conflict, moderation and mediated escalation.
• Restorative justice practices and victim-offender dialogue.
• Environmental and public-policy dispute resolution.
• Conflict coaching.
• Preparation for Florida mediator certification.

Resources & Tools

• Interpersonal Conflict by Hocker and Wilmot (McGraw-Hill) — the standard communication-discipline text for this course and the likeliest assignment.
• Getting to Yes by Fisher, Ury and Patton — short, enormously influential, and the source of principled negotiation. Frequently assigned entire, and worth reading whether or not it is.
• Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton and Heen and Crucial Conversations by Patterson and colleagues — practical, widely used in professional training, and unusually good on the emotional and identity dimensions.
• The Mediation Process by Christopher Moore — the standard practitioner reference on mediation.
• Negotiation by Lewicki, Barry and Saunders — the comprehensive business-school treatment; Getting Past No by Ury for the difficult-counterparty problem.
• The Conflict Resolution Toolbox by Furlong — a practical set of analytical models for diagnosing a dispute.
• Florida-specific, and genuinely valuable because this state has an unusually developed system:
  • The Florida Dispute Resolution Center, operated by the Office of the State Courts Administrator — administers Florida's mediator certification and publishes standards, training requirements and the rules of practice, all free.
  • The Florida Rules for Certified and Court-Appointed Mediators — short, authoritative, and the professional ethics document for anyone practising here.
  • Florida's county and circuit court mediation programmes, and its Citizen Dispute Settlement Centers, several of which take volunteers and observers.
• Professional organisations: the Association for Conflict Resolution; the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution; the Florida Academy of Professional Mediators; the National Communication Association and its conflict division.
• Free training material: the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School publishes a large volume of free articles and teaching notes; Beyond Intractability (University of Colorado) is a free, substantial knowledge base on conflict theory and practice.
• The most useful practice resource is the course itself. Negotiation and mediation are learned by doing them, and the simulations are the course — treat them as the primary material rather than as illustrations of the reading.

Career Pathways

Conflict competence is rarely a job title and is named in a very large number of job descriptions, which makes this one of the more quietly employable courses in a communication degree.

• Human Resources Specialists and Managers (SOC 13-1071, 11-3121) — employee relations, grievance handling and workplace investigations are conflict work under another name, and this is the most direct destination.
• Mediators and Arbitrators (SOC 23-1022) — a real profession in Florida, and the state's certification pathway is accessible; see below. Frequently a second career or a supplement to another practice.
• Ombuds roles in universities, healthcare systems, corporations and government.
• Law (SOC 23-1011) — most civil cases settle rather than go to trial, and negotiation is the practising attorney's daily work; Florida courts require mediation in many civil and family matters, which makes this material directly professional rather than adjacent.
• Management and supervision (SOC 11-1021) — conflict management is a named competency in virtually every management framework.
• Social workers, counsellors and case managers (SOC 21-1021, 21-1093) — mediating between clients, families and systems.
• Public administration and community relations (SOC 11-1021, 27-3031) — public meetings, community disputes and facilitated processes.
• Labour relations specialists (SOC 13-1075) — collective bargaining and grievance arbitration.
• Customer relations and client management — de-escalation as a core competence.
• Education (SOC 25-2031, 11-9032) — school-based conflict resolution, peer mediation programmes and restorative practices, which many Florida districts operate.
• International development, humanitarian and peacebuilding organisations — typically requiring graduate study.

⚠ The concrete Florida opportunity, and it is unusually accessible. Florida certifies mediators through the Supreme Court in several categories — county, family, circuit civil, dependency and appellate. Certification requires a specified training programme, mentorship or observation requirements, a points-based combination of education and experience, and good moral character, with the exact requirements varying by category and revised periodically. County mediation certification is the most accessible entry point and does not require a law degree.

Check the current requirements with the Florida Dispute Resolution Center rather than relying on any summary, including this one — they change. But the practical point stands: a communication graduate in Florida has a defined, published route into a recognised profession, which is a more concrete outcome than most humanities courses can point to. Volunteering or observing at a county Citizen Dispute Settlement Center is the standard first step and costs nothing.

Special Information

⚠ Titles differ, and they signal three defensible emphases

Source	Title	What it emphasises
statewide	Conflict Resolution	Resolving disputes — outcome-focused
UWF	Conflict Management	Managing ongoing conflict — interpersonal, organisational, cross-cultural and moral
UF	Conflict Management and Negotiation in the Professions	Professional and workplace application, with negotiation named explicitly

All three are 3 credits and the underlying material overlaps substantially, so this is emphasis rather than a subject split. But the difference between "resolution" and "management" is a real one in the field: "resolution" implies conflicts are problems to be ended, while "management" accepts that many conflicts are ongoing features of relationships and organisations and asks how to conduct them well. The management framing is the more current and, for most students, the more useful — you will not resolve your relationship with a difficult colleague; you will manage it for years.

UF's explicitly professional framing predicts more negotiation content and more workplace application, and less interpersonal and relational material. UWF's inclusion of "moral conflicts" is unusual and worth noting — value-based conflicts resist interest-based negotiation precisely because the parties are not trading preferences, and a course that addresses them directly is teaching something the standard negotiation literature handles poorly.

Read the syllabus if the emphasis matters to you. A student who wants negotiation for a business career and a student who wants mediation skills for human services are best served by different sections.

Prerequisites and position in the curriculum

UWF lists no prerequisite. Practice varies; some institutions require an introductory communication or interpersonal communication course.

The absence of a prerequisite makes this a widely accessible upper-division elective, and it is taken by communication, business, management, human resources, psychology, criminal justice, social work, education and pre-law students alongside communication majors. That mixed enrolment is a genuine asset in this particular course, because the simulations work better when the participants bring different professional frames — a nursing student, a business student and a social work student negotiating the same scenario produce a more instructive exercise than three of any one.

It pairs naturally with interpersonal and organisational communication, intercultural communication, group communication, and — for students heading toward law or human resources — with employment law and negotiation courses.

Course format and workload — and the participation point is not boilerplate

Taught as a discussion and simulation course. UWF's phrase — hands-on student learning is emphasised — is the operative description. Assessment normally combines role plays and negotiation simulations, a conflict analysis paper, reflective writing, examinations on theory, and participation.

Expect four to seven hours a week outside class. The reading is light to moderate and accessible; the simulations and the reflective writing are the workload, and preparing properly for a negotiation exercise — working out your interests, your BATNA and your likely counterpart's position — takes real time and is the part students skip.

⚠ Participation is structurally necessary here rather than a grading convention. Negotiation exercises require counterparts and mediation simulations require disputants. A student who does not participate is not only losing marks; they are preventing others from doing the exercise. Sections where several students disengage genuinely cannot deliver the course.

And the discomfort is the mechanism. Practising a difficult conversation in front of classmates is uncomfortable for nearly everyone at first. That is a small, safe version of the real discomfort the skills are for, experienced in a room where a mistake costs nothing — which is exactly why the course is built this way.

⚠ On practising with real conflicts

Courses in this area often invite students to analyse a conflict from their own life, and the reflective assignments frequently ask for it. Two practical cautions.

Choose what you disclose deliberately. A conflict analysis paper read by an instructor is one thing; a role play performed in front of classmates is another. Analysing a current, painful, unresolved personal conflict in a classroom exercise is generally a poor idea — the exercise is for practising a skill, not for working through the situation, and your classmate is a student rather than a counsellor.

Some conflicts are not conflict-management problems. Situations involving abuse, intimate partner violence, harassment or serious power imbalance are not appropriate for negotiation or peer mediation, and a well-run course says so explicitly — recognising when a matter must go to a formal process, a supervisor, an institutional office or law enforcement is itself a course outcome rather than a failure of the techniques. Every Florida institution provides free counselling and a Title IX office; the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) operates continuously.

⚠ What students most often get wrong

• Treating collaboration as always correct. The five styles are situational tools. Collaborating is expensive in time and relationship capital and is wasteful on small issues; avoidance is genuinely right for trivial or unwinnable matters.
• Arguing positions harder instead of exploring interests. The instinct when a demand is refused is to restate it more forcefully. The productive move is to ask why the other party's position matters to them, which frequently reveals a solution neither side had considered.
• Believing negotiating power comes from confidence or technique. It comes from your BATNA. A party with a good alternative can walk away; one without cannot, however skilfully they speak. The most useful preparation for any negotiation is improving your alternatives beforehand.
• Mistaking listening for agreeing. Reflecting someone's position accurately does not concede it — and it is the fastest de-escalation available, because most escalation is driven by the belief that one has not been heard.
• Offering a non-apology. "I'm sorry you feel that way" is recognised instantly and escalates. A working apology names the behaviour, accepts responsibility and states what will change.
• Assuming a resolved dispute means a fixed relationship. Settlement, reconciliation and forgiveness are different things and do not automatically follow one another.

Articulation and transfer

COM3465 carries the same SCNS number across Florida public institutions and SCNS equivalency governs transfer of the credit. As an upper-division course it does not appear in A.A. programmes and is taken after transfer.

The emphasis variation above is worth a syllabus if the course satisfies a specific major requirement. Note also that where a section is built around a mediation simulation and includes substantial supervised practice, that is worth documenting — Florida mediator certification includes training and observation components, and a course with a substantial practicum element may count toward them. Ask the instructor and check with the Dispute Resolution Center; the answer is institution-specific and worth having in writing.

AI Integration

Conflict is a domain where these tools have obvious appeal, some genuine uses, and failure modes that are worth thinking about carefully.

Where the tools genuinely help. Preparing for a negotiation — asking what the other party's likely interests are, what your BATNA is worth, and what options might satisfy both sides is a legitimate and effective use, and it does the systematic preparation most people skip. Rehearsing a difficult conversation against a simulated counterpart, which is a real training use and lower-stakes than practising on a person. Drafting and revising a difficult message, particularly one written in anger — the discipline of drafting, waiting, and revising is the oldest and best advice about written conflict, and a tool that helps with the revision is doing something useful. And generating counterarguments to test your own position.

⚠ Where they fail, and the failures here are more interesting than usual.

They do not know the relationship, and the relationship is most of the situation. Advice about a conflict depends on history, power, organisational context, what has already been tried, and what the parties can actually tolerate. A model has none of that, and generic conflict advice applied to a specific relationship is frequently worse than no advice.

Generated conflict messages have a recognisable register. Smooth, balanced, professionally warm prose in the middle of a genuine dispute reads as evasive or, worse, as though the sender did not care enough to write it themselves. In conflict, the perception that the other party is engaging personally is a substantial part of what de-escalates — which makes this one of the clearest cases where using the tool can defeat the purpose.

The skills are behavioural. Tolerating silence, staying regulated when accused, reflecting accurately when you disagree, and reading a room are performances under pressure. A model can describe a de-escalating response; it cannot make you able to produce one when your heart rate is up, and that is what the simulations are for.

What is genuinely happening in the field, and it is more advanced than students expect. Online dispute resolution is established rather than experimental — the large e-commerce platforms have long resolved enormous volumes of disputes through automated and semi-automated processes, and court systems, including in Florida, have adopted online dispute resolution for some case types. Automated tools are used for triage, for structured negotiation support, and for drafting settlement documents.

The questions that raises belong in this course. Procedural justice research consistently finds that people's satisfaction with an outcome depends heavily on whether they felt heard and fairly treated — not only on what they received. An efficient automated process that resolves a dispute without anyone feeling listened to may produce settlements and not resolution, and that distinction is exactly what this course teaches. There are also real access-to-justice arguments on the other side: automated processes can serve people who could never afford a mediator or a lawyer, and comparing them against ideal representation rather than against no representation is a common error in the debate.

A student who finishes this course should be able to argue both halves of that — which is a more useful capability than a verdict, and is the same disposition the course teaches about conflict itself.

Academic integrity. Read your instructor's policy. The point specific to this course: the simulations and the reflective writing are where the skills and the self-awareness develop, and neither can be produced by anything other than doing them — which is a fortunate alignment, since the same is true of the conversations the course is preparing you for.