In an excellent article in the New York Times, Christy Wampole, Associate Professor at Princeton University, explains how abstractions in politics can have deadly consequences. She suggests that generalized concepts …
Lebanon (and Chile and Iraq) are an example to us all
This image says it almost all. A proposed tax on WhatsApp calls and suddenly there is a revolutionary movement. As it demonstrates, there were many other issues, and much build …
Black Box Thinking
The great British economist John Maynard Keynes is reputed to have once quipped to someone, “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?” In his …
Turning Down the Heat
As the political temperature rises across the world, John Bell, Ivan Tyrrell and John Zada explain why they founded The Conciliators Guild, and their hopes for it. TYRRELL: We are …
The Righteous Mind
We are without doubt living in an era of polarised thinking, marked by much bickering across social and political lines. Although the tendency for humans to sort themselves along ideological …
What’s Behind the US-North Korean Rapprochement?
North and South Korea appear to be finding their way to peaceful relations after decades of conflict and strife. The Korean dispute has been addressed by more traditional diplomatic and …
The Wild Country of Cult Thinking
In April of this year Netflix released a documentary series called Wild Wild Country which chronicles the conflict in the early 1980s between a new-age sex-cult in Wasco County, Oregon, …
Jihadi Culture
THIS book is a collection of studies about the cultural practices of jihadis and poses the important question of why these fighters spend so much time on rituals, music, films, …
The Great Attention Heist
The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) is running a piece co-written by CG founders John Zada & John Bell on Tim Wu’s book The Attention Merchants. To give and receive …
The Human Journey
As an initiative working to highlight the role of underlying human motivations in politics, The Conciliators Guild draws upon research from disciplines that shed light on our origins and development …