The word "conflict" is a learned term deriving from the Latin conflictus, that comes from the verb confligere composed of the prefix cum (with) and the verb fligere (strike against). The prefix cum showed that the strike was not unilateral but involved at least two parties: i.e. it was also a fight, a battle or a dispute and these meanings are still in the word "conflict" today. The current more general and comprehensive value of this word is that of "clash" between individuals, groups, peoples and even cultures.
The idea of conflict is surely crucial to the system of knowledge of contemporary social studies. Evidence of its importance is the vast literature devoted to it in the different social sciences: economics, cultural anthropology, social psychology and sociology. Unincidentally, the idea of conflict has become a key issue to understand the complex social phenomenology of our time and represents the core of a multiple approach general theory whence a separate science, polemology, originates.
Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher who lived in the 5th century B.C., maintained that war, polemos, moves all things: "war is common and strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife". Heraclitus saw the kosmos as an ongoing process where everything is perpetually moving and changing by way of a constant conflict that involves all things. Existence is constant transformation in time, being in conflict with what is, what was and what will be.
Conflicts belong to human life in any period and society. No conflict can persist unchanged in time, otherwise all parties are in a way losers. What changes is the response to conflicts. The methods used by social systems to regulate conflicts are different and change in time and only partly do they depend on the way conflicts arise: sometimes the opposite is true and the way conflicts arise depends on the available remedies. The link between conflicts and their remedies depends therefore on a number of variables: "the conflict/remedy circuit is an ecological play in a multifaceted system" (Eligio Resta, Giudicare, conciliare, mediare, in Scaparro F., ed., Il coraggio di mediare, Guerini, Milano 2001, p. 23). What ultimately matters is not the elimination of conflicts, but the way they are managed. A community can be obviously deeply damaged by a bad conflict management, but conflict isn't actually good or bad in itself, but its management can be. Conflict is a fact, an event, a neutral phenomenon that through our appreciation can become useful or useless, positive or negative and so on. It depends on the way we see it.
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