When the Root Does Not Coincide |
Why certain conflicts remain unintelligible to those outside them
Conflicts are usually explained in terms such as interests, strategy, or political errors. All of that exists, but it is not sufficient. If one wishes to understand why certain conflicts do not unravel — why they resist negotiation, diplomacy, and even the mere passage of time — one must go deeper. Much deeper.
Before action, before strategy, even before conscious perception, there is an element that determines everything: the manner in which each mind constructs its version of reality.
Two actors may be looking at the same event and yet not be seeing the same thing.
This divergence is neither accidental nor ideological in its origin. It is cognitive. And from there — from that invisible fracture in the foundations — everything else arises.
There exists a mechanism that connects the way reality is perceived with the most concrete consequences of a conflict. It is not a list of factors, but a causal chain in which each level drives the next: the cognitive mode generates a form of survival, which activates an identity, which filters perception, which crystallises into doctrine, which becomes a system, which produces actions, which generate consequences, which feed back into the original cognitive mode. When the cycle closes, it reinforces itself. And each iteration makes it more rigid.
To trace this chain from the beginning allows one to understand why some conflicts do not resolve, even when there appears to be a willingness to do so.
0. The Point of Departure: how reality is constructed
Everything begins with what may be called the cognitive mode: the fundamental way in which an actor — individual, institution, culture — organises its experience of the world. There are two basic modes.
The sequential mode perceives isolated facts, orders events along a timeline, and reacts to the immediate. The world, seen from this perspective, is a succession of discrete causes and effects. The structural mode, by contrast, detects relationships and patterns: it seeks coherence between parts, reads systems, connects what appears dispersed into families of meaning.
Neither is superior. But they are irreducibly different. In practice, most actors operate somewhere between the two — the distinction marks a dominant tendency, not a sealed category. And even as a tendency, it determines what counts as reality for each actor. Before any negotiation begins, before demands are formulated or red lines are drawn, two parties operating under opposing cognitive modes are already inhabiting different worlds.
1. The Trigger: the perception of threat
When something is perceived as an existential threat, the system shifts register. It no longer optimises the understanding of the environment; it optimises protection against it. Concession becomes risk. Negotiation becomes potential loss. Trust becomes vulnerability.
What matters here is not whether the risk is objectively real. What matters is that it is felt to be real. And that feeling is already filtered through the cognitive mode: one who perceives in sequences will see a punctual threat and react to that event; one who perceives in patterns will see a structural threat and read the same event as a symptom of something deeper. The response will be radically different, even though the stimulus is identical.
2. The Trap of Identity
The perception of threat activates an even more difficult mechanism to disengage: identity. At that moment, the question ceases to be practical and becomes existential. It is no longer “what do we lose if we concede?”, but “who are we if we concede?”.
A strategy can be changed. An identity cannot.
This is where most negotiation processes that appeared technically viable become blocked. Not because acceptable formulas cannot be found, but because accepting any formula would imply ceasing to be what one believes oneself to be. The conflict has ceased to be political. It has become ontological.
3. Filtered Perception: there are no shared facts
Activated identity does not only define who one is; it also determines what one sees. The same facts pass through opposing filters and produce incompatible interpretations. What for one actor is a defensive measure is, for the other, aggression. What one describes as a legitimate reaction, the other registers as disproportionate threat.
At this point, there is no longer a shared reality upon which negotiation could be based. And because the cognitive modes were different from the outset, the distance between the two readings grows faster than any diplomatic effort can compensate.
4. Doctrine: when perception becomes a frame
What is repeatedly perceived stabilises into something harder: doctrine. A fixed way of interpreting the world, of deciding what is right, and of justifying action. One who operates in a sequential mode develops a reactive doctrine, built upon accumulated events. One who operates in a structural mode develops a doctrine of systemic coherence, which validates itself with each new piece of information.
Doctrine is not debated internally. It is assumed. And from it, what is unthinkable is defined before it is even proposed.
5. The System: when doctrine takes form
Doctrine does not remain abstract. It becomes structure: a military apparatus, intelligence, a political class, decision-making processes, institutions that reproduce their own logics. Here occurs the most difficult point of reversal.
What began as the perception of an individual or founding group is no longer what someone thinks, but what the system demands. The system acquires its own inertia. And the original cognitive mode remains embedded within it, invisible but active, conditioning every decision without being made explicit or questioned.
6. Action: the only visible layer
This is what is seen from the outside: troop movements, statements, sanctions, negotiations that collapse, agreements that are not upheld. Action is the tip of the iceberg — the only thing recorded in headlines, diplomatic reports, geopolitical analyses.
But action does not explain the conflict. It merely expresses it. Those who attempt to resolve the conflict exclusively at this level are treating symptoms while the underlying condition continues to operate below.
7–8. Consequence and Feedback: the cycle closes
Every action produces effects. Some are material: damage, loss, shifts in the balance of power. But the most enduring effects are narrative: they confirm or refute the story each actor tells about the other and about itself.
Feedback is the moment in which the system closes and consolidates. “We were right.” “We cannot concede.” “The threat was real.” And above all: the original cognitive mode is reinforced. The cycle begins again, but with greater rigidity, greater urgency, and less room for doubt.
Why it does not resolve
From the outside, a deep conflict appears to be a matter of political will. If both sides wished, they could negotiate, reduce tension, find a reasonable middle ground. This view is not false. But it operates too high up.
The real problem lies below: in cognitive modes that generate incompatible realities from the outset; in perceptions of threat that do not respond to objective evidence; in identities that have incorporated the conflict into their own definition; in systems that function with their own inertia even as the individuals within them change.
It is not disagreement. It is the absence of a shared reality before the conversation even begins.
A deep conflict is not a dispute of ideas that could be resolved through better arguments. It is an entire system operating in a loop, in which each level feeds the next and the cycle closes upon itself.
As long as the chain remains active — from cognitive mode to feedback — the conflict does not disappear. It merely changes form. It is managed, frozen, redirected. But not resolved. For it is not enough to have intelligence, nor sufficient to possess goodwill, nor enough to reach technically correct agreements.
At its core, the issue is not what is to be done. What is being defended is how the world is seen, who one is, and whether one can continue to be.
Up to this point, the model explains why conflicts become rigid. There is, however, a point at which they do not merely harden, but pass into a different category — beyond what negotiation, transformation, or time can achieve.
That point emerges when the relationship between identities is no longer merely incompatible, but mutually exclusive. It is no longer a question of two actors seeing the world differently — nor even of their failing to share a common reality. It is something more radical: that the existence of one stands in direct contradiction to the identity of the other. That one of the identities — in its doctrinal form — contains the negation of the other as a condition of its own coherence.
At this level, asymmetry becomes decisive. And the problem ceases to be epistemological.
It becomes ontological.
No longer the question of how reality is interpreted — but what, within that reality, is permitted to exist.
This changes the entire frame. The implicit assumption of resolvability — that both sides might name their perception, sustain their identity without threat, and reconfigure their relationship — no longer holds. There is no middle ground if one of the frameworks excludes the existence of the other. In such a case, the chain does not merely close. It is sealed.
And when a system is sealed at that level, the kind of change that could open it lies outside negotiation, diplomacy, or conventional conflict management. It would require a transformation of identity itself — neither enforceable from the outside nor accelerable through agreement. Something that cannot be planned, only recognised when it occurs.
As long as that condition persists, the conflict will not be resolved. It will be contained, displaced, managed. But it will remain. In different language, in different form, perhaps even with different actors.
But with the same root.