Teaching Theories of Conflict
Ken Fox
Ken Fox is founding Director of Conflict Studies and Professor of Critical Thinking and Conflict Management at Hamline University. He is also a Senior Fellow in Mitchell Hamline School of Law’s Dispute Resolution Institute. He regularly teaches Business Law, Critical Thinking, Mediation, Negotiation, Perspectives on Conflict and Change, and Theories of Conflict. He also teaches courses on public sector dispute resolution, introduction to peace and conflict studies, relational perspectives on conflict, and approaches to conflict response, among other conflict-related courses.
Professor Fox publishes in the areas of negotiation, mediation, conflict theory and reflective practice. He is a Fulbright Senior Specialist grantee in Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies and, for more than a decade, was part of the leadership team for a series of interconnected U.S. State Department-funded peacebuilding and conflict transformation projects in-region among Israeli, Jordanian, Lebanese, and Palestinian educators, local civic and business leaders. In addition, he has taught, trained, or consulted in the conflict field across the U.S. and in 19 countries on four continents.
Conflict Theories and Perspectivism Teaching Materials
Most conflict and dispute resolution courses focus on skills – what to do when working with parties in response to conflict. Examples include courses that offer an overview of dispute resolution process options and courses that are process-specific in response to conflict, such as arbitration, mediation, and negotiation, among others. Courses may also introduce select theories that support specific process skills being studied. However, it is not as common to find courses whose primary focus is to help students and practitioners build critical thinking and foundational insights from multiple perspectives into the nature and experience of the conflicts with which they will work.
Beginning in 1997, Ken first co-developed, and has since continuously evolved and refined, various undergraduate, graduate and professional courses, curricula, and training programs focusing on a broad and multi-disciplinary range of insights about the nature and experience of conflict. He has found that deeper, broader, and more critically reflective insights into the nature and experience of conflict are important to help students and practitioners develop and refine a language and organizing framework to know when, how and why different skills are more or less appropriate and useful in different contexts, regardless of process.
The resources linked below are organized to complement and apply concepts from the book Perspectives on Conflict: Insights for Professional and Personal Practice, by Kenneth H. Fox (New York: Bloomsbury, 2026). The linked resources can be used to organize a complete course, individual course modules, or discrete activities within courses, trainings and workshops that explore conflict itself. In addition, the resources include suggestions and links to additional and alternative readings and supplemental teaching materials.
Copyright Permissions
Unless otherwise noted, the materials linked here are copyrighted by Kenneth H. Fox. They are available to instructors for use at no charge for non-commercial educational purposes. Instructors may copy or modify (create derivative works of) the various materials to suit their classroom, teaching or training needs, so long as the materials retain their copyright notice and attribution. Any other use is prohibited unless authorized in advance in writing by the copyright holder.