I was reading an editorial in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago about the leaked Supreme Court decision on overturning Roe v Wade. The piece notes that even though a large number of Americans have what they refer to as “nuanced” views on abortion, all the attention is given to extreme views.
Why is this, the editorial wonders. Because it’s in some people’s interest to stoke extreme emotions about the issue. These people are what the piece calls conflict entrepreneurs.
According to the editorial, the term conflict entrepreneurs appears in a book by the journalist Amanda Ripley that examines why issues get so polarized. As it says in the WaPo piece:
Some individuals and organizations are served by any conflict that pits two sides against each other — that makes partisanship and polarization more entrenched, and that drives up emotions of loathing and anger.
The word entrepreneur in conflict entrepreneur in this case is somewhat metaphorical. Some people might promote conflict for a direct profit, sure. My first thought was that an arms dealer could be considered a conflict entrepreneur.
Yes and no. One article I found discusses conflict entrepreneur in this way: “A conflict entrepreneur is any individual, group or organization that profits from violent conflicts through the sale of weapons, goods and services to both the parties at war.” But an arms dealer is a profiteer—they profit from the conflict, but they aren’t necessarily the ones creating or encouraging it. A conflict entrepreneur is someone who does both things. From the same article: “The image of the conflict entrepreneur carries the implication of massive influence and power used to actively cause wars for personal gain, rather than merely passively profiting from them.” So, for example, the military-industrial complex at large.
I have to say that as I was trying to think of examples of a real conflict entrepreneur, meaning entrepreneur in the business sense, my first thought was Sylvester McMonkey McBean in The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss.
You could argue that some politicians fuel conflict to keep their base amped up and to keep the monetary contributions flowing. Similarly, the entire shtick of some media figures is selling outrage, and for some of them that has been astoundingly lucrative. These are entrepreneurial activities, right?
But Ripley sometimes uses conflict entrepreneur with a pretty generous notion of entrepreneur. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, she uses the term for someone who seems to thrive on chaos, often just for personal satisfaction: “Sometimes they do this for profit, but more often for attention or power.” She talks about conflict entrepreneurs at work, like people who send inflammatory emails or monger rumors about the work environment or just generally cause trouble—a conflict entrepreneur as an HR problem.
In addition to trying to get a handle on how exactly the term conflict entrepreneur is used, I wondered where it had come from. The WaPo article says that Amanda Ripley uses the term, but they don’t explicitly say that she invented it. A quick search made it clear that Ripley’s use of the term is where a lot of people learned it. But no, it’s not her term, although she’s written a lot about conflict entrepreneurs. Her book came out in 2021; the HBR article is also from 2021.
The other article I cited, the one that talks about “massive influence and power,” was published in 2014. I tried to see how much further back I could find references to conflict entrepreneur. An article in the Journal of International Affairs from 2004 discusses conflict entrepreneurs. (This article discusses the distinction that I mentioned earlier: “In most conflicts there are actors who profit from conflict. […] The interests of the conflict entrepreneur and the profiteer may often coincide, but this is not always the case.”)
The research proved fascinating to me in terms of reading studies in which people analyzed conflicts in Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans, and other locales. It appears that there’s been a lot of work in trying to understand civil conflict.
But I’ll spare you all that. A footnote in one of the reports (PDF) says this: “The concept of ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ was introduced in a report to the UN Subcommission on Human Rights in the 1994 report on Peaceful Resolution of Situations Involving Minorities, submitted by Asbjørn Eide.” I could go on looking, but I’m going to declare that I’ve found my original source for the term.
It’s interesting to see how the term has evolved from a specific context—civil-political conflicts—to be useful for the level of interpersonal relationships.
For me, learning the term conflict entrepreneur is another example of finding a term for a phenomenon that I sort of understood but didn’t have vocabulary for. Having a label makes it easier to identify.
If only I’d know the term when I first read The Sneetches.
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