Dennis Sandole’s Three Pillar Framework for Conflict Analysis

Conflicts rarely appear out of nowhere. Long before protests fill the streets or violence erupts, tensions usually build quietly beneath the surface. Understanding this progression is exactly what Dennis Sandole, a founding member of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, set out to map. His three-pillar framework gives students of peace and conflict studies a systematic way to break down any conflict, from a neighbourhood land dispute to a full-blown insurgency, and to figure out where it stands and how to respond. This post explains the framework in detail, walks through how conflicts move from hidden tensions to open violence, and shows why this classification matters for designing effective interventions.

Who is Dennis Sandole and what problem was he solving? 🔗

Dennis J.D. Sandole was a professor of conflict resolution and international relations who spent decades studying why conflicts turn violent and how outsiders can intervene. He published his framework in a 1998 article titled A Comprehensive Mapping of Conflict and Conflict Resolution: A Three Pillar Approach in the journal Peace and Conflict Studies.

Sandole was writing during the 1990s, a period marked by the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide. He was deeply concerned by the worldwide rise in intrastate conflicts (conflicts within states) as opposed to interstate conflicts (conflicts between states). His worry was simple but urgent: there were very few mechanisms in place to stop a brewing conflict from becoming the next Yugoslavia or Rwanda. He believed that before anyone could intervene effectively, they first needed a reliable way to “map” a conflict, much like a doctor diagnosing a patient before prescribing treatment.

That mapping exercise became his three-pillar framework. Importantly, Sandole designed it as a generic theory, meaning it works across all levels of conflict, whether interpersonal, intergroup, interorganizational, or international. The same basic structure that explains a workplace dispute can help explain an ethnic war.

The three pillars at a glance 🔗

The framework is built around three connected pillars. Sandole pictured them side by side, with the conflict itself sitting in the centre as the main subject of study.

Pillar 1: Conflict 🔗

This is the heart of the framework, the conflict we are actually trying to understand. Sandole asked analysts to examine six elements of any conflict: the parties involved, the issues they are fighting over, the objectives they hope to achieve, the means they use, their orientations towards conflict and conflict handling, and the environment in which the conflict plays out. Crucially, this first pillar is where Sandole introduces his famous three-level classification of conflict: latent conflict, manifest conflict processes, and aggressive manifest conflict processes. We will unpack these shortly, as they form the core of the syllabus topic.

Pillar 2: Conflict causes and conditions 🔗

The second pillar asks why the conflict exists. Sandole argued that causes operate at four different levels, often called the “four worlds” model: the individual level, the societal level, the international level, and the global or ecological level. A conflict over a river, for example, might have individual causes (a leader’s ambition), societal causes (competition between communities), international causes (a border treaty), and ecological causes (water scarcity due to climate change). Looking at all four prevents an oversimplified diagnosis.

Pillar 3: Conflict intervention 🔗

The third pillar covers what to do about the conflict. Sandole outlined a range of third-party objectives that an intervener might pursue: conflict prevention, management, settlement, resolution, and transformation. He also distinguished between different intervention styles, such as competitive versus cooperative approaches, and the pursuit of negative peace (simply stopping the violence) versus positive peace (addressing the deeper injustices that fuel conflict). The famous distinction between negative and positive peace comes from the peace scholar Johan Galtung, whose ideas heavily influenced this part of Sandole’s work.

The three levels of conflict in Pillar 1 🔗

For most students, the most useful and frequently tested part of this framework is the classification of conflict into three levels of intensity. Sandole saw conflict not as a fixed state but as a dynamic process that moves through phases of initiation, escalation, controlled maintenance, management, and possibly termination. These three categories capture that movement from invisible tension to open violence.

Latent conflict 🔗

A latent conflict is one that has not yet become observable. The underlying tensions exist, but the parties have not started actively pursuing their incompatible goals against one another. Sandole referred to this as the pre-MCP stage, meaning it comes before a manifest conflict process begins.

This is essentially a conflict waiting to happen. The seeds, such as competing claims over resources, unaddressed grievances, structural inequality, or clashing values, are already planted, but they have not yet sprouted into visible disputes. The political theorist Christopher Mitchell, in his work on the structure of conflict, similarly described latent conflict as a situation where parties hold mutually incompatible goals but are not yet acting on them.

From an intervention standpoint, this is the ideal stage to act. Sandole used the analogy of a house: at the latent stage, the parties may not be “talking,” but at least the house is not yet “on fire.” Catching tensions here, through dialogue and early warning systems, is what conflict prevention is all about. An example would be quiet resentment building in a community over unequal access to government schemes, before any organised protest has formed.

Manifest conflict processes (MCP) 🔗

A manifest conflict process is a conflict that has become observable but remains non-violent. Sandole defined an MCP precisely: it is a situation in which at least two parties try to pursue their perceptions of mutually incompatible goals by undermining, directly or indirectly, each other’s ability to reach those goals.

The key word here is undermining, not destroying. At this stage, the conflict is out in the open. People argue, organise, negotiate, file lawsuits, hold demonstrations, and compete openly. But they have not crossed the line into physical violence against one another. Sandole made an important point that an MCP is not necessarily a bad thing. It can act as an “early warning” sign that something has gone wrong in a relationship and needs attention before it deteriorates further.

Many of the most visible disputes in public life sit at this level. Organised, largely peaceful protests, parliamentary debates, trade union actions, and court battles are all examples of conflicts that are manifest but not violent. The challenge for third parties here is to channel the energy of the dispute towards constructive outcomes through mediation, negotiation, and structured dialogue before it escalates.

Aggressive manifest conflict processes (AMCP) 🔗

An aggressive manifest conflict process is the most dangerous level. Sandole defined it as a situation in which parties pursue their incompatible goals by physically damaging or destroying each other’s property and high-value symbols, such as religious shrines or national monuments, and/or by psychologically or physically injuring, destroying, or forcibly eliminating one another.

This is the stage where the conflict has turned violent and destructive. It involves armed confrontation, killing, the destruction of property, and the deliberate targeting of symbols that hold deep meaning for the other side. Sandole’s central concern, the question that motivated the entire framework, was this: how do MCPs become AMCPs, and how can we prevent that transformation? His worry about “future Yugoslavias” was precisely a worry about non-violent conflicts spiralling into genocidal violence.

Insurgencies, communal riots, civil wars, and ethnic cleansing all belong to this category. Once a conflict reaches the AMCP stage, the intervention task becomes far harder. The immediate priority shifts to stopping the violence, after which longer processes of healing, reconciliation, and rebuilding can begin.

How conflicts move between levels 🔗

One of the most valuable insights of the framework is that these levels are not permanent boxes. A conflict can move from latent to manifest, from manifest to aggressive, and ideally back down again through de-escalation. Sandole captured this with his image of the burning house: a third party would much rather intervene before the fire starts than try to put it out once it is raging.

Several factors can push a conflict up the ladder. Catalytic events, such as a controversial law or a provocative incident, can suddenly crystallise tensions that had been simmering for years. Resource competition can turn quiet rivalries into open disputes when supplies become scarce. And a breakdown in communication can transform a manageable disagreement into something far more dangerous, as parties begin to overperceive and overreact to each other, generating what Sandole called conflict spirals.

It is worth remembering that progression is not always linear. A conflict can leap quickly from latent to aggressive if a triggering event is severe enough, or it can hover at the manifest stage for years without ever turning violent. The framework describes tendencies, not iron laws.

Why the framework matters for intervention 🔗

The real payoff of classifying a conflict is that it tells you what kind of response is appropriate. As the conflict scholar Paul Wehr put it, mapping is the first step in intervening to manage a conflict. Matching the intervention to the stage is the whole point.

At the latent stage, the goal is prevention. This means early warning, quiet diplomacy, and addressing grievances before they harden. At the manifest stage, the focus is constructive engagement, using mediation, negotiation, legal processes, and compromise to keep the dispute non-violent and steer it towards settlement. At the aggressive stage, the immediate need is to stop the violence and protect people, followed by humanitarian assistance and longer-term peacebuilding, including reconciliation processes to address past wounds.

This logic connects directly to the wider field of conflict resolution. Bodies such as the United Nations structure their peace work along similar lines, distinguishing between conflict prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding, each suited to a different phase of conflict. Sandole’s framework gives a clear theoretical grounding for why these distinct tools are needed at different moments.

Applying the framework to real situations 🔗

The framework becomes clearer with examples drawn from familiar contexts. A simmering dispute between communities over access to land or water, before any open confrontation, sits at the latent level. Large but largely peaceful movements, such as organised farmer mobilisations or student demonstrations against a policy, with negotiations and media attention but without sustained violence, fit the manifest level. And prolonged armed struggles, such as insurgencies involving repeated armed clashes between security forces and militant groups, illustrate the aggressive level, where what may have begun as latent grievances over land or rights have escalated into organised violence.

Mapping a conflict this way helps analysts ask better questions. Where exactly does this conflict stand right now? Which direction is it moving? What would it take to push it towards de-escalation rather than escalation? These are the practical questions the framework is designed to answer.

Strengths and limitations 🔗

The framework’s biggest strength is its comprehensiveness. By combining the conflict itself, its causes, and its possible interventions into a single map, it links theory to practice in a way many earlier models did not. Sandole was explicit that he wanted to bridge the “two-culture problem” between academics who study conflict and practitioners who actually try to resolve it. Its generic nature also makes it flexible enough to apply across very different scales of conflict.

At the same time, the framework has limits. Real conflicts are messy, and they do not always slot neatly into three tidy categories. The boundaries between manifest and aggressive conflict can blur, and a single large conflict may contain pockets at all three levels simultaneously. Critics also note that detailed mapping requires deep knowledge of a conflict, which is not always available in fast-moving crises. Sandole himself later refined his model into an “enhanced three-pillar framework” to address some of these complexities, as discussed in the Journal of Peace, Conflict and Development.

What do you think? 🔗

Reflect on these questions: Think of a current dispute you have read about in the news. Which of Sandole’s three levels, latent, manifest, or aggressive, best describes it right now, and what early signs might have warned us before it reached its current stage? And do you think it is always possible to detect a latent conflict before it becomes manifest, or are some conflicts genuinely impossible to see coming?

References

1. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/pcs/vol5/iss2/4/
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002234336900600301
3. https://turnerconflict.wordpress.com/theoretical-approaches-ii-conflict-as-a-process/
4. https://www.un.org/en/our-work/maintain-international-peace-and-security
5. https://www.bradford.ac.uk/library/library-resources/journal-of-peace-conflict-and-development/peacebuilding.pdf