Conceptualizing and Measuring Hope During Conflict

Hope is relevant for any negotiation process and especially central during conflict. But what is hope and how can it be measured? These central questions are investigated in this chapter taken from my new sole-authored book titled "Hope Amidst Conflict. The exploration into the meaning of hope is done by diving into hope’s properties and structure. As a first step, I extract and examine hope’s elemental components, namely, the desire to attain a goal and the belief in the possibility of attaining it. I then scrutinize existing conceptualizations of hope, especially those introduced in research on hope and conflict, and show that these conceptualizations fail to capture the two components accurately. Next, I introduce the Bidimensional Model of Hope, explore its advantages and shortcomings, and offer a novel way the measure hope based on the bidimensional conceptualization. Lastly, I demonstrate the utility of the Bidimensional Model of Hope in comparing the hopes for peace of citizens trapped in an intractable conflict.