This volume offers a theoretical exploration of the concept of the communication system as a tool of social inquiry. Focusing on the discourse of conflict management, Arno explores the linkage between everyday communication about conflict, through talk and other forms of message exchange among individuals and groups, and large-scale societal conflicts and the institutions that shape change by maintaining dominant forms of communicative causation (cause and effect in social situations). This volume also develops a theory of the relationship between conflict and communication that demands ethnography as a theoretical necessity.