This article draws on the existing literature, interviews, and case study analysis to highlight the primacy of honor needs above health and safety needs in the context of honor killings and blood feuds among Israel's Arab community, including Muslims, Christians, and Druze. Assuming that individuals in conflict situations will generally act to satisfy more basic needs before they act to satisfy less basic needs, this article examines conflict contexts in which disputants perceive their honor to be a higher priority than their health and safety, and consequently, they tend to act accordingly to satisfy their perceived honor needs first, often ignoring obvious health and safety‐related needs. Such insights could have important implications for scholars and dispute resolution practitioners studying and working within these conflict contexts.

Honor, as a “folkloristic, emotive” value (Wikan, 1984), has long been recognized as central to the Middle Eastern inter‐ and intracommunal dispute resolution tradition of Sulha (Lang, 2002). This article highlights the centrality of honor to conciliation facilitation in Sulha and demonstrates the utilitarian, rather than folkloristic, use of honor within Sulha's distinct functional stages. Further, it shows how disputants and interveners alike wield honor extensively as a purposeful, task‐specific tool to maneuver for position before and during the deliberations, move the process along (or postpone its progress), facilitate an agreement, and ensure the durability of the agreement.

Purpose -This paper aims to locate, describe and analyze the mechanism and impact of women's informal role within the formally male-only Sulha -a prevalent, inter/intra-communal dispute resolution process practiced by Muslim, Christian and Druze Arabs in Israel and in many other regions of the Middle East and the Muslim world. Furthermore, this paper seeks to explore the way men's formal roles and women's informal roles interact within the Sulha's strict patriarchal settings. Design/methodology/approach -The first section of this paper uses interviews, participant observation and existing literature to locate, describe and analyze the specific ways in which women informally participate in and impact on the Sulha process. The second section uses a questionnaire, interviews, existing literature and analysis to examine the attitudes of men and women regarding women's current and future roles in Sulha. Findings -The paper demonstrates that the formal (male-only) visible part of the Sulha process coexists alongside a significant, yet mostly invisible, informal contribution of women -at each stage of the process. Furthermore, the paper shows that both men and women are cognizant of the informal role women play in Sulha, and that both men and women are open to a possible future expansion of the role of women in Sulha, including into formal roles. Originality/value -The paper highlights the need to seek and evaluate informal, sometimes invisible, yet significant contributions of women to traditional dispute resolution processes in strict patriarchal cultures.

About 3,500 Darfuri male (and a few female) asylum seekers live in Israel. Th e majority are 25 to 40 years old. Older men, including village and community dignitaries, stand little chance of surviving the brutal trek.In Darfur, where most inhabitants live in small villages, inter-and intracommunal confl icts are traditionally resolved through the customary justice process of Judiya . But in Israel, Darfuri asylum seekers no longer reside with their kin groups (villages, tribes, clans); instead they often cohabit with asylum seekers from other tribes, clans, and villages, living in crowded conditions, mostly in the poor south side of Tel Aviv-a situation that gives rise to multiple small confl icts.In the absence of their familiar tribal structure, dignitaries, and other interveners, the refugees have no access to the traditional dispute resolution mechanisms they have grown up with. Furthermore, these asylum seekers avoid bringing their confl icts to the attention of the Israeli authorities, for fear of endangering their asylum petitions. Th e result is that this community fi nds itself trying to cope with diffi cult, intracommunal, confl ict-rich conditions, without being able to use either traditional confl ict resolution mechanisms or local formal justice processes.Th e response of the Darfuri asylum seekers community to this circumstance has been to develop their own multitier, quasi-customary intracommunal dispute resolution mechanism. Th is new mechanism combines elements of their traditional, Darfur-based processes, along 112 PELY Conflict Resolution Quarterly • DOI: 10.1002/crq with newly constructed modifi cations designed to compensate for the missing elements (e.g., lack of village elders) and make use of available resources (e.g., young community activists).Th is article employs analysis of multiple interviews and review of relevant literature to identify and describe the unique, informal dispute resolution mechanism that the Darfuri community developed in Israel.Insights developed in this article may help community activists, municipalities, policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, and other individuals and organizations in understanding and facilitating alternative dispute resolution mechanisms within similarly structured and similarly aff ected displaced persons and asylum seeker communities around the world.