“Social conflict is both a cause and a consequence of social change.” Explain. (2016)
The statement asserts a feedback loop rather than two separate propositions. Change disturbs an existing distribution of resources and honour; the disturbance produces conflict; conflict forces redistribution; and redistribution is itself further change. Georg Simmel established the premise by treating conflict as a form of sociation — a relationship, not its breakdown.
Conflict as a cause of change
- Karl Marx supplies the strongest version. Within every mode of production the forces of production develop until the relations of production become a fetter on them; the contradiction is expressed as class struggle, and at a certain point the relations are burst asunder. Conflict is thus the mechanism by which one epoch becomes another.
- Ralf Dahrendorf (Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, 1959) generalised it beyond property. Every imperatively coordinated association divides those who command from those who obey, so conflict is universal; but where it is institutionalised through bargaining and courts, it yields continuous incremental change instead of rupture.
- Indian illustration: the farmers’ movement of 2020–21 compelled the repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021 — conflict producing a direct reversal of state policy. Earlier, the Dalit movement and the Chipko and Narmada struggles reshaped law on caste atrocity, forests and rehabilitation.
Conflict as a consequence of change
- Change redistributes life chances before norms catch up. Émile Durkheim located the danger in the anomie of a rapidly expanding division of labour, where regulation lags differentiation; William F. Ogburn’s cultural lag describes the same interval on the technological side.
- Robert K. Merton’s strain theory and W. G. Runciman’s relative deprivation explain who reacts: conflict follows not absolute want but the gap between rising expectations and available means.
- Indian illustration: the Green Revolution raised output and simultaneously sharpened agrarian conflict between landowning and landless castes; Mandal’s extension of reservation in 1990 provoked immediate counter-agitation; and competition over land, forest and Scheduled Tribe status underlies the ethnic conflict in Manipur since May 2023.
Why the loop holds
Lewis A. Coser (The Functions of Social Conflict, 1956) explains the difference between societies that absorb this cycle and those broken by it. Conflict inside a flexible structure clarifies boundaries, builds alliances and acts as a safety valve, producing adaptive change; a rigid structure that suppresses conflict accumulates it until it shatters. Coser thereby converts the statement from a paradox into a testable proposition about institutional design.
Qualifications
- Not all conflict changes anything: ritualised, repressed or displaced conflict may stabilise the very order it protests, which is Coser’s own functionalist concession.
- Not all change is conflictual. Talcott Parsons’s moving equilibrium and structural differentiation describe adaptation without struggle, and demographic or technological change often proceeds by quiet accommodation.
- The loop is uneven: conflict redistributes power to those already organised, so the unorganised poor may bear the change and not the gain.
Conclusion
The statement is best read as a claim about mechanism: conflict is the medium through which structural strain is converted into institutional change. Its practical value lies in Coser’s corollary — a society that institutionalises conflict changes continuously and survives; one that forbids it changes suddenly and does not.