The difference between how the historian sees and understands history and how the practitioner of conflict analysis and resolution sees and understands history can be found in the difference between the emic and the etic; the internal and the external as it relates to membership within the story. The historian is an internal component of the collective that he writes about, subject to their approval and acceptance. The practitioner of conflict analysis & resolution is an external evaluator who seeks not to make meaning interior to the collective, but rather to understand the meaning that the collective has already made or is making and what their underlying reasons or needs are for making that meaning. The historian is an authorized maker-of-meaning whether his authorization arrives from a university degree or stems from his own self proclaimed expertise as a narrator of his chosen subject. As a maker-of-meaning, the historian interprets the words and actions of the great and mighty and the lowly and victimized to create an account of past lived experience. Like legal precedent, the historian seeks to build upon what has already been promulgated and accepted, deviating only where he can field logical and convincing arguments to the consumers of that historical meaning-making. Where he finds acceptance, he writes history. The acceptance he finds represents not truth, but an essential construction of the historical narrative of the audience that consumes his product. The construction is essential because it provides for a basic human need; the psychological sociological connection of the individual to the collective and the collective to the society of humans.
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