The intellectual debt for the title of my presentation, "Conflicts As Traps & Conflicting Entrapments", I owe to the anthropologist, Alfred Gell, whose powerful ideas still continually inspire me in all things anthropological.1 Here, rather than thinking of traps as art, or even art as traps, we may use some of Gell’s (1999) notions to explain conflict, particularly intractable conflict and conflict theory. My concern is with human entrapment. I employ metaphors of traps as a means of understanding how human actors become entrapped in conflict, and moreover, how researchers have become entrapped in a language of entrapment. By this I mean to explain on the one hand, the dilemma all humans face when confronted with conflict, particularly of the protracted kind, but importantly on the other hand, why intellectuals fall prey to ...