Competition (concurrent + obstacling): in real life, it often happens that two agents that concur towards their goals also make obstacling and aggression acts in order to ensure their success.
In a contest, two candidates can concur without competing: for example, in a football match the players cannot directly act on other players: if they make an act of aggression, then it's a penalty.
It is not always easy to distinguish between aggression, obstacling and competition. These cathegories mix in a complex reality. These types are not separated in a clear-cut way: they are a like focal point on a continuous line that starts from a situation of orientation towards an external goal, keeps going towards an augmentation of the intervetions on other people's action, until arriving there where the original goal ends up having a secondary role in front of the will to act on and against the other actor, that is, there where aggression becomes the goal itself. This gradual process is the process of *escalation*.
There are three big phases of conflict evolution: (Glasl 1997)
win/win: mainly cooperative aspects, prevailing over the objective contradictions
win/lose: there is the belief that the conflict can be resolved only in favor of one side; attitudes and perceptions acquire an outstanding importance
lose/lose: damaging the other even at the price of suffering: violence enters the game
This is not a forced path, and our hope is to become able to activate a process of *de-escalation*.