Avoiding War Making Peace

This book recapitulates and extends Ned Lebow’s decades’ long research on conflict management and resolution. It updates his critique of conventional and nuclear deterrence, analysis of reassurance, and the conditions in which international conflicts may be amenable to resolution, or failing that, a significant reduction in tensions. This text offers a holistic approach to conflict management and resolution by exploring interactions among deterrence, reassurance, and diplomacy, and how they might most effectively be staged and combined.

The Mumbai blasts of 1993, the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, Mumbai 26/11—cross-border terrorism has continued unabated. What can India do to motivate Pakistan to do more to prevent such attacks? In the nuclear times that we live in, where a military counter-attack could escalate to destruction beyond imagination, overt warfare is clearly not an option. But since outright peace-making seems similarly infeasible, what combination of coercive pressure and bargaining could lead to peace? The authors provide, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the violent and non-violent options available to India for compelling Pakistan to take concrete steps towards curbing terrorism originating in its homeland. They draw on extensive interviews with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, in service and retired, to explore the challenges involved in compellence and to show how non-violent coercion combined with clarity on the economic, social and reputational costs of terrorism can better motivate Pakistan to pacify groups involved in cross-border terrorism. Not War, Not Peace? goes beyond the much discussed theories of nuclear deterrence and counterterrorism strategy to explore a new approach to resolving old conflicts.

As recent conflicts in Panama and the Persian Gulf demonstrate, we know much more about making war than we do about making peace. Such conflicts are not likely to disappear, and this volume reviews what has and hasn't worked in negotiating an end to war. Six case studies-ranging from World War I to the Persian Gulf crisis-illustrate a variety of actors, stakes, and strategies involved in the peacemaking process. Key turning points toward peace or deadlock are identified along the way. Making Peace also provides discussion questions, historical backgrounds, and theoretical introductions to show different-and differentially successful-avenues to peace.

"On War" by Carl von Clausewitz (translated by J. J. Graham). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

During most of human history, war was a basic instrument of statecraft, considered, for the most part, a lawful, honorable, ennobling, and even romantic pursuit. By contrast, peacemaking remained a marginal and indeed incongruous interstate activity. A war would end when the belligerents ended it. The experience of the twentieth century’s two world wars has changed, at least, the official view. The introduction of ever more destructive weapons, the drastic escalation of civilian deaths, and the economic and environmental devastation that modern war brought combined to forge an international legal impulse to stop, if not prevent, wars, resolve ongoing conflicts, and build peace. Yet stopping a war, though a useful, if not indispensable, step toward making peace, does not lead ineluctably to peace. Nor does the international community’s interposition of “peacekeepers”; their title notwithstanding, peacekeepers only try to keep a stopped war stopped. Making peace is a separate operation, often applying some parts of the same armamentarium but in very different ways. International efforts at stopping wars and making peace, in the era in which such initiatives have become lawful and virtuous, have proved remarkably unsuccessful. Yet the proliferation of ever more destructive weapons, the growing sense of insecurity and expectation of violence, the increasing difficulty of containing wars within a single arena, the threat of breakdown of order, with the prospect of epidemics and mass migration, all work to intensify the demand to stop wars and to make peace. This volume explores these issues by analyzing the theoretical literature on stopping wars and making peace and its application to a number of concrete cases, including the Falklands, Nagorno Karabakh, Rwanda, Malaya, Thailand, and Mozambique. Each case examines one conflict and the efforts undertaken to stop it and transform it into a peace system. The case studies draw general lessons from the incidents studied, extracting guidelines and principles that might serve those called upon to stop wars and make peace and offering a number of instructive points.

Preventing War and Promoting Peace focuses on how health professionals can actively engage in the prevention of war and the promotion of peace.

The United States faces an increasingly turbulent world. The risk of violent conflict and other threats to international order presents a vexing dilemma: should the United States remain the principal guarantor of global peace and security with all its considerable commitments and potential pitfalls––not least new and costly military entanglements––that over time diminish its capacity and commitment to play this vital role or, alternatively, should it pull back from the world in the interests of conserving U.S. power, but at the possible cost of even greater threats emerging in the future? Paul B. Stares proposes an innovative and timely strategy—“preventive engagement”—to resolve America’s predicament. This approach entails pursuing three complementary courses of action: promoting policies known to lessen the risk of violent conflict over the long term; anticipating and averting those crises likely to lead to costly military commitments in the medium term; and managing ongoing conflicts in the short term before they escalate further and exert pressure on the United States to intervene. In each of these efforts, forging “preventive partnerships” with a variety of international actors, including the United Nations, regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and the business community, is essential. The need to think and act ahead that lies at the heart of a preventive engagement strategy requires the United States to become less shortsighted and reactive. Drawing on successful strategies in other areas, Preventive Engagement provides a detailed and comprehensive blueprint for the United States to shape the future and reduce the potential dangers ahead.