International Conflict Resolution After The Cold War

The end of the Cold War has changed the shape of organized violence in the world and the ways in which governments and others try to set its limits. Even the concept of international conflict is broadening to include ethnic conflicts and other kinds of violence within national borders that may affect international peace and security. What is not yet clear is whether or how these changes alter the way actors on the world scene should deal with conflict: Do the old methods still work? Are there new tools that could work better? How do old and new methods relate to each other? International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War critically examines evidence on the effectiveness of a dozen approaches to managing or resolving conflict in the world to develop insights for conflict resolution practitioners. It considers recent applications of familiar conflict management strategies, such as the use of threats of force, economic sanctions, and negotiation. It presents the first systematic assessments of the usefulness of some less familiar approaches to conflict resolution, including truth commissions, "engineered" electoral systems, autonomy arrangements, and regional organizations. It also opens up analysis of emerging issues, such as the dilemmas facing humanitarian organizations in complex emergencies. This book offers numerous practical insights and raises key questions for research on conflict resolution in a transforming world system.

This book presents papers on different perspectives in tackling the economic, racial and other injustices which generate conflict. The papers infer that the nuclear threat provides the most urgent manifestation of the inadequacy of war as a means of resolving differences between nations.

An interdisciplinary approach to the politics of peace

What constitutes a `conflict' between human groups, organisations or countries? How do people perceive and behave in conflicts? How do conflicts come to an end and what part can outsiders play in settling them or making them less damaging? The present work seeks to answer such questions by examining common structures and processes found in human conflicts in many settings, and by demonstrating how such common features reveal themselves in conflicts as ostensibly different as international war and interpersonal disagreements in organisations. The Structure of International Conflict seeks to be a some permanent use to all students interested in penetrating beneath the surface details and ostensible dissimilarities of specific wars, disputes and quarrels to the basic structure that underlies all human conflicts, from the most peaceful to the most violent, lethal and destructive.

As the cold war comes to an end, world attention focuses even more on tensions in the Middle East. This timely and important book examines both the U.S.-USSR and Arab-Israeli conflicts since 1948 and uses the history of their negotiations--one successful, the other less so--to establish principles that will be helpful in resolving international conflicts now and in the future. Written by an authority on conflict resolution, the book is the first to emphasize the entire process of peacemaking instead of just one of its aspects. Examining the many de-escalation efforts in the U.S.-USSR and Arab-Israeli conflicts, Louis Kriesberg analyzes why initiatives are taken, why some initiatives are followed by negotiations and others are not, why some negotiations conclude in explicit agreements and others do not, and why some agreements become the basis for additional peacemaking moves and others do not even endure. Applying insights from theories of conflict resolution and international relations, Kriesberg builds and tests a general theory of the process of conflict termination, deepening our understanding of specific efforts toward peacemaking and drawing inferences about de-escalation strategies for policy making. In an epilogue, Kriesberg discusses the war in the Persian Gulf and shows how its resolution illustrates the relevance of the insights he provides.

This book provides analyses of international intervention in local conflicts including those in Cambodia, Somalia, Yugoslavia, the Western Balkans and Northern Ireland. It will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of international relations and conflict resolution.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book brings together recent research on the end of the Cold War in the Third World and engages with ongoing debates about regional conflicts, the role of great powers in the developing world, and the role of international actors in conflict resolution. Most of the recent scholarship on the end of the Cold War has focused on Europe or bilateral US-Soviet relations. By contrast, relatively little has been written on the end of the Cold War in the Third World: in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. How did the great transformation of the world in the late 1980s affect regional conflicts and client relationships? Who "won" and who "lost" in the Third World and why do so many Cold War-era problems remain unresolved? This book brings to light for the first time evidence from newly declassified archives in Russia, the United States, Eastern Europe, as well as from private collections, recent memoirs and interviews with key participants. It goes further than anything published so far in systematically explaining, both from the perspectives of the superpowers and the Third World countries, what the end of bipolarity meant not only for the underdeveloped periphery so long enmeshed in ideological, socio-political and military conflicts sponsored by Washington, Moscow or Beijing, but also for the broader patterns of international relations. This book will be of much interest to students of the Cold War, war and conflict studies, third world and development studies, international history, and IR in general.