International Conflict Management

J. Michael Greig, Andrew P. Owsiak, Paul F. Diehl

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509530557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Globalisierung

International conflict has long plagued the world, and it continues to do so.With many interstate and civil disputes experiencing no third-party attempts at conflict management, how can the international community mitigate the effects of and ultimately end such violence? Why, in so many cases, are early, "golden opportunities" for conflict management missed?

In this book, J. Michael Greig, Andrew P. Owsiak, and Paul F. Diehl introduce the varied approaches and factors that promote the de-escalation and the peaceful management of conflict across the globe—from negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and adjudication to peace operations, sanctions, and military or humanitarian intervention.The history, characteristics and agents of each approach are examined in depth, using a wide range of case studies to illustrate successes and failures on the ground. Finally, the book investigates how the various tools interact—both logically and sequentially—to produce beneficial or deleterious effects.

1
Introducing International Conflict Management

The Korean War ended in 1953. Nevertheless, the threat of renewed war on the Korean peninsula has persisted constantly between then and now. More than forty militarized disputes (involving the threat, display, or use of military force) related to the conflict have occurred in this period. Although nuclear concerns date back to 1993 when North Korea first threatened the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the risk of nuclear war stemming from the peninsula’s conflict has accelerated since North Korea began nuclear tests in 2006.

It is fortunate that none of the post-1953 Korean confrontations has escalated to full-scale war. Some of this “success” results from the myriad conflict management efforts of the international community. Over the past seven decades, various actors have employed a wide range of approaches to manage the conflict. Military intervention under United Nations (UN) auspices first attempted to control and end the conflict in 1950, even as it later expanded, perhaps prolonged, the war, and contributed to the stalemate of 1953. Subsequent negotiations between the United States, South Korea, and North Korea dealt with a variety of issues, from lower-order concerns (e.g., reuniting families) to mid-level concerns (e.g., humanitarian aid) to issues central to the conflict (namely, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea). On occasion, these negotiations have even been facilitated by third-party mediators, as when ex-US President Jimmy Carter acted as a go-between in the 1994 nuclear negotiations.

Conflict management efforts have not, however, been confined to diplomacy alone. The UN and individual countries have imposed economic sanctions on North Korea and its leadership at various junctures and to various degrees. These coercive tactics are designed to discourage North Korea from further advancing its nuclear program and, ideally, to encourage it to abandon its desire to possess nuclear weapons at all. Importantly, they also follow failed attempts at consensual conflict management rooted in international law. One hundred and ninety-one countries have voluntarily accepted the NPT, with non-nuclear states promising to use nuclear power only for peaceful purposes and to foreswear any weapons development. International legal agreements have consequently received credit for limiting the number of new nuclear states (Fuhrmann and Lupu 2016), as well as proving effective in restraining North Korea.

The enduring conflict in Korea provides a window into the myriad approaches available for international conflict management, along with the conditions affecting their successes and failures. This book reviews the most prominent of these approaches, used widely to manage both interstate and civil conflicts. At one end of the spectrum sit the more coercive means of compelling protagonists to cease their violent or otherwise undesirable behavior; military intervention and sanctions fall into this category. The rest of the spectrum contains a variety of less hostile conflict management approaches, under which disputants cede various degrees of control over the conflict management process and outcome to third-party actors. Negotiation and mediation, for example, require the cooperation of disputants to begin the conflict management process, reach a settlement on the disputed issues, and enforce any settlement terms. Peacekeeping and peacebuilding activities, on the other hand, still rely on cooperation to a significant degree, but their outcomes rely extensively on the effectiveness of the third parties that conduct the peace operation. Somewhere between mediation and peacekeeping lie the legal approaches (adjudication and arbitration) in which the disputants permit a third party (court or arbiter) to settle their disputed issues, usually through formal, legal processes over which the disputants have little control.

This is a book about conflict management. As such, we begin with defining conflict management and distinguishing it from another process—conflict resolution—with which it is often confused.

Conflict Management vs Conflict Resolution

Conflict management and conflict resolution are often used interchangeably in the media and scholarly analyses (for an overview of the field’s development, see Kriesberg 1997). Both occur in contexts where a significant likelihood of armed conflict exists. Violence or even full-scale war might be manifest, but short of that extreme, conflicting positions on important issues or explicit threats of violence raise the specter of violence in the near future. Preventive measures appear in the early stages of conflict, prior to the onset or threat of violence; management and resolution needs then expand during active violence (e.g., an ongoing war); and disagreements might need to be managed or resolved in the aftermath of any militarized conflict. The management and resolution concepts therefore occur during multiple conflict stages and capture a broad range of pre-, intra-, and post-conflict activity.

The two processes also share the penultimate goals of stopping ongoing violence and preventing its onset or renewal. Yet they do this in slightly different ways. Both processes seek—at a minimum—to achieve what is often termed “negative peace,” usually defined as the absence of violence (or war specifically). Conflict resolution, however, goes slightly further, with a greater focus on “positive peace” as well. Positive peace requires not only the end of violence, but also the achievement of social justice and the removal of the root causes of violence (see Galtung 1969; on types of peace, see Kacowicz and Bar-Siman-Tov 2000, or the discussion in Goertz et al. 2016). Its achievement often requires negative peace as a foundation on which to build. As this distinction in peace types demonstrates, conflict management and conflict resolution are not the same processes, nor do they necessarily produce the same results. Fundamental differences distinguish them from one another.

Maoz (2004) identifies a series of goals for conflict management, three of which are fundamental. The first is to control or limit violence in the dispute. Note that this does not necessarily eliminate all violence or end the possibility of it. Rather, conflict management tries to lower the level of violence to some predefined limit or merely relative to the status quo. A second goal is to contain the geographic scope of any conflict. That is, conflict management works to prevent violent conflict or potential unrest from spreading to new areas, because this expansion would increase the conflict’s negative consequences and perhaps complicate resolution. Finally, a third, related goal is to restrict the number of participants involved in the conflict. Much as firefighters try to confine a blaze to its original structure, conflict managers seek to confine conflict to as narrow a set of locations and actors as possible, which then makes battling the original conflict easier. This also includes limiting the consequences so that civilians are not killed or otherwise adversely affected by the conflict.

Although conflict obviously involves disagreement, conflict management assumes that disputants share some common interest(s) in limiting the conflict and its effects. This does not suggest that all disputant preferences are compatible, but only that some or all of the disputants would like to limit the conflict. These limitations might be temporary (e.g., a ceasefire during a war) or (quasi-) permanent (e.g., a desire to prevent conflict escalation, which produced support for a peacekeeping force in Cyprus [1964–present], even as the underlying issues at the root of the conflict remain unresolved). It is possible, and indeed at times common, for this assumption to be incorrect. There are instances in which some disputants do not want to stop fighting or to place limits on the conflict. If a side is winning battles, for example, then limiting conflict stalls its momentum and potential for victory. For example, in 1997, once the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) took the city of Kisangani, they refused to negotiate with the government in Zaire until President Mobutu resigned, despite previously pressing for negotiations with the government. Similarly, conflict management that freezes the status quo can disadvantage the disputant seeking to revise it (e.g., a government seeking to oust insurgent groups from any territory it holds or a rebel group desiring to overthrow a government). In these circumstances, conflict management efforts are prone to failure, largely because of the revisionist side’s lack of cooperation.

Conflict resolution, in contrast, goes beyond conflict management. In its ideal form, conflict resolution works to remove the issues under contention or the underlying bases of dispute from the relationship (Burton 1987). In other words, it renders the risk of conflict escalation moot because there is no longer a reason to fight. Consistent with this logic, some (e.g., Luttwak 1999) take an expansive view of conflict resolution that includes military victory for one of the warring sides, a situation in which resolution is achieved through brute military force. More commonly, though, conflict resolution resolves the underlying, disputed issues through non-violent mechanisms. For example, if an interstate territorial dispute ends with a mutual agreement to draw a border, then the prospects for war may fall and the groundwork for cooperative activities in other areas may strengthen. This occurred after the Vatican mediated a resolution of the Beagle Channel dispute in 1985; since that agreement, Argentina and Chile have greatly expanded trade with each other and are now considered friendly with one another.

Conflict resolution efforts begin with a more optimistic assessment of the prospects for dealing with the conflict. Except for wholly naive or misguided attempts, third parties must believe that there exist outcomes that will satisfy all disputants. This often means finding non-zero-sum settlements, although settlements heavily weighted toward the interests of one side may still be acceptable to the loser. The International Court of Justice, for example, ruled in 2015 that Costa Rica had full sovereignty over a disputed island, and Nicaragua has indicated that it will abide by that ruling. Conflict resolution therefore requires, beyond limiting the violence, that disputants have “overlapping bargaining spaces” (one or more settlement options acceptable to all disputants), as well as some willingness to end the conflict and accept a settlement. Importantly, conflict resolution also need not be all or nothing. Disputants can agree to settle some disputed issues while leaving others to future resolution efforts, or merely agree to disagree.

Conflict management and conflict resolution are not fully separate but are interrelated in numerous ways. First, many of the conflict management approaches discussed throughout this book can be used for either process. Bringing disputants to the table for direct negotiations or mediation, for example, may produce outcomes that either manage or resolve a conflict—or both (e.g., an agreement to manage the conflict in the short term, while implementing provisions of a comprehensive agreement in the long run). Some agreements even include provisions for conflict management following resolution. After disputed issues are resolved, for example, the possibility arises that disagreements will reoccur over those issues or that new sources of dispute will emerge; conflict management mechanisms cannot ensure that disagreements will not arise, but they can provide peaceful mechanisms to address those disagreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO), for example, has a Dispute Settlement Body that provides for resolving (future) trade disputes, ideally through consultations with the parties and, if necessary, via quasi-judicial panel hearings and awards.

Second, conflict management approaches can be precursors to conflict resolution. Stopping a war or limiting the scope of violence often constitutes the first step in a broader peace process. Traditional peacekeeping forces operate on this principle; they usually deploy following a ceasefire to ensure compliance with it, thereby creating a more suitable environment for negotiations between the combatants. In other instances, actors hope that progress on conflict management will produce a cascade of cooperation that makes conflict resolution more likely; according to this logic, a step-by-step cooperative process, starting with the concerns easiest to address, lays the groundwork for more expansive settlements, including those that resolve the most contentious issues. The Oslo Accords (1993 and 1995) between Israel and the Palestinians relied on this idea. Interim arrangements secured the withdrawal of Israeli forces and Palestinian governance in occupied territory; the final resolution of issues such as borders and the status of Jerusalem, however, was deferred for future negotiations. In other circumstances, conflict management from one approach tries to achieve conflict resolution through another, subsequent approach. For example, negotiations may produce an agreement to halt provocative actions toward claims (e.g., territorial ones) and to submit the dispute to an international arbiter or court (see, e.g., the Colombia–Venezuela or Ethiopia–Eritrea border disputes).

Third, some approaches facilitate conflict management and conflict resolution efforts, although they may themselves produce neither. Economic sanctions offer an illustration. They often attempt to bring a recalcitrant disputant to the negotiating table, where management and resolution could occur. The sanctions against South Africa eventually convinced it to end apartheid and permit majority rule. Similarly, global sanctions on Iran encouraged the multiparty negotiations that produced a deal in which Iran suspended nuclear weapons development in return for the lifting of those sanctions.

Finally, the original pursuit of either management or resolution might produce the other. A process designed for conflict management, for example, could yield resolution. The opposite, however, is more likely, as outcomes fall short of aspirations. Parties in an international or civil war might sign a ceasefire but fail to find the common basis needed for a comprehensive peace agreement; the end of fighting in the Korean War illustrates this idea.

The chapters that follow focus on conflict management and the various approaches used to achieve it. Conflict management is a necessary (but insufficient) condition for resolution. Starting from the premise that a violent conflict exists or there is a significant risk of it, management will take precedence over resolution because resolution is unlikely to proceed in the face of violence or its threat. Nonetheless, as noted above, one cannot always distinguish between conflict management and conflict resolution. The descriptions and, to some extent, the processes and outcomes, of these two approaches may therefore be the same or similar for both.

Overview of the Book

In the following chapter (Chapter 2), we set the stage for our analysis of individual conflict management approaches in several ways. First, we identify a series of key ideas about conflict management and its success found in numerous works; these reappear frequently as threads that connect the logics of conflict management across different approaches. This is followed by a specification of some patterns in conflict over time, as the conflict context is an important variable in determining which conflict management approach is selected as well as when success is achieved. Nevertheless, some conflicts are never managed, even when their importance and negative consequences suggest that they should have been; we will cover some of the occasions when conflict management has been absent and examine the reasons why. The chapter concludes with an overview of how conflict management success might be judged as well as some indicators that might be used to measure that success.

We devote a separate chapter to each distinct conflict management approach: intervention, sanctions, negotiation, mediation, legal approaches, and peacekeeping (see Table 2.2 below). These chapters follow a similar format. We first establish a foundation by defining the approach, discussing its key concepts and characteristics (often in relation to other approaches), describing how the conflict management process unfolds, and providing information on the logic or strategic considerations underlying how the approach facilitates conflict management. We next identify the actors that most commonly employ the approach, along with some historical patterns (when appropriate). Finally, we devote the main parts of each chapter to specifying the conditions under wh...