Abstract
I examine two paradigms that have informed the large and growing literature on conflict resolution. The first, the Believer paradigm, draws from liberal ideas and values, and argues that conflicts are best remedied by way of negotiation, democracy, and markets. The second, the Skeptic paradigm, draws from political realism, and argues that conflicts can be managed only through authority or allowing belligerents to fight to exhaustion. This examination reveals the contrasting—even contradictory—assumptions about the means by which conflict should be understood and remedied. The lack of consensus says that not only experts and practitioners do not sufficiently understand their subject matter but that they are unable to conceptualize complexity in ways that will produce peace.
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Notes
- 1.
Joshua Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Dutton, 2011).
- 2.
John Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
- 3.
Diane McWhorter, “Good and Evil in Birmingham,” New York Times, January 21, 2013, p. A21.
- 4.
See John Mueller, “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons,” International Security, vol. 13, no. 2 (Autumn 1988), pp. 55–79, and Retreat from Doomsday, pp. 11–12. Joshua Goldstein makes a similar comment about the practice of cannibalism. Goldstein, Winning the War on War, p. 231.
- 5.
In 1978, Foreign Affairs published Walid Khalidi’s article “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State,” vol. 56, no. 4 (July 1978), pp. 695–713. Today key parties view some form of Palestinian state as “inevitable.” See Hilary Leila Krieger, “Clinton: A negotiated Palestinian state is inevitable,” Jerusalem Post, December 11, 2010.
- 6.
US Colonel Andrew Bacevich commented on the view that the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) represented a seventh-century version of Islam. To the extent that that view is correct, he said, “my bet would be that over the long haul, the great majority of people in that region, especially of younger people, are more inclined to opt for modernity than they are to opt for returning to the seventh century. There lies the ultimate cause of hope. And the question is, what can the United States and other Western countries do in the interim to try to encourage movement to modernity and to discourage the notion that returning to the seventh century is a good idea.” Alternatively, he said any approach that generates resentment toward the West by way of bombing, invasion, or coercion “tends to be counterproductive.” Col. Andrew Bacevich, Sunday Edition (CBC Radio), June 21, 2015 (author’s transcript).
- 7.
On conservation, see Jon Hoekstra, “Networking Nature: How Technology is Transforming Conservation,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 93, no. 2 (March–April, 2014), pp. 80–89. On how the internet can unite the world and be a “force for peace,” see Somini Sengupta, “Mark Zuckerberg Announces Project to Connect Refugee Camps to the Internet,” New York Times, September 26, 2015; Bono and Mark Zuckerberg, “To Unite the Earth, Connect It,” New York Times, September 26, 2015.
- 8.
Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper: 2011), p. 2.
- 9.
Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 109.
- 10.
Robert Gilpin, War & Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 211.
- 11.
Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (Toronto: Anansi, 2004), p. 35.
- 12.
A fact-finding mission charged with investigating atrocities committed against Myanmar’s Rohingya population claimed that social media such as Facebook was “a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate.” See, for example, United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, A/HRC/39/64 (August 24, 2018), p. 14.
- 13.
See, for example, David C. Benson, “Why the Internet Is Not Increasing Terrorism” Security Studies, vol. 23, no. 2 (2014), pp. 293–328.
- 14.
Wright, Short History of Progress, p. 84.
- 15.
Wright, Short History of Progress, p. 128.
- 16.
Katharine Q. Seelye, “Clinton Blames Milosevic, Not Fate, for Bloodshed,” New York Times, May 14, 1999. See also Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), especially, pp. 367–368.
- 17.
Liberal-minded scholars also link violent conflict to “criminals” who are more or less permanently bad and are readily distinguishable from civilians. Belligerent criminals, according to this view, should be arrested, disarmed, policed, or otherwise neutralized. For an example of this kind of thinking, see Mary Kaldor, New & Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), especially her discussion of a “cosmopolitan” approach (Chap. 6).
- 18.
Anthony Shadid, “Iraq’s Last Patriot,” New York Times Magazine (February 6, 2011).
- 19.
“Somalia: At Last Someone Listens,” Africa Confidential, vol. 33, no. 17 (August 28, 1992); Jane Perlez, “A Diplomat Matches Wits With Chaos in Somalia,” New York Times, September 20, 1992 (Sec 4, p. 4); Jane Perlez, “Aide’s Departure Another Blow to U.N. in Somalia,” New York Times, October 31, 1992, p. 2.
- 20.
An Agenda for Peace: Preventative Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping, Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to the statement adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on January 1992, A/47/277–S24111 (June 17, 1992).
- 21.
Barry R. Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival, vol. 35, no. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 27–47.
- 22.
Multi-ethnic states such as the former Yugoslavia or states with arbitrary colonial borders and diverse populations, such as in Africa, are prime examples. See Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict.”
- 23.
John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), pp. 17–18. For those normally confronted by the perspectives of Western leaders and media, Mearsheimer’s analysis of the 2014 crisis in Ukraine is startling in light of his apparent refusal to pass negative judgment on the actions of Vladimir Putin. See John Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2014), pp. 1–12.
- 24.
Even some Skeptics put stock on the power of individuals. Henry Kissinger admitted that as a practitioner he found individuals more important than he did as a professor when he found impersonal forces (structure) more important. See quotation in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 13. UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali says something similar in his memoir Egypt’s Road to Jerusalem: “The personality of leaders and the chemistry between them affect the course of negotiations and great events. The Marxist belief that history proceeds with scientific ineluctability fails most notably in its disregard of this important reality” (p. 23). For a broader discussion of the role of individuals, see Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollock, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men,” International Security, vol. 25, no. 4 (Spring, 2001), pp. 107–146.
- 25.
See Robert Mackey, “Roots of an Iraqi’s Reputation as ‘Saddam Lite.” The Lede (New York Times News Blog), March 30, 2010; Dexter Filkins, “A Tough Guy Tries to Tame Iraq,” New York Times, June 11, 2004; Jon Lee Anderson, “A Man of the Shadows: Can Iyad Allawi hold Iraq together?” New Yorker, January 24, 2005.
- 26.
Indeed, the fungibility of individuals in terms of good and evil is captured in Lord Palmerston’s dictum that Britain has no permanent friends or enemies but only permanent interests.
- 27.
See Tamasin Ford, “Liberian President Eyes Second Term After Former Warlord’s Election Backing,” Guardian, October 18, 2011; “Liberia vote: Prince Johnson backs President Sirleaf,” BBC News, October 18, 2011.
- 28.
See Graeme Smith, “Wedded to the Warlords,” Globe and Mail, June 4, 2011, p. A 19; Declan Walsh, “Powerful Afghan Police Chief Puts Fear in Taliban and Their Enemies,” New York Times, November 8, 2014; and Jeffrey E. Stern, “This Former Johns Hopkins Professor Could be Afghanistan’s Next President,” New Republic, March 27, 2014.
- 29.
Charles G. Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty: The Truth about Bosnia,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 1995), pp. 24 and 34. See also, Alan J. Kuperman, “Strategic Victimhood in Sudan,” New York Times, May 31, 2006.
- 30.
See Somini Sengupta, “Spreadsheets and Global Mayhem,” New York Times (Sunday Review), March 22, 2014.
- 31.
Gareth Evans, “Ethnopolitical Conflict: When is it Right to Intervene?” Ethnopolitics, vol. 10, no. 1 (March 2011), p. 120.
- 32.
Gareth Evans, “NATO Must Do More in Macedonia, Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2001. In his Agenda for Peace, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali argued that a central aim of the international community must be to “identify at the earliest possible stage situations that could produce conflict and to try through diplomacy to remove the sources of danger before violence results.”
- 33.
“If only we had intervened last November,” observed Mohammad Sahnoun, the UN’s special representative to Somalia. “Now we are paying the price.” “Somalia: Poor Man’s War,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 33, No. 16 (August 14, 1992). The title of Sahnoun’s memoir was Somalia: The Missed Opportunities (Washington: United States Institute of Peace: 1994).
- 34.
Edward N. Luttwak, “Give War a Chance,” Foreign Affairs vol. 78, no. 4 (July/August 1999), p. 36. See also Edward N. Luttwak, “To Help Iraq, Let It Fend for Itself,” New York Times, February 6, 2007; Monica Duffy Toft, “Ending Civil Wars: A Case for Rebel Victory,” International Security, vol. 34, no. 4 (Spring 2010), pp. 7–36.
- 35.
Geoffrey C. Ward and Kenneth Burns, The Civil War (Knopf Doubleday, 2009), p. xiv.
- 36.
Important here is William Zartman’s idea of a “mutually hurting stalemate.” For Zartman, disputants are amenable to conflict resolution once they come to accept that victory is unlikely, and that ongoing belligerence is too painful. Efforts to resolve conflicts prior to this moment are likely to be fruitless. In the abstract, this is a compelling concept, though identifying that moment in reality is more difficult. See I. William Zartman, “The Timing of Peace Initiatives: Hurting Stalemates and Ripe Moments,” The Global Review of Ethnopolitics, vol. 1, no. 1 (September 2001), pp. 8–18. For a brief statement on the practical difficulties associated with it, see Paul Hare, Angola’s Last Best Chance for Peace (Washington: United States Institute of Peace, 1998), pp. 131–132.
- 37.
Robert A. Pape, “When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention,” International Security, vol. 37, no. 1 (summer 2012), p. 53.
- 38.
Cited in Georgie Anne Geyer, Buying the Night Flight: The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign Correspondent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 360.
- 39.
According to another senior UN official: “We UN people have a professional stake in stopping bloodshed.” The UN could not use military force because “we would be perceived as the enemy and that would endanger our carefully constructed relations with the parties. We are impartial; we are in a war but we are not at war. Once we became a party to the war, we would have to liquidate our efforts—withdraw or cut down.” Cited in Geyer, Buying the Night Flight, p. 360.
- 40.
United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, “Principles of UN Peacekeeping,” https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/principles-of-peacekeeping.
- 41.
See Gareth Evans, “Ethnopolitical Conflict” pp. 115–123.
- 42.
Evans, “Ethnopolitical Conflict,” p. 118.
- 43.
See Barbara F. Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement,” International Organization, vol. 51, no. 3 (Summer 1997), pp. 335–364.
- 44.
Richard K. Betts, “The Delusion of Impartial Intervention,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 6 (November–December 1994), pp. 20–33.
- 45.
Ramachandra Guha, “Democracy’s Biggest Gamble: India’s First Free Elections in 1952,” World Policy Journal, (Spring 2002), p. 98.
- 46.
In France, even the National Front has sought to attract voters outside of its natural constituency. See Amanda Taub, “France’s Far Right, Once Known for Anti-Semitism, Courts Jews,” New York Times, April 5, 2017; Adam Nossiter, “As French Election Nears, Le Pen Targets Voters Her Party Once Repelled,” New York Times, March 19, 2017.
- 47.
Omar G. Encarnación, “Gay Rights: Why Democracy Matters,” Journal of Democracy , vol. 25, no. 3 (2014), p. 91.
- 48.
Amartya Sen, “Freedoms and Needs,” The New Republic, January 10 and 17, 1994, p. 35.
- 49.
See Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially Chap. 6.
- 50.
Peter Jones, “Why we just get along,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), August 13, 2012, p. A11.
- 51.
Robert Harris, “Twilight of the Gods, #2,” Inside the Music, CBC Radio, July 28, 2013 (transcript).
- 52.
Among them, Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind (1962); Neil Young, “Ohio” (1970); Bruce Cockburn, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” (1984); U2, “Bullet the Blue Sky,” (1987).
- 53.
See Maïa de la Baume, “France’s Palate Acquires a Taste for Halal Food, to the Delight of Muslims,” New York Times, September 9, 2010, p. A8. See also Peter Baker, “In Gas Reserves, Israel Sees a Transformation, New York Times, January 15, 2017, p. 6.
- 54.
Vincent T. Maphai, “The New South Africa: A Season for Power-Sharing,” in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner eds. Democratization in Africa (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1999), p. 97. See also Donald Horowitz Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), p. 572.
- 55.
Benjamin Schwarz, “The Diversity Myth: America’s Leading Export,” The Atlantic Monthly (May 1995), p. 64.
- 56.
See Robert Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 127.
- 57.
Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), p. 21.
- 58.
Snyder, From Voting to Violence, pp. 21–22.
- 59.
Roland Paris, “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism,” International Security, vol. 22, no. 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 54–89.
- 60.
Schwarz, “Diversity Myth,” p. 66.
- 61.
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18.
- 62.
Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist, pp. 354–355.
- 63.
Charles Krauthammer, “Peacekeeping is for Chumps,” Saturday Night (November 1995), pp. 73–76.
- 64.
Eliot A. Cohen, “Military Power and International Order: Is Force Finished?” in Mark Charlton ed. International Relations in the Post-Cold War Era (Toronto: Nelson, 1999), pp. 14–30.
- 65.
In international relations more generally it is asserted that the dominant paradigm is realism. However, conflict prevention, by its nature, requires a conviction that outsiders can have a role in peaceful conflict management and prevention. Consequently, Believers—those who take the position that conflict prevention is possible—maintain that there is “no realistic alternative” to the liberal peacebuilding strategies embraced by Believers. See Roland Paris, “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding,” Review of International Studies, vol. 36 (2010), p. 340.
- 66.
This is particularly true as the time between events and post-conflict analysis increases. Stephen Wertheim documents how, for example, four years after the Rwandan genocide events were reconstructed by pro-intervention analysis such that any dissent from the view that the genocide could be stopped became deeply unpopular. See Stephen Wertheim, “A Solution from Hell: The United States and the Rise of Humanitarian Interventionism, 1991–2003,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 12, no. 3–4 (2010), pp. 149–172.
- 67.
Roland Paris, “Peacekeeping and Global Culture,” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 9, no. 3 (2003), p. 448.
- 68.
Roland Paris (2003) makes a similar argument but his range of non-liberal strategies is limited and tends to focus on resurrecting the UN’s mandate system (p. 358) or for the international community “to identify” local leaders (pp. 452–461). Skeptics are more inclined to reserve a strategy as comprehensive as the mandate system for truly exceptional situations and to allow leaders to emerge on their own. Nonetheless, his argument is correct that the international community selects its strategy based on “legitimacy and propriety” rather than effectiveness.
- 69.
Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War World (New York: Random House, 2000), pp. 138–139.
- 70.
F. Greg Gause III, “Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?” Foreign Affairs, vol. 84, no. 5 (September–October 2005), pp. 62–76.
- 71.
Michael Barnett and Christoph Zürcher, “The Peacebuilder’s Contract: How External Statebuilding Reinforces Weak Statehood,” in Roland Paris and Timothy D Sisk, eds., The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations (London: Routledge, 2009). See also Christoph Zürcher, “Building Democracy While Building Peace,” Journal of Democracy , volume 22, no. 1 (January 2011); Mvemba Phezo Dizolele and Pascal Kambale Kalume, “The DRC’s Crumbling Legitimacy,” Journal of Democracy , vol. 23, no. 3, (July 2012), pp. 109–120.
- 72.
Snyder, From Voting to Violence, pp. 297–301.
- 73.
Snyder, From Voting to Violence, p. 301. For another contemporary commentary on this issue, see also Jean-Marie Kamatali, “Following Orders on Rwanda,” New York Times, April 4, 2014.
- 74.
See the comments of Chris Alexander in Anita Elash, “Pakistan’s attitude of deception harmed ‘war on terror,’ former envoy says,” Globe and Mail, September 10, 2011.
- 75.
For example, James Dobbins, the former US special envoy to Afghanistan, had claimed that Afghanistan had moved toward its intended goal of a more peaceful country. “The Bonn Agreement,” he said, “has been a remarkably successful road map toward Afghanistan’s political evolution, in which all of its benchmarks have been met more or less on schedule.” See Phillip Kurata, “Former U.S. Envoy to Afghanistan Reviews Bonn Agreement Success,” The Washington File (Bureau of International Information Programs http://usinfo.state.gov:6. October 2005).
- 76.
Packenham, Liberal America, pp. 112–113. See also Schwarz, “The Diversity Myth.”
- 77.
Roland Paris, “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism,” p. 58, and “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding,” especially page 361.
- 78.
Roland Paris, “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding,” pp. 337–365.
- 79.
Goldstein, Winning the War, p. 107.
- 80.
See the comments of some UN and donor country officials in Richard Synge, Mozambique: UN Peacekeeping in Action, 1992–1994 (Washington: United States Institute of Peace, 1997), pp. 146 and 166. Synge describes Mozambique at this time as “a country drained of the will to fight” (p. 169). While ONUMOZ “scored” success in areas of demobilization, the process was facilitated by the fact that “it was the demobilizing soldiers themselves who drove the process to conclusion, rioting in order to be allowed to go home” (p. 159). As for disarmament, Synge concludes that “very few of their weapons were collected or destroyed” (p. 160).
- 81.
In still other cases on Goldstein’s list of success is Kosovo. For some, the events there represent not the benefits of peacekeeping but the successful and intentional fulfilment of another foreign policy objective: prying away of Kosovo from Russia.
- 82.
Goldstein, Winning the War, p. 108.
- 83.
See, for example, Howard Adelman and Astri Suhrke, with Bruce Jones, The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience (Copenhagen: Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, 1996); Marrack Goulding, Peacemonger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). D. W. Ashley, “The Failure of Conflict Resolution in Cambodia: Causes and Lessons,” in F. Z. Brown, and D. G. Timberman (eds) Cambodia and the International Community (New York: Asia Society; Singapore: ISEAS).
- 84.
Goldstein, Winning the War, p. 104.
- 85.
See Lakhdar Brahimi, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, United Nations Document A/55/305 S/2000/809. Goldstein’s discussion is found in Winning the War, pp. 115–119.
- 86.
Indeed, the first chapter of the “Brahimi Report” is entitled “The need for change.”
- 87.
Roméo Dallaire, Interview broadcast on CBC Television’s The National, March 23, 2014.
- 88.
Paul Collier et al. “Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy,” World Bank Policy Research Report (World Bank/Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 6.
- 89.
Report of the Secretary-General, An Agenda for Peace A/47/277–S/24111 (17 June 1992), p. 8.
- 90.
Goldstein, Winning the War, p. 98
- 91.
Andrew Bacevich, “Obama at War,” Frontline (transcript). For a strikingly similar statement, see Ross Douthat, “Grand Illusion in Syria,” New York Times, September 21, 2014, p. 12.
- 92.
Roland Paris, “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding,” p. 360.
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Spears, I.S. (2019). Perspectives on Conflict Resolution. In: Believers, Skeptics, and Failure in Conflict Resolution. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14144-8_2
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