The Future of Conflict Management

Session Submission Type: Featured Paper Panel: 30-minute Paper Presentations

Session Description

A huge literature examines the effect of various tools of international conflict management on the dynamics of intrastate conflicts. In general, this literature is quite optimistic, finding that strategies such as UN peacekeeping and third-party mediation lead to conflict termination, longer-lasting peace agreements, and reductions of violence in ongoing wars. The data for these studies is primarily drawn from a period where the permanent five members of the UN Security Council were broadly supportive of conflict management generally and these strategies in particular, a situation which is not present now and unlikely to return in the near future. Beyond the UN Security Council, international aid donors are increasingly fragmented and unable, or unwilling, to provide coherent backing for war-to-peace transitions. What does this mean for the future of international conflict management?
In this panel, we present three papers that explore these questions. We examine how changes in geopolitics affect the ability to use tools of conflict mitigation. We also explore whether other tools that are less dependent upon preference alignment among major powers are viable, and if so in what contexts. We investigate how intrastate conflict management is influenced by broader changes in interstate conflict and cooperation. We also examine how the initiative of individual bureaucrats contributed to a sea change in UN peacekeeping policy: the agreement to use UN assessed contributions to finance peace operations carried out by African regional organizations. Collectively, these papers contribute to our understanding of the effect of conflict management activities and of their future efficacy in a world characterized by great power competition.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Intrastate Conflict Management in the Shadow of International Politics - Kyle Beardsley, Duke University

• Negotiating Agency: Sustainable Financing in African Peace Support Operations - Emmanuel Balogun, Skidmore College

• Peacekeeping, Preference Alignment, and the Future of Conflict Management - Susanna Campbell, American University; David E. Cunningham, University of Maryland, College Park

Chair

• Susanna Campbell American University

Discussants

• Andrea Ruggeri Università degli Studi di Milano

• Burcu Savun University of Pittsburgh

• Magnus Lundgren University of Gothenburg