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CHAP T E R 1
Introduction to Conflict Resolution: Concepts and Definitions
In this third edition of our book we bring the survey of the conflict resolution field up to date at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Conflict resolution as a defined specialist field came of age in the post-Cold War era. It also found itself face to face with fundamental new challenges, many of which have come into even sharper focus since the first and second editions of this book.
Why a Third Edition?
The first edition of the book (1999) was written at a time when, despite setbacks, conflict resolution approaches in peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding were widely seen for the first time to be central in global politics in the context of what US President George Bush senior had (somewhat reluctantly) called a ‘new world order’. His successor, Bill Clinton, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan both broadly subscribed to what we identify as the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldview shared by many if not most of the founders of the conflict resolution field. The aim of the first edition of the book was to explain what this meant. The second edition (2005) coincided with the apogee of the ‘neo-con’ reaction, associated particularly with the administration of President George W. Bush junior. The ‘global war on terror’ had come to dominate the stage, and conflict resolution appeared to have been marginalized and its cosmopolitan values either dismissed or co-opted and discredited. The aim of the second edition was to rescue the conflict resolution enterprise from this entanglement, and to reassert its distinctive nature and contribution in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This third edition (2011) appears at a particularly uncertain moment in world history, with the promise of a new US administration once again ready to embrace conflict resolution approaches in wider foreign policy formulation, but with mounting challenges from rising non-western powers (notably
Introduction to Conflict Resolution: Concepts and Definitions
In this third edition of our book we bring the survey of the conflict resolution field up to date at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Conflict resolution as a defined specialist field came of age in the post-Cold War era. It also found itself face to face with fundamental new challenges, many of which have come into even sharper focus since the first and second editions of this book.
Why a Third Edition?
The first edition of the book (1999) was written at a time when, despite setbacks, conflict resolution approaches in peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding were widely seen for the first time to be central in global politics in the context of what US President George Bush senior had (somewhat reluctantly) called a ‘new world order’. His successor, Bill Clinton, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan both broadly subscribed to what we identify as the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldview shared by many if not most of the founders of the conflict resolution field. The aim of the first edition of the book was to explain what this meant. The second edition (2005) coincided with the apogee of the ‘neo-con’ reaction, associated particularly with the administration of President George W. Bush junior. The ‘global war on terror’ had come to dominate the stage, and conflict resolution appeared to have been marginalized and its cosmopolitan values either dismissed or co-opted and discredited. The aim of the second edition was to rescue the conflict resolution enterprise from this entanglement, and to reassert its distinctive nature and contribution in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This third edition (2011) appears at a particularly uncertain moment in world history, with the promise of a new US administration once again ready to embrace conflict resolution approaches in wider foreign policy formulation, but with mounting challenges from rising non-western powers (notably