scholarly journals The surprising decline of international mediation in armed conflicts

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205316802091724
Author(s):  
Magnus Lundgren ◽  
Isak Svensson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
International Mediation ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Armed Actors

We identify and investigate a fundamental puzzle in contemporary mediation of armed conflicts. Although the preparedness of international mediators has increased, the proportion of armed conflicts that receive mediation has not increased, but decreased. Using quantitative data on the occurrence of mediation between 1989 and 2013, our analysis suggests that this puzzling contradiction cannot be explained by conflicts being more fragmented, intractable or internationalized. Instead, we argue that the puzzling decline of mediation can be explained by a mismatch between supply and demand in the international mediation ‘market’. Although there are more mediators available, the rise in the number of conflicts involving Islamist armed actors, coupled with increased reliance on terror-listing, especially since 2001, has placed a growing number of conflicts beyond the reach of international mediators. Our findings challenge the conventional belief that the post-Cold War era is characterized by high mediation rates and point to the need to develop the practice of mediation to maintain its relevance in the contemporary conflict landscape.

scholarly journals Military Intervention and the Destabilization of Target States

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Kaitlyn Rose ◽  
Hanna Samir Kassab
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Democratic Peace ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The World ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Target States

Conflict in nations around the world have often warranted involvement from external actors, either on behalf of or in opposition to the current regime. Foreign military intervention (FMI), regarding the development and evolution of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) over the years, has created power vacuums and destabilized the target states. In the post-Cold War era, intra-state conflict has replaced inter-state conflict as the dominant form of organized violence. In 2014, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) reported that there were 40 active armed conflicts and 11 of which were labeled as wars, and while the number of armed conflicts in the world has decreased since the end of the Cold War, the number of internationalized armed conflicts is on the rise, giving the impression that the world is becoming ever more violent (Pettersson and Wallensteen, 2015). A fundamental component of liberalism is democratic peace theory, which states that liberal states (democracies) do not go to war with one another. Although democracies do not go to war with one another, this may not make them more peaceful than non-democracies (Navari 2008). This use of military force could further be utilized depending on the regime type of the recipient state, and intervention can be viewed as the new, liberal face of conflict in the post-Cold war era.

‘Realism as an Unsentimental Intellectual Temper’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mats Berdal
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Armed Force ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Theoretical Construction

The post-Cold War era witnessed a growing tendency to justify the use and the threat of use of military force in international relations on humanitarian grounds. Freedman’s writing on the use of armed force in pursuit of humanitarian goals and his contribution to the field are explored in this chapter. He rejects the traditional dichotomies in International Relations scholarship between Realism and Idealism. Freedman’s work on ‘New Interventionism’, with the Chicago Speech contribution at its core, suggests that it is unhelpful to delineate sharply different existing schools of thought, or paradigms. Freedman draws a distinction between ‘realism as an unsentimental temper’ and realism as a ‘theoretical construction.’ Liberal values are important for Freedman and their universality is to be asserted, but that does not mean being naively oblivious to dangers and difficulties inherent in seeking to promote them as standards against which Western governments should be judged.

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