CDSn4001:
Conflict
Analysis
Conflict resolution
December 4, 2023
Miriam Matejova, PhD
Agenda
• How do we end wars? How should we
end wars?
• What is the future of war and war
prevention?
Conflict resolution
• Why do we
study causes of
conflict?
• How do we
bring on peace?
Achieving negative peace
• Peacemaking
• Efforts to bring the conflict parties to a peace settlement – through
negotiations, mediation, etc.
• Peacekeeping
• Deployment of peacekeeping forces to separate and monitor the
conflict parties
• Peace enforcement
• The use of force or threat of force, which will force the states or
groups to stop fighting.
Achieving positive peace
• Peacebuilding
• Focus on social, political and
economic structures that cause
conflict
• Goal is to build a constructive
relationship between conflict parties
to prevent the return of violence.
• Many different strategies: partition,
powersharing, cooptation, atď.
Credible commitment theory
• Parties don’t reach cooperative solutions,
because they can’t commit themselves
credibly to act (in advance) in agreed ways.
– Actor’s promise to behave cooperatively might not
be believed by others if promises cannot be
enforced.
– Actors make promises but have no intention of
upholding them, or
– An actor may sincerely want to promise to
cooperate, but in the future, it may be rational to
break a promise if an opportunity arises.
How to make commitments credible?
• Make reneging on the agreement costly by
raising the political costs of defection
– Audience costs – sovereign states raise their
audience costs if they want to increase the
credibility of their commitments
Debate
• What is the
predictive power
of “old” theories?