The Conflict Management Toolkit

International Conflict Management is a dynamic, interdisciplinary field, constantly evolving as a response to problems in International Relations.  Theoretically located between social and behavioral science, it is the point at which these perspectives meet and sometimes clash.  Conflict management can be functionally understood by what it seeks to accomplish.

Conflict Management aims to:

  • Prevent the eruption of destructive conflict.
  • Facilitate a move from violent to spoken conflict.
  • Enable a transformation from conflict to lasting peace by addressing root causes and effects of conflict.

The Conflict Management Toolkit identifies five devices or strategies of conflict management:

At different phases of a conflict the multiple strategies of conflict management respond to barriers in the process in different ways: Conflict Prevention is an approach that seeks to resolve disputes before violence breaks out; Peacemaking transforms the conflict from violent to spoken, and further, toward the definition of a common peaceful solution; Peacekeeping missions are often required to halt violence and preserve peace once it is obtained. If successful, those missions can strengthen the opportunity for post-conflict Peacebuilding, which should function to prevent the recurrence of violence by addressing the root causes of conflict and creating a stable and durable peace. Finally, Statebuilding is the process of reconstructing weak or collapsed infrastructure and institutions of a society - political, economic and civil - in order for civil society and politics to begin to function normally.

It may be difficult or even undesirable to come up with exact definitions of these concepts. Trying to define the tasks that go into each "strategy" would risk limiting rather than expanding the means by which conflicts can be managed. It is therefore useful to look at these concepts in terms of the goals and aims of those strategies, the targets of particular actions, and in terms of the specific problems that need to be addressed. Each strategy addresses specific problems that occur during the Conflict Process:

  • Conflict Prevention: Politicization, militarization, escalation.
  • Peacemaking: Perceived incompatibility of interests.
  • Peacekeeping: Violent behavior/military activity.
  • Peacebuilding: Negative attitudes/socio-economic structure.
  • Statebuilding: Collapsed States and weak or non-existing civil and political institutions.

In an effort to merge theory and practice, the SAIS Conflict Management Toolkit approaches conflict and conflict management from three perspectives: Approaches, Issues in Practice, and Resources.

Approaches

The aim of the theoretical analysis of conflict is to develop an understanding of the variables, processes, strategies, and techniques that interact to form the basis for Conflict Management. These enable us to analyze, understand, explain and predict conflict and the mechanisms that contribute to its solution. We organize conflict management into five overlapping and interrelated areas: Conflict Prevention, Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, Post-conflict Peacebuilding, and Statebuilding. Rather than providing a package of tools and strategies that have to be stretched in order to apply to a variety of conflict situations, the approaches presented here attempt to identify the challenges that Conflict Management faces in practice and ways to deal with them. Instead of playing one strategy off against another, the toolkit looks at how these approaches can interact through a focus on problems, target groups, actors, and tasks involved. 

Issues In Practice

The Challenge for Conflict Management Theory is to study real problems in the real world rather than just ideal cases. In the Issues in Practice section a number of topics that confront theoreticians and practitioners on all levels of activity are introduced and analyzed in view of the theoretical approaches. Most of these issues are answers to problems that span across the entire field of Conflict Management, or crosscutting agendas that have to be dealt with in order for the theoretical approaches to truly tackle the reality of conflicts. It involves evaluating the effectiveness of Conflict management as well as its readiness to deal with new problems and new issues, such as terrorism. In the Case Studies section, the theoretical approaches are used as a guideline to analyze country-specific cases of conflict from around the world. The cases highlight problems, procedures, as well as examples of conflict management theory. 

Resources

The resources section provides a guide to different organizations and practitioners working in the field of Conflict Management in its link section and it offers information about similar conflict management initiatives. The practitioners are usually mediators, negotiators, diplomats, facilitators, relief workers, or even the conflicting parties themselves. The tasks range from negotiating cease-fires to providing social and psychological healing to those who have been most affected by the violence. The "organizations" involved these activities can be sovereign states, agencies, international organizations, diplomats or other actors that support, organize and fund those working in the field. They provide training, legitimization, knowledge, resources, early warning and experience. This section also includes syllabi from several dfferent conflict management courses, both at SAIS and elsewhere, and links to a multitude of journals focusing on conflict management-related issues.  It also offers a list of useful links to the websites of NGOs, government agencies, donor organizations, media outlets, and research institutions that work in conflicts worldwide. A glossary and historiography explain common conflict management terms and their theoretical evolution.  The section offers a look into "Peacekidz," a SAIS project to adapt international conflict management to everyday life - a team of SAIS students research and design a conflict resolution program for middle school children and teaches it weekly at Francis C. Hammond Middle School in Alexandria, Virginia.  Finally, the section contains a site map for simple navigation of the toolkit.

As new concepts emerge and agendas expand, we need ways with which to classify and understand new information. The Conflict Management Toolkit attempts to arrange the concepts and terms of Conflict Management into meaningful theoretical and practical categories. These categories then become more comprehensible and useful for students, practitioners and academics. We hope that this highlights both the importance, as well as the interdependence of both theory and practice to conflict management. In the words of the Swedish negotiator to the Kyoto Protocol, Bo Kjellen: "I only knew negotiations through my practical experience and started to read the theory only towards the end of my career. I think it would have helped me a lot had I known the theory earlier." (World Bank Seminar on International Waters, February 27, 2002.)