Description
Social science and legal scholars usually approach international conflict management—ranging from unilateral or multilateral forms of diplomacy and economic pressure to covert interference and open military intervention—based on rather static and presentist definitions and typologies. This paper encourages us to widen the view by including historical context as a crucial but often overlooked variable. It argues that the frequency, form, and outcomes of international action to manage conflicts and crises are to a significant extent determined by the given historical ‘regime’ of international conflict management. The paper defines a ‘regime’ of conflict management as the wider political, military, legal, and mental frameworks within which the international community debates and addresses regional conflicts and crises. In a historical birds-eye perspective, the paper identifies the major shifts in regimes of conflict management from 1945 until today. To do this, it examines contemporary debates among scholars and policymakers about foreign intervention in connection to human rights and international law. It then places these debates in the context of quantitative changes over time, focussing on UN peacekeeping operations and UN Security Council resolutions passed and vetoed. The paper also refers to several key cases of international conflict management since 1945. It finds that a Cold War cycle of experimentation (1945–1955), expansion (1955–1965), and contraction (1965–1982) of open and ‘robust’ international conflict management was repeated in surprisingly similar form in the post-Cold War era, where interveners moved from experimentation and gradual expansion (1982–1989) to rapid expansion (1989–2011) and decline (since 2011). The paper concludes with a few reflections on how to assess, from a historical perspective, the current crisis of international conflict management and the liberal international order more generally.
