International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Evaluating Interventions in History: The Case of International Conflict Resolution
Evaluating Interventions in History: The Case of International Conflict Resolution
Pages 38-89
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From page 38... ...
Various scientific methods are used to identify infectious agents, develop vaccines and treatments, and evaluate their effectiveness and safety. Conflict resolution practitioners are like physicians in that they work to prevent or control noxious situations.2 Few of them, however, believe that violent international conflict follows the classical model of infectious disease in which each condition has a single cause and a small number of effective treatments that can be identified and evaluated by scientific analysis and applied independent of the situation.3 Practitioners are typi38
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From page 39... ...
International relations scholars do more than apply standard scientific techniques of measurement and analysis when they try to understand the causes of international conflict and its cessation. They know that the phenomena are difficult to categorize and quantify and virtually impossible to manipulate in the style of experimental microbiology.
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From page 40... ...
It takes the form of propositions that, under certain kinds of conditions, a particular type of intervention can be expected to yield certain kinds of outcomes. To make such generic knowledge useful in practice requires not only that the propositions be correct but also that the practitioner can accurately classify the situation at hand as to the types of conditions present.
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It can develop and refine taxonomic categories that make it easier to accurately diagnose conflict situations, and it can develop empirically supported
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From page 42... ...
Because of the nature of international conflict, there are reasons to believe it never will be. The next section identifies and critically discusses the key challenges of taking a social scientific approach to evaluating interventions for international conflict resolution.
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From page 43... ...
Defining the Intervention Interventions in international conflicts can be considered analogous to treatments in scientific experiments, but neither practitioners nor researchers are as precise in defining types of interventions as scientific canons prescribe. For social scientific analysis it is critical to define each type of intervention precisely enough to know how to classify each specific case.
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From page 44... ...
If a single conceptual model can do this for peacekeeping or interactive conflict resolution, it would demonstrate the usefulness of the umbrella terms. Defining Success Conflict resolution interventions are generally intended to alter the course of events in a particular direction, usually from violent to nonviolent interactions or, more ambitiously, to transform relationships from hostile and unstable to friendly and enduring (i.e., they may aim for "negative peace," defined as the reduction of violence, or "positive peace" defined in terms of transforming relationships; Galtung, 1969~.
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From page 45... ...
Some observers, stressing international norms of human rights, selfdetermination, or democratic participation, suggest that conflict resolution efforts should not be considered successful without improvements in these aspects of the well-being of people affected by the conflict. Sometimes, the violence of civil war has been greatly reduced by the establishment of a repressive and authoritarian regime (e.g., Zaire in the 1960s)
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From page 46... ...
A more recent example may be the consociational governmental arrangements in Lebanon that seemed to be successfully managing conflict into the 1970s but that may have contributed to conflict later on, when the formulas for group representation no longer fit the distribution of the groups in the population. Thus, evaluation requires setting reasonable expectations as to what a particular intervention should accomplish and over what period of time.
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From page 47... ...
The standard social scientific approach to developing empirical generalizations is to define or enumerate the universe of cases of interest and, if there are too many cases to study them all, to investigate a representative sample of cases that is, a sample that approximates the entire population in terms of the distributions of the key independent and dependent variables that will eventually become part of the explanation. There are formidable difficulties in applying this scientific approach to the study of international conflict resolution; however, other case selection strategies can help in developing useful generalizations (see below)
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From page 48... ...
Often threats, economic sanctions, and the delivery of foreign aid are publicly represented as if the intent is to help resolve conflict in the target country when the main objective is something else, such as to placate public opinion in the country that took the initiative. It may be inappropriate to treat a purely symbolic effort analytically as part of the same universe as a serious intervention, even if symbolic efforts may have an impact on the conflict.
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From page 49... ...
Large-sample analyses have occasionally been carried out on international conflict resolution techniques (e.g., Bercovitch, 1997, on mediation; Druckman, 1997, on negotiation) , but typically only a few instances of the use of an international conflict resolution technique are available for study or resources are insufficient to study a large sample.
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From page 50... ...
For example, the Cold War international regime is a constant in all pre-1989 studies of conflict resolution techniques, so these studies cannot determine whether bipolarity in the international system moderates the effectiveness of the techniques studied. The problem is a general one: it is always appropriate to ask whether new historical conditions invalidate the conclusions of past research.
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From page 51... ...
Such associations between events are called spurious. Because each international conflict situation is unique in some way, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions from historical experience and particularly to make judgments about the causal efficacy of interventions.
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From page 52... ...
Second, such cases are unlikely to be fully comparable to ones in which the intervention was used because they will tend systematically to have characteristics that the decision makers believe predispose the technique to failure. Assessing the Roles of Extrinsic Events Evaluation requires determining how much an outcome should be attributed to specific conflict resolution efforts and how much to events independent of those efforts.
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From page 53... ...
However, social scientific analysis of this issue is challenging. Taking a purely empirical approach may not be fruitful because there are normally a very large number of potentially relevant events going on relative to the number of interventions available for study.
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From page 54... ...
We discuss this approach, sometimes referred to in terms of "causal mechanisms" and "process tracing," in more detail below. The challenge for theory is to develop the necessary hypotheses about the contingencies that matter for particular conflict resolution techniques or about the processes they set in motion.
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From page 55... ...
The phenomena of international conflict are too complicated and too resistant to normal scientific methods to make it possible to produce simple lawlike generalizations. Nevertheless, each of the above challenges has faced other social scientific endeavors in the past, and some of the strategies that have been tried in other fields are available in this one.
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From page 56... ...
Eventually, a widely shared concept of cohesion may be adopted, but in the meantime much is being learned about group processes and performance (for a discussion of these issues, see National Research Council, 1988~. This intellectual history, which has analogs in several other social scientific fields, holds some lessons for the newer field of international conflict resolution with its many loosely defined concepts, such as peacekeeping and mediation.
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From page 57... ...
Stedman (Chapter 5, also 1997) develops a typology of "spoilers" to peace agreements that he believes will help practitioners choose the best strategy for defeating spoilers and advancing peace processes.
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From page 58... ...
Systematic analysis of what is responsible for each of the outcomes of peacekeeping missions can help inform practitioners' judgments about whether and how to support particular peacekeeping missions, in light of their objectives. Third, it is important to define reasonable expectations for an intervention: to select a time horizon for evaluation and when the time horizon is long to identify interim indicators of progress.
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From page 59... ...
Unfortunately, it is rare for any of these conditions to be met for studies of international conflict resolution techniques. Even examining the entire universe of cases a viable strategy when the universe is small has limitations because the data often allow for multiple explanations, making interpretation inconclusive.
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Researchers who use purposive sampling resolve these questions by making judgments based on explicit or implicit theoretical propositions. The results of their studies often lead them to modify these propositions.
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Reliability is relatively easy to achieve for certain indicators of successful outcomes, such as a signed agreement or a reduction in the number of deaths in communal violence, but these are rarely the only outcomes of interest. It can be difficult for observers to agree, for example, about whether a peace process is stalled or still moving forward, whether or not the police force in an emerging democracy is making progress in upholding norms of human rights, or whether an absence of violence indicates conflict resolution or conflict suppression.
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From page 62... ...
An important complication in evaluating outcomes, especially when relying on expert judgment, is that all observers do not have access to the same information. Often, important parts of a peace process are privatefor instance, deliberations among negotiators on one side of a negotiation are seen only by that side, and the progress of a problem-solving workshop is rarely recorded electronically, so only those present know what happened.
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From page 63... ...
This issue is especially important for evaluating interventions that are intended to contribute to a peace process but are not expected to produce peace by themselves; however, the issue has not received much attention to date. A first step is to raise the issue to ask practitioners in interviews and to discern from their writings what their expectations have been for the short- and long-term effects of particular interventions.
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From page 64... ...
For discussing the challenges of inference about the effects of international conflict resolution interventions, it is useful to group the methods into three broad categories: experiments and simulations, multivariate analyses, and case study methods. This section discusses the possibilities and limitations of each.
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From page 65... ...
There is little experimental research on international conflict resolution because actual conflict situations do not permit experimental controls and because, for most types of intervention, conceptual models are not yet sufficiently well developed even to conduct laboratory simulations (negotiation processes are an exception to this generality)
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From page 66... ...
This progress has come primarily in research on small-group interventions such as negotiation, mediation, and interactive problem-solving workshops. Simulations typically include considerable detail to enhance external validity and a careful experimental design to allow statistical separation of the key variables posited to affect processes and outcomes and to enhance internal validity.
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From page 67... ...
The usefulness of the approach is limited because the criteria for conducting strong experiments are too stringent for collecting and evaluating data on some types of conflict resolution interventions (e.g., the design of national electoral systems, peacekeeping missions)
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From page 68... ...
A common use of multivariate analysis for research on international conflict resolution begins with the compilation of so-called events data on conflicts and on the efforts that have been made to resolve them. For example, Bercovitch and colleagues (e.g., Bercovitch, 1989, 1986; Bercovitch and Wells, 1993; Bercovitch and Langley, 1993)
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From page 69... ...
Multivariate analysis can also consider change over time and examine causal mechanisms more directly by analyzing data arranged in a time series, in which the same variable is coded at many points in the history of a case to allow the study of temporal processes. In one such time series approach, historical data are used to "postdict" known outcomes.
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From page 70... ...
This multivariate time series research design is quite useful for identifying how the temporal pattern of interactions between the conflicting parties and interventions by external actors led to the ultimate outcome. Postdiction can be considered as something like an experiment in that theory can be tested by comparing the actual outcome with "predictions" made on the basis of the theory and the initial conditions.
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From page 71... ...
Similarly, patterns that emerge from time series data are also worth further examination by other methods, particularly intensive examination of case material. A major value of quantitative research approaches is through the discipline they impose on thinking.
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The structured, focused case comparison method cannot, as a rule, be applied to previously completed case studies because they usually lack information demanded by the protocol. A well-known application of the structured, focused case comparison approach has been to test deterrence theory.
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These insights can then be examined by collecting the necessary information on the other cases under study. Compared to the multivariate analysis approach, structured and focused case comparisons examine fewer variables and fewer cases (the selection being made on theoretical grounds)
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From page 74... ...
Thus, multivariate analysis is likely to yield more useful results if concepts are made explicit if an effort is made at the start to specify the key variables and to develop
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We further believe that progress in understanding depends on such convergence. Both case study and multivariate research approaches to international conflict resolution were initially used in an exploratory mode to examine the available evidence (either case material or quantitative indicators)
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From page 76... ...
First, theory development is key to addressing many of the most serious challenges of building knowledge about what works in international conflict resolution. This point has also been emphasized by others (e.g., Lijphart, 1971; Eckstein, 1975; George, 1979; Bennett and George, forthcoming)
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From page 77... ...
Theory Development The practical concern with how best to develop generic knowledge about what works in international conflict resolution leads to a perhaps surprising conclusion: there is a critical need to develop theory. This conclusion follows from the recognition that improvements in the quality of theory would help meet each of the major challenges of evaluation.
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From page 78... ...
Nevertheless, enough thinking and study have been done to state fairly well specified theories about many of them and subject those theories to focused empirical analysis. Pressing ahead with clear theoretical statements is, we believe, essential to developing generic knowledge about international conflict resolution techniques.
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From page 79... ...
Even partial theoretical statements partial taxonomies, for example, or limited sets of hypotheses about the ways that certain contingencies affect the outcomes of intervention help both research and practice by directing attention to particular variables that may be important to the outcomes of conflict resolution interventions. To the extent that a theory is supported by evidence, it has identified variables worth considering.
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It is important to be explicit about the ways in which theory can and cannot help practitioners of international conflict resolution. No matter how well a theory is established, it cannot eliminate the need for practitioners to exercise judgment based on their experience and knowledge.
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From page 81... ...
Theory provides diagnostic categories for classifying conflict situations, and it advises on which aspects of a conflict situation are diagnostically important. It offers generic knowledge about the conditions that favor the use of particular interventions in particular kinds of situations and about the effects of implementing the interventions in specific ways.
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From page 82... ...
Because there is no single best way to develop knowledge, the search for generic knowledge about international conflict resolution should adopt an epistemological strategy of "triangulation" (Campbell and Fiske, 1959) , sometimes called "critical multiplism" (Cook, 1985, 1993~.
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From page 83... ...
The parties to international conflict may be states, international organizations, or other collective actors that are defined or that mobilize themselves as ethnic, cultural, religious, socioeconomic, political, or national entities. International conflict resolution efforts are activities that aim to decrease the level of violence in international conflicts, to reduce the likelihood that conflicts will result in violence, or to provide or strengthen mechanisms or institutions for the peaceful expression and resolution of intercommunal grievances so that they will not turn violent.
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From page 84... ...
In Peacemaking in International Conflict, I.W. Zartman and J.L.
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From page 85... ...
In International Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, E.E.
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1964 Fractionating conflict. In International Conflict and Behavioral Science: The Craigville Papers, R
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From page 87... ...
George, A.L., and A Bennett 1998 Process tracing with notes on causal mechanisms and historical explanation.
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1997 Spoiler problems in peace processes. International Security 22~2~:5-53.
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From page 89... ...
Pp. 868-912 in Handbook of Social Psychology, D
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