Guessing the rules: Conflict resolution in the post-cold war era.

Abstract

When the Soviet Union shattered into a dozen pieces, many students and practitioners of foreign policy and conflict resolution also lost their bearings. The bipolar international system which had provided an organizing framework for foreign policies and scholarly work was gone, replaced by a new world. To the surprise of many, the decade following the Cold War did not develop into a warm peace. It was tumultuous, bloody, riven by horrifying conflict not across national borders but across towns and roads and neighborhoods. It was also a decade of large-scale political and social transformation, largely toward democratic processes, personal freedom, unprecedented individual access to information, and of an astonishing growth in the global economy. Although we could see the new reality, its meaning remained elusive. Was there a new theory to explain this world? Had we arrived at the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama (1989) proposed, an end in which the growing embrace of liberal democracy presaged a more p...