Preventing Deadly Conflict

<p>Conflict is inherent to all human and inter-state relations, but it is not inevitable. Since the end of the Cold-War, the prevention of conflict escalation into violence through management and resolution has become a fundamental objective of the international system.</p> <p>So how does prevention work when it works, and what can be done when tried and tested practices fail? In this book, I. William Zartman offers a clear and authoritative guide to the key challenges of conflict prevention and the norms, processes and methods used to dampen and diffuse inter and intra-state conflict in the contemporary world. Early-stage techniques including ‘awareness’ ‘de-escalation’, ‘stalemate’, ‘ripening’, and ‘resolution’, are explored in full alongside the late or ‘crisis’ stage techniques of ‘interruption’, ‘separation’ and ‘integration’. Prevention, he argues, is a battle that is never won: there is always more work to be done. The search for prevention – necessary but still imperfect – continues into new imperatives, new mechanisms, new agents, and new knowledge, which this book helps discover and apply.</p>