Book Review: Conflict Management and Resolution in the Twenty-first century: Strategies and Techniques available to the International Community

The three volumes reviewed below represent different perspectives on international conflict management and resolution. Two of them, International Conflict Managementand Conflict Resolution in the Twenty-First Century, are explicitly designed as text- books for undergraduate or graduate students. They are less well-known than, for instance, Contemporary Conflict Resolution by Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse and Hugh Miall, which is among the most frequently assigned texts for British stu- dents.1 It should not however be seen as a judgement on their quality since they have a slightly different focus. Unlike Contemporary Conflict Resolution, which provides a broad overview of the philosophical and theoretical debates on conflicts and the ways to address them, International Conflict Management and Conflict Resolution in the Twenty-First Century offer detailed accounts of various strategies and techniques avail- able to the international community. For example, Contemporary Conflict Resolutioncovers mediation in a mere five pages and makes only a passing reference to interna- tional arbitration and adjudication, while Butler devotes more than 40 pages and Bercovitch and Jackson more then 10 pages to each of these issues. War and Peace in Transition is a collection of the proceedings of the 2008 conference on Peace and Conflict Research at Lund University. The essays offer a more in-depth and theory- driven look at the difficulties and dilemmas of contemporary conflict resolution, with some of them reporting the results of original research.

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