We begin the conclusion of this volume with a story of hope.

For several years, our center, the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, cosponsored a course with our colleagues at Columbia Uni­versity’s School of International and Public Affairs on the theory and practice of preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution at the United Nations.

In 1999, we began the course with a conceptual overview of Deutsch’s the­ory of cooperation and competition (see Chapter One) and discussion of its rel­evance for resolving international conflict. After providing a summary of the theory, we asked the students to work in small groups to apply the ideas from the theory to the emerging conflict in Kosovo (this was in January, prior to the NATO bombing campaign), with the objective of generating recommendations for the U.N. and for the international community.

At the conclusion of this exercise, one particularly articulate student, a military attache to a U.N. ambassador, summarized his group’s discussion. He said they felt there were few feasible options to the crisis other than recommending that NATO threaten to bomb or use other force against the Serbians to stop the ethnic cleansing in the area. There was general consensus on this conclusion among the students in the class.

Three months later, at the final meeting of the course, Richard Holbrook (whose position as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. was at that time pending approval in Congress) spoke to the class about what was then current United States and NATO policy in Kosovo and Serbia. Holbrook spoke passionately for the need to continue the bombing campaign against the Serbs.

It was at this point that the same young attache who had advocated bomb­ing earlier in the term spoke again. He began by saying that he had been struck by something during Holbrook’s remarks: the fact that the military initiatives that were typically employed in these situations, such as use of bombing mis­sions or sending in ground troops, were rarely successful in achieving their polit­ical objectives. The objectives, he claimed, in many such situations were to inflict enough harm on the general population that either the leadership feels its pain and acquiesces, or the people organize and remove the leaders. The use of mili­tary force, he said, as we had seen in Vietnam, Iraq, and now in Kosovo, rarely achieved these objectives. I paraphrase him: “The notion of bombing a village in order to save it, as in Vietnam, is insane. The Serbs are bombing Kosovo in order to save it, and we are bombing Serbia in order to save it. It simply makes no sense. There has to be a better way!”

He continued, as best I recall: “Every day I look at a map of Africa hanging in my office, and I think that if these are the types of solutions we have to offer the many conflicts on that continent, there will never be peace.” Here was an accomplished U.S. Marine, someone who had risen in the ranks of the mili­tary to a position of substantial importance, stating emphatically, “There has to be a better way!” In subsequent discussion with this student, he thanked us for the course and said that learning about constructive approaches to con­flict had challenged his thinking about conflict resolution and peacemaking in important ways.

For more than seventy years, scholars and practitioners in the field of con­flict resolution have been searching for a better way. As is evident in the many chapters of this handbook, a great deal of progress has been made toward understanding conflict and resolving it constructively. However, a great deal of work remains to be done.

We find this opening story hopeful because it illustrates how education in conflict resolution, particularly when presented in practical terms to individ­uals who are in influential positions, can begin to have an important impact on our world. The story also points out, however, that there are no simple answers to complex conflicts and that we all must keep striving to find a better way.