FUTURE RESEARCH
Despite both the recent theoretical and empirical improvement in our understanding of the factors that influence military dispute settlements and the dramatic increase in the employment of conflict management techniques, the conflict management literature still has considerable room for improvement.
We focus on two directions for advancing our understanding of settlement durability: considering more effectively the roles of selection and substitutability in conflict management outcomes and, in particular, agreement duration.Selection effects
Conflict management behavior is not random, but rather is the result of actors making strategic decisions based on their anticipation of the consequences resulting from those decisions. This strategic process affects why some conflicts are mediated in the first place (and some are not) and the outcomes of particular management activities and therefore must be taken into consideration in any study of conflict management.
Outcomes ranging from the foreign policy of individual states to international phenomena such as war or cooperation cannot be understood apart from the strategic choices actors make and the interaction of those choices. (Lake and Powell 1999, 3)
Accepting that international outcomes result from the interaction of actors' purposeful choices requires that we acknowledge that this process creates selection effects (Fearon 2002; Reed 2002). Failing to study the expectations of decision makers introduces selection bias and can lead to incorrect inferences.
Selection effects mean that the population from which a dispute is drawn provides information about the likely outcome of that dispute and its attendant agreements. We identify three types of selection effects related to conflict management: entry effects, management method effects, and dispute effects.
Entry Effects: The first selection effect is a product of an actor's involvement as a manager.
Third parties make strategic calculations about whether or not to become involved in a dispute, and belligerents make strategic decisions about whether or not a conflict manager is acceptable. We observe only those situations where conflict managers thought their actions were likely to have a desired outcome, resulting in a selection effect. Research must therefore consider not only the outcomes of conflict management effort, but also the reasons conflicts are managed by an outside party and those that are not managed.Management Method Effects: The second selection effect is a consequence of actors' strategic choice of conflict management method. Actors have expectations about which methods of management will be the most effective. Intermediaries strategically choose their approach to managing a conflict according to how difficult they anticipate resolution will be while minimizing their costs and efforts. Since cases that merit more expensive methods of management are the most difficult to resolve, conflicts receiving such measures are less likely to reach a lasting resolution. Thus, because mediation is generally more costly than most other third- party resolution efforts, we can expect that the conflicts that merit mediation are, ex ante, comparatively more difficult to resolve.
Dispute Effects: The third selection effect results from the characteristics of the disputes that require outside assistance for resolution. Since the cases requiring outside involvement are the ones the disputants are unable to resolve themselves, managers are most likely to become involved in the conflicts that are difficult to resolve (Greig 2005; Bercovitch and Gartner 2006b). This is critical if the conditions that involved third parties in the first place also influence the effectiveness of the effort. That a third party becomes involved at all signals the likely effects of the effort, as third parties are less likely to generate a lasting resolution compared to cases in which the disputants resolve the conflict themselves (Regan 2002).
Despite the necessity of considering the entire strategic process, many studies of conflict management focus solely on the characteristics of successful involvement and most authors focus on a single method of management (Frei 1976; Kleiboer 1996). For example, there is much debate surrounding the effectiveness of economic sanctions (Huf- bauer and Schott 1983; Li 1993; Martin 1993; Weiss 1999). Similar debates exist in the military intervention literature (Regan 1996) and the vast mediation literature (Mack and Snyder 1957; Ott 1972; Pruitt 1981; Kleiboer 1996; Bercovitch 1998; Regan 2000). It remains unclear which management efforts are the most effective and why.
Recent work has begun to incorporate the role of selection in the duration of peace agreements. New studies have begun to examine: (1) the role of selection effects in mediated conflicts (Bercovitch and Gartner 2006b); (2) which actors are likely to act as mediators and which disputants accept third-party offers to mediate (Schmidt 2004); and (3) the supply and demand of mediation (Crescenzi et al. 2005; Beardsley 2006). Future research should follow this progress and examine the variation in the identity and method of outside involvement across conflicts and the results of this variation on the effectiveness of third-party management efforts.
Substitutability
The literatures on mediation, economic sanction, and military action have remained isolated from one another, despite the fact that they all address methods of dispute resolution. The complexities of foreign policy decision making require attention to issues of substitutability (Most and Starr 1984, 1989). Policymakers have a wide array of available options for approaching any range of policy issues, since any cause may have a number of effects and any effect can stem from several causes (Morgan and Palmer 2000). Different conflicts may lead to similar responses (as in mediation efforts by the USA with Israel and Egypt in the 1970s, by the Vatican in the Falkland conflict between Argentina and the UK in 1982, and by Congo with Burundi and Rwanda in 1966).
In addition, there are multiple ways to respond to similar types of conflicts (as was the case of the UN observers sent in 1992 to Yugoslavia compared to the later NATO military intervention in Kosovo). Economic sanctions, diplomatic efforts, and military operations are substitutable foreign policy instruments potentially triggered in response to conflict.Analysis of the complex decision process involved in choosing a response to conflict requires the inclusion of the various foreign policy instruments available to policymakers and is “essential” for the comparison of state policies (Palmer and Bhandari 2000, 6). Accounting for foreign policy substitutability captures some of the complexity of international relations omitted in much of the existing research and reflects intuition of how policy is made (Morgan and Palmer 2000). Research that fails to address the issue of substitutability in foreign policy risks producing inaccurate results and unconvincing conclusions (see also Most and Starr 1989).
Focusing on only one [policy] would mean a failure to provide full coverage of the possible outcomes and lead to incomplete results that fail to cumulate (or even make sense when compared). The results would fail to capture the theory or model being tested (as only part was being tested). (Starr 2000, 129)
Management methods are rarely used in isolation, and yet they are treated as such in a majority of the existing literature. As a result, it remains unclear how methods of conflict management work together theoretically and in practice. If the outside party is truly interested in resolving the conflict, it will likely employ different tactics until the conflict is resolved. For example, the United States and European Union used economic sanctions, mediation, and eventually military intervention to help end the bloody conflict that arose during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Future research should build on the work of authors who systematically evaluate the relative effectiveness of third-party conflict management techniques and recognize the existence of foreign policy substitutability in approaching conflict management (Dixon 1996; Regan 2000).