Political leaders have engaged in international conflict resolution for millennia, yet it is only relatively recently that scholars have developed explanatory and prescriptive theories about this important phenomenon.
World War I generated some preliminary research, but it was Cold War fears and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis in particular that led to the emergence of an academic field of conflict resolution.1 With the decline in the frequency of interstate war in the six decades since World War II, and with the sharp increase in civil war and “identity wars” between communal groups after the end of the Cold War,2 the interdisciplinary study of conflict resolution has broadened from a primary focus on interstate conflict resolution to a concern with conflict resolution in intra-state and intragroup conflict.3
Scholars have approached the study of conflict resolution through a variety of methodologies, including interactive conflict resolution and simulations, large-n data analyses, formal modeling, and historical case studies.
My focus here is on case study analysis, which has been the subject of intensive methodological discussion and debate during the last decade in political science, sociology, and related disciplines. Indeed, scholars in the social sciences have increasingly come to see case study approaches as a genuine methodology, on par with statistical methodology, with standards and rules of inference that good work in the field is expected to satisfy. Thus, a brief review of the current state of the art in case study analysis will serve as a useful guide to conflict resolution theorists working in disciplinary settings that have become increasingly demanding in terms of methodological self-consciousness and sophistication.Beyond a brief review of the literature on case study methodology, I have a second aim in this chapter: I look more specifically at the question of crisis management, both to illustrate the application of methodological principles and to suggest the kinds of substantive propositions that have emerged from the case study literature. I focus in particular on the two leading crises of the 20th century, the July 1914 crisis and the Cuban missile crisis.