As the 21st century began, many hoped that it would be a less violent one than the 20th, the most violent century in history (Licklider 2005).

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, a decade of peacemaking helped end a large number of conflicts in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. In El Salvador, Guatemala, Mozambique, Namibia, and Cambodia, violent conflicts yielded to negotiated peace agreements.

Even so, many of the world's conflicts have proven resilient to any kind of settlement or resolution. In the Middle East, in spite of almost five decades of peacemaking by the United States and other third parties, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has continued. Outbreaks of violence and terror­ism have hardened public opinion on both sides. In Sri Lanka, despite repeated efforts at mediation by Norwegian interlocutors, the conflict between the Sinhalese-dominated government and the Tamil insurgency shows few signs of abating. In Africa, the long- awaited signing of a peace agreement between the government and the Sudan People Liber­ation Movement has been overshadowed by a continued high level of violence in Darfur. And longstanding insurgencies in Thailand and the Philippines pose a continuing threat to political stability in these countries.

The conflicts of the 20th century, which have spilled over into the 21st, have been called many things: “intractable,” “pro­tracted,” “self-sustaining,” “deep rooted,” or the product of “ancient hatreds.” Much intellectual and scholarly effort has been devoted to studying their origins, causes, and their consequences.

Many scholars, analysts, and practition­ers have grappled with the definition of intractability (Azar 1986; Burton 1987; Pruitt & Olczak 1995; Coleman 2000; Kriesberg 2003; Pruitt & Kim 2004). Some scholars question the concept on the grounds that there are few “long wars” in the recent history of international relations as measured by the number of battle-related deaths. Intractable conflicts, however, are conflicts that generally tend to experience episodic but recurring bouts of violence and appear to be highly resistant—though not necessarily impossible—to resolve through a process of negotiated settlement or peacemaking.¹ They are also conflicts where the main targets of violence are often civilians and/or the military forces of the state. Terrorist attacks are often the preferred means of violence in these conflicts, even though such attacks typically tend to accompany armed insurgencies by guerrilla forces or other kinds of freedom fighters. And even if violence is on the decline or has disappeared completely, intractable conflicts may exist in a suspended state of animation because they refuse to yield to negotiated efforts to secure a more lasting political settlement. In these kinds of situations—what we refer to as “frozen” or abeyant intractable conflicts—the potential for a renewed outbreak of violence exists (Kriesberg 2005).

For the purposes of discussion, we propose a very broad definition: intractable conflicts are conflicts that have persisted over time and refused to yield to efforts—either by the direct parties, or, more often, with third- party assistance—to arrive at a political settlement.

Whatever conditions lie behind the dispute, intractable conflicts share a common charac­teristic: they defy settlement because leaders believe their objectives are irreconcilable and they have a greater interest in maintaining the status quo—which may be violent— than considering their political alternatives. In other words, these local decision-makers seek to resist or prevent the emergence of politics as the arena for settling their differences. Although all intractable conflicts share this characteristic, the actual level of violence and the potential for an escalation of military hostilities may vary from one setting to another. Sri Lanka continues to experience high levels of violence—usually terrorist- based—while Cyprus has not seen violence for many decades even though a political settlement has remained elusive. And the Middle East shows that levels of violence can escalate, de-escalate, and re-escalate over the lifetime of a conflict.

Another important point: if we confine our examination to the last 10 years we would believe that intractable conflicts are largely intrastate—that is to say, they take place within the borders of a state. There are, nonetheless, many conflicts that are essentially interstate disputes where the par­ties are—or consider themselves to be— “sovereign” entities. This distinction between inter- and intrastate conflict breaks down when contested sovereignty, or the refusal of one (or more) parties to recognize the sovereign claims of the other side, lies at the heart of the dispute. Further, the intrastate-interstate distinction or dichotomy can be extremely artificial because many so- called “intrastate” or “civil” conflicts involve external actors, including regional neighbors, who not only try to manipulate the conflict for their own ends, but may also be actively involved in the fighting itself.

Some intractable conflicts are hot conflict zones, like the Sudan or Israel-Palestine. Violence is a more or less endemic feature of these conflicts even though the actual level of violence may be intermittent, sporadic, or even seasonal (dry seasons, for example, are good for launching conventional military offensives against insurgents). Such conflicts may be stalemated because they have not reached that plateau—what William Zartman (1986, 1989, 2000) calls a mutually hurting stalemate—where the costs of a political set­tlement are appreciably lower (and recognized to be so) than the military and political costs of continued fighting. They therefore elude the moment of ripeness, that is the moment when all of the parties are seriously interested in exploring their political options and finally commit themselves to resolving their differences through negotiation rather than force of arms.

Abeyant intractable conflicts share a com­mon characteristic with active intractable conflicts: they are not ripe because the parties themselves have not experienced the full and direct costs of a mutually hurting stale­mate. They differ, however, in crucial ways. Abeyant intractable conflicts are conflicts in which violence is suspended or “frozen” (i.e. they have gone into remission), usually because a third party is willing and capable of guaranteeing the terms of a negotiated cease-fire—a cease-fire that may also include the broad outlines of a political settlement, for example as in the case of Cyprus. When outsiders freeze a conflict through providing the means to check violence and keep peace, they save lives and manage the problem, prevent it from spreading and limit damage, but they may also, perversely, sustain the underlying polarity and delay political solutions. In this situation, outsiders become indispensable and their eventual departure presents a security dilemma for local parties, as there is real potential for escalation if those third-party security guarantees are withdrawn.