Research cluster

Conflict: Its Causes, Conduct and Consequences

Staff research interests and a significant part of the teaching programmes converge in the area of research on conflict: theorising violent and non-violent conflicts; examining their origins, conduct, and consequences; reviewing the role of institutions in the management and resolution of conflicts; and analyzing efforts to end them and lay the conditions for a more stable order. The common starting point for this research is that conflict is a complex social phenomenon that cannot be successfully studied from a single theoretical or methodological perspective. As a result, the research programmes and projects undertaken under this theme combine a wide variety of approaches and often cross disciplinary boundaries. They also regularly involve collaboration with other institutions both in the UK and abroad.

 

Within the theme, current research activities of the school can be grouped into several closely interrelated strands:

Strategic studies

This field of studies which arguably goes back to Classical Antiquityis tackled in a variety of ways in the School, most rooted in the positivist, empirical tradition that assumes that lessons can be deduced from historical occurrences.

Recent and planned key outputs include:

• (ongoing) a General Dynamics funded fortnightly seminar on aspects of Strategy, with high outside attendance, especially by military and MoD participants.
• Major completed manuscripts by Colin Gray (OUP) and Beatrice Heuser (CUP) on Strategy, to be published in 2010.
• A Leverhulme-sponsored workshop on "Atrocities in Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies" (see Liberal Way of War Project below).

Conflict and international institutions

 International institutions play an important role in managing and resolving both violent and non-violent conflicts between and within states, and in addressing the consequences of war. Current research examines the impact of decisionmaking structures and mechanisms within international organisations, the ways in which international organisations legitimate their increasingly deep involvement into the domestic affairs of their member states, and the way in which the UN Security Council has addressed - and at times failed to address - the problem of war since 1945.

Recent key outputs include:

• Jonathan Golub's work on EU decision-making, including the creation of new datasets.
• A series of British Academy funded workshops on the legitimacy of international organisations, exploring both conceptual issues specific legitimation practices of a wide range of international organisations; and a forthcoming edited volume on the topic.
• A major edited volume by Dominik Zaum (co-edited with Vaughan Lowe, Adam Roberts, and Jennifer Welsh), on The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution of Thought and Practice (OUP 2008).

Peacebuilding and post-conflict stabilisation

 The international community has increasingly involved itself in the establishment and reform of political and social institutions of post-conflict countries with the aim of creating the conditions for self-sustaining peace - efforts which in some cases conflict with continued military operations, in particular counterinsurgency activities. A central part of this aspect of the research theme is a Carnegie Corporation funded project on Power after Peace: The Political Economy of Post-conflict Statebuilding, which examines the impact of post-conflict statebuilding practices on the relationship between formal and informal political and economic structures in post-conflict countries. Other research in this area explores the tensions between ongoing counterinsurgency operations and post-conflict reconstruction, the impact of democracy promotion in post-conflict environments, and the problems of exit strategies.

Recent key outputs include:

• Oisin Tansey's monograph Regime-Building: Democratization and International Administration, Oxford University Press, 2009.
• The formation of an international research group on the political economy of statebuilding, which will meet several times in 2009 and 2010.

Understandings and representations of war and conflict

 The way in which a legitimate international order, and within this war and conflict, are understood differs not only historically but also between different cultures. Exploring such different understandings is a central part of this research theme. A major aspect of this research is the Leverhulme funded programme The Liberal Way of War: Strategy, Ideology, Representations, examining the ways in which liberal states justify and represent their recourse to war and violence and conduct military operations, and critically assesses the geo-politics of the liberal peace and the de-limitation of political spaces inherent in certain aspects of liberal thought. It also assesses competing conceptions of conflict, such as Islamic conceptions of jihad and just war, and the epistemology of global terrorism.

Recent key outputs include:

• A series of workshops and conferences under the Liberal Way of War programme over the next four years, and related publications, by different members of the school.
• Several publications on the problems of the political in liberal thought, and its implications for understandings of peace and conflict, by Andreas Behnke.