Conflict management strategies and applications

The Challenges and Prospects in International Conflict Management The process of reconciliation following civil or global conflict is beset on all sides by difficulties, relating to the prospects of maintaining precarious ceasefire agreements, to the need for the doling out of resources and assistance necessary to restore order and to the demand for some actionable form of punitive justice. Today, a consensus amongst members of the United Nations seems to argue that the repair of fractious intra and inter-state conflicts must involve a high degree of compromise designed to defuse long-standing geographical, political or ethnic tensions. Simultaneously, this process must remove from influence, power and threat those responsible for the atrocities inclining global peacekeeping intervention. Those engaged in such intervention are most commonly members of an international peacekeeping force commissioned by the United Nations, a global alliance such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which was conceived following WWII as a way to steward former Axis Power states toward democracy or a singularly influential and unilaterally acting nation such as the United States. The intervening actor will typically take on the array of challenges associated with local and regional conflict in a series of steps which would be given precedent in the prosecution of World War II. Here, the challenges associated with conflict management would be forged as "three distinctive undertakings-the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials, 1945-48 denazification proceedings and 1945-57 transatlantic and inter- and intra-European reconstruction, reindustrialization and integrative institution building process." (Lecture Notes, 2) Called the Marshall Plan, this would clearly delineate the responsibilities imposed upon the parties responsible for dismantling a global threat and ending a conflict there within. Specifically, the challenges which would come to be seen as incumbent upon intervening actors in the years following the Cold War would be based upon the initial process and eventual success experienced in the context of Germany. Here, a fundamentally and physically divided Germany would emerge from the ruins of the second World War. One half would be shaped in the image of its Western conquerors while the other would take on the mantle as one of Soviet Russia's most prized creations. As one half of Nazi Germany, which would be the seat of World War II and the Holocaust, East Germany's 20th century history is stained by the active participation of its leadership and populace in the instigation of worldwide carnage and the mass murder of millions of European Jews in its concentration camps. Thus, its subsequent Soviet occupation would oversee a bleak humanitarian scenario. By clear contrast, the American occupied West Germany would become a model for democratic reconstruction, ultimately serving as a template for global conflict management, both for better and for worse. The end of WWII would also be a pivotal time for the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, producing a ripple effect. Former partners in the defeat of Germany, they would now begin a struggle at defining the future of the Germany, Europe and, indeed, the world. However, these two world powers would have distinctly different views on how to do this, resulting in the division of Germany into East and West, as well as the alignment of the global community on either side of a long Cold War. Thus, in the period which would follow the second World War, East Germany and West Germany would be among the most significant national births to occur in a time global power re-distribution and the complex demarcation of international boundaries. Thus, these would be significant fronts in the Cold War that would shape the fate of the globe for nearly the remainder of the 20th century. In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, East Germany could in fact be looked to as evidence of a failure of policy. In 1989, the first and most emotive signal of the end of the Cold War came with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. A generation of failed economic policies, over-reaching military priorities and repressive social conditions had instigated the end of an empire and the fall of the Eastern Bloc. The time known as 'd?tente,' where an opening up of the former Soviet republics finally allowed those essentially held captive in such societies to move freely about the world. (U.S. Department of State, 1) And within less than a year of the fall of Berlin, East and West Germany began the discourse toward a return to German sovereignty. "During the 1990 negotiations on German unification, the decision was taken to confirm, and partially extend, West Germany's existing provisions on compensation. This decision was formalized in Article 2 of the 'Agreement on the Enactment and Interpretation of the Unification Treaty' of September 18, 1990 that unified Germany." (U.S. Department of State, 4) At this juncture, the nation of East Germany fundamentally ceased to be, with those territories formerly known thusly now recognized as beholden to the same principles and policies as those governing West Germany. After five decades of international conflict, waged between the imperial champion of the communist ideology and the frontrunner for western democracy, the latter prevailed in the peaceful revolution of 1989. With the reunification of Germany, and two years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War had ended with little violence or resistance, providing a long view of the most optimistic weathering of challenges. And from the perspective that the invasive and draconian presence of Soviet supported regimes had fallen in Hungary, Romania, Czechloslovakia and Poland, the end of the Cold War certainly appeared to light the way toward the pervasion of civil liberty, capitalist evolution and democratic policy representation in a host of nations. Hence, much of the policy which is concerned with the challenges of intervening in conflicts on the smaller scale created in the fallout of the Cold War would be focused on the successful strategy of prosecuting those responsible for the conflict, removing the cultural elements of the conflict from the population and infusing the context with western features of technological, commercial and infrastructural development. Today, this process of nation-building can be evidenced in perhaps the most prominent modern example of the United Nations as a conflict management force-both with respect to its strengths and its flaws. The splintering of Yugoslavia, which devolved into war and ethnic cleansing in the power vacuum created by the collapse of its Soviet sponsorship, would become a crucial early test for the U.N.'s conflict management capabilities following the Cold War. Indeed, this would represent a new achievement for the international human rights movement as reflected in the potential of the United Nations to try international war criminals for the abhorrent deeds of which they are accused. Thus, in the case of Slobodan Milosevic's arrival at the Hague in February of 2002, Bass (2003) tells that "this was an amazing triumph for the human rights movement, but at the same time the realization of a nightmare that had haunted the allied officials who planned the Nuremberg tribunals nearly 60 years ago. They had worried that Nazi leaders would be able to use those trials as a forum to justify their actions and present themselves as martyrs to subsequent generations. Milosevic has tried to do the same." (Bass, 83) And as par for the course, much of the discussion on this subject focuses also on the slow and bureaucratic pace at which conflict management occurs where the United Nations is involved. Indeed, in the case of the eventual tribunals for those who were said to be guilty of war time atrocities, Bass (2003) denotes that "when NATO finally struck against the Bosnian Serb army and oversaw the Dayton accord that ended the war, the tribunal still had to wait almost two years, until July 1997, for NATO troops to begin arresting war crimes suspects in Bosnia. Even then, the nationalist regime in Croatia and Milosevic's regime in Serbia excoriated its efforts and frequently refused to cooperate." (Bass, 84) These types of challenges demonstrate that even where the model appears to exist in that which had been accomplished in Germany, the incubation period remains frustrated by practical obstacles to intervention and action. Just as those who sought to try Nazi war criminals learned of the monumental difficulty in holding individuals accountable for the crimes of whole nations and governments, so do those who attempt to clear the debris from modern cases of wartime atrocity find today that the process of assigning accountability is impacted by moral relativism, legal rationalization and sheer practical difficulty. But in the case of Milosevic and the conflict management process which produced him for the world community, there is a division of labor which is at once promising and problematic. Such is to say that the combined efforts of states, coalitions and the United Nations would ultimately produce the will to take action. While under the leadership of the Clinton Administration at the time, the United States took an aggressive lead role in seeking an intervening global force which could bring reconciliation through state-separation and which could bring punitive justice through the removal of guilty parties. And though there are many who will view the Clinton administration's disruption of ethnic tensions in Kosovo as one of the first examples of the Marshall Plan template in a post-Cold War atmosphere, Buchanan (2002) speaks of the 1999 invasion by noting that "for the first time, NATO, a defensive alliance, took offensive action against a country putting down an insurrection inside its own territory." (Buchanan, 29) This description of the struggle in Kosovo as an 'insurrection,' is one that of course fails to acknowledge the multitude of Yugoslavia's state level crimes against the ethnic-Albanians which, in spite of their majority population in Kosovo, had been reduced to an ethnic-minority with few state rights. The abuses which had created hundreds of thousands of refugees would have, under Buchanan's purview, continued unabated as, likely, ethnically driven responses to aggression on either side would certainly have produced some level of genocide. Thus, we are given something of a point/counter-point with respect to the division of labor which dictates a role for the United States and for NATO as supplemental to the punitive capabilities of the United Nations international courts. Certainly, if there is a parallel between this situation and that currently afflicting the Sudan, this prospect of ethnically motivated killing is the most pressing and does appear to justify a division of labor which allows for individual state actors to take a lead role in conflict intervention. However, the relative failure of any parties to take a sufficient and rapid response to the situation in the Sudan demonstrates the danger in allowing individual states to too greatly influence or direct the agenda of the international community. Certainly, speaking from a politically realistic standpoint, the United States is currently ill- equipped to consider an additional military undertaking given its continuing troubles in Iraq. But as the Marshall Plan doctrine that has guided benevolent international intervention on the behalf of those undefended against human rights violations argues, the United States is proving itself a silent enabler of a conflict which has surely already claimed an irreconcilable number of casualties. (Kunz, 162) International organizations most closely related to the problems taking place in Darfur and future conflicts like it might be considered the most practical immediate route to rectification of the actions still unfolding there. The African Union's primary function for existence is to prevent or reverse the effects of the human rights tragedies like those that the world is now witnessing and allowing in the Darfur region of Sudan. However, its personnel assert that the Union's abilities are severely limited by a lack of resources, manpower and international support. Though recent current events indicate some measure of the progress being made in diminishing the carnage transpiring there, it also makes concessions that tens of thousands have already been killed, 1.5 million are now refugees and that mutilation, rape and murder are still taking place. The AU's newly evolving conflict resolution mechanisms are being tested by this crisis. It is next to impossible, however, that the AU's methods will succeed without greater international contribution and action. This brings about the promises of the Marshall Plan, which indicates that America's self-evident dominance in world affairs and its paralleled presumption of itself as supporter of constitutional democracy saddle it directly with the responsibility to help address the Darfur crisis and to take a lead role in any such future conflicts. Specifically, the doctrine indicates that the cost of its dominance as well as the pursuit of its foreign interests are together contributory to its interest in bringing about peace, stability and the rectification of justice in venues where such is needed. Thus, if the U.N. is to be considered an effective punitive force, the United States must work to support local alliances and international agreements aimed toward conflict reconciliation.