ABSTRACT
The Correlates of War project at the University of Michigan provides with the data necessary to chronicle the trends of international conflict and crisis since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The costs of war in terms of lives, property damage, social dislocation—the staggering international refugee problem, for example—and economic woes have become largely intolerable. The chapter argues that the approaches make incomplete diagnoses of the etiology of international conflict and that, therefore, their prescriptive elements may be only partially helpful, or helpful only for particular types of conflicts. It demonstrates how some types of international conflict are inconsistent with the assumptions of the literature. The technical literature on conflict resolution says little about the type of intractable conflict. The chapter provides some evidence from practice to show to what extent international institutions have been able or unable to fulfil their mandates for the pacific settlement of international conflicts.
