ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the emergence of the concept of conflict transformation can be explained by reference to changes in the real world of international politics and new trends within the academic study of world affairs. It explores development of the concept of conflict transformation, which people linked to a number of developments in the post-Cold War world and to new approaches to the academic understanding of peace and conflict. The chapter describes the development of the literature on conflict transformation by focusing on several key texts that have emerged since the late 1980s. It suggests that it might be best to distinguish transformation not in terms of a single characteristic, but as a cluster of objectives. The chapter identifies several criticism that could be made of the conflict transformation idea from the fact that it might actually increase insecurity to a worry about the dangers of utopian engineering.
