Nested Security: Lessons in Conflict Management from the League of Nations and the European Union
Erin K. Jenne
Abstract
Why does soft power conflict management meet with variable success over the course of a single mediation? This book asserts that international conflict management is almost never a straightforward case of success or failure. Instead, external mediators may reduce communal tensions at one point but utterly fail at another point. The book uses a “nested security” model of conflict management, which holds that protracted ethnic or ideological conflicts are rarely internal affairs, but rather are embedded in wider regional and/or great power disputes. Internal conflict is nested within a regional ... More
Why does soft power conflict management meet with variable success over the course of a single mediation? This book asserts that international conflict management is almost never a straightforward case of success or failure. Instead, external mediators may reduce communal tensions at one point but utterly fail at another point. The book uses a “nested security” model of conflict management, which holds that protracted ethnic or ideological conflicts are rarely internal affairs, but rather are embedded in wider regional and/or great power disputes. Internal conflict is nested within a regional environment, which in turn is nested in a global environment. Efforts to reduce conflict on the ground are therefore unlikely to succeed without first containing or resolving inter-state or trans-state conflict processes. Nested security is neither irreversible nor static: ethnic relations may easily go from nested security to nested insecurity when the regional or geopolitical structures that support them are destabilized. The book argues that regional security regimes are ideally suited to the management of internal conflicts, because neighbors that have a strong incentive to work for stability provide critical hard-power backing to soft-power missions. The theory is tested against two regional security regimes in Central and Eastern Europe.
Keywords:
conflict management,
mediation,
power disputes,
ethnic conflict,
ideological conflict,
internal conflict,
regional security regimes
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780801453908 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9780801453908.001.0001 |
