ABSTRACT
Prior to the Second World War, interstate conflict was the predominant form of organized violence in international relations. During the Cold War and the period that has followed it, intrastate violence and intercommunal conflict have replaced interstate violence as the principal form of conflict in international relations. However, what is striking about the international conflict trends is that over the past two decades the number of civil wars, measured by their frequency and aggregate levels of violence, has been on the decline. This trend is now welldocumented in a large number of studies, including, most recently, the Human Security Report (Mack 2005) of the Liu Institute of International Studies at the University of British Columbia. What is also borne out in these studies is that many of these conflicts – Bosnia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Mozambique, the conflict between North and South Sudan, El Salvador, Guatemala, the border dispute between Peru and Ecuador, and now perhaps the conflict in Aceh – have been settled or ‘resolved’ through a process of negotiation, upsetting a longstanding, post-Westphalian trend where wars traditionally ended when one party defeated the other on the battlefield. And even in those cases of those perennial conflicts – Israel-Palestine, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Mindanao, and Korea – that are still on-going, negotiations between the warring parties have rarely been off the table.
