ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of major approaches and directions to the study of conflict primarily by international relations scholars in recent years. Several major trends in the study of world conflict over the past two decades may be discerned. First, many scholars have explicitly looked at conflict processes—whether in the origination, escalation, duration, or termination of conflict. Secondly, such studies have self-consciously identified the contexts in which such processes have taken place, and the conditions under which these processes are most likely to take place. Thus, what had been formerly considered to be subfield focused on “international conflict”—with a heavy reliance on a Realist view that the only conflict of consequence occurred between “states”—became a subfield much more fully placed within the broader study of social conflict (for an overview, see Pruitt and Kim 2004). As such, the study of conflict processes returned to a group of trends that first emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, which relied on the multidisciplinary study of conflict (e.g., Wright 1942; 1968).
