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AbstractThis article surveys the emergence of conflict management from the academic and policy shadows into a far more prominent field of inquiry and practice. As the barriers to entry into third party roles collapsed at the end of the Cold War, the field of conflict management expanded, diversified, and fragmented into a range of practice areas (scholarly, policy-oriented, and operational). Four phases of this evolution are identified. An increasingly crowded field lacks gatekeepers or natural coherence, underscoring the need for leadership and sustained, coordinated efforts. The study of mediation has blossomed around the work of Zartman and others, while the policy community has swung back and forth in its enthusiasm for third party roles in an age where hard power and smart power vie for pride of place. Conflict management responses are increasingly spontaneous, ad hoc and case-specific. Debate is emerging over the pros and cons of engaging with armed non-state actors that are placed on proscribed lists in the struggle against terrorism. Post-conflict challenges continue to pose a severe test to practitioners of peacebuilding.

A review essay of a book by Dennis Ross, 'Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World', (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2007).

The global war on terror is a dubious template for the security challenges faced by the United States because it distorts the focus of policy and exaggerates the effectiveness of military power. A grand strategy cannot rest solely on the idea of 'taking out' specific sets of bad guys and fighting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It is essential, as the Iran case demonstrates, to get at intractable political tensions and frozen geopolitical divisions that foster dangerous security conditions in much of the globe. Strategic debate should focus less on unilateral versus multilateral approaches or hard power versus soft power, and recognise the real missing ingredient in recent policy-smart statecraft using leverage in all its forms for engaging the world's zones of turbulence. (Survival / SWP)