The Regionalization of Conflict and Intervention ipa seminar Report

II. The Regionalization of Conflict

It has become commonplace among scholars and policy-

makers to assert that the latter half of the 20th century

witnessed a decline in the incidence of interstate war and

a rise in the frequency of intrastate war. Certainly in the

post-Cold War era the international community has

directed its attention and resources toward peacefully

resolving what have been typically understood as civil

wars – achieving considerable success in some cases

while seemingly inexplicably failing in others. However,

as knowledge, policy, and practice inevitably lag behind

real world events, an important reason for failure within

these interventions can often be traced back to fuzzy

assumptions made about the nature of conflict itself. For

example, while the apparently “civil” wars in regions

such as West Africa exacerbated one another through

prominent regional dimensions such as transborder war

economies, the regionalization of conflict has until

recently attracted scant attention among academic and

policymaking  communities.  As  this  section  strongly

implies, getting the analysis right is a necessary precursor

for effective intervention.