Conflict Management in the Post-Cold War Era: Preventive Diplomacy and PKO

Abstract

This article is an empirical analysis of the cases of preventive diplomacypracticed for conflicts during the post-Cold War era. It focuses on establishingand verifying the hypotheses on the successes and failures of preventive diplo-macy. For an analytical framework, it accesses the definition and theory ofpreventive diplomacy, along with three case studies: denuclearization of the formerSoviet republics, civil war in East Timor, and the North Korean nuclear crisis.This research found that the definition of the concept hardly reflects thereality and has some limitations in its application to empirical study. For thisreason, it has taken preventive diplomacy as the PKO activities, which make itpossible to easily collect data and clearly identify the beginning of interventionand the number of participating actors. Then it verifies the hypotheses on thesuccesses of preventive diplomacy based on the conflict data over a 10-yearperiod during the post-Cold War era.For the empirical analysis, this paper selected three of Lunds successfactorstiming of intervention, support from major powers, and state autonomyand added another factor: namely geographical region. The main findings ofthis paper are as follows: First, timing is a vital factor. PKO intervention wasmost successful at the latent level of conflict. Second, intervention of majorpowers is also significant. The intervention of the United States yielded a highrate of success. Third, state autonomy is not a critical factor. Domestic andinternational conflicts showed no differences in the success of PKO. Fourth,geographical region proved to be an important factor.