How does the state system measure up to today's realitites when it comes to managing conflict? To what extent are efforts to manage
conflict successful, and for whom?
Prevailing structures designed to deal with conflict between collectives -- sovereign states supported by militaries, military industry,
and the United Nations -- operate mainly on principles that are hundreds of years old. Conditions for conflict and its management have changed
radically since this state system was constructed. There is a risk that
institutional inertia produces growing disparity between real-world problems
and the institutions that are supposed to manage them.
Realism and legalism are found to form a double idological support for the state system. The study compares the state system's realist
and legalist premises to different cases of post cold war intercollective
conflict: the 1990-91 Gulf War, the 1990-95 break-up of Yugoslavia, and the
1992 Los Angeles riots. These cases present important challenges to the
pravailing system's premises -- mismatches between idea and reality that
are clearly connected to failures in conflict management. In addition,
findings suggest that the state system not only fails to deal with important
aspects of modern-day conflict, but that it increasingly produces
problems that it cannot manage. This suggests that the prevailing state system
is not in harmony with crucial conflict-related aspects of global
impact, indicating a serious systemic problem.
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