theory

I have been using Bloomfield and Moulton's Managing International Conflict, and the associated CASCON software for several years teaching both undergraduate and graduate students. It embodies a lot of generalized wisdom about international and domestic conflicts since 1945. The Bloomfield-Leiss "life cycle" model of conflict phases, which is the basis for the coding of 85 multi-phase conflicts, is a classic contribution. The discussion of conflict threats in the contemporary world is excellent; the teaching manual is really accessible. The analysis routines offerred do a good job of highlighting the most suggestive of the 170 or so specific factors judged by experts to have exacerbated or diminished the liklihood/magnitude of violence in the first 3 phases of the historical cases included in the institutional memory that the CASCON system provides. My students are putting in the current Kosovo crisis this week, while it is happening; we hope that the precedent-searching and generalizing options within the software will help us see new dimensions in the management of this (and similar) cases. Unfortunately, the Dayton agreement is not a case already coded into CASCON, so we may have to include it too to get a more historically accurate rendition of the reasoning going on in Holbrook's mind. The pragmatic, policy-oriented way of using history is certainly more relevant to public-policy training in this area than the more statistically oriented treatments of contemporary conflicts that one finds in much of the "scientific" international relations literature. On the other hand, the coded details available from CASCON concerning past, "relevant" management cases of a similar sort, is really rich, but tantalizingly brief. I have found it necessary to find longer accounts of key precedentially relevant cases in some uses of the CASCON system. Users wanting an informed, but accessible introduction to sophisticated and historically informed practical thinking about international crisis management will get an unparalleled introduction throught the use of this book and it's associated CASCON software. Experts will get new ideas how to design policy-relevant information support systems.