| This dissertation provides a socio-cultural analysis of the globalization of international conflict resolution (CR) expertise, a set of analytical frameworks, pedagogical tools, and suggested methods for managing violent conflicts. Though they have diverse personal and professional biographies, the CR-specialists who make up this developing expertise have professional networks that intersect in a small set of university degree programs, training and research centers, and practitioner organizations located in the United States and Europe. The author spent sixteen months conducting ethnographic fieldwork at a sample of these sites located in the U.S. and the U.K. The author interviewed over 160 CR-specialists and government officials, collected oral histories from the field's founders, conducted archival research, and was a participant-observer in numerous training seminars, workshops, and policymaking fora. Two questions guided this research. First, what factors explain the global dissemination of CR-expertise, a field that was until very recently a marginal area of scholarship and policy activism? And second, what forms of power structured the circulation of CR-specialist's policy ideas as they moved onto the agenda of U.S. and U.K. policymakers?; CR-specialists are strongly motivated by a diverse array of value orientations and commitments evident both in their divergent understandings of core concepts like peace, conflict and just force, and in their responses to events like the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Despite the heterogeneity of their commitments, specialists share a strong belief in the viability of their expertise, a belief that is reinforced by the formal properties of core models and analytical frameworks, particular kinds of communicative acts, and the effects of particular forms of CR-pedagogy. CR-specialists have been able to parlay the credibility and authority they have acquired in other professions and through their affiliations with specific institutions in ways that capture the political imagination of sympathetic donors, giving them the resources necessary to further promulgate their expertise. The ability particular CR-specialists to exploit new and old communication technologies, and to cultivate authority within the knowledge economies of policymaking, strongly influenced when, how and through whom, conflict management policies made their way onto the policy agendas of the U.S. and U.K. governments. |
