Michael Butler

Clark University · Department of Political Science

Purpose Conventional wisdom tells us that mediation without ripeness is a fool’s errand (Zartman and Touval, 1985). What, then, is Türkiye’s motivation for mediating the war in Ukraine in lieu of ripeness – and what can its behavior as a mediator tell us about that motivation? In pursuit of this question, this paper inductively analyzes Turkish med...

Nearly two decades after its formal endorsement by the international community, the Responsibility to Protect is stuck in a quagmire reminiscent of the contentious politics that both preceded and precipitated it. A once ambitious effort to transform notions of responsibility and practices of accountability regarding civilian protection and atrocity...

This book revisits and interrogates the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect in search of the root cause of R2P’s failure to date. Employing a critical constructivist lens throughout, the book locates the origin of that apparent failure in the close association of R2P with humanitarian intervention. In returning to the ideational underpinnin...

The absence of ripeness in Russia’s war against Ukraine begs the question of why both China and Türkiye have intervened diplomatically in the conflict. One possible answer resides in the role of mediation and diplomacy in ameliorating the ‘authoritarian control problem.’ Informed by constructivist insights on the co-constitutive relationship betwee...

This new textbook provides students with an accessible overview of the logic, evolution, application and outcomes of the five major approaches of the growing field of international conflict management: traditional peacekeeping peace enforcement and support operations negotiation and bargaining mediation adjudication. The book aims to provide the st...

The Responsibility to Protect was supposed to ensure states care for their people — or else. In Gaza, Ukraine, and beyond, this hard-won principle lies in tatters. Published by 360Info, Monash University (https://360info.org/violence-victimhood-and-the-collapse-of-civilian-protection/)

By virtue of their defining criteria, international crises seem unlikely candidates for conflict management and resolution (Snyder and Diesing, 1977). However, negotiations among crisis protagonists are not uncommon (Debs and Weiss, 2016; Abbott and Snidal, 1998). Such behavior may reflect a desire to 'exit' the crisis dynamic (Zartman, 2018). This...

The various contributions to this special issue reveal three overarching insights with respect to negotiation and mediation in the hard(est) cases: one, the discrepancy between securing negotiated or mediated agreements and actual solutions; two, the conditioning effects of structural and contextual considerations on the bargaining process; and thr...

This introductory chapter sets the stage for the range of applications and interrogations of securitization contained in this book. It does so primarily by chronicling the larger shift in the security studies field toward critical approaches which, in turn, paved the way for the so-called 'constructivist turn' and the development of securitization...

The dynamic quality of protracted intra‐state conflicts is a factor that complicates and sometimes confounds the efforts of peacemakers. Building on this insight, and given the prevalence of conflicts of this type in the contemporary international system, this paper takes up a central question: how can peacemakers adapt to changing dynamics along t...

The dynamic quality of protracted intra-state conflicts is a factor that complicates and sometimes confounds the efforts of peacemakers (Zartman and Touval, 2007; Zartman, 1995). Building on this insight, and given the prevalence of conflicts of this type in the contemporary international system, this paper takes up a central question: how can peac...

In light of the resurgence of illiberalism and nationalism in the international system, this paper argues that the architects of Canadian foreign policy currently have a window of opportunity to advance Canada’s long-standing strategic objective of Canadian internationalism – by actively assuming the role of “norm entrepreneur” with respect to the...

When and in what circumstances do states turn to conflict management to manage a crisis? This paper identifies a set of contextual, processual, and structural variables, examining the presence and strength of their associations with the likelihood of states employing conflict management in a foreign policy crisis. Conducting an empirical analysis o...

One of the long-standing debates between diplomatic historians and social scientists focusing on diplomacy and negotiation turns on what we know and how we know it. While diplomatic history points to the necessity of micro-level approaches rooted in the details of discrete and idiosyncratic negotiations and interactions, social science strives to i...

The preceding analysis provides an exploratory assessment intended to push beyond the anecdotal impression that just war theory matters in US foreign policy, in order to address the more compelling question of how it does. While it is possible for even a casual observer to find copious evidence of the saturation of the prevailing American wardiscou...

One of the last and most dramatic acts in the saga of Yugoslavia’s disintegration took place in Kosovo at the end of the 1990s. By that time, the historical and cultural significance of Kosovo for Serbs (stemming from the highly mythologized Battle of Kosovo in 1389) was clearly at odds with the province’s ethnic composition; as of 1991, the popula...

To say that the 9/11 attacks dramatically reshaped US foreign policy would be to patently state the obvious. Indeed, in the view of many, 9/11 remains a transformational event that has significantly reconfigured American society, US foreign policy, and the international system (Kellner, 2003). From the standpoint of this research, the chief importa...

At the simplest and most fundamental level, the importance I attribute to the just war frame is due to the unconscious appeal of the just war tradition within the Western liberal imagination. There is no comparable logic and set of ideas available to those in positions of authority in Western liberal societies who wish to forge a shared understandi...

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 was the first major foreign policy crisis of the post-Cold War era for the United States (see Table 5.1). Largely catching the White House unaware, the Iraqi invasion was less of a surprise to regional experts or intelligence analysts within the Administration (Little, 2002; Freedman, 1993; Miller and M...

While extant changes in the views of liberal societies toward the practice of war suggest that the utility and by extension the practice of war could or perhaps should be in jeopardy in the United States (and potentially other liberal societies), this is clearly not the case. The origins of the reason it is not, I contend, can be found in the conti...

The core function of any frame is to advance a collective perception of some problem as well as a consensus concerning its optimal solution (Benford, 1987; Nepstad, 1997). As such, the claim that a consensus concerning the war problématique in US foreign policy has been cultivated through use of the ‘just war frame’ requires one to first assess whe...

Butler sheds light on how American political leaders sell the decision to intervene with military force to the public and how a just war frame is employed in US foreign policy. He provides three post-Cold War examples of foreign policy crises: the Persian Gulf War (1990-91), Kosovo (1999), and Afghanistan (2001).

A decade after achieving independence, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (DRTL) continues to rely upon the United Nations (UN) directly and indirectly to carry out functions typically ascribed to the state. This dependency raises the specter of what scholars concerned with the breadth and extent of recent and ongoing UN operations in places su...

The purpose of this review essay is to examine the use of experimental methods and its contributions to international studies research. Following a general discussion of the experimental approach, including the advantages and disadvantages of experimentation in International Relations (IR), this review moves to a categorized discussion of the ways...

Increasingly, scholars have taken note of the tendency for women to conceptualize issues such as security, peace, war, and the use of military force in different ways than their male counterparts. These divergent conceptualizations in turn affect the way women interact with the world around them and make decisions. Moreover, research across a varie...

The appropriate role for the United Nations in international dispute resolution is a matter of high profile discussion and controversy. This paper begins with this ambivalence about the appropriate role for the United Nations in the world and examines several sets of issues that relate to the future of support for the UN within the US and the prosp...

The intersection of the study of bargaining and international crisis has proven a fertile area of inquiry that has notably excluded third-party mediation. This research chronicles this omission from the crisis bargaining literature, and seeks to identify whether mediation as a form of international crisis behavior merits inclusion in that literatur...

The profound reliance on rhetorical appeals by political leaders in the articulation and prosecution of U.S. foreign policy initiatives, particularly those involving the use of military force, is a phenomenon both long-studied and widely chronicled. This phenomenon appears to be an especially favored tactic of the current Bush administration. This...

The polities of Canada and the United States are purportedly engaged in the process of value convergence; however, with regard to the legitimacy of foreign military intervention, divergence seems a more apt characterization. This research explores whether the current discord between Canada and the US reflects an aberration, or a realization of...

The GlobalEd Project is a problem-based learning simulation delivered via the web for middle and high school students as their classes are assigned the role of a specific country with the goal of negotiating a treaty with one of the other participating classes/countries during a five-week period. A repeated measures ANOVA conducted on a Knowledge s...

Abstract The GlobalEd Project is web-based research project applying problem-based,learning with students involved in performing as groups of representatives for specific countries and negotiating treaties. Themes such as human rights, internationaleconomics and world health are discussed. During the winter 2002/03 simulation held with middle schoo...

The GlobalEd Project employs a technology richenvironment for high school students who wishto participate in a simulation of internationalrelations and negotiation. A simulationconsists of negotiations on a variety ofinternational policy issues conducted bystudents from 10–15 schools through anInternet-based interface. This study reportsthe finding...

Gender analysis has emerged as an important conceptual approach to the study of decision making and conflict resolution in the international arena. Although scholars and practitioners within the field of international relations have debated the effect of gender on the negotiation and decision-making process, little systematic evidence to support th...

One compelling aspect of U.S. foreign policy during the cold war was the propensity of policy makers to seek harmony between the pursuit of security objectives and a stated American belief in enduring values of peace and justice. One need look no further than campaign monikers such as "Operation Just Cause" and "Operation Restore Hope" or declarati...

GlobalEd is a interactive simulation project designed for middle and high school students in the northeastern USA. The simulation is embedded within an academic course and lasts for approximately six weeks during which teams of 12-15 classes engage in international negotiations across the Internet. Classes are assigned a country for the period of t...

The New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) is responsible for preparing and evaluating fishery management plans (FMPs) for the coastal states of the Northeast. Perhaps the most extensive and contentious of these FMPs is the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan, which collectively manages 15 species of groundfish found in New Engla...

Human dimensions is a general term used to describe the application of the social sciences to natural resource-related problems and issues and is one of the newest areas of emphasis in wildlife management circles. The main objectives of this study were to complete an inventory of university courses in human dimensions of fish and wildlife managemen...