The wars in the former Yugoslavia continue to be viewed through a “civil war” lens, making it easy to forget the cross-border territorial, material, and power ambitions that propelled them then – and continue to shape agendas today. The seizure of territory by Russia in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014) were appeased and willfully ignored. As we come up on the three-month anniversary of the Ukraine war, Russia’s losses and the subsequent likely substantial downgrading of Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, there will be increasing pressure to reach some agreement. Unity and resolve – among policymakers and audiences – can only last so long.

And yet this “negotiating period” will be the period of time in which the outlines of the post-2022 European and global security paradigm are perhaps at the most existential risk. While Ukraine’s future must be decided by the Ukrainians, Volodymyr Zelensky will at some point be under mounting diplomatic pressure by the now supportive West – to “be reasonable”.

Any ceding of territory to Russia – through formal absorption or long-term limbo ambiguity – would be a demonstration that sheer force and disregard for civilian life can yield territorial and political gains.  But, many would be uncomfortable with a continued fight to reclaim every inch of the east, and of the coastline, warning of nuclear arsenals and calling for negotiation.

This is where Adams’ book, expertise, and perspective come in, as he offers the reader a walk through peacekeeping and conflict resolution theory, complemented by his personal experience in various civilian peacekeeping and humanitarian missions around the world.

Adams’ book reads as the culmination of a lifetime of professional and academic work. Far from being the “typical” social science student pursuing a PhD with fairly little life experience, Adams makes his different path clear from the start, explaining how his deployment in Vietnam as a young man, and later his work in various civilian humanitarian and peace missions in Sudan, Somalia, Kosovo, and elsewhere, shaped his thinking.

The view from inside the destroyed Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) building in Mariupol, Ukraine, 21 May 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE/ALESSANDRO GUERRA.

Beginning with the book’s title, he astutely articulates reflections and comparisons to the current divisive churn in the United States, joining a mounting chorus of voices pointing out that the US should not be viewed as uniquely exceptional in its ability to avoid the type of violent conflict that has destroyed other countries. His decision to hit the road and work as a truck driver in the US in 2015 positioned him to have a literal driver’s seat view of the turmoil of American society and politics at the time that ushered in the era of Donald Trump and Trumpism. His experience conducting research in Bosnia and Herzegovina and studying the rise of conflict and the exploitation of grievance globally poised him to identify the echoes of conflict entrepreneurs like Slobodan Milosevic and Benito Mussolini. “In other words, a style of leadership promoting blame, character assassination, exclusion, division, and coarser instincts, particularly towards immigrants, minority groups, intellectual activists and a free press. Such a practice does not lead to a good end. Democracy is based on trust that truth is being held forth. There are differences in perceptions of truth, of course, but the deliberate purveyance of falsehoods for personal or political gain is reckless and dangerous at any level”

He sees the escalatory effects of conflict spirals in the polarization that has now seemingly divided much of the US into an “us” and a “them” politically, but even at the inter-personal and community levels, and, illustrating the higher level implications, he notes the calls by a few for Texas or Georgia to secede; he suggests that such people learn the lessons of the dangers of such spiraling, polarizing zeal from Yugoslavia.

His book is a unique blend of academic literature review, diligent mapping and charting of theoretical and empirical conflict dynamics, and personal experience sharing and reflection. I, too, did my doctoral work at George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (now renamed the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution), and while Adams and I were not there at the same time, I was glad to see that much of the foundational work and analytical approach to understanding conflict have remained at the core of the institution.

His intellectual meandering through some of the key conflict theorists, including Johan Galtung (and his concept of positive and negative peace), John Burton’s human needs theory, Lonnie Athens’ concept of “violentization” and others, is a useful reminder of the interdisciplinary perspectives needed in conflict studies, and would be a useful supplementary reader for students working through these original texts.

His earnest graphing and diagramming of conflict dynamics reminded me of this analytical process of understanding conflict cycles and potential entry points for mediation, resolution, or transformation, and the need to map various actors, both Track 1 (officials) and Track 2 and beyond (touching on the notion of multi-track diplomacy). Such mapping exercises force one to see that conflicts are a part of a system and a structure.

He also integrates various frameworks for analyzing conflict, peace stabilization operations, and transformation opportunities, presenting his own framework which he used in his doctoral field work in Bosnia. A key lens he applies in his work is distinguishing between structural (the operating ecosystem in a place in conflict) and relationship (the human and interpersonal) indicators of conflict transformation. While he reports that some of his respondents noted that the structural elements of transformation should drive the relationships, and others said that relationships should drive the structural change, overall this chicken-and-egg dilemma received mixed response (with some saying both needed to be addressed simultaneously). Again highlighting the human element of transformation, he writes that he did find that, “of those who had suffered serious personal losses during the war, nearly all said relations needed to be fixed first”.

Adams also argues that while conflicts must be understood in historical perspective, human beings should be kept front and center, suggesting a bridging of realism and idealism into what he calls human realism.

The inclusion of pull-out, color graphics, charts, and visualizations are dense but useful references, and could inspire readers to consider how to graphically display some of the conflict dynamics they may seeing playing out, at a community or higher level. Again, this would be very useful to students grappling with these issues in their own studies and early field work.

However, reviewing this book while “traditional” war has returned to the European continent, and as Bosnia’s negative peace often seems to be becoming ever more negative, can make even the most dedicated disciple of conflict analysis and resolution begin to question some of these tenets – and whether bottom-up mobilization for peace can ever really disempower the conflict entrepreneurs, or whether pure Machiavellian and realpolitik-based power is really all that matters.  At times, Bosnia can seem like the ideal case study.

People attend the 23rd remembrance of the genocide in Srebrenica in The Hague, The Netherlands, 11 July 2018. Bosnian Serb soldiers massacred 8,372 Bosnian Muslim men after capturing the former Bosnian Muslim enclave in Srebrenica on 11 July 1995 during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995. Photo: EPA-EFE/BART MAAT.

Various conflict management tools put into place in Bosnia have not yet led to a more positive peace, primarily because the “conflict managers” have lacked the long-term strategic perspective needed to consistently ensure fertile seeds would not be simply uprooted by changing administrations and personalities – domestic or international. As a result, we’ve essentially had conflict resolution game pieces on an increasingly realpolitik game board.

Elements of territorial autonomy or consociationalism have not created space for more rebuilding of relationships, but have hardened into political movements for more autonomy, greater ethno-national partition, or even secession. The notion of the benefits of international engagement and supervision (including by “guarantors”) of the peace agreement implementation has not created space for constructive redevelopment of Bosnia’s traditional social and cultural diversity, but has provided inroads for illiberal external actors (Turkey, Russia) and neighbors (Serbia and Croatia, who had been warring parties in Bosnia themselves) to continue to pursue various agendas in peacetime.

The notion that a salami slicing approach to addressing conflict issues incrementally would create a foundation for eventually addressing bigger issues (the “boulder in the road”) has instead allowed for the incremental widening and calcification of structural, legal, cultural, and educational divisions among people throughout Bosnia by political leaders who have remained focused on long-term political agendas held since the war.

The idea that an EU perspective would gently nudge regional leaders to more EU-minded values, practices, and reconciliation has never yielded the once-hoped-for Willy Brandt moment, but has arguably enabled EU and Western moral and political support to increasingly divisive and anti-democratic actors. Social contact theory – the notion of simply bringing people in a conflict together with “the other” to engage in a task of mutual importance – has instead led to the projectization of civil society which, in the absence of higher-level political reconciliation, results in technical project implementation unmoored from the pursuit of lasting structural change.

Yet again, the reality we see in Bosnia should not lead to the conclusion that these conflict management theories never had a chance.  The problems are related to shifting attention spans in terms of global priorities, a misunderstanding of the difference between partners and spoilers (to use another good conflict-analysis term), and a failed assumption that economic liberalization would automatically lead to rules-based democratic systems rather to what my colleague Kurt Bassuener calls “peace cartels.”

The arc of the war in Bosnia and of the post-war process in the region has in many ways followed the rise and now possible decline of the post-Cold War “liberal consensus” that enabled such conflict management tools to be developed and deployed.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic (R), Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic (C) and UN special envoy to the former Yugoslavia Yasushi Akashi (L) talking to reporters after they met for talks on the situation in the eastern Bosnian town of Gorazde in April 1994. Photo: EPA/PHOTO SRDJAN SUKI.

However, following the experiences in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the short-lived emergence of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, a series of developments began to close the door on this window of opportunity for a new conflict management approach to global engagement. The attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent ill-considered “global war on terror,” the financial crisis and related geopolitical impact (most notably in North Africa and Syria), the rise of a quasi-democratic global authoritarian right (seen through India’s Modi, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Trump, Hungary’s Orban, etc.), and the multiplier impact of COVID-19 on all of these trends all led to a recalibrating international system which is now being thoroughly challenged by Putin’s violent pursuit of his territorial and broader political aims.

Putin’s failures on the battlefield do not deter from his broader goals. His aim to demonstrate the inability of the liberal rules-based order to have any standing or teeth when norms are actively disregarded is the whole point. The post-World War II security architecture was aimed – admittedly imperfectly – at reducing the likelihood of another cataclysmic war by developing hotlines, good offices, development and democratization interventions, international organizations, and diplomatic communication structures.

While there have of course always been substantial limits to their effectiveness (Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, etc.), until recently people have not lived under fear of a Third World War, and while inequality has risen, more people have been pulled out of poverty than at any time in history. But if international bodies like the UN, OSCE, and others exist primarily to issue statements of regret and condemnation, and can’t operate due to the veto-wielding role of illiberal members, his point will have been proven. Even NATO’s now presumed expansion to include Finland and Sweden will strengthen the view of authoritarians of the inevitability of certain essential geopolitical spheres of influence, and of the primacy of brute military force over the conference rooms and negotiation sessions of the peacemakers.

This real-time resurgence of realpolitik doesn’t mean that the conflict management era is definitively over. However, it’s a reminder that the tools of conflict transformation need to be applied as rigorously, strategically, and consistently as the weapons of war.

Adams’ book is a reminder for students of conflict studies and practitioners, diplomats and policymakers that peace requires long-term strategy, commitment, and zeal that is equal to the task. Policymakers interested in conflict management strategies would do well to not simply react to the aggression in Ukraine, but to understand the continued drivers of the conflict and the impediments to positive peace in Bosnia and the western Balkans generally. Adams’ book could contribute to their food for thought in such a long overdue exercise.

Analytic Reflections from Conflict Zones: A Cautionary Tale for a Polarizing America and World, by James R. Adams, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021.

The opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.