Nested Security: Lessons in Conflict Management from the League of Nations and the European Union - Tapa dura

"The conclusions Erin K. Jenne sets out in Nested Security will be of interest to policymakers and practitioners. She argues convincingly that conflict mediators are more likely to succeed when they treat sectarian tensions as an integral part of wider conflicts that extend beyond the target state's borders. Jenne's research shows how important it is to focus on stabilizing the regional situation before one can stabilize an internal domestic one." -- Paula M. Pickering, William and Mary, author of Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor "In Nested Security, Erin K. Jenne explores a necessary condition for the successful mediation of ethnic territorial conflict. Jenne makes an important contribution in considering simultaneously the important influences that international institutions and regional state powers have on the potential for intrastate conflict to escalate. She convincingly demonstrates that we overlook the regional context at great peril; it is almost impossible to expect ethnic territorial conflicts to be resolved without sufficient nesting in regional cooperation." -- Kyle Beardsley, Duke University, author of The Mediation Dilemma "Jenne (Central European Univ.) presents a comprehensive analysis of international conflict management under two European security systems: the League of Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).... highly recommended." -- K. M. Zaarour * CHOICE * "Erin Jenne makes an important contribution to the literature on conflict management. Jenne argues that in order for mediation of civil disputes to succeed, it is necessary to first address the wider conflict environment.... But as she herself acknowledges, external stability alone does not create peace. It is an important piece of the conflict management puzzle and she does well to remind scholars and policymakers alike that we cannot get so caught up in the trees that we miss the forest." -- Jennifer De Maio * H-Net *

Why does soft power conflict management meet with variable success over the course of a single mediation? In Nested Security, Erin K. Jenne asserts that international conflict management is almost never a straightforward case of success or failure. Instead, external mediators may reduce communal tensions at one point but utterly fail at another point, even if the incentives for conflict remain unchanged. Jenne explains this puzzle using a "nested security" model of conflict management, which holds that protracted ethnic or ideological conflicts are rarely internal affairs, but rather are embedded in wider regional and/or great power disputes. Internal conflict is nested within a regional environment, which in turn is nested in a global environment. Efforts to reduce conflict on the ground are therefore unlikely to succeed without first containing or resolving inter-state or trans-state conflict processes.Nested security is neither irreversible nor static: ethnic relations may easily go from nested security to nested insecurity when the regional or geopolitical structures that support them are destabilized through some exogenous pressure or shocks, including kin state intervention, transborder ethnic ties, refugee flows, or other factors related to regional conflict processes. Jenne argues that regional security regimes are ideally suited to the management of internal conflicts, because neighbors that have a strong incentive to work for stability provide critical hard-power backing to soft-power missions. Jenne tests her theory against two regional security regimes in Central and Eastern Europe: the interwar minorities regime under the League of Nations (German minorities in Central Europe, Hungarian minorities in the Carpathian Basin, and disputes over the Aland Islands, Memel, and Danzig), and the ad hoc security regime of the post-Cold War period (focusing on Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic States and Albanian minorities in Montenegro, Macedonia, and northern Kosovo).