Understanding Conflict Resolution

Reviews / Votes

Those of us guiding students through this field owe Peter Wallensteen great thanks for a masterful and erudite guide to modern-day political violence and conflict resolution. This is one of the best single-authored books on the subject, and one that can be employed as the main text on modules and degree courses, but which is much more than a mere textbook. It draws on the extensive dataset amassed by researchers at Uppsala University to reach some important and robust conclusions about the evolving nature of armed conflict and peace processes...It is a thoroughly recommended purchase for peace and conflict studies students
Times Higher Education



There are three major problems confronting the world at the present time: climate change, inequality and organised violence. Wallensteen's path breaking Understanding Conflict Resolution is absolutely essential reading for anyone seeking insight into the origins, management and transformation of the latter. He surveys the major theoretical perspectives on conflict and violence and provides excellent examples of ways in which violence is being handled at intra-state , inter state and regional levels. He raises important and challenging questions about the role of the United Nations and the United States in the building of a more stable and peaceful world order. This book is essential reading for scholars, practitioners and anyone interested in creative, progressive solutions to 21st century problems
Professor Kevin P. Clements
Foundation Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies and Director of the New Zealand National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand





Peter Wallensteen's recent addition to the study of managing conflict, Understanding Conflict Resolution (3rd Edition), will provide the most analytically complete and conceptually useful text out there. I have taught a seminar in conflict management for eight years in a row using eight different textbooks, none of them sufficiently analytically developed to provide students with a coherent way to think about managing global conflict. When I discovered Peter's second edition my search for a useable textbook ended. The second edition was great to use in a classroom because the analytical lens and conceptual clarity with which that book was organized resonated with the students. All the other ideas that needed to be presented would be evaluated in light of the core ideas set up by Wallensteen. The newest edition builds on this already successful model by expanding coverage to conflicts that are most salient to today's students and by building on new scholarship about the role of peace agreements in securing long term peace. By framing the methods for managing today's seemingly intractable conflicts in terms of the knowledge built on a generation of scholarship, Wallensteen makes teaching these core ideas rather easy



Patrick M. Regan
Professor of Political Science at the University of Binghamton