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Relational repair is a key concept to understand the maintenance and evolution of close allies' relationships. Close allies - such as some of the founding members of the Atlantic alliance - sometimes go through disputes that are serious enough to endanger their relationships. Because they attach great value to these ties, they have to find a way to overcome their deterioration, i.e., to achieve relational repair. Yet, little scholarly work has been done on the concept of relational repair among close allies after a serious dispute. This paper contributes to filling this gap by showing how relational repair processes are initiated - from the very start of the disputes - through the actions and interactions of the countries concerned. Applying some of the findings of research in sociology and social-psychology on relational repair among individuals, I show how certain actions or communications can be effective in facilitating relational repair processes among close allies during serious disputes. I illustrate these claims through the analysis and comparison of two cases of serious dispute: the Suez crisis of 1956 and the NATO crisis of 1966. Both crises opposed two close allies, France and the United States, and eventually led to relational repair between them, but they differed as to some of the actions that were undertaken by both countries during the dispute. This in turn led to differences in the evolution of the relational repair processes that took place between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying the nature of trauma and how it affects individuals, societies, and groups is a complex and challenging undertaking. The majority of research on trauma comes from a psychological approach, although scholars in sociology, social psychology, and anthropology have also begun to explore the issue. In the this paper the author briefly explores the sources and dynamics of trauma as according to several social science disciplines. Then he focuses on the need for conflict resolution theorists and practitioners to address trauma related issues in their work. All too often, conflict resolvers working in deep-rooted conflicts, fail to recognize the severity of trauma that many parties have suffered in the hopes of negotiating a solution to a conflict or rushing to undertake reconciliation. This failure to adequately acknowledge the suffering that parties experience and the effect it has on populations can lead to future conflicts and continued suffering. Moreover the author examines how conflict resolution practitioners can be affected by burnout and secondary trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses from a modern systems theoretical perspective political discourses of conflict and cooperation in the Middle East. The specific regional focus of the paper are the Mashreq countries (Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon) and Israel in the period 1991-2005. The paper argues that the constructivist perspective of modern systems theory is particularly well suited to study both conflict and cooperation structures in the Middle East, thereby overcoming some of the shortcomings of more rationalist approaches which tend to conceptualise the Middle East as a regional ?container of conflict?. In contrast to such arguments, the paper argues that in spite of the prominence of political conflicts on the interstate and intrastate levels, the Middle Eastern region is also characterised by formal and informal structures of cooperation that limit the overall societal reach of conflict. By combining IR-approaches on ?regional security complexes? with insights from modern systems theory, the paper looks in particular at the relationship between collective identity constructions in the Middle East, on the one hand, and regional conflict and cooperation structures, on the other. The first part of the paper takes a closer look at the processes of collective identity constructions in the aforementioned countries. On this basis, it proposes a model of Self/Other distinctions that allows to conceptualise both conflictive and cooperative identity relations in the region. The second part of the paper then relates these discourses of identity to the regional structures of conflict and cooperation. Here, the paper is particularly interested in how these patterns of identity relations shape concrete political structures in the Middle East. It hence addresses in particular the role of political, military, religious, media and economic structures. The paper argues that the ubiquitous structures of conflict in the Middle East are balanced by manifold, but often more informal structures of cooperation that limit the overall societal reach of conflict. Such an argument questions the usefulness of conceptualising the Middle East primarily in terms of ?conflict? without an adequate analysis of discourses and structures of cooperation. Moreover, these arguments challenge all those approaches that assume a distinct conflict-inclination of societies and cultures in the Middle East. Rejecting these approaches, the final section of this paper hence puts the study of conflict and cooperation patterns in the Middle East into a world societal perspective. It argues that such a focus on structural developments in world society ? such as functional differentiation, inclusion/exclusion, (de-)bordering ? is better suited to describe patterns of conflict and cooperation in the Middle East, than rationalist, actor-centred or area-specific foci on this region. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As constructivists and other advocates of constitutive theories have often noted, the natural world is very different from the social one. Our ideas about the social world not only reflect that world, but help shape and create it; we are part of the reality we try to describe and explain, not external to it, and we therefore have the potential to alter the reality a theory is merely intended to describe or explain. Our theories about the social world may thus become self-fulfilling prophecies or autogenetic in character. And yet while constructivists often make this point in epistemological debate, there have been relatively few attempts so far to address its empirical implications. With that objective in mind, this paper examines three prominent IR theories – the democratic peace theory, the interdependence equals peace thesis and the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis – arguing that each has a self-fulfilling character rather than being true or false in any objective or timeless sense; each is, to paraphrase the now time-honored expression, what the relevant actors make of it. The paper also probes the processes by which theories become self-generating, stressing the role of opinion entrepreneurs in fashioning explanatory and predictive theories which become popularized – usually because they seem to fit the nature of the times in some way - so that people begin to believe that a theory explains reality in a naturalistic sense and that its predictions are therefore bound to hold. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

15 years after the Soviet collapse the four secessionist regions (Karabakh, Abkhazia, S. Ossetia and Transdniester) remain internationally unrecognized and are a major obstacle to the political and economic development of thestates in the region. Why have these conflicts not been resolved, and why have these statelets managed to survive? This paper explores geopolitical and geoeconomic explanations for this situation, and asks what has tohappen before one can expect some substantial progress towards conflict resolution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]