Molly M. Melin

Fear of rejection: The puzzle of unaccepted mediation offers in international conflict

How do factors that influence mediation offers affect belligerent behavior? The circumstances that attract potential mediators are not the same as those that make mediation desirable to belligerents. Third parties offer mediation when the conflict is intense, generation of an agreement is likely and they have ties to the conflict. However, mediation is less acceptable to belligerents in these circumstances. This dynamic creates a dilemma; the characteristics that make third parties more forthcoming with mediation offers simultaneously make disputants more likely to reject mediation proposals. A better understanding of this strategic process can help scholars and policy-makers better determine how to supply mediation where it is needed most.

Connecting the Dots: Dispute Resolution and Escalation in a World of Entangled Territorial Claims

We explore states’ decisions to escalate disputes over their territorial claims or settle them peacefully. We complement existing arguments by accounting for the fact that states are often simultaneously entangled in multiple territorial claims. We build on previous scholarship in positing that two states involved in a territorial dispute will act based on information they glean from each other’s reputation for dealing with claims with other states and their recent actions involving disputes with other states. Because states know that their actions will impact their adversaries’ calculations, the existence of multiple ongoing territorial claims will act as a deterrent from any type of action to resolve the dispute, whether militarized or peaceful. Our hypotheses therefore consider the impact of the number of states’ other territorial claims as well as the number of their adversaries’ claims. Tests using the Issue Correlates of War data support our arguments.

Escalation in international conflict management: A foreign policy perspective

Efforts to resolve interstate disputes are often characterized by repeated engagement and evolving strategies. What explains a state’s decision to continue conflict resolution efforts but escalate their management strategy? Drawing from foreign policy literature, I argue that third parties escalate policies in response to past failures, shifting conflict dynamics and their relationship with the disputants. Analysis of management efforts from 1946 to 2001 reveals that the changing nature of the conflict, policy failures and relationships between the third party and disputants are integral to understanding the management decision process, but the effects of these factors depend on the management history.

Commitment Problems: Understanding Variation in the Frequency of International Conflict Management Efforts

In the last decades, Tibetan medicine has spread around the globe. From a Western point of view, Tibetan medicine is part of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (cam). In many Asian medicines, mercury sulphide is considered an important ingredient. Tibetan medicine is famous for its precious pills, many of which contain mercury sulphide in the form of an ash called tsotel (btso thal). In the Western, specifically in the European context, such ingredients are not accepted for human consumption. These legalities are discussed from the perspective of today’s pharmaceutical practice in Europe. Neither the law of medicinal products nor the food law allow such ingredients and place strict limits on residues of heavy metals. The cam community is also very cautious about any use of heavy metals. This article advocates that on the global level, the production and distribution of Tibetan medicines has to consider today’s modern pharmaceutical and biomedical environment. The formulas of Tibetan medicine based solely on herbs and certain minerals could be the foundation stone for a modern pharmacopoeia of Tibetan medicine. Tibetan medicines are always a carefully blended mixture of many ingredients. This multi-compound principle could then serve as a basic concept for a modernised Tibetan medicine. Such medicines have to be investigated in their entirety, without reducing the formula to its active ingredients. This article suggests that such a herbal mixture could be understood as a new ‘man-made herb’, where the scientific tools specifically developed to investigate individual herbal constituents would be applied to the entire formula. Tibetan medicine and its products based on pharmaceutical-grade clean herbs and minerals can offer important therapeutic options for humankind on a global level.Why do some militarized interstate disputes involve multiple third party attempts to resolve the dispute, while others seemingly end before movement towards peace is possible? This article examines third party commitment to international conflict resolution. I argue that a third party’s commitment reflects strategic interests, barriers to entry and the conflict’s prospects for peace, which encourage third party involvement while having a dampening effect on their commitment. I also explore the role of bias in management onset and third party commitment. Analysis of conflict management in militarized interstate disputes from 1946 to 2001 offers significant support for the hypotheses. 1 Prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30–September 2, 2012, New Orleans, Louisiana. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 21–25, 2010, Chicago, IL. The author would like to thank Scott Gartner, Zeev Maoz, Michael Greig, Kyle Beardsley, Megan Shannon, Burcu Savun, Daniel Kono, Jacob Bercovitch, Brad Jones, Krista Wiegand and Vincent Mahler for their helpful comments. Sara McKeever and Andrea Morrison provided valuable research assistance. The Folke Bernadotte Academy provided financial support for the project. 2 Molly M. Melin is an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of international relations and political methodology, with emphasis on international conflict and conflict management. Her current research focuses on third party interventions in international conflicts and the dynamics of conflict expansion.

Exploring the Threshold between Conflict Management and Joining in Biased Interventions

Recent research emphasizes the effectiveness of biased third parties and their use of leverage in resolving conflicts. However, scholars fail to explore systematically the conditions under which conflict management strategies straddle the confines between mediatory techniques and approaches more commonly associated with joining behavior. This article examines the threshold between neutral conflict management and overt joining by offering a model of third-party intervention based on the notion of international social proximity and situated within the familiar opportunity–willingness framework. Our arguments are tested with a novel combination of data on biased joining from Corbetta and Dixon and data on neutral mediatory efforts from Frazier and Dixon. Our findings reveal that the application of biased leverage and mediation is rare but salient, and asymmetrical ties between third parties and combatants explain their occurrence.