Systems, States, Diplomacy and Rules C.1

The research programme of the University College Centre for the Analysis of Conflict is based on theoretical studies of conflict, and on empirical studies of on-going communal and inter-State disputes, employing whenever possible face-to-face discussions between nominees of the parties concerned.

This research programme was stimulated in 1965 by a discussion that was then current in the United Kingdom, and which had commenced in the United States of America a decade or more earlier, regarding the theories and viewpoints of the many scholars, mostly American, who had taken part in what will for a long time be regarded as the most important decade of thought in international studies. (See bibliography.) Arguing the relevance of their theories by reference to case studies of past situations did not do justice to these scientists. One needed to be in a position to ask, in relation to whatever case was being examined, the answerable questions posed by their hypotheses. Official, historical, journalistic, and even analytically descriptive accounts, written up after a crisis, do not provide answers to the kind of questions that are prompted by contemporary behavioural approaches. Many of these can be answered only by analysing perceptions and misperceptions, interactions and features of State decision-making, and these are best observed when the parties in conflict are in an inter acting situation.

The obviously desirable procedure was to select a current conflict, preferably one in which there was actual violence, and to create a situation in which the parties involved would expose their perceptions of each other, their motivations and goals, their internal political problems, their interpretations of events that led to the conflict and then to its escalation, and anything else to which contemporary theories of relations between States and of conflict might point. Accordingly, in 1965 a request was made to the governments directly involved in a particularly interesting violent conflict to co-operate in this academic inquiry. They were asked to nominate representatives who could reliably reflect the views of their governments and be in a position to maintain communication with them,