Howard Wolpe, to whom this book is dedicated, was an MIT-trained political scientist specializing in Ibo politics in Nigeria who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979. He served as chair of the Africa Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee and subsequently as U.S. Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region of Africa. When the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi, signed in August 2000, failed to bring an end to the hostilities there, Wolpe, who had helped to negotiate the accord, undertook to engage key political, military, and civil-society actors in Burundi in a series of workshops involving role playing, simulation, joint problem analysis, and other related exercises, with the aim of building trust and ultimately transforming relationships among the parties. These efforts are credited, in part, with having contributed to the establishment of the fragile peace in Burundi in 2005 that is holding (albeit only just) to this day.

This volume represents an attempt to articulate the kind of approach that Wolpe employed in his peacemaking and peacebuilding efforts and to assess systematically the effectiveness of this approach. Edited by Michael Lund, a leading scholar of conflict and conflict resolution, and Steve McDonald, a former director of the Africa Program at the Wilson Center who worked with Wolpe in Burundi, Across the Lines of Conflict provides a systematic analysis of this important but largely underexamined dimension of peacemaking and peacebuilding. It is exceptionally well edited and achieves a coherence that often eludes edited volumes, beginning with the exposition of the conceptual framework by Lund, followed by case studies by country specialists of trust-building initiatives in six conflict-affected countries, and concluding with a discussion by Lund of the findings and implications drawn from his analysis of the case studies.

The basic premise of the volume is that externally supported conflict-resolution efforts often do not succeed because they fail to foster ownership of the process among the key local parties. The tendency of external actors, Lund maintains, is to place the emphasis on achieving particular outcomes (e.g., power-sharing agreements, elections) without sufficient regard for cultivating genuine interest in these outcomes among the parties. A corollary of this lack of attention to local ownership is the lack of investment by third parties in strengthening the capacity of political leaders, in particular, to work together as required to achieve sustainable peace.

The method examined in this volume—known variously as interactive conflict resolution, track-two diplomacy, and conflict transformation, among other names—is underpinned by the claim that it facilitates collaboration among leaders in conflict-affected societies in seeking to achieve the peaceful resolution of their conflicts. As the scholarly and policy literature on this approach tends to be descriptive, Lund and McDonald have sought to assess its effectiveness in a more rigorous way. For that purpose, they chose six country cases where the approach has been employed—Burundi, Cyprus, Estonia, Guyana, Sri Lanka, and Tajikistan—and developed a common framework of analysis to examine each of the initiatives. Each case-study author was asked to describe the conflict situation, the main features of the initiative, the apparent effects of the initiative on the conflict environment, and the factors that explain why the initiative had the effects that it did.

The case studies are one of the many strengths of this work. They are detailed and informative, and the analysis is carefully honed with the specific purposes of the volume in mind. Indeed, to help ensure coherence and comparability, case-study authors were provided with leading questions to address, drawn up by the editors on the basis of the few existing analyses of this type of intervention, although the authors were also invited to consider any other factors that they believed may have been germane to their particular case.

It is, of course, inherently difficult to isolate or pinpoint the specific influence of particular factors in social phenomena as complex as processes of conflict resolution, and this is one nagging issue that hangs over the volume. With respect to the one case study that Lund provides, for example, the Social Cohesion Program (SCP) in Guyana from 2003 to 2006, how does one distinguish the contribution that this program may have made to reducing political and ethnic tensions as opposed to, say, the very significant socioeconomic progress that Guyana was experiencing at the same time? There is a related question concerning endogeneity, as even Lund acknowledges tacitly when he observes that “it remains unclear how much of this improved socioeconomic and political climate can be attributed to the SCP in particular, or whether it arose independently from smarter economic management, global factors, and broader changes in politics” (p. 117).

The other questions that this exercise raises are how generalizable the findings are and what lessons can be learned from them. In her chapter on Estonia, Susan Allen cites Western security support for Estonia in 1994, when NATO welcomed Estonia into the Partnership for Peace framework, as one of the contextual factors that contributed to the success of the dialogue between Estonians and ethnic Russians in Estonia at the time, because, as she observes, it helped to alleviate Estonian security concerns about Russian troops and interests in Estonia. Yet it is easy to imagine how such a move by NATO instead might have antagonized Russia and inflamed tensions, as would effectively occur in Ukraine 20 years later, and thus heighten Estonian security concerns. On the other hand, if the lesson here is that the regional or international environment needs to be a factor of appreciation in assessing the impact of conflict transformation efforts, then the finding is indeed generalizable, but rather less significant insofar as much has already been written about the international dimensions of internal conflicts.

These difficulties are inherent in any enterprise of this kind, and they are not meant to detract from the immense value of this volume. In view of the high rates of conflict recidivism, it is important to gain insight into the dynamics of conflict transformation, which this volume helps to achieve. The efforts, moreover, to introduce greater rigor and precision into our analysis, whether it is in relation to the characteristics of and requirements for sustainable peace or in devising categories of impact to guide us in our assessments of conflict resolution efforts—to give but two examples—have value that extends well beyond the contours of this particular study.