Narratives of Disorder

Conflict research was in vogue during the 1990s as theorists grappled with new global realities after the end of the Cold War, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union and global bipolarity. While Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of an ‘end of history’ was widely contested, it certainly seemed that ideology — which had so busied people during the Cold War — occupied a less prominent role in explaining conflict following the fall of the Berlin Wall than it had in the decades prior. The demise of superpower rivalry was followed by widespread assumptions about a growing international liberal consensus; to those so minded, the post-Cold War world offered unprecedented promise for more peaceful relations both between and within states. It was this mood that then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, captured when he in 1992 declared that ‘the nations and peoples of the United Nations are fortunate in a way that those of the League of Nations were not. We have been given a second chance to create the world of our Charter that they were denied.’1 Optimism about the prospects for a new international order was by no means confined to discussions within the UN, however; then US President Bill Clinton uttered similar hopes at the time of the signing of the Bosnia-Croat peace agreement in 1994.2 The most paradigmatic statement is probably that given by Tony Blair, two years into his period as UK Prime Minister, in a speech at the Economic Club in Chicago in 1999: Blair proclaimed prospects for international order under the banner that ‘we are all internationalists now’.3