International Organizations and Post-Soviet Conflicts in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine: The Limitations of Imagining Peace and the Failure and Success [Hardcover]

International Organizations and Post-Soviet Conflicts in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine: The Limitations of Imagining Peace and the Failure and Success in Negotiationsaddresses the protracted history of international conflict resolution efforts to the Georgian-Abkhaz, Moldovan-Transnistrian, and Eastern Ukraine conflicts. The author explores the origins and onset of these first two conflicts in the early 1990s, but also looks at the eruption of conflict in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and at the first months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This book shows how, from a conflict-transformation perspective, local vested interests and strategic interests have created obvious obstructions that have both fueled the conflicts and prevented their resolution. This volume develops a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the success and failure of international engagement that offers a new understanding of the extent to which international responses may or may not be helpful. Through an analysis of over 500 closed-source documents and about 70 interviews, the efforts of pan-European international organizations  with mandates from the OSCE, EU, UN, and NATO  are examined on both political and cultural levels. This works innovative analyses of those institutions performances shows how successes have often been overlooked and identifies misperceptions that reshape our understanding of the limitations to imagining peace.Nina Lutterjohannis a project manager at Bertelsmann Foundation, and a former lecturer at the School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews.

Most accounts of the unresolved conflicts in Eurasia summarily dismiss the multi-level role of external NGOs and international organizations. In this rich and conceptually innovative study, Nina Lutterjohann expands our understanding of success and failure by showing how external actors, even when they don't definitively solve a conflict steeped in geopolitics,lÃB