International Organization and Ending Conflicts

International organization as an idea or an approach to political and social conflict management and resolution—now often referred to under the rubric of “global governance”—has been the subject of much discussion by scholars and practitioners, and has taken shape in numerous historical examples. A landmark figure in thinking about war, peace, and statecraft during the earliest period undoubtedly remains the classical Greek general and historian Thucydides (460–395 bce); his History of the Peloponnesian War, chronicling the conflict between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, features prominently in virtually all discussions of the subsequent emergence and development of ideas and practices of conflict management. Succeeding scholars have built upon Thucydides’ ideas. While the earliest theorists and philosophers brought out important discussions of war causation, and basic notions of political-social conflict management in divergent settings, political thinking about the context of state interactions and new mechanisms for constraining state behavior had not yet—by the early seventeenth century—reached the era of preparation for international organization. That would wait another 200 years. In the nearly three centuries from the Thirty Years War to the beginning of World War I, scholars of international organization identified a number of proposals that arguably demonstrate the development, growth, and deepening of thought about such mechanisms.