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International Organizations and Post-Soviet Conflicts in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine: The Limitations of Imagining Peace and the Failure and Success in Negotiations addresses 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 work's 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.
List of contents
List of Tables and Figures
Preface: Transliteration and Translation
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Conflicts and the External Actors
Chapter 1: Post-Soviet Conflicts and Distinctive Commonalities: Moldova and Georgia
Chapter 2: A Comparison to the Conflict in Eastern Ukraine: The Third Case Study
Chapter 3: A Typology of Perceived Relative Success-Failure: A Framework of Analysis and Model for International Organisations in Peace Processes
Chapter 4: Conflict Transformation and the Transformation of Conflicts: A Toolbox for Identity and Sovereignty
Chapter 5: European and IO Responses to the Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict
Chapter 6: European and IO Responses to the Moldovan-Transnistrian Conflicts
Chapter 7: European and IO Responses to the Conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the War in 2022
Chapter 8: Comparative Evaluation
Conclusion: The Limitations of Imagining Peace
Appendix A: Expanded Tables
Appendix B: List of Interviews
Appendix C: Primary Source Documents
Bibliography
About the Author
About the author
Nina Lutterjohann is a project manager at Bertelsmann Foundation, and a former lecturer at the School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews.
Summary
This book analyses dilemmas arising from the engagement of international organizations in the still-unresolved Georgian-Abkhazian and Moldovan-Transnistrian conflicts. The lessons drawn from these earlier conflicts are compared with the conflict in Eastern Ukraine since 2014.
