Peacemakers share a vision of a less violent world and a faith in the existence of real possibilities for achieving it: pathways to peace that are, or might be, less violent than those all too visible in the international relations of the 20th Century. If both faith and the intuition of experienced peacemakers tell us that this is possible, the relevant practical and intellectual issue is: how may such a less violent world be concretely achieved? Moreover, can scholars, teachers and administrators develop better ways to learn from, remember, transmit, convincingly publicize, generalize and improve upon the practical experiences of those responsible for such successes, as well as of those less successful, or less nobly minded?

This website and the associated book (Hayward R. Alker, Ted Robert Gurr and Kumar Rupesinghe (eds.) (2001), Journeys through Conflict: Narratives and Lessons, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD.) report on nearly a decade of international social scientific effort with the above needs in mind. They are the principal products of the Conflict Early Warning Systems (CEWS) research project of the International Social Science Council. The project involved an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, peace researchers and conflict prevention specialists from different regions of the world focussed on successes and failures in preventing violent inter-group conflicts. Specifically, CEWS sought to enhance the capacities of scholars and practitioners in governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental institutions to use productively past scholarship encoded in their information systems and bureaucratic memories.

The CEWS project was administered through the Center for International Studies and the Department of International Relations at the University of Southern California, from 1995 through 1999. The work was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and used some results of the "Paris-in-LA" project at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC.

The CEWS website is a prototype electronic database focussed on enhancing the production and sharing of information across and among peacemakers in the multiple nodes of decentralized networks, linking researchers to the different societal levels at which today's conflicts, as well as conflict management and violence limitation activities, are organized. Designed to illustrate feasibility and usefulness, this prototype reports on 20 conflict cases, using narratives or chronologies provided by an international team of experts in conflict prevention. They were written from a violence diminishing perspective, so that fruitful lessons might be drawn from comparisons of a relatively equal number of relatively successful and unsuccessful cases in the area of the experts' special competence. Other case descriptions can, and hopefully will, be added to this database. The authors realize that such larger scale efforts would probably involve recoding and the introduction of new sources of information, both qualitative and quantitative.

Our special contribution to such larger efforts has been the development of a systematic, analytical method for integrating the narratively oriented ways of shaping and drawing lessons from such accounts with the quantitative and formalized orderings more familiar to social scientists. Moreover, we have been sensitive to the contested ways that conflict participants usually make qualitative sense of their own involvement, i.e. the contested historicities of their conflict. To achieve these goals, we have developed, and illustrate here, a comparative methodology for coding and graphically representing in a sequential fashion the narratives and chronologies provided by CEWS experts. The website features such a graphic representation for each of our 20 conflicts in the CEWS Conflict Database. The graphs distinguish among different conflict episodes, the conflict phases within them, and the often diverging perspectives on phase sequences of major parties to the conflict. Notes on the application of the coding procedures generating these graphs from the narratives and/or chronologies will be made accessible on (or through) this website.

The graphical approach is designed for incorporating different kinds of qualitative and quantitative texts or data into a computerized analysis tool, the CEWS Explorer. It allows the comparison of different conflict trajectories, as well as the counterfactual exploration of conflict ameliorating or intensifying trajectories. Such explorations should facilitate further research on conflict prevention practices.

Related Papers:

Three Times for Tomorrow, by Hayward R. Alker and Kinhide Mushakoji, Paper presented at the Conference of the Agenda of the Millenium: Time in the Making and Possible Futures, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 10-12 May, 1999.

CEWS Final Report, submitted on October 8, 1999 to the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the International Social Science Council, Paris, France.

Testable Understandings of Structured Histories, by Hayward R. Alker, Thomas Schmalberger, Anita Schjolset, Andrew Blum, Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Washington D.C., February 19, 1999.