Decisional opportunity and political controversy: the Quemoy case
Charles A. McClelland · Journal of Conflict Resolution · 1962
Several purposes can be served by studying the patterns and sequences of protagonist behavior as revealed in the public record of the postwar series of acute international crises. There is, for example, the possibility of suggesting how national controls over the dangerous, brink of war situations that are commonly called crises might be improved. While it may be argued that the communist bloc countries deliberately provoke these conflicts and then covertly retreat when they meet determined opposition, there still remain technique problems of how best to meet and handle such provocations. From a different viewpoint, the acute crises can be considered to be learning situations in which the protagonists finally have to search for successful ways to disengage unless one or more parties intend to intensify and widen the violence of the conflict. Without reference to the underlying causes of such affairs, one may regard the further development of skills in the handling and demobilization of acute crises as an important means of strengthening the prospects for peace. The encouragement of what Thomas Schelling has described as tacit coordination (Schelling, 1960, pp. 83-118) is one of the means for imposing added controls over the international system. Crisis control, in other words, may be thought of as a distinct reform, parallel to disarmament and arms control having, perhaps, more immediate and practical prospects of success than these but with less long-term and far-reaching implications for any future reorganization of the intemational system. Improvements in the techniques for controlling and guiding acute crises may not promise tension reduction or solutions of interational conflicts but, instead, have more bearing on conflict resolution in the meaning of that term that denotes directed change in a dynamic system from one state of affairs to some other state of affairs.