Going Beyond 'partners-rivals' dichotomy : Networked Forms of Intervention in Conflict Management

During the past 30 years, IR Scholars have underlined the increase of IGO's involvement in conflict management processes as well as the emergence of new forms of intervention such as partnerships (Bah and Jones, 2008), simultaneous peace operations (Balas, 2010) or collective conflict management (Crocker and al 2011). Besides these new forms of intevention caracterized by ad hoc and non stable interactions between IGOs, there is another kind of interaction, networked forms of intervention, that have been understudied so far by IR scholars. Contrary to the others, these new kinds of intervention are caraterized by recurrent, relatively stable, non ad-hoc forms of co-operation between two or more IGOs in the same policy domain. This article adresses two questions. The first deals with the caracteristics of networked forms of intervention in conflict management. So far, the main typologies intend to compare institutional arrangements with respect to degree of institutionalization or degree of coordination. In this article, we suggest that structural criteria, such as degree of segmentation, degree of centralization and degree of redundancy may also provide very useful insights about the design of these networked forms of conflict management. Secondly, this article focuses on the effect(s) of inter-organizational relations (IOR) among IGO. Using the new Database of Inter-organizational Relations in conflicts (DIORc), this article aims at comparing, with a social network perspective, the effects of IOR in the cases of Kosovo and South-Ossetia, two violent and highly internationzalised conflict where the same group of IGOs have been jointly involved for years. Whereas the question of institutional performance remains central in the field of international institutional, collective legitimacy and structural power seems to be the more important effects of networked forms of intervention in conflict management. Finally, this article aims at illustrating the added value of social network analysis to study IGO's interactions