Journeys Through Conflict is the story of the Conflict Early Warning Systems (CEWS) project of the International Social Science Research Council. It relates the history of the project, presents its empirically grounded approach to anticipating violent conflict, and shows how the approach may be extended to other social science research arenas. Phase analysis of conflict life cycles, comparative case studies, reconstructed narratives, and policy lessons are hallmarks of this pathbreaking work by an international, interdisciplinary group of expert conflict analysts. Journeys Through Conflict projects alternate pathways to war and peace by a unique coding, graphing, and computational procedure that takes into account both contested conflict histories and future conflict resolutions.

This book provides a distinctive and rich conception of methodology within international studies. From a rereading of the works of leading Western thinkers about international studies, Hayward Alker rediscovers a 'neo-Classical' conception of international relations which is both humanistic and scientific. He draws on the work of classical authors such as Aristotle and Thucydides; modern writers like Machiavelli, Vico, Marx, Weber, Deutsch and Bull; and post-modern writers like Havel, Connolly and Toulmin. The central challenge addressed is how to integrate 'positivist' or 'falsificationist' research styles within humanistic or interpretive ones. The author argues that appropriate, philosophically informed reformulations of conventional statistical and game-theoretic analyses are possible, and describes a number of humanistic methodologies for international relations, including argumentation analysis, narrative modeling, computational models of political understanding and reconstructive analysis.

In this book Hayward Alker presents his principal methodological "rediscoveries" of the past twenty years. He provides a rich set of "humanistic" alternatives to the conventional scientific approaches within international studies, and social science more generally. He offers a reinterpretation of premodern, modern, and postmodern thinkers from Aristotle to Connolly, and argues that the humanistic and scientific modes of inquiry can be integrated into a rigorous, philosophically rationalized methodology for international studies.