As the number and intensity of conflicts increased around the world during the latter part of the 20th century, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners of non-violent conflict management strategies created conflict-monitoring networks to track the escalation of tensions in conflict-prone regions. This essay demonstrates how cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) was employed in the service of a conflict-monitoring network in the former Soviet Union. Based upon historical and participant observation research on the development of the Network for Ethnological Monitoring and Early Warning during 1990–1999, a CHAT-based analysis of the Network's systemic contradictions illuminates its development through one expansive cycle and into a second. Summaries of findings consider relations within the Network, the evolution of the Network's complex object, and the Network's development of tools for monitoring ethnic relations and building an epistemic community. The essay concludes with an analysis of the correspondence between the CHAT framework and the 5 features of practical theory laid out by Cronen (1995).
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Kirsten Foot (2001) studied this question.