Towards a Contingency Approach to Third Party Intervention in Regional Conflict: A Cyprus Illustration

management strategies, particularly third party approaches. Effective interventions need to acknowledge and address the numerous issues and demands which fuel the conflict. Thus, the different constituencies involved, their demands and interests, the belief systems challenged, the perceptions held, the history of the relationships, and the fundamental needs to be met must be dealt with if a conflict is to be resolved.1 With such a large number of elements, it seems unreasonable to expect that a single intervention strategy could deal fully with all of them. It seems more useful to envision intervention in regional conflicts as a co-ordinated series of concurrent and consecutive strategies directed towards the long-term goal of resolving the conflict. A look at the history of some recent conflicts indicates that third