Alliances represent an important means to improve firms’ competitiveness and development. But their failure rate remains high. A framework to analyse conflict-based failures is proposed in this paper, based on a survey of management literature. It distinguishes four main categories of factors influencing the dynamics of alliances: elements of context, partners’ profiles, attributes of the relationship and monitoring of the co-operation. This framework is then used to analyze four representative case studies. It enables us to advance a plausible explanation and suggests that, if conflict failure risk can never be completely avoided, a thorough preliminary reflexion and a suitable management can contribute to reducing it.