NEXT STEPS: TAPPING THE POTENTIAL

To answer the puzzle this chapter first posed, conflict prevention is still a relatively marginal international concern for several reasons: a plurality of possible instruments and agents; its de facto operation under other names, lack of conceptual closure about stages and types of interventions; a lack of confidence due in part to dim awareness of the actual extent of recent capacity building and effective actions on the ground; dispersed activism globally and in a given country by diverse professions and overstretched governmental and non­governmental international organizations; and scattered research agendas and findings, yielding little usable guidance for would- be preventors.

1. Consolidate what is known. Lackof suf­ficient knowledge does not excuse why more frequent and effective responses to incipient conflicts are not undertaken. Policymakers tend to ignore the useful knowledge that already exists. Professionals need to gain access to top officials to present promising options and evidence of their results. The main problem is not epistemological but organizational. We need not wait until social scientists have found the universally highest correlations among the limited set of variables already most plausibly known as relevant before we continue as in the previous section to gather, synthesize, and disseminate the existing findings among policymakers and field practitioners. Enough is known to produce heuristic guidance, for even the most verified conclusions are cannot be imple­mented mechanically in any particular conflict setting, but used as action-hypotheses to be combined with astute political judgments.

2. Focus the knowledge on emerg­ing conflicts. Conflicts do not emerge in Washington, New York or Brussels, but in particular developing countries at specific times. To have practical value, any gathered policy wisdom needs to be applied on the ground in real time. Many currently early- warning-identified poor societies and weak states (e.g., Papua, Kyrygystan, Guinea) would benefit from pro-active and concerted efforts that apply peaceful policies to avoid escalation to crises and violent conflicts. The country level is where the diverse agendas and tools are most clearly juxtaposed and con­cretely reconciled. This requires organizing consultations through which key actors (USG, UN, EU, regionals, governments, NGOs) can jointly assess the country situations and devise and implement diagnosis-driven targeted strategies, both at the field and desk officer level. Such processes would (a) apply conflict­sensitive indicators to identify systematically the most important short- and long-term risks in a country that are affecting the prospects for escalating conflict as well as its capacities for peaceful management of conflict; (b) identify what actions each actor can contribute within the strategy; and (c) consult the lessons learned from actual experience with various combinations of instruments.⁸¹ To harness their global influence, leading actors such as the USA and other governments, the EU, and the World Bank, in cooperation with agencies in the UN system, could con­vene these multi-lateral country consultations to develop jointly formulated, analytically based, multi-faceted strategies. The processes could be linked to existing country-specific development planning procedures such as the PRSP and CAS, but should also involve diplomatic and military agencies as well as inside stakeholders.

3. Conduct more basic prevention research. Though would-be preventors need not be inhibited by overly fastidious methodological standards, existing findings must be treated as preliminary hypotheses that research needs to test further.⁸² More rigorous and com­prehensive policy research is still needed to establish what types of preventive actions at both a priori and ad hoc levels, in what combinations, are likely to have what positive or negative effects in different stages of conflicts and contexts.⁸³ Promising structural and direct instruments have received little if any research, such as positive incentives to governments to encourage compliance with accepted international norms, special envoys with preventive mandates such as the HCNM, institutional support for strengthening equi­table state service-provision, and preventive deployment.⁸⁴