WHAT IS BEING DONE? A WELL-KEPT SECRET

The examples so far show that conflict prevention is neither hypothetical nor new.

Although Darfur, the Russia-Georgia conflict, and other unaverted conflicts reflect a frequent failure to act when violence is growing, sig­nificant effort has been devoted to preventive action and capacity-building, especially since the ending of the Cold War.

1. Early warning and advocacy

From Quincy Wright to Paul Collier, leagues of social scientists have identified causes of inter-state and intra-state conflict. Databases track the global trends and locuses of conflicts (SIPRI, Human Security Report, 2005) and assess the prospects for conflict or peace in particular countries (e.g., the former Conflict Prevention Network). Some country risk indicators and early warning systems are university-based and open-sourced (e.g., CIDCM, CIFP), and some provide political risk assessments commercially. Helped by the connectivity of the Internet, NGOs issue periodic alerts to official bodies and the public, with recommended responses (e.g., International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, International Alert, the former Forum for Early Warning and Early Response [FEWER]). Intergovernmental and bi-lateral agencies have set up in-house systems (UN, OSCE, USAID, CIA, ECOWAS, IGAD). More recently, USAID outlined a ‘fragile states' strategy including a ‘watch list' to identify priority countries for attention. In short, what one book foresaw as an ‘emerging global watch' seems to be gradually taking concrete shape (Ramcharan, 1991).

Conflict prevention defined above has been taken up by several successive non­governmental programs,²⁴ and was studied and promoted by the Carnegie Commission. In public advocacy, the Global Partnership for Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) is seeking to capacitate NGOs for early warning and peacebuilding. Efforts are being made to sensitize private corporations to the impacts their commercial activities may have on con­flicts, negatively or positively (Wenger and Mockli, 1991).

Policy agenda

Since the 1990s, more and more intra­state conflicts have burdened the UN and other organizations' humanitarian caseload, the number of UN peacekeeping missions has far exceeded all previous ones since the UN was founded, and the financial costs in post-conflict countries have mounted. As over and over, new conflicts caused human suffering and diplomatic and peacekeeping travail, world leaders and organizations were increasingly swayed by the appealing argu­ment that it would be more humane and cost­effective to try to keep as many bloody and devastating wars as possible from occurring at all. Conflict prevention came specially to the fore after the embarrassing failures by the UN, the USA, and others to stem the massive genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Numerous conferences on particular wars or peacekeeping issues solemnly concluded that what really ought to have happened was more vigorous effort at the outset to avoid such conflicts from occurring in the first place.

Conflict prevention entered the official policy statements of the USA and other major governments, the UN, the EU, and many regional bodies. The title of the 1999 annual report on all the activities of the UN system summed them up as ‘Preventing War and Disaster.' Conflict prevention was the topic of two UN Security Council discussions in 2000 and 2001; a priority urged in July, 2000 by the G-8 Okinawa Summit; and the focus of major reports of the UN Secretary General in June, 2001 and 2006.

Initiatives on the ground

Prevention has gone considerably beyond exhortation and policy into actual efforts in specific countries. Though little-publicized, direct and structural activities have been applied in such diverse places threatened by conflict as Slovakia, Indonesia, and Guyana. These activities range from bi-lateral and regional high-level diplomacy (e.g., by ECOWAS) to NGO projects in peace building at the local level, such as dialogues, peace radio, and inter-ethnic community development programs, to mention a few. The UNDP local community development program in southern Krygyzstan was explic­itly entitled ‘preventive development.' Again, many programs in potential conflict settings are intended as conflict-preventive but not so labeled, like the UN good offices' efforts with the Myanmar regime, and the World Bank offer in 2000 to help fund land reform in Zimbabwe as its political crisis over land worsened.²⁶

Institutional capacity-building

Ongoing response mechanisms have been set up to trigger actions automatically based on risk criteria, at least in principle. The UN Sec­retariat, the European Commission, and inter­governmental, regional, and sub-regional bodies have staffed small units to watch for early warning signs and consider preventive responses. At UN headquarters, the Secre­tariat's ‘Interagency Framework Team for Coordinating Early Warning and Information Analysis' identifies countries at risk of conflict and applicable UN preventive measures. In addition to the most active regional mech­anisms of the OSCE and OAS, all African sub-regional organizations have agreed to prevention mechanisms (e.g., AU; ECOWAS; IGAD; SADC; ECCAS). Although many are not fully operational,²⁷ some have been used to respond to threatening situations, such as in Congo-Brazzaville and Guinea-Bissau.

Ahead of foreign and defense ministries, major development agencies have taken the lead in intra-state conflict prevention. Count­less training workshops have been carried out by the UN for staff and donor imple­menting partners.²⁸ NGOs and universities offer institutes for training in conflict analysis and ‘peace and conflict impacts assessment.' Conflict and peace-building units exist in all major development agencies including the World Bank. These agencies have supported numerous assessments of the conflict drivers and peace capacities in particular countries. While they have funded unofficial diplomatic initiatives, such as in Georgia, Uganda, Senegal, and the DRC, their preventive efforts have been shifting from specially dedicated activities such as dialogues to ‘mainstreaming' conflict and peace-building criteria into all development sectors, such as agriculture, health, education, economic growth, environment, youth, democracy- and state-building, civil society building, as well as security sector professionalism, and into the full programming cycle from assessment through design, monitoring, and evaluation. USAID's Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management is producing practical ‘toolkits' that provide lessons learned about how to address typical sources of conflicts arising from issues such as water, minerals, forests, land, youth, human rights, and livelihoods (e.g., CMM). Consultants are tasked with doing assessments of programs for their effects specifically on conflicts and peace (e.g., Lund and Wanchek, 2005) and how they might be improved or at least ‘do no harm' by inadvertently exacerbating risk factors (Anderson, 1999). A host of practical analytical tools have been developed for these assessments and formulating appropriate pro­gram designs,²⁹ published in practical guides. These present the typical sources of conflicts, how to assess the impacts of programs on conflict, and how they might be improved. The UN and some donor and multi-lateral organizations are also trying to incorporate conflict-sensitive development into country­wide development strategies such as PRSPs and the UN's CCA and DAF.

Changing norms

New international norms appear to be emerg­ing, albeit slowly and tacitly, that affirm an international obligation to respond to potential eruptions of violence, especially genocide. As successive bloody wars have hit the headlines, one no longer hears that they are inevitable ‘tragedies' resulting from ‘age- old hatreds.' Instead, concerns are voiced that the calamity could have been avoided, and about what went wrong and who is responsible. UN Secretary GeneralAnnan and US President Clinton both acknowledged that they could have acted more vigorously to halt the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Parliamentary public inquiries were held in France and Belgium on the roles that their governments may have played in neglecting or worsening the genocide, and in the Netherlands about the roles of their forces under the UN during the atrocities at Sbrenica. In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty asserted a ‘responsibility to protect' (R2P) ordinary people who are at risk of crisis or conflict.³⁰ This duty rests first with sovereign governments about their own citizens, but if states are unwilling or unable, the responsibility to intervene to protect those in harm's way devolves to the international community.³¹ R2Pmay become a critical impetus for conflict prevention, for the Commission argued that the duty to protect also ‘implies an accompanying responsibility to prevent' such threats (ICISS, 2001: 19).

Governments in potentially conflict-prone countries often object to this trend as undue interference in their domestic affairs, especially as it implies possible military intervention. But the more that late and possibly non-consensual armed interventions are justified and necessary to halt atrocities, the more acceptable earlier and consensual preventive engagement may become as an alternative. Moreover, the norm of outside responsibility for avoiding threats to citizens is gaining some hold in such countries as well.

In sum, conflict prevention is now more common. In addition to these explicit efforts, much of it is hidden in plain sight under other rubrics such as nuclear arms control, democratization, non-violent regime change, people power, power-sharing, conditional aid, and counter-terrorism. Though such activities can contribute to preventing conflict, they are taken for granted and not registered in the conflict prevention column. Media tend to report on wars, not how peace is maintained much of the time.³³ The failures to prevent in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo are widely reported, the successes in Albania (Tripodi) and Romania (Mihailescu) go unnoticed. This lack of awareness outside professional circles of advances and achievements may deflate the preventive enterprise, perpetuating unwarranted pessimism regarding its value. So another part of the answer to our question as to why conflict prevention is disregarded is that lack of awareness of what is actually being done keeps it off the table of actions that could be taken in current potential conflict situations. If one does not believe an activity exists, one does not consider it an option or devote resources to it.³⁴

Obstacles

Despite incremental progress in pro-activism, international actors often fail to apply vigorous measures to unraveling societies when they are first significantly threatened by social turmoil, state breakdown, gross human rights violations, and violence. In one study to ascertain the most active third parties in the early stages of recent conflicts, the U.N. and the USA led other third parties, but the responses occurred at late stages of crisis or actual war and in salient arenas such as the Middle East (Moller and Svensson, 2007: 17). U.S.foreign policy debates constantly dwell only on the narrow question of how “tough” to be toward enemies and whether to go to intervene militarily here or there, thus totally ignoring the options available before such adversaries are created and crisis points are reached. Although humanitarian and development aid have increased, resources earmarked for conflict prevention, with the exception of a few dedicated funds, have not.

Dispersion of wills

The conventional explanation of why major international organizations do not respond to potential conflicts is a ‘lack of political will.’ But this is vague and does not explain how it can be that preventive actions sometimes are taken. While it may be assumed that Western publics are opposed to the use of force abroad to stop genocide or humanitarian crises, it is not clear they would balk at strengthening the capacity to avert crises and avoid later costs. (Jentleson, 1996: 14). Public opinion is also not the final arbiter, for political leaders can circumvent or influence it. Several recent prevention decisions have been taken quietly with little or no wider consultations (Lund, 1999). In 2002-3, the USA’s handwringing throughout the 1990s about humanitarian interventions and disdain for nation-building were quickly swept aside with regard to Iraq by White House arguments justifying the more drastic and costly choice of preventive war and forceful regime change.³⁵

More often, the problem may be that there is an excess of political wills. The major powers and international community are present extensively in most developing countries, including those vulnerable to conflict. This presence takes many forms such as diplo­matic missions, cultural activities, health and education and infrastructure development, trade and commerce, military assistance, as well as efforts to promote democracy, human rights, and civil society. But this multi­tude of activities building schools, training nurses, assisting elections, digging wells, teaching good business practices, you name it, is pursuing a variety of differing policy goals that are not necessarily supportive of conflict prevention. If many actors are already engaged in conflict-prone places, often in sizeable numbers, the problem is not what is commonly depicted as receiving an early warning from some remote country and then pressuring international actors to rush to it before a crisis erupts. International actors are already there. Yet each mission is expending energy and resources in many dispersed directions other than preventing violent conflicts. An effective prevention system does not operate in potential conflict areas because everyone is busily pursuing other mandates. While some of these conflict­blind activities may help, some enable or worsen conflicts.

Even the most prevention-relevant activ­ities listed above are too segmented. Early warning and conflict indicators come up through separate reporting channels and program desks, such as for human rights, humanitarian aid, and development, arriving at differing definitions of local problems and interpretations of conflict causes. This information is not synthesized to reveal possible overlap and complementarity. For example, genocide prevention is advocated as if it is a separate problem from intra-state conflict. But most genocides by far occur during wars (Harff, 2003), and wars are hard to stop, so the best way to prevent genocide is to prevent the wars in which they usually arise.

Clash of professions

Lying behind the problem of disparate wills are differing values and paradigms of separate disciplines and professions such as conflict resolution, peace studies, human rights, eco­nomic development, political development, and security studies. Contradictions arise over the often-inescapable need to make tradeoffs between these fields’ desirable but competing goals. The prevailing Western liberal model often assumes that the democracy, human rights, rule of law, free markets, and economic growth are all compatible with one another and with peace. But in many situations, such compatibility does not hold, yet there is no common understanding or procedure for prioritizing goals at differing stages of conflict.

These value conflicts reflect differing worldviews of diverse professionals regarding how to conflict. Diplomatic, military, and security communities often ignore the need to address underlying, longer-term factors that contribute to conflicts, as they pursue pre­dominantly elite-oriented and state-centered approaches to already armed conflicts. On the other hand, development agencies and NGOs generally fail to recognize the need for sufficient diplomatic clout or other forms of power to confront the immediate drivers of intra-state conflicts, such as political leaders who can mobilize popular followings and armed groups. On their part, the human rights community often takes a legal-juridical approach to exposing violations of human rights principles and punishing the guilty - justice over peace - whereas the conflict resolution school emphasizes stopping vio­lence, strengthening human relationships and achieving reconciliation.³⁶ But these philo­sophical differences lead the various fields to elevate one value above others and pursue differing policy goals, thus frustrating the achievement of effective overall prevention strategies. All good things do not necessarily go together. Empirically speaking, one kind of leverage without others may have serious limits or cause harm (see the following section). What is required is recognition that no one value necessarily can be achieved absolutely; compromises need to strike bal­ances between competing values in differing circumstances.

These dissonances may be getting more crossfield attention, however. Procedurally, efforts to achieve policy coherence are being made by country-level coordinators such as the UN Secretary General's special representatives and UNDP resident repre­sentatives. Whole-of-government efforts are reflected in such entities as the US State Department's new Coordinator for Recon­struction and Stabilization. Inter-agency har­monization is being attempted by the UN's Peacebuilding Commission, at least for post-conflict countries.³⁷ Some development agencies are funding non-official diplomacy initiatives that are intended to influence domestic power politics, while the notion of ‘soft power' encourages diplomats and military officials to explore the utility of development and other non-coercive policies. In sum, another part of the lack of suffi­cient proactive response is the dispersion of international activities and goals already in countries threatened by violence. The problem is not deploying them anew. A downside of the expansive notion of prevention is that these various activities are pursued with no procedures for galvanizing them into concerted prevention strategies. Alternatively, a considerable multiplier effect would be achieved if the multiple efforts in a given country were each made more ‘conflict­smart,' for their aggregate impact would be more potent. Conflict prevention might be largely a matter of re-engineering the many diplomatic, development and other programs that already operate in developing countries so that they serve conflict prevention objectives more directly and in a more concerted way (Lund, 1998a).