Conflict Prevention
FROM PROMISE TO PRACTICE:STRENGTHENING UN CAPACITIES FOR THE PREVENTION OF VIOLENT CONFLICT
The concept of conflict prevention has by now become a widely used term of art throughout the multilateral policy community, from government ministries through donor fora to the United Nations Secretariat. In the 1990s, the failure of international efforts either to forestall armed conflicts or to significantly diminish their destructive effects spurred a range of initiatives to examine more closely and creatively the opportunities for, as well as constraints upon, the international system’s collective capacity to prevent deadly conflict. The United Nations weighed in at an early stage, through the writings of then Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who described “preventive diplomacy” as one of four primary instruments of the UN in conflict management, along with peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding.
By now, it is generally recognized that diplomacy, per se, is one preventive instrument among many which need to be developed and deployed across the full spectrum of international assistance and engagement. Moreover, even on the diplomatic front, there has been comparatively little follow-through. While preventing deadly conflict has many advocates at a general level, the precise details about how it is to be done, under what circumstances, when, and by whom, remain significantly underdeveloped. This is partly a problem for analysts, whose techniques for assessing volatile situations and prospective remedies could be further sharpened. It is also significantly a problem of organizations and institutions, whose practices, cultures, styles of decision-making and systems of learning and accountability, often inhibit effective response to the complex environments in which conflict may turn violent.
Increasingly, attention is turning to what has been termed “structural prevention”, which aims to address the underlying, root causes of violent conflict in given societies through a host of economic, social, political and military preventive measures. Such structural prevention is potentially of great benefit to the developing countries that are the sites of most contemporary conflicts, not only to prevent violent conflict from erupting, but also to help create an environment in which the risk of conflict is significantly reduced.
In 1999-2000, the International Peace Academy (IPA) launched a modest but analytically cross-cutting project on conflict prevention in collaboration with the UN’s Strategic Planning Unit and with support from the Government of Sweden (see Conflict Prevention, 1999-2000). Its purpose was to determine the degree of consensus and discord in recent research on conflict trends and the causes of conflict and peace, and use this to help shape policy and action on conflict prevention initiatives within the UN system.
From Promise to Practice engaged in a multi-year program of work that sought to build on previous work undertaken by IPA and others to strengthen the capacity of the UN to stem violent conflict. The aim was to provide operational and practical suggestions for the development and implementation of conflict prevention initiatives by the UN system and its agencies. In particular, the project devoted considerable attention to structural prevention, emphasizing the role of development and capacity-building in the promotion of peace early and at the local level. It sought to do so in explicit relationship to recent and upcoming initiatives both within and outside the UN system, which IPA will sought to facilitate, bolster and help move forward. The project engaged the efforts of working level officials at the UN in addition to maintaining high-level attention for prevention by the relevant UN departments, agencies, and programs, among which sustained collaboration is essential for effective preventive action.
Research Design
This project combined research, facilitation and organizational advocacy as elements of its efforts to build support and capacities for conflict prevention within the UN system.
Capturing Innovation: Case Studies
First, we sought to remedy, at least partially, a persistent and much lamented lack of systematic evidence about actual measures tried, whether they succeeded or failed and why. We viewed it as especially valuable to try to capture the experiential knowledge, ideas and best practices from field staff and others with specific local and other knowledge, on both developmental and political sides of the equation. IPA thus commissioned a series of case studies of conflict prevention initiatives in Georgia, Burundi, Tanzania/Zanzibar, Fiji, Kenya, East Timor, Colombia, Tajikistan and Liberia – both success stories and failures and the range of assessments in between – in an effort to gain a greater understanding of which kind of strategies might work at different instances of the potential and actual conflict cycle.
We built a solid foundation for this research with the aid of an expert committee on research design, comprised of leading academics, practitioners and current and former UN staff members. The committee members and IPA were linked by a select listserv, allowing for continuing input and feedback and to ensure that the research is tightly focused on the needs of the UN system.
We continued to develop our research agenda for the next set of case studies through a series of consultations with practitioners as well as academics, with particular attention to the work of non-American experts. Our intention was to further develop and refine specific facets of structural prevention, which gained increasing currency within the UN.
Facilitating New Policy Approaches
We also aimed to strengthen existing networks of interest in conflict prevention and to this end convene sessions on aspects of conflict prevention that seemed ripe for organizational innovation and change. IPA brought together policy, academic and NGO New York based actors; experts on particular countries, regions or conflict dynamics; and select personnel from the field. Our unique access to the inner workings of the UN system provided us with a particular edge with regards to addressing areas of immediate concern to the UN, its agencies, and member states, and anticipating future ones.
Such efforts included two-hour lunchtime policy forum events on various issues ranging from the Report of the UN Panel on Peace Operations (the Brahimi report) to the evolving security situation in Tanzania/Zanzibar, in addition to Security Council briefings on new conflict prevention resources aimed specifically at the UN system such as the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF) and the Conflict Prevention Initiative.
In addition, we held several smaller meetings and a one-day Security Council Workshop which sought to create greater dialogue between member states and the UN System on the opportunities and constraints for UN preventive action. These were focused on providing constructive input for the UN report on conflict prevention which was released at the end of June 2001 in follow up the Security Council thematic discussions on prevention in November 1999 and July 2000.
Filling Research Gaps
As this project developed, we encountered additional analytical or empirical “gaps” which were important to try to fill in order to move a given policy initiative forward. Areas included the need for a more sophisticated grasp of the mobilization strategies of political elites; more detailed understanding of the socio-economic dimensions of conflict; further research into the regional dimensions of conflict and the impact of “spill-over” and “spill-in” on preventive strategy and implementation; the difficulty of developing context-responsive strategy in response to particular conflicts; and the role of regional actors in early, structural prevention.