15,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: War and Conflict in the Modern World
- Sprache: Englisch
Conflict is inherent to all human and inter-state relations, but it is not inevitable. Since the end of the Cold-War, the prevention of conflict escalation into violence through management and resolution has become a fundamental objective of the international system.
So how does prevention work when it works, and what can be done when tried and tested practices fail? In this book, I. William Zartman offers a clear and authoritative guide to the key challenges of conflict prevention and the norms, processes and methods used to dampen and diffuse inter and intra-state conflict in the contemporary world. Early-stage techniques including �awareness� �de-escalation�, �stalemate�, �ripening�, and �resolution�, are explored in full alongside the late or �crisis� stage techniques of �interruption�, �separation� and �integration�. Prevention, he argues, is a battle that is never won: there is always more work to be done. The search for prevention - necessary but still imperfect - continues into new imperatives, new mechanisms, new agents, and new knowledge, which this book helps discover and apply.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 365
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Fatal Attraction of Prevention
1. The Inevitability and Value of Conflict
The Historic Attraction and Failure of Prevention
The Reasons for Persistence and Optimism
Notes
2. The Ubiquity of Prevention
Who Done It?
Security Conflict
Territorial Conflict
Ethnic Conflicts
The First Line of Prevention
Notes
3. Norms for Long-term Prevention
Territorial Integrity
Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
Ethnic Relations
Environmental Protection
Human Rights
Population Displacement
Democratization
Good Governance
Responsibility to Protect
Long-Term Norms and Regimes
Notes
4. Mechanisms of Mid-term Prevention
Awareness
De-escalation
Stalemate
Ripening
Resolution
“Early-Early” Conflict Gestation Prevention
Notes
5. Methods of Pre-Crisis Prevention
Interruption
Separation
Integration
6. Measures of Late (and Earliest) Post-Crisis Prevention
7. Conclusions: The Elusive Quest for Prevention
The Search for New Imperatives
Search for New Mechanisms
Search for New Agents
Search for New Knowledge
References
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
Print Page Numbers
ii
iii
iv
v
viii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
War and Conflict in the Modern World
Alexandru Balas & Paul Diehl, Peace Operations, 2nd EditionL. Brock, H. Holm, G. Sørensen & M. Stohl, Fragile StatesFeargal Cochrane, Ending WarsMatthew Evangelista, Law, Ethics and the War on TerrorJ. Michael Greig & Paul F. Diehl, International MediationJohn Kaag & Sarah Kreps, Drone WarfareJanie Leatherman, Sexual Violence and Armed ConflictAndrew Mumford, Proxy WarfareDennis Sandole, PeacebuildingEric Shibuya, Demobilizing Irregular ForcesTimothy Sisk, StatebuildingRachel Stohl & Suzette Grillot, The International Arms TradePaul Viotti, American Foreign PolicyThomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention, 2nd Edition
Preventing Deadly Conflict
I. WILLIAM ZARTMAN
polity
Copyright © I. William Zartman 2015
The right of I. William Zartman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8695-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zartman, I. William.Preventing deadly conflict / I. William Zartman.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-0-7456-8691-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-8692-9 (pbk.) 1. Conflict management. 2. Crisis management. 3. War--Prevention. 4. Violence--Prevention. 5. Responsibility to protect (International law) I. Title. JZ5538.Z37 2015303.6--dc23
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
To my dedicated friends in the ultimate phases of the prevention business, Martti Ahtisaari, Alvaro de Soto and Lakhdar Brahimi
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Prof. James Piscatori, director of the Global Security Institute of Durham University for arranging my monastic stay in Durham to write this book, and to Prof. David Held, Master of University College, for having taken me under the College roof. St Cuthbert’s spirit hath wrought much inspiration.
Introduction: The Fatal Attraction of Prevention
Prevention of deadly conflict is a life-long challenge. It is a challenge of preparedness for the whole course of a conflict, from its early potential for escalation to a final paroxysm of violence. It demands pro-active attention to keep conflicts – differences of opinion and position – at the level where they can be managed and resolved through normal politics and normal diplomacy. This is the essence of World Order, as it is the pillar of the institutionalized life of domestic order. Yet it must be recognized that there is nothing natural about prevention. Conflict begins and escalates for a reason, and to arrest its course demands a deliberate effort. It requires promoting, practicing, and perfecting, and that is the message of this book, a concept-based analysis for action.
To provide appropriate guidelines for analysis and policy, the matter of conflict and prevention must be differentiated in terms of both immediacy and issues. The choice of mechanisms, methods, and measures of prevention depends on the point in the evolution of the conflict, from gestation to pre-crisis, at which they are applied. A right response at the wrong time is a wrong response. Similarly, conflict and prevention are not the same across all issue areas; a toolbox with only hammers is not good for all jobs. Distinctions are needed between the dynamics of escalation in different issues and appropriate ways of arresting them. These distinctions are what is distinctive about this work.
The understanding and practice of prevention begins with its nature as a paradox. On one hand, conflict is a natural, important, and useful element inherent in human behavior. As such, it involves strongly held, committed, even existential motives from which individuals and states are not likely to be dissuaded. On the other hand, literally innumerable conflicts have been prevented from escalating to serious political contention and to violence; the existing World Order rests on pervasive prevention of deadly conflict. Statesmen and doctors, weathermen and firemen, among others, continually talk of prevention, but live on the insufficiency of their efforts. Beginning in January 1992, the first-ever meeting of heads of state and government of the Security Council concluded with a call for “analysis and recommendations on ways of strengthening … the capacity of the United Nations for preventive diplomacy” (pp. 117–18) that produced Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali’s (1992a) pioneering Agenda for Peace, welcomed by the Security Council and the General Assembly at the end of the year (Boutros Ghali, 1992a, 1992b, 1995). No one has yet been decorated for preventing World War III, which has not yet happened. But most countries do have a national hero who refused to be prevented from leading a bloody, patriotic campaign for independence. National security through national defense requires (and is accorded) about 200 times more in most countries’ budgets for military security than for diplomacy, the preventive and preferable alternative to war. The list of contradictions about prevention could continue. This study of prevention offers itself as an analytical guidebook through this maze, in order to facilitate the understanding of practice and prevention for both the analysis and practice.
This book aims at presenting a comprehensive view of prevention of deadly conflict. It will bring together earlier treatments of the broad subject and draw in the many case studies and more narrowly focused treatments of parts of the subject. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the important but still inconclusive debate on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P); it situates prevention within the larger context of World Order, which exists despite its imperfections; it regards prevention as necessary and valuable but running against the current of difficulties inherent in an anarchic sovereign state system (and therefore requiring specific, creative attention); and it sees prevention, not as an imposition of big established states (Westphalian, Weberian, Western, nuclear, status quo), but as the first step to evolutionary change and the peaceful settlement of disputes among universally motivated peoples and states, at a much lower cost in population and productivity. The ethics of prevention will be discussed in the next section, but would-be preventers should remember that violent escalating conflict is a symptom of a causal problem of some sort, and de-escalating the conflict disarms the forces who demand attention to their problem; disarmament (conflict management) carries with it the promise of settlement (conflict resolution). Efforts at prevention must be complemented by efforts at solution, or the prevention will not hold.
The book begins with an examination of the fatal attraction of prevention and the associated concept of conflict, and brings the two together in an analysis of the challenges involved in conflict prevention, laying out the reasons why the goal persists and how to make a contribution to its final realization. The argument will then turn from a broad consideration to a “vertical” division into specific issue areas that have their own prevention practices, and a “horizontal” division of the topic by levels of immediacy into early, mid-term, pre-crisis, and post-crisis prevention. The treatment will close with an evaluation of the challenges to be overcome for better conflict prevention in the future. It will emphasize what can be learned from the structures and strategies of prevention that have often been successful in overcoming the attitudes toward conflict and how they can be improved with constructive use and development. We can learn from what we have done and left undone, and do more, better.
For the visually minded, figure 1 encapsulates the idea.1 Conflict ratchets its way from a passive state of incompatibilities to active confrontation, escalating toward and into violence. That process is not a smooth progression but a bumpy path of intensification with its ups and down that provide opportunities for would-be preventers to seize and exploit, to counter and inhibit that escalation. Long-term norms provide standards for handling conflict from its beginnings to the end, wherever in the conflict cycle that end may occur. Mid-term mechanisms for conflict management and resolution work to reverse the course of the cycle before it reaches the threshold of violence. If those efforts fail, last-minute methods are indicated to prevent a crisis and then to wind down the conflict so that the mechanisms and norms can redirect its course through management toward resolution. Even as the conflict moves away from the threshold of violence toward the threshold of (de)activation, post-crisis measures are needed to prevent recidivism and re-emergence of the conflict even when ostensibly managed but not fully resolved. Each of these efforts acts within the context provided by the others, homing in on particular phases of the conflict cycle as it spins through escalation and de-escalation. The norms, mechanism, methods, and measures of prevention act as brakes on that spin and help the conflict fall back into the hands of normal politics and diplomacy.
Given the omnipresence of conflict inherent in human and interstate relations, prevention of its escalation into violence through its management and resolution is a fundamental component of the post-World War II and post-Cold War systems of World Order. The functioning and yet-to-be-perfected prevention of violent conflict is not just a set of techniques for dampening inter- and intrastate behavior. It is a set of norms and practices that hold World Order together and keep relations functioning normally and effectively, allowing them to move on to other, more creative and positive matters (Zartman 2009; Jones et al. 2014). The norms and practices of prevention are not perfect but the instances that escape their effects are all the more striking for their exceptional character. The system operates through the individual and uncoordinated activities of members of the international community and through their coordinated actions in international institutions – norms and organizations. For those who would question the existence of a World Order and mistake exceptions and imperfections for normalcy, the widespread practice of prevention should be recognized as pervasive patterns consensually followed to maintain basic, regular responses to deviant challenges. Were it not so, international politics would indeed be total anarchy, wasting all time and energy in unregulated conflict and unprevented violence. With no authority or even coordinator to organize those activities and actions, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and General Assembly (UNGA) being only the tool and toy of their member states, states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have to do it themselves. Thus is World Order constituted, with the prevention of conflict escalation and violence as its key function.
Figure 1 Conflict prevention.
Rather than introduce yet another definition of “Deadly Conflict Prevention,” this discussion begins with the definition of Boutros Ghali (1992b, ¶20): “action to prevent disputes from arising between parties, prevent existing disputes from escalating into [violent] conflicts, and to limit the spread of the latter when they occur” (cf. Lund 1996; Holl 1997; Wallensteen 1998; Miall et al. 1999; Zartman 2001; Carment & Schnabel 2003). This identification, however (like most of the others), is circular: It tells what to prevent but it defines prevention as preventing. To avoid that problem, prevention can be further defined as “measures to inhibit actions that can lead to deadly violence.” In these characterizations, prevention, in relation with peace-making, peace-keeping and peace-building, is recognized as a fundament of the World Order system. “This wider mission for the world Organization … [is] to seek to identify at the earliest possible stage situations that could produce conflict, and to try through diplomacy to remove the sources of danger before violence” (Boutros Ghali 1995, ¶¶16, 15). Prevention has to include all possible “actions,” not just diplomacy, and has to consider the aftermath of violence into the “peace-building” efforts to bring the conflict fully to an end and prevent new conflict from arising, a circular and continuing effort, as the rest of Boutros Ghali’s (1995, ¶21) definitions emphasize. An examination of violent conflict cannot begin with the violence, any more than one can study a person’s development starting at age 21. One has to understand the pre-violent stage to understand where the violence comes from and therefore focus prevention on the conflict before it reaches violence.
A number of further facets of the prism of prevention are introduced within this definition. To prevent means, first of all, to warn (French prévenir). One has to know what is coming, either generally or specifically, in order to prevent it from arriving. The object is conflict or disputes susceptible of escalating to violence, to be discussed further below. The second notion is to avoid, inhibit, or stop something from happening, or at least reduce or limit its effects, all suggested in the UN definition. The action involves both managing and resolving the conflict; the term “handling” can be used here as a looser characterization that covers both management and resolution, also as discussed below. The conflict is not just to be left hanging when it is stopped; its re-escalation potential has to be reduced. To pursue the notion a bit further, conflict is turned aside in two ways: it is made either impossible or unthinkable. The first refers to structural efforts to prevent, the second to attitudinal changes. These two broad distinctions will also be developed more fully below. In either case, it is preferable to complement the prohibition with enablement, to add to the injunction “You can’t do this” (or “Don’t even think of it”) an answer to the retort, “Well, what can I do?”
Notes
1
. Other treatments of conflict prevention have made their attempts at visual presentations. Lund (1996: 38) has presented a life-history of a conflict as a smooth Bell curve that others have often reproduced. It does not see conflict as a cycle and its categories or measures appear mutually exclusive. Hopp-Nishanka (2013: 5) presents a more realistic, bumpier depiction of conflict stages, with peace efforts. Miall et al. (1999) includes lots of diagrams, with a conflict hump (p. 11) and a management “hourglass” (p. 12), but the two have not been combined. Major et al. (2012: 94) presented a Conflict Management Cycle that includes a quadrant on Crisis Prevention separate from Conflict Management, Mediation, and Intervention and Peacebuilding. Figure 1 seeks to combine the Conflict Cycle in its variations with the typology of prevention efforts at various phases of the conflict, as is pursued in this book.
CHAPTER ONEThe Inevitability and Value of Conflict
As long as people hold different views of the same subject, there is conflict, classically defined as an incompatibility of positions (e.g. Hobbes 1964 [1651]: 83; Raven & Kuglanski 1970: 70). As such, conflict is inherent in the existence of separate units, whether they be individuals, parties, societies, or states; humans predate the conflicts they bear but without conflicting views individual socio-political units would have no reason for separate existence. At this stage, conflict is merely passive or potential, and generally unpreventable. But when parties escalate their positions to an intersocial relationship, such as an attempt to assert their position over others, they have raised their conflict to an active stage, the threshold indicated in figure 1 (Coser 1956: 8). Two parties that value the same thing passively and then make efforts to get it, two parties who have their own beliefs and then make efforts to convert or deny the other, two parties which hold different strategies for reaching a goal and then make efforts to make their approach prevail, are all cases of moving from passive to active conflict.
These efforts are usually normal and to be expected, and we engage in competition, persuasion, and bargaining all the time. When we run into resistance, we increase our efforts, but usually within bounds established by social norms and the value of the object to us. The value of the object is a personal matter, but social or interpersonal norms have several effects. Like personal values, they impose limits on conflict behavior, but they also provide established or acceptable ways of conducting the conflict. We can bid or bargain for the coveted object, we can debate or separately schedule the different beliefs, we can vote or adjudicate over the rival strategies. Many of our differences and even active conflicts are governed by established norms, and the conflict, though active and escalated to a certain point, is managed and resolved appropriately and acceptably.
A witness called to the stand on the subject is Robin Hood, who stood at the opposite end from Little John at the one-log bridge. Their passive conflict soon escalated as they reached the middle of the bridge and they came to blows, until Little John flicked Robin Hood into the drink with his deft staff. (They then made up and went off together to join the Merry Men in Sherwood Forest.) This kind of action is not common practice anymore: one-lane bridges have priority signs and red lights, or if not we have more informal procedural norms such as “age before beauty,” “first come first served,” “ladies first,” alphabetical listings, or even rolling dice. These are termed conflict management devices; they replace violence as an arbiter and they demote the pursuit of the conflict to a social or political level. In this case, of course, they do more, they resolve the conflict, which no longer exists once the two parties have crossed the bridge safely (and joined the Merry Men). A second witness on the subject is the Chinese premier, who proclaimed his country’s claim against neighboring countries over most of the South China Sea and the reefs and rocks (and oil and fish) in it. Hoping to avoid the Robin-and-John means of conflict resolution, interested third parties, including the United States, urge resort to other modern procedural norms of World Order such as the International Court of Justice or negotiation. A third witness is Vladimir Putin, who trashed World Order norms and the tenth of the Ten Commandments and escalated conflicts over neighbors’ internal governance and territory into aggression, showing that Robin and John are not just historical or mythical characters.
But conflict has a deeper meaning in our society: It is the essence of our political and economic system (Matthews 1995; Zartman 1995). Democracy is based on conflict and its management by accepted norms that prevent the conflict from rising to the level of violence. Democrats believe that debate, application, and accountability are the test of truth and effectiveness. Democracy is the right to choose and the right to repent. Voting for candidates and for legislation is an exercise in conflict management in active conflict. Rarely is it conflict resolution, as the parties tend to hold their incompatible views even if they lose the vote. But they have resorted to a procedural norm for handling conflict, which replaces older methods such as killing the rival or imposing an ideology. Thus conflict management and prevention are the bundle of procedures on which democracy rests.
The same holds for the economic system of free enterprise, based on competition (conflict) to establish the best product and the best price. The market manages conflict and preventive measures of regulation manage the market; conflict escalation often rises high, although it usually stops before violence. More broadly, conflict is the basis of scientific inquiry. Theories are advanced, contested, and tested, with research and evidence managing the conflict until temporary truces are established, awaiting the next paradigm shift and challenge (Kuhn 1962). Scientific truth is established by conflict.
The Historic Attraction and Failure of Prevention
Because active conflict is normal and inherent in all these areas of activity, for that very reason prevention is desirable to keep it from escalating out of hand, beyond its useful benefits. Prevention is locked into domestic governance systems as an important value that makes the system work, linking the management mechanism with the conflict situation. Prevention here is a neutral effect; it does not purposely favor any candidate, product, theory, or argument, but provides an accepted means for handling the conflict among them. We know what would happen if it did not work, because conquest, killings, coups, and concentration camps have a historical record and are the methods of handling levels of conflict that current societies seek to prevent.
Prevention is the basis of a stable political system like a stable World Order, operating so that citizens can live and function in security with a firm sense of expectations. Law is the regulation of expectations, and prevention serves to inhibit actions that fall outside the normal range of expectations, specifically those on the path to violence. It is not enough to stop violence; violence comes from somewhere for some reason, and prevention needs to deal with situations that can lead to violence, as well as those that have already become violent. It is inefficient to have to resort to the Robin-and-John means of conflict resolution when stop signs and stop lights (and behind them the law enforcement officer) will suffice, establishing reliable expectations and generally preventing violence. Thus prevention is a political expectation and has a historical attraction. We work to establish ways of handling conflicts to keep them short of violence, as part of the general political system but also with regard to specific areas such as domestic security, civil litigation, education standards, sports rankings, and other areas of conflict. Domestically, the record is rather solid, even though there are always traffic infractions, crimes of passion, cheating scandals, and rioting sports team supporters that get through the net of norms and mechanisms to contain violence.
The same type of expectation of prevention extends to attitudes toward conflicts with nature, although the record is less solid. People look for prevention of hurricane damage, earthquake destruction, climate change effects, unwanted births, or disease epidemics (or even just the flu). Where such conflicts cannot be prevented directly, the demand shifts to protection against their effects. The politics of conflict prevention with nature in turn become the subject of conflict among parties, as politicians are held accountable for the failure to prevent hurricane damage, scientists are fined for supposedly inadequate seismic warnings, tempers fray as temperatures and ocean levels rise without adequate state action, marches clash (and sometimes feed violence) over abortion issues, and HIV/AIDS prevention becomes a major political topic. Again norms for managing the ensuing interpersonal conflicts are generally solid, but the means for handling the conflicts with nature that underlie them still elude us.
Similar expectation of prevention is transferred to the international arena, where it becomes the ingredient of normal state relations. Prevention has been a constant theme of UN Secretaries-General, from the early times of Dag Hammarskjöld to Boutros Boutros Ghali, Kofi Annan, and Ban Ki-moon. Secretaries-General establish records and reputations based on their abilities for bringing peace and preventing war. As noted, the world organization was established as the institution of World Order with the purpose of proving a means for peaceful resolution of disputes and a prevention of violence as a means of pursuing conflicts. While the UN is no world government, its members aspire to the reduction of violence, the prevention of wars among states and even within them when such conflicts are seen as a threat to international peace and security and World Order. To do so, they pursue the development and reinforcement of accepted norms, mechanisms, and practices for managing and even resolving conflicts. They have established a series of such mechanisms that provide a network of norms for behavior and for handling such conflicts similar to those that govern the management of domestic conflicts. The UN Charter (chap. VII, art. 33.1) lists such measures, including “negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.” As for domestic conflicts, the international system contains courts, tribunals, dispute settlement bodies, and others. International organizations and institutions have set standards for behavior in regard to issues that feed international conflict. However, whereas domestic conflicts fall rather firmly within the network of norms because they are predictable by standard categories, international conflicts are much more sui generis than terms such as “war” or “rebellion” might suggest. People know what will happen if they break the law; states play on the margins.
Yet such marginal plays are rare, compared with the literally innumerable cases of conflict where normal relations have prevailed and where World Order has been maintained. In these rare cases, prevention faces formidable obstacles and challenges. Preventers, after all, are whistleblowers, trying to change the course of events as they see them gain momentum toward disaster. While the larger community of onlookers may benefit from prevention efforts on their behalf, the parties to the conflict regard the preventer as a meddler in their dedicated business. The preventer’s challenge, like the whistleblower’s, is to make the conflicting parties aware of the pitfalls on the path they have chosen and to offer detours from the road to violence. Significant obstacles, some structural but above all attitudinal, both within their own organizations and with the conflicting parties, make this pursuit more difficult.
These challenges can be enumerated as sovereignty, the barrier to interference; knowledge, the uncertainty of the causal chain into escalation and violence; prediction, the fallibility of foresight; early warning, the distractions of inertia and inattention; action, the problem of knowing how to break the causal chain; effectiveness, the encroachment of externalities and other distractions; protection, the mitigation of effects as an alternative to an aversion to events; and non-prevention, the attraction of the natural course of events and the hubris of the preventer. Each deserves a fuller treatment, not as absolute impediments but as challenges to be overcome if prevention is to work.
Sovereignty
The first challenge is of course the barrier that sovereignty erects against interference with its actions (Ban 2010, ¶10). States may well act capriciously, but they usually act on the basis of firm convictions, popularly supported, that their action is in the national interest, which carries a higher justification than mere and only loosely enforceable international norms. Indeed, a major norm of the UN and of international interaction is the sanctity of sovereignty, higher than the sanctity of human life, and it wreaks havoc, for example, with such prevention efforts as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). In regard to rebellion, sovereignty impedes efforts to mediate or otherwise prevent domestic conflict, and the rebels are often motivated by their version of sovereign devotion to the cause, which provides a coat of justifying armor against efforts to manage the conflict. When a state is set on a course of action and its leaders – elected or self-chosen – are committed to it, it is difficult to turn them from the course of violence. Sovereignty allows a Putin to invade a Georgia or a Ukraine, a Chavez to imprison opponents and inflate the national currency, or a Museveni to sentence homosexual citizens to imprisonment, despite preventive efforts of the world community. Similarly, when a rebellion is committed to achieve independence or to bring the Way of God or the self-determination of a nation to the people it purports to represent, arguments, sanctions, and inducements to turn to the peaceful path ring hollow.
Knowledge
Scientists and other knowledge specialists are professionally wary, and the greater the knowledge and specialization, the greater their reluctance to make causal statements with assurance. Policymakers and other knowledge consumers often mistake such scientific skepticism for evidential weakness, and so find support for inaction. Conflict is always overdetermined. Finding the “real reason” for a conflict is like looking for the source of an underground river; its courses are multiple and hidden. Conflict also feeds itself, so that the original causes and grievances are often overtaken by wrongs committed in its course, just as they are by scars from before this round began. Conflicts do not hold still; they snowball into greater complexity, and pulling off the outer layers for treatment only reveals a compound core. Especially, conflict management tries to separate the underlying grievances of the conflict from the means of pursuing them; it carries with it promise for conflict resolution that leaves the parties doubly frustrated and angry if not pursued. The causal landscape for serious conflict involves a wide field of many antecedents; in most cases they peter out before reaching hurricane force, although often re-emerging later in new dimensions, but in a few cases the multiple antecedents will converge to produce a crisis.
Given the multicausality of the conflict, where it may be multicausality itself that contributes to its obduracy, it is difficult to establish a causal chain that would enable preventers to break the links effectively. The causes of the Bosnian war (1992–8) began in 1537, Serbia’s national day commemorating its defeat (sic) in Kosovo Polje (Field), and run through World War II with the Croat Ustashi, the collapse of Tito’s Yugoslavia, the economic downturn, the enclaved territories, and simply the animal macho of the Yugoslav/ Serbian fighters. Some of these links in the chain are harder to sever than others. We do not know what it is that keeps half a millennium of memory alive, demanding revenge for its bearers (Ricoeur 2000; Rosoux 2001). We do not know the effect of economic change and of economic pressures on the conflicting parties, although much work (and as much controversy) is being devoted to the topic. We do not know how absolute sacred territories and how divisible indivisibles are (Albin 1991; Toft 2003; Norlén 2015). Work has gone into the social psychology and the power of emotional leadership, including its psycho-sexual impact, but we have little secondstep knowledge on how to make such macho rabble-rousers climb down from the entrapment of their own popularity (Ury 1991). And, at the end, we have no knowledge about the way in which these variables interact to cause conflict and then to support prevention efforts.
Prediction
Prevention depends on prediction, a notoriously difficult action that also bedevils dealings with conflicts with nature (Lorenz 1972, 1993; Silver 2012). It is surprising how little attention is given to prediction in the prevention literature. Prediction errors are grouped by operations specialists and church liturgists as Type I error (unpredicted events, or sins of omission) and Type II error (unfulfilled predictions, or sins of commission) (Avenhaus & Krieger 2014). Each relates to the misinterpretation of evidence, but the two actually work together to weaken each other: Errors of commission make predictors wary and susceptible to errors of omission (the Cry Wolf Problem), and errors of omission press predictors not to make the same mistake again and so to make errors of commission. The problem in regard to nature conflicts is illustrated by the dilemma of a North Carolina governor in 2000. After ordering coastal evacuation because of an impending hurricane that then never made it to shore, arousing instead a storm of protests for the unnecessary disruption (Type II error), he decided to ignore warnings about the subsequent hurricane, causing an even bigger storm of protests when the hurricane actually landed (Type I error). The challenge is not merely to be able to identify tropical storms but to be able to identify those cases where the tropical storm actually turns into a hurricane. An analyst once exclaimed: “We’re great at prediction; we’ve identified 100 of the last ten hurricanes.”
Prediction becomes surer, the closer the event. This explains why distant predictions are hard to sell and why prediction is often too late and too difficult. Distant prediction deals with categories of events, where probability of a specific occurrence is variable. Academic articles and government files are filled with indications of coming wars and rumors of wars, even if the exact dates of the crash are not predictable, even up close. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has its conflict assessment, the UN Development Program (UNDP) its early warning assessment, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) its Early Warning System which it coordinates with private sector systems, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) its State Failure Task Force, the African Union (AU) its early warning project, SwissPeace’s Early Tension and Data Analysis (FAST), Francophonie’s early warning and rapid reaction system, the Fund for Peace its Failed States index, and the UN Charter its art. 99, stipulating that the Secretary-General may serve as an agent of early warning (which he has almost never done before the outbreak of hostilities). Playing backward to crisis antecedents is not the same thing as playing forward to determine which and how antecedents actually produce the crisis. It is in this area that more work needs to be done to produce reliable predictions, but until it is done, practitioners will feel justified in not taking predictions seriously or in substituting their feelings for more scientific – even if still imperfect – analyses.
Early Warning
It cannot be stated too often that early warnings abound, although they are not unambiguous. The real challenge is early awareness and early action, the ability to listen, hear, and act on early warnings (van Walraven 1998).1 Surprises in this business are rare but deafness is widespread (Adelman 1998). Foreign affairs bureaucracies and political advisors are the screen between analysis and action, each operating for their own reasons to avoid action that can be seen as either operationally or politically risky (the Bureaucratic Inertia Problem). Inactivity is usually safer than engagement, and non-decisions in favor of inaction are often rational given the uncertainties involved in action: the present devil we know is seen as a safer bet than the future devil we don’t know. Such an attitude may be regretted in hindsight in specific cases, but it is generally preferable and rational compared to overly eager or uninformed involvement in uncertain futures. But as so often occurs, the rational routine stands as a barrier to appropriate awareness for the unusual signs and events that, as noted, are characteristic of violent conflicts.
Even when early warnings are available, the road to effective action is mined with typical problems beyond scenario unreliability, the North Carolina governor’s problem (the Tropical Storm Problem). There is the Busy Fireman Problem:2 The normal bureaucratic organization is not set up to look for uncertain problems in the future, and so the common response is, “Don’t bother me with smoke; can’t you see I’m busy putting out fires?” The US and the European Community ignored the risk of Yugoslav disintegration because they were fixating on the Soviet-Russian and German problems at the time (Woodward 1995).3 Another is the Sleeping Dogs Problem: Best not stir up things that show no signs of stirring on their own for the moment. The argument against declaring a Year of African Boundary Demarcation by the Organization of African Unity (OAU)/African Union (AU) to deal with the risk of boundary wars was that most undemarcated boundaries are untroubled at the moment and so the best preventive measure might be not to trouble untroubled trouble (Nordquist 2001). A fifth problem is the Free Viewer Problem, where the viewer claims that the danger is someone else’s problem and will pass him by. This is the opposite of the Free Rider Problem, where the rider claims that the danger calls for someone else’s solution from which he will benefit; free riders enjoy a collective good, whereas free viewers feel untouched by a collective bad (Olson 1968). While some developing countries have acted as free riders toward the risk of global warming as seen in the protocols of the Climate Change Convention, the US is currently adopting a position of free viewer toward the “alleged problem.” Studies have shown that it takes personalized, imminent or rapidly increasing threats and warnings to capture attention, quite the contrary of warnings that are, by definition, early (Gilbert 2006).
The Three Monkeys Problem is simply the event the predictor missed (Type I error). People tend not to want to hear – or see or speak of – bad news; it is not only disquieting but if taken seriously would require some costly measures of prevention or preparation. In the years – and especially the year – preceding the first Gulf War, the US refused to believe that its friend Iraq would do such a thing (Jentleson 1994). The reverse is the Cry Wolf Problem, or warning fatigue (Type II error). The most important problem in early warnings is the uncertainty of their predictions – uncertain warnings of uncertain events. Even the most sophisticated attempts at solid predictors of future disasters have come up with antecedents but not predictors, leading to repeated Type II errors that set up the Type I error. Actually more frequent is the Deny Wolf Problem, which illustrates the difficulty of prediction. A situation becomes so standard that no effort is put into identifying when exceptions can/will occur, because they “can’t happen.” Analysts of Arab authoritarianism, Soviet totalitarianism, and terrorist fundamentalism all focused on unshakable explanations of the situation, leaving only incredulity before the rise of the Arab Spring, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the negotiations with terrorists.
Other blinders to awareness include the Sunk Cost Problem. Parties put further denial efforts into covering up earlier denials, which will demand further denials and cover-ups in the subsequent round (Meerts 2005). EU officials, faced with the exposure of corruption in the late 1990s, denied the problem rather than fixing it, insuring that the problem would be larger when the next round of revelations came around, as it did. A related reaction is reinforcement, in which not denial but persistence in an inappropriate direction is the response, another version of entrapment. Here the warning is heard but it provokes a continued or exaggerated wrong action. Warned by George Washington and others of the Indian forest tactics in the French and Indian War, General Braddock reinforced his red-coated phalanx, making them even better targets for the ambush. Finally, there is the Certainty Problem (or Effect) whereby, as prospect theory indicates, things unlikely to occur are fully discounted and things likely are counted as certain, so that risk is perceptionally reduced (also referred to as the hyperbolic discount function in intertemporal choice) (Loewenstein 1989, 1992; Laibson 1997; McDermott 2009).
Examples, as a result, are too numerous (Zartman 2005). The US government declined to act in 1991–6 when told of the presence of Osama bin Laden in Sudan. The UN Secretariat turned a deaf ear to clear signals of impending genocide in Rwanda in 1993, viewing them as “routine announcements” (Salton 2014). The UN Security Council declined to send a peacekeeping force to Congo-Brazzaville in 1997 because the ceasefire was merely de facto, not de jure, but instead ordered a study of the causes of African conflicts, while the ensuing massacre was going on (Zartman 1998). The 1994 Rwanda genocide, the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic and unrelated anthrax mailings, the 2011 Fukushima tsunami disaster, the 2012 Assam violence, and the 2012 murder of the US Ambassador in Benghazi could have been averted by awareness of the warning evidence available at the time (Prunier, 1994; Enserink 2001; Bhattacharjee 2011; Normile 2011; Harris 2012).
