A Guide:
	Post-Cold War Opportunity and Challenge

A. Today’s Parameters

B. Fundamental Principles in Preventing Conflict

C. Issues Addressed in this Guide

D. Who Should Read This Guide?

E. Using This Guide: A Road Map

F. Violent Conflict: A Price of Rapid Change?

1. National Conflicts in the Post-Cold War Era

2. Recent Responses to Conflict: From Crisis Intervention to Conflict Prevention

G.Adjusting Old Programs and Procedures for Post-Cold War National Conflicts

1.Conflict Prevention Gaps in Established Programs

2. Gaps in New Approaches

3. The Challenge

A. Today’s Parameters

The end of the Cold War in 1989-1990 offers an historic opportunity for international collaboration to resolve ongoing violent conflicts and prevent new ones.

§ A number of long-standing conflicts have diminished—the Middle East, South Africa—even if they are not settled.

§ More than at any time this century, none of the major centers of power—the United States, Russia, Western Europe, China, Japan—perceives other major powers as currently posing a serious military threat or as fundamentally antagonistic to its interests.

§ Governments are more willing to work together through the United Nations and other multilateral channels to resolve international conflicts. Only three vetoes have been cast in the Security Council since 1991, a dramatic reduction since Cold War years; the number of cases brought to the International Court of Justice has shot up in the past five years; and the growing number of peacekeeping missions—Cambodia, Namibia, Iraq, Somalia—reflects international willingness to cooperate in mitigating conflicts and alleviating human distress.

§ War is losing favor as an instrument of national policy. The hostility to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, for example, signaled that many nations are less willing to tolerate the unilateral use of force as a foreign policy tool.

§ The global geopolitical contest between capitalist and communist ideologies is over; market-oriented economics, freer trade, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are widely accepted as norms, if not fully implemented. In Latin America, for example, every country except Cuba now has a democratically elected government. In Africa, the collapse of communism stimulated popular pressures on autocratic regimes, leading to broader participation in politics, if not necessarily full democracy in places such as the Congo and Zambia.

§ The notion of national sovereignty is no longer so sacrosanct that nations can use it as an excuse for violating their citizens’ rights or practicing bad government. More nations are now held accountable to the standard that sovereignty is earned through good governance.

To this changing political environment must be added current trends in technology, globalization and, in some regions, economic integration. Improved access to technology has brought worldwide improvements in communication. Communication can help resolve disputes but can also mean that marginalized groups become more aware of the extent of their marginalization. As national economies open up and protectionist policies are dismantled, competition has increased within and among nations. Economies are now potentially more efficient, at a cost of heightened vulnerability and possible destabilization, itself creating the potential for new cleavages and conflicts. At the same time, growth rates in the economies of Western donor nations have slowed while unemployment and other domestic problems have increased, reducing the resources and attention their leaders and citizens are willing to focus on the developing world. Developing countries are increasingly asked to rely on their own resources and institutions, raising expectations and putting additional strain on strapped or inefficient governments, especially those with a tenuous grasp on popular legitimacy.

The post-Cold War change in political priorities presents incompatibilities. Market competition and freer trade have increased prosperity for some nations and groups but left others behind. Peace and human rights do not always go hand in hand. Democratization and increased popular participation in government can lead to minority rights abuses. Economic development and democratization cannot always be achieved simultaneously; in the long run, these values may be reconcilable, but in the short run, they can generate tensions.

B. Fundamental Principles in Preventing Conflict

The analysis and recommendations in this Guide rest on six critical premises:

§ Effectively preventing the eruption of new violent conflicts and immunizing countries against future conflicts begins by understanding the nature and stage of the particular conflict.

§ Appropriate policy tools should then be selected on the basis of this diagnosis.

§ These policy tools should be applied in combinations.

§ These combinations of policy tools should be proactive, aiming for conflict prevention or mitigation and peace-building.

§ These strategies should be tailored to the specific conditions and capacities in the area of conflict.

§ Coordinated multilateral country and regional strategies to implement these tools would allow for comparative advantage and burden-sharing.

C. Issues Addressed in this Guide

This Guide assists in addressing a number of issues surrounding conflict prevention and resolution efforts. It offers a holistic approach to devising and implementing strategies for conflict prevention and mitigation in the Greater Horn region, encompassing ten countries: Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Certain policy debates have approached this task from the perspective of a platform of programs such as peace-keeping or humanitarian interventions, working to apply these interventions to a given conflict. Others have begun by examining the conflict itself. Our method combines these two approaches, linking analysis of the dynamics of conflict escalation and extinction with assessment of policy options and results into a framework to assist policy-makers in defining, choosing and implementing options in conflict prevention and mitigation. This Guide addresses the following issues.

§ How can we know when violent conflicts are imminent?

§ Are there particular strategic entry points into emerging conflicts?

§ What approaches can be taken to intervening into conflicts before they become major crises?

§ Which diplomatic, developmental, military and other interventions are most effective at different stages of conflicts?

§ What is the relationship of long-term, medium-term, and short-term approaches to conflict prevention and mitigation?

§ How can indigenous capacities to manage conflict be preserved while promoting often-disruptive social and political change?

§ How can international programs pursuing other primary goals be attuned to averting conflicts?

§ How can third parties avoid harming and help to empower indigenous institutions?

§ Who should take responsibility for early warning and conflict prevention?

§ How could an ongoing prevention and mitigation capability be structured?

D. Who Should Read This Guide?

This Guide is intended for policy-makers and practitioners, from those engaged in traditional conflict prevention and mitigation activities—diplomats, military personnel—to experts who wish to bring conflict prevention and mitigation to areas such as economic development. It is intended to inform policy planning and programming from the local level up to headquarters as shown in the following examples.

E. Using This Guide: A Road Map

For ease of readership, this Guide is structured into four sections.

Part I. Post-Cold War Opportunity and Challenge introduces current challenges in new and existing paradigms, strategies and programs in conflict prevention and mitigation.

Part II. Understanding Conflict and Peace discusses the manifestations and sources of conflicts in the ten countries in the Greater Horn region, examining the life cycle of a typical conflict as a critical building block to choosing appropriate policy interventions.

Part III. A Toolbox to Respond to Conflicts and Build Peace reviews an array of policy interventions to prevent or mitigate conflict.

Part IV. Developing Conflict Prevention Strategies offers guidelines on how to build on an understanding of policy tools to develop coherent multi-tooled strategies to prevent or mitigate conflict, including the goals, tasks and issues in planning and implementing conflict prevention strategies.

A list of Acronyms, a Bibliography, an analysis of Current Conflict in the Greater Horn of Africa and a description of the team that developed this Guide are supplied as appendices.

F. Violent Conflict: A Price of Rapid Change?

Violent conflict around the world has not declined, despite the end of the Cold War. From 1989 through 1993, a total of 90 large and small armed conflicts occurred. At any given time, the number of violent conflicts fluctuates around 50 each year.

§ Long-standing civil wars and government/minority conflicts continue in Afghanistan, Angola, Sudan, and eastern Turkey.

§ New conflicts erupted—Nagorno-Karabkh, Tajikistan, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Algeria, Chechnya, Chiapas, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern Zaire, and Albania.

Other nations are perilously close to serious conflict; observers worry about Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Asia, the Korean peninsula, and the Persian Gulf. Though not all the developing world is in or on the verge of chaos, violent conflicts have been and will continue to be serious problems in many countries.

1. National Conflicts in the Post-Cold War Era

Few post-Cold War conflicts have occurred between states. The vast majority arose within nations over ethnic, governance, ideological or other national issues. In 1993, for example, all 47 active conflicts were internal, without a single active inter-state conflict. Many analysts expect this trend to continue, with conflicts arising from pressures within and across states. Furthermore, all world regions present unsettled border and natural resource disputes; inter-state wars and related phenomena such as nuclear arms proliferation and state-sponsored terrorism could increasingly destabilize international relations.

Authoritarian regimes and popular governments in the developing world have difficulty maintaining political legitimacy and governing effectively. Many face economic decline and competition, demands for increased participation in government, fragmenting political parties, ethno-nationalism or fundamentalist political movements, and security threats fueled by proliferating conventional arms and insurgencies from their neighbors. The result has been secessionist struggles, civil wars, collapsing states, local warlordism, organized international criminal activity, ethnic cleansing, state repression, gross human rights violations, and genocide.

Incidence of Conflicts

The number and nature of violent conflicts and complex emergencies—defined as combinations of internal conflicts, fragile or failing economic, social and political institutions, large-scale population displacements, and widespread famine, malnutrition or other human deprivations—varies by region. Western and Northeastern Europe, North America, and in certain respects, Latin America, have been labeled "zones of peace" because certain types of conflicts are now unlikely, especially inter-state wars. Violent conflicts and tensions have generally eased more in Southeast Asia than in Africa, Central Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and South Asia.

Particular regions tend to be prone to certain types of conflicts. For example, some analysts expect that communal conflicts are likely to increase in South Asia. Conflicts between governments and indigenous minorities, as in Chiapas, could worsen in Latin America, though they are not conspicuous so far.

Africa’s combination of advances and setbacks presents a mixed picture. Africa has experienced an especially large number of recent conflicts and complex emergencies.

§ Liberation wars have been replaced by struggles for material survival and competing groups’ control of the state and a country’s resource, seen in warlordism, ethnically-based factional struggles, fundamentalist movements, resource wars, and failed states.

§ Overall, from 1989 through 1993, Africa was second only to Asia in the average number of small and large armed conflicts active in each year (15). This figure does not include instances of repression or massacres of civilians, as in Burundi in 1993 and Rwanda in 1994.

§ Twelve of the 18 "great domestic slaughters" occurring in the world from 1955 through 1994 were in sub-Saharan Africa.

§ In 1995, 26 countries in the world were affected by complex emergencies; twelve were in Africa.

These trends are typified in the Greater Horn of Africa, where conflicts and repression within the past decade have caused massive human crises. Eight of the twelve "great domestic slaughters" in sub-Saharan Africa between 1955 and 1994 occurred in the Greater Horn: in Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. Other illustrations:

Ethiopia, 1984-1985. Possibly a million people perished in a famine caused by years of military campaigns by the Addis Ababa regime against areas of northern Ethiopia and Eritrea harboring liberation movements. Drought exacerbated the crisis.

Sudan, 1987-1988. Over a quarter of a million people died in a famine caused by Sudanese governments’ campaigns to wipe out the southern rebel movement’s support base. Drought also contributed.

Somalia, 1991-1992. The Somali famine developed out of vicious conflict between factions after Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991. Estimates of the dead range from a quarter to a half million people.

Rwanda, 1994. Perhaps a million people were slaughtered in a power play by senior government officials who envisioned a "final solution" where all Tutsis and moderate Hutus would be exterminated, leaving only government supporters of Hutu origin.

Today, actual and potential conflicts are rife in the Greater Horn.

§ The longstanding war in the Sudan shows no sign of resolution.

§ While international intervention in Somalia saved many people from starvation, opposing factions still fight for control of the country.

§ In Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda, years of civil war or internal turmoil ended. But because peace came through military victory, resentments fester without the national reconciliation needed to avoid future conflicts. Reconstruction is particularly difficult in environmentally devastated Eritrea.

§ In Rwanda, ethnic distrust weakens institutions in their struggle to maintain basic order.

§ Burundi has escalated into a virtual civil war despite efforts to avoid the horrors experienced by its neighbor.

§ Kenya and Tanzania face serious tensions over unresolved political and ethnic issues, though both have avoided major civil conflicts in recent decades.

Despite important differences in scale and intensity of the various conflicts in the Greater Horn, in many peoples’ eyes the region epitomizes war, famine and ethnic bloodshed, and conflicts incur multiple, staggering and far-reaching costs and impacts within and outside the country or region in conflict.

Costs of Conflict

Violent conflict incurs far-reaching costs that include:

§ The human toll when families cannot meet basic needs, with particular consequences for children.

§ Impacts on communities as war destroys social fabrics and coping mechanisms.

§ Effects on national economies as resource bases are devastated and reoriented from productive to military requirements.

§ Repercussions within national political institutions when traditional institutions and power relations are altered.

§ Threats to regional stability and security if national political disputes spill over into neighboring countries.

§ Humanitarian and reconstruction aid costs incurred to rebuild war-torn societies.

§ The price tag for peacekeeping now reaching unprecedented levels.

§ Lost opportunities for development, commerce and investment as scarce funding is siphoned off into emergency relief.

To these costs should be added the impacts on US foreign policy, domestic political fall-out, and effects on international cooperation as foreign policy goals are thwarted and prospects for international order are dimmed. The costs of conflict and causes of conflict in the Greater Horn of Africa are discussed in detail in Appendix C.

2. Recent Responses to Conflict: From Crisis Intervention to Conflict Prevention

The many recent violent conflicts and accompanying humanitarian crises have mostly been relatively small-scale and low-intensity in nature yet have imposed significant individual and cumulative costs. The international community usually acts to alleviate these conflicts; assuming responsibility for such crises through diplomacy, humanitarian relief, peacekeeping, and reconstruction aid is necessary, moral and laudable. But prolonged conflict leads to the belief that conflict is endemic in the Greater Horn, and that sending peacekeepers and doctors is simply one of the international community’s permanent functions. Economic problems and domestic political concerns in developed countries have led to a backlash against the risks and costs of international humanitarian interventions.

Many countries are currently at risk for violent conflict. These states usually have poor resources, lack international economic competitiveness, are often undergoing the strain of economic and political liberalization, have weak political and state institutions, are prone to ethnic or religious nationalism, and have ready access to arms. Recent crises were not aberrations; they will be repeated.

Outsiders have a choice in responding to these conflicts.

§ Developed countries sometimes ignore local conflict and resist efforts to address them. They deride local conflicts’ importance and seek to disengage from all but the most strategic countries and regions.

§ The mounting human toll and other costs of persisting national conflicts increasingly cause the opposite result: developed nations cannot avoid getting involved in these conflicts because of their huge impacts and mounting costs.

"Conflict prevention" and conflict management grow in appeal because persisting and future violent conflicts incur high human and material costs. International agencies, governments, and NGOs are trying to develop ways to address conflicts to avoid at least some of these costs. The UN, European Economic Community (EEC), the Organization for African Unity (OAU), the US, other governments and third parties have launched diplomatic initiatives to mediate conflicts in Angola, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and El Salvador, often with peacekeeping and humanitarian missions that try to restore order and provide medical and other aid.

The term "conflict resolution" implies ending ongoing conflicts: conflict resolution has traditionally focussed on containing, mitigating and ideally terminating active conflicts—Angola, Cambodia— rather than avoiding them and their terrible costs in the first place. Within the last three years, international interest in conflict prevention, humanitarian concerns and a pragmatic interest in cost-effectiveness have prompted a look beyond the largely reactive approaches of conflict resolution, reasoning that violence might be largely avoided by addressing issues before they degenerate to that level. This is what is meant by terms like "preventive diplomacy," "crisis prevention" and "preventive deployment." These activities are deliberate steps to deter conflicts and crises before they escalate: they come into play early in a conflict and address some of conflict’s causes, building early warning and other institutional capacities to anticipate and cope with conflicts early on. These new methods to anticipate and keep incipient conflicts from erupting have joined older techniques of managing and resolving existing conflicts.

Four notions guide conflict prevention.

Conflict begins at the national level. More policy-makers and citizens accept that the international community is burdened and its security possibly threatened when national troubles erupt into violence and cause massive refugee flows and large-scale loss of life. Despite sovereign nations’ prerogatives, internal sources of potential conflict warrant monitoring and early response. Preventive action now means more than watching for cross-border aggression: it means looking for signs of possible crisis such as gross violations of human rights, massacres, ethnic cleansing, collapsing states, and military or executive usurpation of established democratic institutions.

Early warning systems are being devised and include processes to scan regions for signs of trouble. Researchers are studying past conflicts to determine predictors of civil wars, genocide and failing states. Efforts are being made to link early warning to decision processes. Communications technologies are opening up more nations’ affairs to general view, and databases and information-sharing networks are proliferating such as Humanitarian Early Warning System (HEWS), "Reliefnet," and UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs projects which put conflict information on-line worldwide.

Conflict prevention requires multi-pronged, multi-organizational means, deploying a wide array of tools through more global and regional actors, rather than leaving the task solely to individual states or the UN. Third-party official international bodies, NGOs, individual governments, and military and civilian agencies are now working with affected countries and regions. "Preventive diplomacy needs a multi-track approach where national, regional, and international actors complement one another."

The Cold War philosophy held that certain policies and programs—diplomacy and development—were inherently peaceful, while others—military assistance and military intervention—were inherently bellicose. Current conflict prevention theory states that all tools have the capacity to promote or prevent conflict, depending on particular circumstances and how they are implemented, so each must be evaluated with respect to their probable effect on the situation at hand.

Conflict prevention capacities should be institutionalized. Organizational and procedural changes are supporting conflict prevention. These changes improve the capacity to anticipate and respond to the first signs of conflicts by ministries, international and regional organizations.

While skeptics may dismiss conflict prevention as impractical, a review of pre-violent conflict interventions provides evidence that this approach to conflict works. International interest and action to develop and use various methods to head off conflicts—not just to stop already raging wars—is at its highest since the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the efforts to prevent nuclear war of the 1970s and 1980s.

This new interest in conflict prevention is encouraging and shows an unusual recognition that peace is not simply the absence of war. Peace must be preserved and consolidated through deliberate efforts. As historian Donald Kagan concludes in his study of five historic wars and crises:

"A persistent and repeated error through the ages has been the failure to understand that the preservation of peace requires active effort, planning, the expenditure of resources, and sacrifice, just as war does. In the modern world especially the sense that peace is natural and war an aberration has led to a failure in peacetime to consider the possibility of another war, which, in turn, has prevented the efforts needed to preserve the peace."

G. Adjusting Old Programs and Procedures for Post-Cold War National Conflicts

Many programs already contribute to conflict prevention or mitigation, including diplomacy, economic development, education, health, agriculture, population, democracy-building, human rights, humanitarian affairs, defense and military affairs, and international law. A range of governmental and non-governmental agencies carry out these programs within particular governments and through international organizations whether or not they are labeled "conflict prevention," "preventive diplomacy" or "dispute resolution." In addition, all societies have indigenous dispute resolution and social control mechanisms. These vary from councils of elders and other traditional dispute settlement mechanisms to national institutions such as modern parliamentary government legislatures. These institutions operate through local and national governments, culturally-specific customs and procedures, and even the family to keep many disputes from becoming unmanageable and violent.

Conflict prevention is an implicit if not always explicit rationale in the US and other nations’ functional programs in all of the following "Six D" fields.

Diplomacy. Governments and multilateral organizations conduct official bilateral and multilateral diplomacy and negotiations that frequently ease tensions between or within states and defuse potential sources of conflict.

Development, trade and environment programs. Economic development activities alleviate poverty and address resource deficiencies; health and social service programs deal with disease, sanitation, famine and other community problems; education programs increase literacy and address ignorance and prejudice; programs halt environmental degradation, preserve and expand physical resource bases and reduce scarcity. Economic reform and freer trade stimulate more efficient market-oriented ways to produce and distribute goods and services to generate wider prosperity. Higher living standards for more people mitigate social strife by increasing groups’ stakes in the peaceful operation of the economy. All of these programs reduce the potential for violence.

Defense and arms control. Military assistance programs strengthen defense against potential aggressors, creating a balance of power between nations that can deter war. The US Defense Department’s military-to-military International Education and Training (IMET) programs develop appropriate professional roles for foreign military establishments and encourage their subordination to civilian authorities. Other infrastructure and "Operations Other Than War" (OOTW) have peacemaking as an objective. Programs such as arms control, weapons dismantlement and counter-proliferation clearly relate to conflict prevention.

Democratization and human rights programs build civil society, give unrepresented citizens a voice, strengthen governments’ ability to fulfill citizen needs, and promote minority rights. Opening up authoritarian and autocratic governments to wider participation makes government structures more legitimate and fragments political power. These measures redress or pre-empt demands and grievances that could otherwise provoke conflicts.

Demography and population control programs aim to reduce rapid population growth, especially in societies whose resource base cannot adequately provide for larger populations. Population control helps prevent conflicts by reducing the number of potential competitors for scarce resources.

Disaster relief. Aid workers meet basic needs when they provide food, medical supplies, temporary housing, and other humanitarian relief for refugees and others affected by war. This reduces frustrations that can lead to conflicts. Aid workers can also become involved in resolving disputes that could easily escalate into larger conflicts.

Long-standing international programs and indigenous institutions can serve as conflict prevention "safety nets," contributing to dispute management and conflict prevention in a variety of ways. With these programs and institutions in place, we might feel confident that existing preparations are sufficient. However, despite the efforts of all those interested in keeping the peace, horrible conflicts have recently erupted or been deliberately launched in Africa and elsewhere. These conflicts were not adequately addressed by existing programs. Why have these events occurred?

One possible explanation is that violent conflicts in developing countries stem from historical forces so powerful that the conflicts are inevitable. Yet this deterministic view ignores instances where conflict prevention and mitigation efforts have headed off crises, or have stopped violence before it would have done more damage. In Kagan’s words,

"It would... be wrong to despair of reducing the danger and frequency of wars. If war in general cannot be avoided, we may still hope to be able to reduce the danger of war for long stretches of time, to avoid particular wars, to pursue policies that make a satisfactory peace more likely and more lasting."

1. Conflict Prevention Gaps in Established Programs

Present approaches to conflict are inadequate, either because they are not designed to deal with the various stages of conflicts or because of insufficient budgetary, staff and other resources. Established programs typically present shortcomings that inhibit their conflict prevention capabilities.

The dominant crisis orientation. Despite the new mechanisms to address future conflicts, government agencies and international institutions whose mandates concern war and conflict are still oriented primarily to managing full-blown violent crises once they occur rather than averting them. For example, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees can only alleviate refugees’ plight, not address the forces that caused it. Responses to looming political crises and possible violent conflicts are thus left to officials and field professionals who are primarily doing other tasks. To act preventively, they must step outside their established bureaucratic routines and job descriptions.

Overload. A handful of agencies or programs have added conflict prevention to their mandate, including the UN Secretariat. Unfortunately, few government and multilateral organization officials are assigned to monitor and respond to social, political and international changes that may generate violent conflicts (perhaps the single official whose mandate is solely conflict prevention is the OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities, and his charge allows him to act only in pre-crisis situations; if they heat up, he must disengage). Most of these units are also expected to deal with existing and incipient conflicts. These units are often overburdened with current crises and understaffed: without time to look ahead systematically and prepare for future crises, current crises absorb their time and preventive tasks get short shrift.

State-to-state focus. Most conventional methods of bilateral or multilateral international diplomacy—negotiations, shuttle diplomacy, sanctions, arms control, and so on—were designed to respond to the behavior of states and the corresponding types of conflicts they usually perpetrate— inter-state wars or nuclear crises. This assumes that states are the only organized, cohesive actors affecting international problems and solutions. While technically speaking, the language of the UN Charter does not foreclose acting on threats to international peace and security which originate within member countries (e.g., civil conflict), rather than those originating from the member states themselves, the Security Council has mainly addressed inter-state conflicts involving cross-border armed incursions, such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, or domestic conflicts only after they have become major civil wars and humanitarian crises, as in the Congo in 1960 or Somalia in 1992. Yet the vast majority of post-Cold War conflicts originated within states and concern internal issues. Eastern Europe is the sole significant example of international preventive procedures and mechanisms focussing on states’ behavior towards populations within their borders.

Focussing on armed force as the cause of conflict. In recent years, the international community has become more deeply involved in trying to regulate the level of armed conflict and alleviate its effects within individual nations through efforts such as mediation and peacekeeping. Yet this increased involvement often comes too late in a violent national crisis’s development, and typically focusses on the symptoms of conflict—armed fighting between factions—but not their sources. Thus, international peacekeeping forces do not change the political, cultural and other conditions that caused the conflict; even international programs directly concerned with conflict generally focus on the behavioral manifestations of conflicts, or at best, on their most immediate antecedents such as ceasefire violations and troop movements without addressing the conflict’s deeper sources. Intervenors may not be prepared to survey evolving conditions for their potential for violence and rarely have a mandate to address those conditions.

Despite long experience with problems and policies that affect conflicts directly or indirectly, the international community is less experienced in dealing specifically with preventing relatively low-level conflicts within countries, or in galvanizing different functional programs in development, human rights, education, and so forth into coherent, effective anti-conflict strategies. Many development professionals, for example, see the more immediate causes of national conflicts as "getting into politics" and thus none of their business, something that should be left to military agencies.

An inadequate link between general development assistance and conflict prevention. Economic assistance, economic reform, the newer aid programs for democratization and civic society-building can help prevent conflict, but causal links are often diffuse and unclear. As presently carried out, these efforts are not necessarily conflict-preventive, though they can support conflict prevention objectives. In fact, development assistance can inadvertently contribute to conflict. How project benefits are distributed and control of these benefits determine whether the project contributes to reducing conflict or instead becomes part of the problem. In fragile societies and brittle political systems, rapid socio-economic development or democratization can weaken the ways societies manage disputes in the short run; this is destabilizing and increases short-term chances of violence or repression. The way humanitarian assistance is distributed among different regions can buttress one side of a conflict’s political and military power and so encourage greater violence. It may make development sense to build a road or bridge or stimulate intra-regional trade. Yet these can enhance a regional warlord’s position and make aggression more viable.

Practitioners are beginning to understand and document the specific ways in which programs help or hurt the cause of conflict prevention and mitigation. Efforts aiming at promoting social and political change must be tailored to the capacity of societies to absorb those changes. The relationships of these programs to the sources and dynamics of violent conflicts must be further developed, with program design and implementation modified accordingly:

"We must give greater thought to prevention before we reach for the ‘cure’—for humanitarian, political, and financial reasons... This means, for example, that we will have to begin examining whether the economic policy ‘medicine’ often prescribed will reduce conflict or enhance it."

Detection without enforcement. Some organizations monitor nations’ domestic behavior to alert the world community to possible violent conflicts or repression in the short and medium term, for example, international or domestic NGOs monitoring human rights. When these organizations do not have the capacity to take action, additional responses are needed—such as international publicity campaigns or efforts within the UN Security Council or other bodies—to compel nations to pursue peaceful resolutions to conflicts.

Lack of coordination and coherent strategy. International agencies pursuing separate functional mandates rarely coordinate to develop conflict prevention strategies that address potential conflicts’ long, medium, and short term sources. This lack of coordination can mean missed opportunities for conflict prevention and can contribute to a conflict’s emergence. These agencies were largely created during the Cold War and organized around distinct "specific and defined sets of problems" such as arms control, development, security assistance, health, or agriculture. These separate functional mandates mean that these entities often operate in isolation from each other; even departments and sub-units within the same international entities often work at cross-purposes. Decision-making and action are often governed by bureaucratic politics and organizational routines; policies that are ostensibly those of a government pursuing its interests are actually the particular priorities, agendas, and modus operandi of departments within that government. As part of a government may be trying to prevent violent conflicts, another part of the same government may be doing things that worsen them.

Top-down organization. Existing international bureaucracies and programs are generally organized according to a "stove-pipe" or top-down, compartmentalized structure. This causes some of the functional fragmentation in many international relief and other programs and complicates lateral coordination behind a new initiative such as conflict prevention.

Weaknesses of indigenous institutions. National-level state institutions and local-level traditional institutions have several shortcomings.

§ Many indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms no longer operate effectively because they were destroyed by socio-economic change, wars, or deliberate subversion. In some cases, indigenous institutions are not useful because these structures have been part of coercion and repression rather than part of its solution, for instance, traditional rural community authority structures, such as councils of elders, who discriminate against outsiders or minorities in their midst, including women or ethnic groups.

§ Traditional rural institutions are not always effectively linked to modern state institutions and in fact have been eroded or displaced by "modernizing" trends such as wider communications. At this point, many may be incapable of mediating conflicts effectively.

2. Gaps in New Approaches

The new impetus is beginning to generate early warning indicators and preventive mechanisms for conflicts. Yet there are gaps in the newer approaches as well.

Inadequate response structure. The lack of institutionalized procedures to respond to early signs of conflict means that special efforts, largely de novo, must be worked out each time to mobilize resources and political will for action.

Patchy, fragmented coverage. Post-Cold War early warning and preventive action lacks focal points where information can be pulled together and coherent policy responses launched on a regular basis. In particular, the US government lacks an overall post-Cold War conflict prevention strategy and capability. US preparedness is patchy and disjointed. Except with the most compelling global or regional threats, most US officials who wish to take preventive action must work outside established job descriptions, functional program mandates, and bureaucratic routines. Absent are government-wide procedures to regularly monitor and assess a wide range of incipient national and sub-regional political disputes, using known indicators and linking these to decision-making that assesses the stakes, poses feasible objectives, and considers intervention alternatives based on lessons from experience.

More systematic early warning activities occur within some regional bureaus and functional units of different government departments. These include certain geographic areas (Russia, Latin America) and types of crises (terrorism, drugs, nuclear dissemination), using different policy tools (peacekeeping, diplomacy). Possible conflicts and responses are viewed through each unit’s conceptual lens, not in terms of the wider range of policy options that might be brought to bear at various stages of conflict emergence. The US has been less supportive of watching and engaging medium-term factors that might provoke violence, even in countries seen as geopolitically critical—Russia, Ukraine, Japan, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran—much less in smaller, less strategically important countries.

Inadequate knowledge and feedback. Recent country-level initiatives have had mixed success. The lessons of these experiences are being systematically examined but they have yet to be widely disseminated. In addition, interventions often have no provisions for evaluating their efforts, so relatively little has been done to garner lessons from these cases, identify what makes for success and failure, and disseminate these results to policy-makers.

Existing prevention mechanisms neglected. Even where early warning and preventive mechanisms are relatively institutionalized and available, they are not always used. Present-day Burundi is an example where a peacekeeping force might cool the situation but nations are not willing to deploy that tool. In Chechnya the US and other CSCE member nations failed to pressure Russia to comply with already agreed-on CSCE transparency requirements regarding troop movements and CSCE human rights standards. Neglecting these existing international agreements sent a message that Chechnya was an internal matter and that Russia did not have to be concerned about the agreements.

3. The Challenge

The approaches to conflict prevention must be linked to sources of effective power, at least by following more systematic strategies of conflict intervention with appropriate divisions of labor between NGOs and governments. Old and new programs must be coordinated into focussed, effective strategies that methodically address the short, medium and long term sources of conflicts. New thinking and policies are needed to meld traditional and non-traditional programs into effective strategies for the Greater Horn and elsewhere. A new policy is needed to link development, diplomacy and other tools into a new "operational code" for preventing and mitigating conflicts.