A Guide:
	Executive Summary

This document, Preventing and Mitigating Violent Conflicts: A Revised Guide for Practitioners, was prepared by Creative Associates International, Inc. at the request of the Greater Horn of Africa Initiative to help support the Initiative’s efforts to promote peace and development, especially in the Greater Horn. This Guide was researched and prepared by a multi-disciplinary team, integrating specialists in the Greater Horn of Africa region with experts in conflict prevention, policy analysis, economics, democracy-building, civic society and development. It is a revision of the 1996 document entitled Preventing and Mitigating Violent Conflict: A Guide for Practitioners that the Greater Horn of Africa Initiative commissioned Creative Associates to prepare. This version of the Guide incorporates feedback from policy-makers and practitioners working in the Greater Horn of Africa and in the conflict prevention and mitigation field.

This Guide is one component of a three-part resource to assist in responding to conflicts. The other two elements are:

    § A World Wide Web page here which offers an interactive point-and-click means to analyze conflicts and prepare responses. This web page includes the contents of this document along with a list of organizational resources and a growing list of links to other related web sites.

    § An abridged version of this Guide which is also available from Creative Associates International.

Click here for an outline of the Guide

The end of the Cold War offers a new opportunity to address conflicts cooperatively. Major powers and international organizations are finding unacceptable the mounting human, material and political costs of repairing the damage these conflicts cause; commitment is growing to finding ways to stop violence before it erupts and to keep recent conflicts from reigniting. This Guide outlines why and how the design and implementation of established programs in development and other fields can be calibrated to address the different sources and levels of incipient conflicts more directly. Newer approaches to conflict resolution and prevention must be linked with established programs in more coherent, context-specific conflict prevention and mitigation strategies.

Conflict prevention is not a discrete technique or method in itself. It is an orientation that can be applied with a variety of techniques, programs and projects in many fields, from development, humanitarian affairs and democracy-building to military affairs and diplomacy. These activities prevent or mitigate conflict when they are consciously designed and operated with attention to conflicts’ sources and manifestations.

Conflict prevention can be carried out by:

    § Applying stand-alone initiatives to particular disputes or potential conflicts, in which particular methods such as negotiations or dialogues are aimed deliberately at keeping these disputes from escalating—for example, an NGO project that engages influential people from two ethnic communities with tense relations in a training program in dispute resolution.

    § Adding explicit objectives in conflict prevention or mitigation to existing development, relief and other programs with other primary objectives. These programs can support conflict prevention or mitigation when they take special pains to:

    ¨  Do no harm—avoid contributing to the sources of conflict, for instance, by changing an electoral system from a "winner-take-all" formula to reduce ethnic competition.

    ¨  Do better—increase positive impacts while ameliorating conflicts, for example, deliberately hiring laborers from two ethnic groups with tense relations to build a road, or designing social safety nets for a minority-populated region into a structural adjustment program.

    ¨  Strengthen and transform indigenous social and political mechanisms to support conflict prevention—for example, supporting elders’ councils in addressing simmering local issues.

The Guide offers an analytic framework to devise effective strategies for conflict prevention and mitigation. Sections in the Guide:

    § Discuss the causes of violent conflict, distinguishing between systemic or structural conditions, proximate or enabling factors, and immediate triggering events.

    § Examine the nature and ingredients of violent conflict compared to peace in order to suggest leverage points for action and to look at gradations of conflict within societies or in relations between nations and dividing a typical conflict’s life cycle into initial, middle and end phases.

    § Describe the processes and stages through which violent conflicts escalate out of peaceful conditions.

    § Compile a list of 90 policy tools that third parties and national actors have used to prevent and mitigate conflicts in differing functional areas—official diplomacy, non-official diplomacy, military measures, economic and social development, political development and governance, judicial or legal processes, communications and education.

    § Profile 25 policy tools in depth, examining their implementation, conflict context, strengths and weaknesses, and illustrating their usage with case studies from within and outside of the Greater Horn region.

    § Discuss multi-tooled strategies for selecting and applying policy tools to prevent or mitigate particular conflicts.

More than one policy tool can be applied to a conflict; past experience in conflict prevention and mitigation suggests that early intervention facilitates successful resolution. Coordination among intervenors is critical to avoid inadvertently exacerbating conflict. The Guide offers an eight-step approach to developing coherent strategies for single conflicts, from isolating the specific factors behind the conflict to determining strategic priorities, defining tasks, choosing implementing partners, negotiating responsibilities, and defining criteria for disengagement. The Guide argues for institutionalizing an international system for conflict prevention and mitigation to reduce response time, minimize the intervention learning curve, and stretch limited resources. An effective system would stress multilateral cooperation and collaboration under US leadership, with partners exhibiting early interest in low-level conflicts and focusing resources on especially troubled areas while emphasizing peaceful change. An international conflict resolution system would empower local and sub-regional actors as the first line of prevention, offering a graduated sequence of responses based on a conflict’s intensity and antagonists’ power, with higher-level, more coercive responses by major powers and other global actors available if needed.