Preventing Violent Conflict

The Cold War ended, and we were presented with what we thought was a new world order, but it turned out to be a new world of disorder. That is the issue that the Carnegie report addressed on preventing deadly conflict. What is it about this new world order that creates so many trouble spots where violent conflict rears its head in a way that it didn't before?

Well, I don't pretend to understand all of it, but there are a few important factors that I think have become reasonably clear, especially in the work of this worldwide commission that I had the privilege of co-chairing with former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance -- a commission on preventing deadly conflict.

During the Cold War, we and the Soviets sat on a lot of conflict. We stirred up a lot, too, but we did suppress conflicts that might have become much more dangerous in terms of the logic of the Cold War. Once the Cold War was over, neither we nor the former Soviet Union had much inclination to suppress conflicts. We were rather inclined to withdraw and look after our own people and let nature take its course. Many of the conflicts seemed very far away from us, remote from our own vital interests. Whether it's true or not, that's the way it looked to us. Now and then some things were happening: one was that some ancient hatreds that had been checked by us came back to life. Now that, to some degree, has been exaggerated because it's a bit too simple in most of these conflicts to say that it was just an ancient hatred that came back to life. Commonly, the ancient hatred was in a context when it became really violent. The context often included another dangerous element, namely, the erosion of social norms. As happened when the Soviet Union fell apart, if you didn't have the communist structure, for a while you didn't have much of anything, and people didn't know what would hold their lives together.

Moreover, you had there and in Africa, particularly, the decline of governance -- a government which could provide some services and could provide some ground rules and could hold people together now fell into decline. So you had the erosion of a capacity to govern. You had an erosion of social norms. And oftentimes an economic free-fall, or at least a serious fear of economic erosion, and lack of a clear-cut economic system. So that all that together made for a lot of fear in a lot of places. And that fear was typically played upon by political demagogues in Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, and elsewhere. They would come putting gasoline on the embers of the ancient hatreds -- "Look, we can only survive by bashing, killing, eliminating these ancient enemies of ours. If we do that we'll have better economic conditions, we'll seize their assets, whatever. We'll have a higher status. We'll have a way to live." So that the ethnic and religious animosities, important as they are, tend to be part of a complex of factors, all of which together make for a mass violence.

Did the commission come up with at least a formula or a pathway to addressing some of these complex problems?

We decided, after looking at the conditions that are conducive and have recently been conducive to violent conflict, that we had to extend our range from inter-state warfare to intra-state mass violence -- civil war, ethnic conflict, what-have-you. Which, by the way, has great spillover potential anyway, so that it tends to fuzz the distinction between intra- and inter-state warfare. But nevertheless, we had to spend a lot of our time looking at intra-state conflicts as they boiled up, partly because the earlier thinking like the formation of the UN and the Marshall Plan dealt with inter-state war, and the international institutions and governments were not well prepared to deal with this heavy outbreak of intra-state fighting. That's one thing.

The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict; photo includes Herbert Okun, Hamburg, Jane Holl, and John Stremlau

Then we decided, well, who could do what? We had to try to delineate to some extent who could do what with respect to preventing passing the threshold from conflict to mass violence. And that led us to broaden our horizons from governments and international institutions like the UN, and regional intergovernmental organizations like the Organization of American States, to institutions of civil society. And so we looked at business and religion and education and science and media and nongovernmental organizations. And in each case, right along the line, governments and international organizations and institutions of civil society, we asked, what have they done up till now? Answer: not much mostly, in prevention terms, although there are some good exceptions. We tried to find the exceptions, cherish the exceptions, highlight them in the report. If it's happened once or twice, it can happen more. It could happen again. What could make it happen again? What ideas would tend to strengthen the capability of each institution to prevent deadly conflict? That's the structure we followed.

Now, in order to do that, we felt we could not just look at the immediate crisis. That's what we call "operational prevention." That's very important. You have two groups coming toward the deadly collision, and what can you do in the way of preventive diplomacy? Economic sanctions and economic inducements? And even rapid deployment capability of military force to separate the antagonistic parties? That's important. There's a lot that can be done in operational prevention. But what then? Suppose we get that job done and you stop the immediate conflagration; the fire's likely to break out in five or twenty years again and maybe even worse.

So we had to think about what we call "structural prevention." What are the conditions conducive to living peacefully in the long term? And there you get into issues of economic and social development. You get into issues of building democracy around the world, of finding structures to protect human rights. Our shorthand for it is "security," meaning arms control and the like, diminishing the threat of pervasive armaments. The second shorthand is "well-being," which deals with issues here and abroad of economic and social development and justice. Some notion of a just society in terms of an independent judiciary and other things of that sort, the building of democratic institutions. So, security, well-being, justice for the long term. And asking what can each country do in that respect, and what can the international community do particularly to help fragile democracies, countries that have been in deep trouble, failed states. Is that beyond human ingenuity? We don't think so.

And in the short term, early warning systems become very important, information about what is going on in a particular setting.

Very important. We have a special monograph on that done by a member of the commission, Professor Alexander George of Stanford, a great scholar in international relations, and the executive director, Dr. Jane Holl, who actually took her Ph.D. with Alex George. They did a monograph on early warning and early response. I would just make one particular point about early warning, and that is that one of the best, most meaningful predictors in the set of various early warnings is a sharp upsurge of egregious human rights violations. That tells you that it's highly probable that in that setting there will be an outbreak of very serious fighting. And it also tells you you've got to think for the longer term about how you build institutions and processes that will protect human rights from large-scale egregious violations.

But on the whole, we conclude that the problem today, with all the information available, all the intelligence for the whole wide world, is not so much early warning as early response. What do you do to respond to the information that something dreadful is about to occur?

See the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict website.

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