What are the most effective means of preventing violent conflict from escalating into war? How do you develop a theory of conflict prevention? This study from Uppsala University looks at the research on conflict prevention and proposes a more effective way of analysing it. It argues that if conflict prevention strategies are to be improved, there must be a more nuanced understanding of why current strategies fail or succeed.
There are two ways of understanding conflict prevention. One concerns direct preventive actions: a crisis is judged to be in a dangerous phase of military escalation, intensification or diffusion. Thus, there is a need to act to prevent increasing dangers. The actor is a third party, whose interests are less immediate and not directly linked to the incompatibility between the primary parties. A second concern is the structural prevention, where the idea is to create conditions where conflicts and disputes do not arise or do not escalate into militarised action. Here a third party could be involved in furnishing assistance for such conditions to develop.
The literature has so far failed to develop a conflict prevention theory. There are some elements to build on, such as type of preventive action, phases of conflict, including the matter of timing as well as some insights drawn from the study of the causes of war.
- Categories of preventive actions include: a ladder of increasingly coercive actions and different approaches (military, non-military and development and governance). It is often difficult to differentiate these from normal diplomacy or national policies.
- The focus on phases of conflict allows analysis of the resources needed and when they should be employed. However, there are no sharp lines between the phases, and those that are defined are usually recognisable only after the phases have taken place.
- Although timing is seen as the most important factor, it is impossible to know whether an action failed because it was “too” late or because it failed to address certain elements of the situation.
- Although the importance of the specific context is seen to be critical to successful prevention, prevention also depends on the context being operationalised and made comparable.
- Variables contributing to the success of preventive measures include: the type of preventive action (degree of coercion), characteristics of the preventive actor (neighbour, major powers, international organisations) and timing of the preventive measures.
- Variables that explain why a particular situation does not escalate include: type of incompatibility, previous experience of war or peace, the presence of military escalatory measures, degree of democracy and the regional context.
What is needed is an evaluation of how the typical factors that explain the onset of war can be offset by the preventive actions that the prevention literature discusses. This requires a different methodological approach. Promising approaches for studying conflict prevention are:
- studies that work on the cases where prevention measures have been observed in reality;
- large-number studies where cases include war or non-escalation into war, using databases that already exist or by developing a new database of serious disputes;
- studies, where the same case is studied over time and where there are experiences of crises that were averted as well as crises that escalated; and
- studies that could be developed into small-number studies where similar cases are paired and where outcomes vary between escalation and no escalation.
