What can international donors do to help prevent conflict? This paper from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) presents a conflict assessment framework. It is designed to help USAID Missions gain a deeper understanding of the causes of conflict and think about how to use development assistance more strategically in order to address them. It emphasises the interactions between the motives, means and opportunities for conflict, and recommends that donors take an integrated approach.
Internal or civil conflicts have become the dominant mode of violence in the post-Cold War era. While conflict can be an inherent and legitimate part of social and political life, in many places the costs and consequences of violent conflict have become unacceptably high. Increasingly, the costs of civil conflict are not limited to the country where it is fought, but spill over borders and reduce growth and prosperity across entire regions. Conflict also has a damaging effect on global stability.
Violent conflict disrupts traditional development. Many of the most important causes of violence, such as a stagnant or deteriorating economy, weak or corrupt political institutions, or competition over natural resources, are already at the heart of traditional development assistance. However, although development and humanitarian assistance programmes are increasingly implemented in situations of open or latent conflict, most still do not explicitly incorporate a sensitivity to conflict in their design or execution.
Conflict is extremely complex. It happens when causes found at multiple levels come together and reinforce each other.
- Root causes shape motives or incentives for participating in violence. Many of these factors feed into a strong sense of grievance, but greed is another powerful reason for turning to violence.
- Without the means or resources to organise and execute conflict on a wide scale, widespread violence cannot be sustained.
- Political and social institutions are the filter through which all other causes have to pass. The opportunity structure for violence is deeply affected by the relative strength and health of institutions.
- Forces at the regional and international level are increasingly important, and often reinforce internal causes.
- If all these causes are in place, there will be windows of
- Vulnerability, when particular types of events may trigger the outbreak of full-scale violence.
Effective interventions must be based on consideration of how problems manifest themselves at all levels, and how solutions can be strengthened or built at each of the levels. International donors should:
- Facilitate dialogue between and within groups.
- Identify the economic agendas that sustain violence and work to raise the costs of pursuing them, for example by encouraging partnerships between multinational companies and local civil society groups.
- Assist the diversification of national economies that are heavily reliant on one or two commodities, to remove the monopoly on economic opportunity.
- Increase the number of economic options available to those population groups at high risk of being recruited to support elites in executing violence.
- Engage the private sector in conflict management.
- Focus on civilian oversight of the security sector, community policing and civil-military relations in pre-conflict settings.
- Strengthen civil society’s role in all areas of conflict management and peacebuilding.
- Carry out an analysis of how civil society groups are either reinforcing or bridging lines of division, and support organisations that cross ethnic, economic or political fault lines.
