Why does there seem to be a gap between the promise and the actual pursuit of conflict prevention? How can decision makers devise effective conflict prevention policies? This chapter from the Sage Handbook of Conflict Prevention reviews the concepts, activities, and impacts of conflict prevention, focusing on the ‘primary prevention’ of prospective new conflicts. Policymakers need to consolidate lessons learned from past experience, and apply that knowledge to weak states through multilateral country consultations with key actors to develop jointly formulated, multifaceted conflict prevention strategies.
Conflict prevention occurs in peaceful situations where rising hostilities and other indicators suggest that substantial physical violence is possible. However, conflict prevention is still a relatively marginal international concern for several reasons. These include difficulty in determining the type of intervention to use in which circumstances, dispersed activism by diverse professions, overstretched resources and a lack of clear guidelines for implementation.
Direct prevention, such as diplomacy or intervention, includes time-sensitive and actor-or event-focused measures. Structural measures address deeper societal conditions that generate tensions, such as rebuilding faulty institutions or correcting gross disparities in the standard of living. Both of these types can be applied at the ad hoc (regional or country-specific) or a priori (international) levels.
Different levels of early conflict require different prevention methods For example:
- Latent conflicts occur when changes generate unacknowledged, underlying strains among social groups. This level benefits the most from a mixture of structural and direct measures aimed at alleviating socio-economic sources of conflict or institutional policy deficits.
- Manifest limited conflicts occur when groups publicly voice diverging positions. These conflicts benefit from direct measures towards non-binding interactions, facilitation of dialogue, and if necessary coercive diplomacy. Structural measures are used to support direct measures.
- Escalating violent conflict occurs where major hostilities are imminent. Direct measures like formal diplomacy, coercive diplomacy and careful military intervention are most effective.
Creation of an effective conflict-prevention strategy should include a mix of preventative methods depending on context and stage of conflict. Policymakers should:
- Consolidate what is known:Tap into the useful knowledge of the situation that already exists when constructing a conflict prevention strategy. A structured framework could illustrate the use of preventative instruments available with guidelines about how and where they would be most useful.
- Apply the knowledge to emerging conflicts: Focus on the country level informed by field and desk-based consultations of the specific emerging event. The resulting processes should be linked up to the country’s official development strategy and should involve all stakeholders.
- Work with key actors to implement diagnosis-driven, targeted strategies: The most important short and long-term risks to conflict-prevention need to be identified through consultations with key actors and, using lessons learned from previous experiences, the roles of each key actor should be defined.
- Conduct more research on what types and combinations of preventative actions are the most effective at different stages of conflict.
