Preventing Deadly Conflict

I. William Zartman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745686929, 9780745686912
• eBook ISBN: 9780745686950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Conflict is inherent to all human and inter-state relations, but it is not inevitable. Since the end of the Cold-War, the prevention of conflict escalation into violence through management and resolution has become a fundamental objective of the international system.

So how does prevention work when it works, and what can be done when tried and tested practices fail? In this book, I. William Zartman offers a clear and authoritative guide to the key challenges of conflict prevention and the norms, processes and methods used to dampen and diffuse inter and intra-state conflict in the contemporary world. Early-stage techniques including ?awareness? ?de-escalation?, ?stalemate?, ?ripening?, and ?resolution?, are explored in full alongside the late or ?crisis? stage techniques of ?interruption?, ?separation? and ?integration?. Prevention, he argues, is a battle that is never won: there is always more work to be done. The search for prevention - necessary but still imperfect - continues into new imperatives, new mechanisms, new agents, and new knowledge, which this book helps discover and apply.

CHAPTER ONE
The Inevitability and Value of Conflict

As long as people hold different views of the same subject, there is conflict, classically defined as an incompatibility of positions (e.g. Hobbes 1964 [1651]: 83; Raven & Kuglanski 1970: 70). As such, conflict is inherent in the existence of separate units, whether they be individuals, parties, societies, or states; humans predate the conflicts they bear but without conflicting views individual socio-political units would have no reason for separate existence. At this stage, conflict is merely passive or potential, and generally unpreventable. But when parties escalate their positions to an intersocial relationship, such as an attempt to assert their position over others, they have raised their conflict to an active stage, the threshold indicated in figure 1 (Coser 1956: 8). Two parties that value the same thing passively and then make efforts to get it, two parties who have their own beliefs and then make efforts to convert or deny the other, two parties which hold different strategies for reaching a goal and then make efforts to make their approach prevail, are all cases of moving from passive to active conflict.

These efforts are usually normal and to be expected, and we engage in competition, persuasion, and bargaining all the time. When we run into resistance, we increase our efforts, but usually within bounds established by social norms and the value of the object to us. The value of the object is a personal matter, but social or interpersonal norms have several effects. Like personal values, they impose limits on conflict behavior, but they also provide established or acceptable ways of conducting the conflict. We can bid or bargain for the coveted object, we can debate or separately schedule the different beliefs, we can vote or adjudicate over the rival strategies. Many of our differences and even active conflicts are governed by established norms, and the conflict, though active and escalated to a certain point, is managed and resolved appropriately and acceptably.

A witness called to the stand on the subject is Robin Hood, who stood at the opposite end from Little John at the one-log bridge. Their passive conflict soon escalated as they reached the middle of the bridge and they came to blows, until Little John flicked Robin Hood into the drink with his deft staff. (They then made up and went off together to join the Merry Men in Sherwood Forest.) This kind of action is not common practice anymore: one-lane bridges have priority signs and red lights, or if not we have more informal procedural norms such as “age before beauty,” “first come first served,” “ladies first,” alphabetical listings, or even rolling dice. These are termed conflict management devices; they replace violence as an arbiter and they demote the pursuit of the conflict to a social or political level. In this case, of course, they do more, they resolve the conflict, which no longer exists once the two parties have crossed the bridge safely (and joined the Merry Men). A second witness on the subject is the Chinese premier, who proclaimed his country’s claim against neighboring countries over most of the South China Sea and the reefs and rocks (and oil and fish) in it. Hoping to avoid the Robin-and-John means of conflict resolution, interested third parties, including the United States, urge resort to other modern procedural norms of World Order such as the International Court of Justice or negotiation. A third witness is Vladimir Putin, who trashed World Order norms and the tenth of the Ten Commandments and escalated conflicts over neighbors’ internal governance and territory into aggression, showing that Robin and John are not just historical or mythical characters.

But conflict has a deeper meaning in our society: It is the essence of our political and economic system (Matthews 1995; Zartman 1995). Democracy is based on conflict and its management by accepted norms that prevent the conflict from rising to the level of violence. Democrats believe that debate, application, and accountability are the test of truth and effectiveness. Democracy is the right to choose and the right to repent. Voting for candidates and for legislation is an exercise in conflict management in active conflict. Rarely is it conflict resolution, as the parties tend to hold their incompatible views even if they lose the vote. But they have resorted to a procedural norm for handling conflict, which replaces older methods such as killing the rival or imposing an ideology. Thus conflict management and prevention are the bundle of procedures on which democracy rests.

The same holds for the economic system of free enterprise, based on competition (conflict) to establish the best product and the best price. The market manages conflict and preventive measures of regulation manage the market; conflict escalation often rises high, although it usually stops before violence. More broadly, conflict is the basis of scientific inquiry. Theories are advanced, contested, and tested, with research and evidence managing the conflict until temporary truces are established, awaiting the next paradigm shift and challenge (Kuhn 1962). Scientific truth is established by conflict.

The Historic Attraction and Failure of Prevention

Because active conflict is normal and inherent in all these areas of activity, for that very reason prevention is desirable to keep it from escalating out of hand, beyond its useful benefits. Prevention is locked into domestic governance systems as an important value that makes the system work, linking the management mechanism with the conflict situation. Prevention here is a neutral effect; it does not purposely favor any candidate, product, theory, or argument, but provides an accepted means for handling the conflict among them. We know what would happen if it did not work, because conquest, killings, coups, and concentration camps have a historical record and are the methods of handling levels of conflict that current societies seek to prevent.

Prevention is the basis of a stable political system like a stable World Order, operating so that citizens can live and function in security with a firm sense of expectations. Law is the regulation of expectations, and prevention serves to inhibit actions that fall outside the normal range of expectations, specifically those on the path to violence. It is not enough to stop violence; violence comes from somewhere for some reason, and prevention needs to deal with situations that can lead to violence, as well as those that have already become violent. It is inefficient to have to resort to the Robin-and-John means of conflict resolution when stop signs and stop lights (and behind them the law enforcement officer) will suffice, establishing reliable expectations and generally preventing violence. Thus prevention is a political expectation and has a historical attraction. We work to establish ways of handling conflicts to keep them short of violence, as part of the general political system but also with regard to specific areas such as domestic security, civil litigation, education standards, sports rankings, and other areas of conflict. Domestically, the record is rather solid, even though there are always traffic infractions, crimes of passion, cheating scandals, and rioting sports team supporters that get through the net of norms and mechanisms to contain violence.

The same type of expectation of prevention extends to attitudes toward conflicts with nature, although the record is less solid. People look for prevention of hurricane damage, earthquake destruction, climate change effects, unwanted births, or disease epidemics (or even just the flu). Where such conflicts cannot be prevented directly, the demand shifts to protection against their effects. The politics of conflict prevention with nature in turn become the subject of conflict among parties, as politicians are held accountable for the failure to prevent hurricane damage, scientists are fined for supposedly inadequate seismic warnings, tempers fray as temperatures and ocean levels rise without adequate state action, marches clash (and sometimes feed violence) over abortion issues, and HIV/AIDS prevention becomes a major political topic. Again norms for managing the ensuing interpersonal conflicts are generally solid, but the means for handling the conflicts with nature that underlie them still elude us.

Similar expectation of prevention is transferred to the international arena, where it becomes the ingredient of normal state relations. Prevention has been a constant theme of UN Secretaries-General, from the early times of Dag Hammarskjöld to Boutros Boutros Ghali, Kofi Annan, and Ban Ki-moon. Secretaries-General establish records and reputations based on their abilities for bringing peace and preventing war. As noted, the world organization was established as the institution of World Order with the purpose of proving a means for peaceful resolution of disputes and a prevention of violence as a means of pursuing conflicts. While the UN is no world government, its members aspire to the reduction of violence, the prevention of wars among states and even within them when such conflicts are seen as a threat to international peace and security and World Order. To do so, they pursue the development and reinforcement of accepted norms, mechanisms, and practices for managing and even resolving conflicts. They have established a series of such mechanisms that provide a network of norms for behavior and for handling such conflicts similar to those that govern the management of domestic conflicts. The UN Charter (chap. VII, art. 33.1) lists such measures, including “negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.” As for domestic conflicts, the international system contains courts, tribunals, dispute settlement bodies, and others. International organizations and institutions have set standards for behavior in regard to issues that feed international conflict. However, whereas domestic conflicts fall rather firmly within the network of norms because they are predictable by standard categories, international conflicts are much more sui generis than terms such as “war” or “rebellion” might suggest. People know what will happen if they break the law; states play on the margins.

Yet such marginal plays are rare, compared with the literally innumerable cases of conflict where normal relations have prevailed and where World Order has been maintained. In these rare cases, prevention faces formidable obstacles and challenges. Preventers, after all, are whistleblowers, trying to change the course of events as they see them gain momentum toward disaster. While the larger community of onlookers may benefit from prevention efforts on their behalf, the parties to the conflict regard the preventer as a meddler in their dedicated business. The preventer’s challenge, like the whistleblower’s, is to make the conflicting parties aware of the pitfalls on the path they have chosen and to offer detours from the road to violence. Significant obstacles, some structural but above all attitudinal, both within their own organizations and with the conflicting parties, make this pursuit more difficult.

These challenges can be enumerated as sovereignty, the barrier to interference; knowledge, the uncertainty of the causal chain into escalation and violence; prediction, the fallibility of foresight; early warning, the distractions of inertia and inattention; action, the problem of knowing how to break the causal chain; effectiveness, the encroachment of externalities and other distractions; protection, the mitigation of effects as an alternative to an aversion to events; and non-prevention, the attraction of the natural course of events and the hubris of the preventer. Each deserves a fuller treatment, not as absolute impediments but as challenges to be overcome if prevention is to work.

Sovereignty

The first challenge is of course the barrier that sovereignty erects against interference with its actions (Ban 2010, ¶10). States may well act capriciously, but they usually act on the basis of firm convictions, popularly supported, that their action is in the national interest, which carries a higher justification than mere and only loosely enforceable international norms. Indeed, a major norm of the UN and of international interaction is the sanctity of sovereignty, higher than the sanctity of human life, and it wreaks havoc, for example, with such prevention efforts as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). In regard to rebellion, sovereignty impedes efforts to mediate or otherwise prevent domestic conflict, and the rebels are often motivated by their version of sovereign devotion to the cause, which provides a coat of justifying armor against efforts to manage the conflict. When a state is set on a course of action and its leaders – elected or self-chosen – are committed to it, it is difficult to turn them from the course of violence. Sovereignty allows a Putin to invade a Georgia or a Ukraine, a Chavez to imprison opponents and inflate the national currency, or a Museveni to sentence homosexual citizens to imprisonment, despite preventive efforts of the world community. Similarly, when a rebellion is committed to achieve independence or to bring the Way of God or the self-determination of a nation to the people it purports to represent, arguments, sanctions, and inducements to turn to the peaceful path ring hollow.

Knowledge

Scientists and other knowledge specialists are professionally wary, and the greater the knowledge and specialization, the greater their reluctance to make causal statements with assurance. Policymakers and other knowledge consumers often mistake such scientific skepticism for evidential weakness, and so find support for inaction. Conflict is always overdetermined. Finding the “real reason” for a conflict is like looking for the source of an underground river; its courses are multiple and hidden. Conflict also feeds itself, so that the original causes and grievances are often overtaken by wrongs committed in its course, just as they are by scars from before this round began. Conflicts do not hold still; they snowball into greater complexity, and pulling off the outer layers for treatment only reveals a compound core. Especially, conflict management tries to separate the underlying grievances of the conflict from the means of pursuing them; it carries with it promise for conflict resolution that leaves the parties doubly frustrated and angry if not pursued. The causal landscape for serious conflict involves a wide field of many antecedents; in most cases they peter out before reaching hurricane force, although often re-emerging later in new dimensions, but in a few cases the multiple antecedents will converge to produce a crisis.

Given the multicausality of the conflict, where it may be multicausality itself that contributes to its obduracy, it is difficult to establish a causal chain that would enable preventers to break the links effectively. The causes of the Bosnian war (1992–8) began in 1537, Serbia’s national day commemorating its defeat (sic) in Kosovo Polje (Field), and run through World War II with the Croat Ustashi, the collapse of Tito’s Yugoslavia, the economic downturn, the enclaved territories, and simply the animal macho of the Yugoslav/ Serbian fighters. Some of these links in the chain are harder to sever than others. We do not know what it is that keeps half a millennium of memor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Fatal Attraction of Prevention
• 1. The Inevitability and Value of Conflict
• 2. The Ubiquity of Prevention
• 3. Norms for Long-term Prevention
• 4. Mechanisms of Mid-term Prevention
• 5. Methods of Pre-Crisis Prevention
• 6. Measures of Late (and Earliest) Post-Crisis Prevention
• 7. Conclusions: The Elusive Quest for Prevention
• References
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement