The Structural Prevention of Mass Atrocities

Understanding Risk and Resilience

Stephen McLoughlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415706131
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134594047
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a different approach to the structural prevention of mass atrocities. It investigates the conditions that enable vulnerable countries to prevent the perpetration of such violence.

Structural prevention is commonly framed as the identifying and ameliorating of the 'root causes' of violent conflict, a process which typically involves international actors determining what these root causes are, and what the best courses of action are to deal with them. This overlooks why mass atrocities do not occur in countries that contain the presence of root causes. In fact, very little research has been conducted on what the causes of peace and stability are, particularly in relatively countries located in regions marred by civil war and mass atrocities. To better understand how such vulnerable countries prevent the commission of mass atrocities, this book proposes an analytical framework which enables not only an understanding of risk which arises from the presence of root causes, but also of the factors that build resilience in countries, and consequently mitigate and manage such risk. Using this framework, three countries – Botswana, Zambia and Tanzania, are analysed to account for their long term stability despite their location in neighbourhoods characterised by decades of civil war, ethnic repression and mass atrocities.

This work is a significant contribution to the field of genocide studies and crimes against humanity and will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

1 A review of prevention

In his 2008 book, Preventing Genocide, David Hamburg drew on a two-pronged definition of prevention, originally articulated in the Carnegie Commission’s 1997 report, Preventing Deadly Conflict. Operational prevention – ‘measures applicable in the face of immediate crisis’ – and structural prevention – ‘strategies to address the root causes of deadly conflict’ (Hamburg and Vance 1997: 69) – were identified as the two key approaches. This distinction has underpinned prevention in the UN system, both in the development of institutional capacity and in numerous reports written subsequently by Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon. As Hamburg was also co-architect of the Carnegie Commission’s report, it is interesting to consider his use of public health analogies to illustrate both proximate and long-term preventive strategies. Operational preventive measures, such as ‘early, skilful, and respectful preventive diplomacy’, were likened to ‘expert care of a sprained ankle’ (Hamburg 2008: 5). Structural prevention, which entailed ‘helping a troubled nation to build a democratic, equitable, socio-economic infrastructure’, was comparable to ‘promoting a healthy lifestyle and environment … for a society that is accustomed to health-damaging habits such as cigarette smoking’ (Hamburg 2008: 5).

Such analogies are useful for illustrating, in general terms, the benefits of multi-dimensional preventive strategies that do more than address the most visible signs of dangerous risk escalation. However, they also reveal blind spots. Two in particular stand out: the first is an assumption that the existence of root causes assumes an inevitable violent outcome. The second is a tendency to make a distinction between external prevention actors and internal prevention recipients, much like the relationship between a doctor and a patient. What these blind spots overlook are the myriad domestic sources of resilience that contain insights into the way that risk of violent conflict or mass atrocities is managed over time. This is particularly relevant for structural prevention, as the effectiveness of long-term strategies becomes more difficult to prove the further upstream from potential violent outcomes they are implemented. Understanding what already works in countries that manage challenges associated with the long-term risk of mass atrocities is surely an important dimension of structural prevention.

To discuss these challenges, this chapter commences with an overview of prevention in the UN system and beyond, since 1945, with a particular emphasis on developments in the post-Cold War era. I then discuss the policy implications of structural prevention, with specific reference to the concerns that in aiming to address the root causes of potential violence, the utility of prevention as a policy and analytical tool may become diminished in its attempts to ‘make it be all things to all people’ (Luck 2002: 256). The third section then addresses two major limitations inherent in the concept of structural prevention. The general argument is that these limitations, which are inherent in the way that structural prevention has been conceptualized, overlook what communities and states already do to build resilience and mitigate the risk of genocide and other mass atrocities.

The evolution of prevention since 1945

Conflict prevention and the UN

There is nothing novel about the idea of preventing war. Ackermann points out that a number of preventive measures were agreed on and implemented as a result of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, seeking to bring about the peaceful settlement of disputes between various principalities and states (Ackermann 2003: 340). Although the terms ‘prevention’ or ‘preventive diplomacy’ were not used,¹ the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Marshall Plan, as well as the European Union (EU) can all be seen as efforts to provide the institutional and infrastructural groundwork for the fostering of cooperation and the peaceful settlement of hostilities (de Maio 2006: 132).

Prevention is also central to the UN. The UN Charter clearly mandated the prevention of violent conflict, and established it as its central principle (Bellamy et al. 2004: 250). The opening lines, ‘To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war … to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights … justice and respect … for international law … to promote social progress …’ (United Nations 1945), brought together the basic ingredients of a broad notion of prevention which included both immediate concerns (‘the scourge of war’) and more structural concerns (human rights, international law, social progress). Further articles give shape to this approach. For example, Article 1 reinforces the UN’s primary principle by articulating its purpose as taking ‘effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats … to the peace’ (United Nations 1945). In Article 2, paragraph 5, member states are requested not to assist other states that are subject to UN preventive/enforcement action. Responsibility is given to the UN Security Council, in Article 24, paragraph 1, to maintain peace and security, and this is followed up in Article 34, which highlights the importance of investigating any dispute or situation that might lead to a threat to international security, implying that action can legally be taken well prior to a conflict breaking out (United Nations 1945). This preventive action is reinforced in Article 40, which gives the Security Council the authority to ‘call upon the parties concerned’ to adopt ‘provisional measures’ in an effort to offset an escalation to violent conflict. In fact, membership of the UN itself was declared to be open only to ‘peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter, and in the judgement of the organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations’ (United Nations 1945).²

Despite conflict prevention being the ‘first promise in the Charter’ (Hampson et al. 2002: 1), it has been one of the most difficult areas not only to devise and implement policy, but also to articulate and map out how such a goal could be understood and reached. This is also reflected in the way that conflict prevention has arisen and evolved as a concept, particularly since the end of the Cold War. Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar raised one major limitation in 1982 regarding Article 99, which stated that ‘The Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security’ (United Nations 1945: 15/99). De Cuéllar brought to light the inadequacy of UN early warning capacity in his annual report of the same year (Dedring 1998: 48). In the report he stated he was unable to give the Security Council reliable and timely updates on developments that might lead to international disputes if not dealt with appropriately and swiftly. This concern was triggered by the war in the Falkland Islands between the UK and Argentina, which was said to have caught the UN Secretariat by surprise, to the extent that it did not have a map of the islands at the time the invasion commenced (Peck 1998: 72). Eventually, in 1987, the Office of Research and Collection of Information (ORCI) was set up to provide timely early warning, as well as engage in policy planning, disseminate information, thus aiming to improve the UN’s capacity for responding to situations that were deemed at risk of escalating into violent conflict (Boothby 2004: 252). However, as part of a number of reforms initiated by Boutros Boutros-Ghali (and due to the political controversy of the Office having the capacity to collect information that could be used against some member states), ORCI was shut down in 1992, with some of its functions of information collection being transferred to the UN Secretariat-based Department of Political Affairs (DPA) (Sutterlin 2003: 18).

With the Cold War over, and optimism spreading about the potential for the UN Security Council to make more effective use of its Chapter VII powers, Boutros-Ghali was called upon to provide a report that would address the way this renewed international consensus could be galvanized to meet current issues of security (Luck 2006: 52). The subsequent report, An Agenda for Peace, went beyond the original request of the Council to provide proposals that would ‘improve the capacity of the United Nations for preventive diplomacy, for peacemaking and for peacekeeping’ (Boutros-Ghali, quoted in Meisler 1995: 287). This, and the Supplement to An Agenda for Peace three years later, stressed the need for greater coordination and resources to engage in preventive diplomacy, as well as for post-conflict peace-building efforts to address the underlying causes of conflict (Boutros-Ghali 1995; Menkhaus 2004: 421).

Conflict prevention beyond the Cold War

Although the UN Charter clearly mandated the prevention of violent conflict, the focus until the end of the Cold War had been on inter-state conflict. Following this, and in response to a greater concern for the number of internal conflicts that were taking place, the Secretariat, in response to a request from the Security Council, began to develop a framework for dealing with intrastate conflict. Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace outlined this framework.

An Agenda for Peace represented what Carment and Schnabel (2003: 12) call an ‘attitudinal shift’ in conflict prevention. This was evident in the first visibly successful preventive operation in Macedonia, which commenced in the same year (1992). In addition, it posited that long-term peace efforts must extend beyond the security paradigm to address systemic inequalities such as poverty and human rights violations. In effect, it stimulated the coordination of agencies to ‘integrate conflict prevention strategies’ with the UN system, especially those dealing with development projects (Duggan 2004: 246–47). Although the Supplement to An Agenda for Peace placed greater emphasis on addressing the underlying causes of intra-state conflict, one conceptual limitation in addressing these causes was the tendency to associate peace building with post-conflict reconstruction, rather than preventive efforts prior to crises. By contrast, Evans contends that peace building is what stable prosperous nations do as a matter of course, and this is an essential ingredient in the long-term establishment of peaceful societies (Evans 1993: 40). Nevertheless, both An Agenda for Peace and the Supplement to An Agenda for Peace placed new emphasis on the need for the UN to address not only inter-state but also intra-state conflict, highlighting the UN’s responsibility to mitigate disputes as early as possible through preventive diplomacy, as well as addressing underlying causes.

Many of the themes in these two reports were developed further in Preventing Deadly Conflict, published by the Carnegie Commission (Hamburg and Vance 1997). The steps toward an institutional approach to conflict prevention were crystallized and extended, and this was to become a conceptual cornerstone of the UN’s approach to conflict prevention. In its report, the Commission presented three broad aims. The first was to mitigate the long-term risk of violent conflict through assisting states to foster ‘security, well-being and justice for their citizens’ (Hamburg and Vance 1997: 69), the protection of human rights and the promotion of fair and equitable economic circumstances. The second aim was to prevent disputes that had already started from escalating further; third was to prevent past conflicts from reigniting. This led to the repackaging of preventive activity into two main categories: structural prevention and operational prevention. Structural prevention refers to action that seeks to address the underlying causes of violent conflict (Hamburg and Vance 1997: xix). Also referred to in the report as peace building,³ such action is associated with creating equitable, social, economic, political and humanitarian circumstances within which a society can operate, without subjecting its citizens to mounting grievances, which increase the likelihood of conflict. Operational prevention refers to action that is taken to prevent an already tense situation from escalating into violent conflict. Known also as direct prevention, it involves such activities as fact finding, preventive diplomacy and preventive peace keeping.⁴

The Carnegie Commission’s report clarified and broadened the concept of prevention. The commission expanded it to include not only diplomacy, sanctions and preventive deployment, but also peace building, which had previously been associated largely with post-conflict reconstruction. This two-tiered approach to prevention set a precedent in that it framed prevention as addressing early warning signs of impending conflict and the perceived underlying causes – or risk factors – of conflict. If these ‘root causes’ were addressed through more equitable development and governance, then the possibility of conflict erupting would be greatly lessened. Such a concept of prevention, Lund (2002: 160) suggests, reaches out ‘to a wide range of policy sectors and organizations’. This was certainly the authors’ intention: upon establishing the new parameters of the term, the commission posited that ‘its approach to prevention was broad’ (Hamburg and Vance 1997: xix). The authors claimed there needed to be an ‘international commitment’ to this broad concept of prevention, as this was the only way to ensure a progressive approach to combating the vast range of factors that contributed, both over the short term and the long term, to the outbreak of violent and deadly conflict (Hamburg and Vance 1997: xvii). This articulation of prevention reflected in part what had already been initiated by the OSCE, which had been engaged in structural prevention (emphasizing the need to address the root causes of conflict) as early as 1992 (Miall et al. 1999: 116).

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan adopted this two-tiered approach to conflict prevention. In his report Prevention of Armed Conflict (2001), Annan called for the establishment of a ‘culture of prevention’ throughout the UN system. This amounted to the adoption of what he coined a ‘prevention lens’, or prevention mainstreaming, for any project by any agency engaged in activities that were in some way related to operational or structural prevention. The report set a precedent by combining what had been separate concerns of security and development. For UN agencies to adopt a prevention lens would mean, for example, that agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which had traditionally distanced themselves from the political affairs of nation-states, were now being called on to consider the implications that projects would have on the overall security of countries concerned (Annan 2001: 1).

Annan’s report contains 29 recommendations, targeting the UN’s main bodies as well as addressing the need for coordination between its departments, agencies and programmes, encouraging and often urging reform that would amount to greater coordination and capacity to engage in conflict prevention, both at the operational and structural levels. In legitimizing his call to adopt a ‘culture of prevention’, Annan evoked both Chapter II and Article 55 of the Charter, which respectively mandated the peaceful settlement of disputes and linked development with peace, stating that ‘when sustainable development addresses the root causes of conflict, it plays an important role in preventing conflict and promoting peace’ (Annan 2001: 18).

Two focal points for prevention within the UN system were identified: the DPA and the Interdepartmental Framework for Coordination (Framework Team). Annan urged member states to give the DPA greater capacity to identify early warning cases, and as overseer of all preventive activities in the system. Greater support was also urged for the UNDP in an effort to bring about more sustainable and equitable development, and to prevent more effectively the lack of human security contributing to conflict triggers, thus easing the ‘security’ mandate of the DPA (Annan 2001: 7). The Framework Team was established in 1994, and consists of ‘fourteen different departments, agencies, programmes and offices’, which meet monthly to ‘exchange information from their respected areas of competence and to assess the potential for armed conflict, complex emergencies or other circumstances that might provide a prima facie case for United Nations involvement’ (Annan 2001: 22). Coordinated efforts within the UN system presided over by the DPA and the Framework Team were essential to move towards a ‘culture of prevention’, as central to such a culture is the developing of ‘long-term and integrated strategies, combining a wide range of political, economic, social and other measures aimed at reducing or eradicating the underlying causes of conflict’ (Annan 2001: 18).

The culture of prevention that Annan envisaged involved a shift of emphasis in the large number of bodies, departments and agencies affected, and also required much greater coordination among these groups. With the overall aim of eradicating the root causes of conflict, the UN system required a consensus on causes and risk factors which could then in turn inform a wide range of projects (Annan 2001: 10). Without such broad coordination and consensus-building efforts, UN preventive efforts would remain ad hoc, and limited in their ability to succeed.

It was the ongoing lack of institutional coordination that highlighted Annan’s Progress Report on the Prevention of Armed Conflict (Annan 2006). Admitting that ‘an unacceptable gap remains between rhetoric and reality’ (Annan 2006: 4), Annan declared that the primary obstacle was the inability of the UN to provide leadership and coordination with regards to the many and complex initiatives that were already underway. This coordination ‘has fallen short of providing a coherent, over-arching strategy, both in the field, and at Headquarters’ (Annan 2006: 26), with the DPA remaining ‘significantly under-resourced’ and consequently ‘not always in a position to respond’; it ‘needs to be better equipped to do so’ (Annan 2006: 26). While Annan refers to a ‘newly strengthened Framework Team’, its ability to serve as a focal point for structural prevention continues to be hindered as ‘the United Nations system lacks a comprehensive repository for the knowledge gained in its diverse conflict prevention activities – its institutional memory in this field is fragmented and incomplete’ (Annan 2006: 27).

The 2006 report on the prevention of conflict indicated that there had been greater discussion of the concept of prevention, but little in the way of results. The report was also noted for its expansion of the concept to include ‘systemic prevention’, referring to actions and initiatives that aim to lessen the risk of conflict, such as reducing the illicit trade of weapons, confronting environmental degradation and regulating industries that are known to fuel conflict (Annan 2006: 1). There remain two major obstacles to effective prevention by the UN – early warning capacity and coordination of the variety of structural prevention projects that currently operate on an ad hoc basis. Another oversight is the lack of consideration of how states themselves carry out prevention, despite a repeated emphasis on their primary responsibility in this area (Annan 2006: 1, 5, 15). While Annan strongly promoted a ‘culture of prevention’ on the one hand, and stressed the primary responsibility of states on the other, there was no suggestion as to how these two ideas overlapped. Indeed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A review of prevention
• 2 Re-examining the root causes of mass atrocities
• 3 Understanding risk and resilience
• 4 Botswana: Managing scarcity and abundance
• 5 Zambia: Resilience through trial and error
• 6 Tanzania: Unity and diversity amidst poverty
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index