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Key Text Preventing Deadly Conflict

Author: William Zartman
Date: 2001
Size: 19 pages (2.3 MB)

Summary

How can deadly conflict be prevented? This article from Security Dialogue examines the choice of decisions taken in escalating deadly conflict in Lebanon, Liberia, Somalia, Zaire, Haiti and Yugoslavia. It analyses the characteristics of alternative policies to begin the process of creating a new polity out of conflict, the incentives and disincentives required for such policies and the reasons for their rejection at the time. Opportunities tend to constitute a period of time in the life of the conflict when preventive diplomacy is possible, after which entry becomes much more difficult.

In major cases of deadly conflict in the last decade and before, specific actions identified and discussed at the time could have been taken that would have gone a long way towards preventing the costly catastrophes that eventually occurred. These actions were not exceptional measures in foreign relations. They were all moves that had been made elsewhere at other times or even were to be made in the same conflict but belatedly and incompletely. The agent that might have been able to implement these preventive measures varies, as does the reason why no action was taken, which ranges from loss of nerve to preoccupation with other crises elsewhere. As a result, lives were sacrificed and money lost, new and worse situations were created, reconciliation and reconstruction became ever more difficult. In many cases, following the conflict, the situation became a major problem for international actors who had not deemed it worthy of their interest beforehand.

Under the assumption that parties in a conflict need help to get out of it, the emphasis is on third-party diplomacy based primarily on negotiation, not on military involvement. Preventive diplomacy cannot guarantee to halt the process of conflict and collapse but could have seriously increased the chances of that arrest.

There were a number of missed opportunities and these interventions were no different in nature from other similar actions taken by the same actors.
More than half of the interventions proposed were the earlier execution of actions ultimately carried out later, the pursuit of decisions already made but not carried to fruition or the implementation of decisions taken at a lower level but vetoed by a higher authority.
The two principal strategies – early retirement and replacement of the egregious ruler and an international conference to refill the political vacuum – constitute standard, conceivable measures by external intervenors.
These strategies do not need a particular signal to be implemented but can simply be a response to a gradually worsening situation.

Success of preventive diplomacy interventions depends largely on factors such as the provision of positive and negative trade-offs and the ability to hold the parties’ attention to the completion of the reconstruction agreement.

Constructive interventions cannot be viewed as of value in and of themselves. The negative forces need to be bought off or threatened out.
The United States has a unique position in regard to preventive diplomacy but other external powers and regional groups of states also have a role to play, operating under the legitimising authority of a regional organisation or the UN.
Private agencies and NGOs can also have a role where a non-state facilitator is needed in the negotiations and where training is needed to raise politicians and diplomats to the level of their challenges.
The clustering of many of the propitious moments for an active policy in the cases studied indicates that missed opportunities may prevent entry into a whole phase of a conflict.

NB: The argument of this article is more fully developed, with detailed cases, in the author's 2005 book Cowardly Lions: Missed Opportunities to Prevent Deadly Conflict and State Collapse, (Lynne Rienner).

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Source: Zartman, W., 2001, 'Preventing Deadly Conflict', Security Dialogue, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 137-154
Author: I. William Zartman , zartman[at]jhu.edu