Document Library

Conflict Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect

Author: Alex Bellamy
Date: 2008
Size: 19 pages

Access full text: available online

Summary

Why has conflict prevention been neglected in the ongoing debates over global security? This article from Global Governance examines attitudes toward the international community’s responsibility to prevent conflict since the publication in 2001 of the report The Responsibility to Protect.  In explaining the relative neglect of prevention in debates about The Responsibility to Protect, it argues that the answer can be found in a combination of doubts about how wide the definition of prevention should be, political concerns raised by the use of prevention in the war on terrorism, and practical concerns about the appropriate institutional locus for responsibility.

According to the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), the Responsibility to Protect concept comprises three responsibilities relating to deadly conflict and other human-made catastrophes: to prevent, to react, and to rebuild.  The responsibility to react has received significant political and scholarly attention and has dominated debates about the adoption of the responsibility-to-protect principle in 2005. Likewise, the responsibility to rebuild has been accompanied by renewed interest in questions of justice after war and was institutionalised through the creation of the UN's Peacebuilding Commission.

Despite being described as the "single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect", the responsibility to prevent has been relatively neglected.  In the 2005 World Summit's Outcome Document, in place of a "culture of prevention", the High-Level Panel put forth nine discrete proposals, not all of which were overtly connected to conflict prevention. The call of the ICISS for measures to centralise preventive efforts, tackle the root causes of conflict, and enhance direct prevention capabilities was overlooked in favour of a focus on early warning.

Given that the Panel replaced the innovation of the responsibility to prevent with calls for the UN to continue work to which it was already committed, it is not surprising that the preventive element received much less attention than the other aspects. At least three factors have contributed to the relative neglect of the responsibility to prevent:

• Inherent difficulty in translating a commitment to prevention into coherent policy: genuine conflict prevention entails a bewildering range of policies and potentially vast political and economic commitment
• The impact of the place of prevention on the war on terrorism: the prevention of terrorism and WMD proliferation have been prioritised
• The question of authority and agency: beyond the host state having primary responsibility, it is not clear where the responsibility to act lies

These challenges cannot be entirely overcome, but their long-term effects may be alleviated by measures designed to give weight to the responsibility to prevent. These could include: (a) granting individual states specific responsibilities related to the pursuit of their own foreign policy; and (b) locating a specific and carefully delimited range of prevention measures within an institutional setting. Although there is a long path to a global consensus on prevention, these two initiatives might enable the formation of coalitions of like-minded states. Some principles for operationalising the responsibility to protect are:

• Do no harm: governments should scrutinise their foreign, defence, environment, and trade policies and change behaviours that might contribute to the root causes or to the direct triggers of violent conflict
• Institutional focus: obtain agreement on how likely major crises are to be identified, what measures are necessary to prevent them, and whose responsibility this is.

Access full text: available online

Source: Bellamy, A., 2008, 'Conflict Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect', Global Governance, no. 2 (April-June), pp. 135-156
Author: Alexander Bellamy , a.bellamy[at]uq.edu.au