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Article Excerpt
Although the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty identified the responsibility to prevent as the single most important aspect of its report The Responsibility to Protect, most scholarly and political attention has been given to the concept's reaction component rather than to its prevention component. This article aims to correct this imbalance by examining progress with, changes to, and attitudes toward the responsibility to prevent since the publication of the commission's report in 2001. It seeks to explain the relative neglect of prevention in debates about The Responsibility to Protect, arguing 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. The article moves on to identify some basic principles that might help advance the responsibility to prevent. KEYWORDS: responsibility to protect, conflict prevention, UN, institutions, war.
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. (1) The responsibility to react has received significant political and scholarly attention and has dominated debates about the adoption of the responsibility-to-protect principle by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. (2) Likewise, the responsibility to rebuild has been accompanied by renewed interest in questions of justice after war (the so-called jus post bellum) and was institutionalized by the World Summit through the creation of the UN's Peace-building Commission. Despite being described as the "single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect," the responsibility to prevent to prevent has been relatively neglected. (3) In the World Summit's Outcome Document, the UN's commitment to conflict prevention was kept separate from its commitment to the Responsibility to Protect, and states committed only to help establish an "early warning" capability for the UN and to support the secretary-general's Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide. (4) The call of the ICISS for measures to centralize preventive efforts, tackle the root causes of conflict, and enhance direct prevention capabilities was overlooked in favor of this focus on early warning.
The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it examines progress with, changes to, and attitudes toward the responsibility to prevent since the release of The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2001. Second, it seeks to explain the relative neglect of the responsibility to prevent and the reluctance of even advocates of the R2P to lobby for reform in this area. Finally the article explores ways of developing the "responsibility to prevent" and making good on the vision set out by the ICISS.
Prevention in the Responsibility to Protect
It goes without saying that the prevention of deadly conflict is one of the fundamental goals of the UN. The preamble to the UN Charter commits the organization to "saving future generations" from the "scourge of war." In 1955, Dag Hammarskjold identified the prevention and solving of conflicts as the organization's most significant function. (5) Indeed, UN peacekeeping itself grew out of Hammarskjold's belief that the primary contribution that the world organization could make to international peace and security was in the prevention and resolution of conflict, and not in the enforcement of collective will as envisaged by the drafters of the Charter. The case for conflict prevention was strengthened in 1997 when the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict estimated that even a maximal commitment to direct and structural conflict prevention would cost less than half the price of intervention and subsequent rebuilding. (6) Nevertheless, the UN's conflict prevention function developed in an ad hoc fashion and was based mainly on the secretary-general's preventive diplomacy and crisis management and the proliferation of social, economic, cultural, and humanitarian organizations under the UN umbrella, none of which has been integrated into a system of conflict prevention. Prominent commentators have therefore commented that "in general at the UN, conflict prevention is preached more often than it is practiced." (7)
From 2000, partly in response to such criticisms, Kofi Annan's UN adopted a range of measures designed to institutionalize conflict prevention and enhance the UN's capacity. In 2000, the UN Development Programme announced its intention to focus on conflict prevention and set aside 20 percent of its Track 3 funding for preventive measures linked to peacebuilding. (8) In his 2001 report Prevention of Armed Conflict, Annan urged the UN Secretariat and member states to foster a "culture of conflict prevention." (9) In its follow-up to the report, the Security Council passed Resolution 1366 (30 August 2001), which affirmed the centrality of conflict prevention to the council's work, welcomed the creation of a central fund for the provision of conflict prevention training for UN staff, called for the development of regional conflict prevention capacity, and promised to "employ all appropriate means" to prevent violent conflict.
Meanwhile, a host of institutional mechanisms for preventing violent conflict was developed by regional organizations. These include the 1993 Mechanism for Conflict Prevention of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and a variety of measures put into effect by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in the Baltic, Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia. (10) The European Union (EU), in addition to being a conflict prevention mechanism in itself, deployed a series of Conflict Prevention Assessment Missions to assess at-risk countries such as Indonesia, Nepal, and Fiji and propose conflict prevention strategies. (11) Collectively, these measures coincided with a marked decline in the global incidence of violent conflict in the past two decades, but analysts contend that the decline is a product of assertive conflict resolving and peacekeeping on the part of the UN and regional organizations, not the successful prevention of new conflicts. (12)
It was this apparent gap--between rhetorical support for prevention and the level of tangible commitment to achieving it--that the ICISS attempted to address with its "responsibility to prevent." (13) Underlying the commission's recommendations was Annan's argument that the world needed to move from a "culture of reaction" to a "culture of prevention." (14) This challenge had already been taken up in part. In July 2001, the G8 set out its Rome Initiative on Conflict Prevention, focusing on measures dealing with small arms trade, conflict diamonds, child soldiers, the role of women in development, and the private sector. (15) At the same time, Britain set up two conflict prevention pools: the Global Conflict Prevention Pool and a pool dedicated to Africa. (16) These initiatives notwithstanding, the need to do better in relation to prevention was a constantly recurring theme of ICISS global consultations. (17) Reflecting long-standing views about the different types of prevention, the commission divided its recommendations into the areas of "early warning," tackling root causes, and "direct prevention." Ironically, given that early warning was the only element of the responsibility to prevent explicitly adopted by the General Assembly, the ICISS opened its discussion by noting that failings associated with early warning are often overstated and that the nub of the problem tends to lie not in predicting the outbreak of violent conflict but in generating the political will to act on these predictions. (18) As is now known only too well, mass killing in Bosnia, genocide in Rwanda, and the reign of terror in Darfur were all predicted before the event--the latter two by senior UN officials. However, the ICISS found that more accurate analysis of warning signs might identify earlier opportunities for constructive third-party engagement, and it is partly as a result of these possibilities that a number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the World Bank, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as ReliefWeb, have developed their own early warning mechanisms. The ICISS recommended that UN headquarters develop the capability to collate this information, including sensitive intelligence from member states. (19)
Given the sheer diversity of the potential root causes of violent conflict, it is not surprising that the commission's recommendations in this area were more opaque. In keeping with the overall tenor of its findings, the ICISS called for the Security Council to play a leading role and identified four key dimensions of root cause prevention: political (relating to good governance, human rights, and confidence building); economic (relating to poverty, inequality, and economic opportunity); legal (relating to the rule of law and accountability); and military (relating to disarmament, reintegration, and sectoral reform). (20) These four dimensions also shaped the commission's recommendations in relation to direct prevention. In this regard, the political dimension referred to the secretary-general's preventive diplomacy; the economic dimension referred to the use of positive and negative inducements; the legal dimension referred to a range of measures from mediation to legal sanctions; and the military dimension--considered the most limited in scope--referred to preventive deployments. (21) To actualize this agenda, the ICISS called for the creation of a pool...
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