Preventing Deadly Conflict

Final Report With Executive Summary

Carnegie Corporation of New York

1997

Preface

It has been our privilege to lead a unique effort over the past three years, one that has been rooted in the spirit of Andrew Carnegie's quest for peace in the early part of the twentieth century. Carnegie, an authentic pioneer in both industry and philanthropy, searched for and sought to establish conditions and institutions conducive to durable peace. For this purpose he created four foundations, three peace palaces, and made many proposals for arbitration of international disputes, courts of various kinds—including the World Court—and an international police force. He provided ideas, buildings, and money for social action to overcome the perennial scourge of war. It was in this spirit that the Board of Trustees of Carnegie Corporation of New York created the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict in 1994.

The Commission—16 international leaders and scholars with long experience and path-breaking accomplishments in conflict prevention and conflict resolution—deliberately sought a worldwide, long-term view and faced many fundamental issues of human conflict in all their complexity. The Commission sponsored research by leading scholars and policymakers and is disseminating the products of this work in a series of reports, background papers, and books. This final report will be disseminated throughout the world as a stimulus to preventive policies and actions at the highest levels of governments and international organizations.

We have worked closely as cochairs with Executive Director Jane Holl and her dedicated staff, who managed an enormous number of projects and meetings. The Commission also has a distinguished international Advisory Council of 42 eminent practitioners and scholars who have contributed their thoughtful advice. Altogether, the contributions of Commissioners, staff, and advisors have been immense, and we will continue to draw on these resources in the two years of follow-up to the Commission's work.

It is particularly interesting and relevant that many Commissioners have tried to help resolve very bitter conflicts, often at a late stage. We challenged ourselves in this enterprise to ask what might have been done at an early stage to avert mass violence and achieve a just outcome. These are very hard problems. If it were otherwise, prevention would have gained ascendancy long ago.

Prevention is based on long-range foresight, anticipation, and action. In this effort, the Commission used the best available knowledge to discern the major risk factors that increase the likelihood of mass violence. We then examined what steps might be taken to counteract or avoid the risk factors, especially through changes in the behavior of leaders and their constituencies. We focused attention on the pivotal institutions that can shape and support constructive behavior while avoiding the risk factors and dangerous directions. Thus, in seeking to prevent the deadly conflicts leading to mass violence, we explored ways in which governments, intergovernmental organizations, and the institutions of civil society could help to build favorable conditions in which different human groups can learn to live together amicably. The application of such prevention concepts in the public health sphere is familiar, for example, in the provision of immunizations through the combined efforts of institutions of scientific research, health care, and education. We have found a similar view of the prevention process useful in this arena of international conflict. The Commission had a vision of a worldwide system of conflict prevention.

Peace and equitable development will require not only effective institutions, but also greater understanding and respect for differences within and across national boundaries. We humans do not have the luxury any longer of indulging our prejudices and ethnocentrism. They are anachronisms of our ancient past. The worldwide historical record is full of hateful and destructive behavior based on religious, racial, political, ideological, and other distinctions—holy wars of one sort or another. Will such behavior in the next century be expressed with weapons of mass destruction? If we cannot learn to accommodate each other respectfully in the twenty-first century, we could destroy each other at such a rate that humanity will have little to cherish.

The human species has a virtuoso capacity for making harsh distinctions between groups and for justifying violence on whatever scale the technology of the time permits. It is disturbing that fanatical behavior has a way of recurring dangerously across time and locations. Such behavior is old, but what is historically new and very threatening is the destructive power of our weaponry and its ongoing worldwide proliferation. Also new is the technology that permits rapid, vivid, widely broadcast justification for violence. This combination is what will make the world of the next century so dangerous. In such a world, human conflict is a subject that deserves the most careful and searching inquiry. It is a subject par excellence for fresh thinking and public understanding.

All these considerations are made more complex by the rapid and drastic world transformation in which we are living as the twentieth century draws to a close. The power of technological advance and global economic integration to change social conditions is a critical issue for the conflict agenda. The economic and social changes fostered by global technological developments in information and telecommunication—combined with parallel developments in research and development on space, energy, materials, and biotechnology—are likely to be profound and pervasive.

Historically, technological advances have resulted in social and economic transformations on a vast scale. This is especially likely when fundamental new technologies are unfolding across the entire frontier of scientific and engineering research and are rapidly disseminated throughout the world. The impact over the long term has been positive. Along the way, there have been massive dislocations. In this context, it is worth recalling the severe disruptions of the industrial revolution; they had much to do with the emergence of Communism and fascism, especially the Nazi catastrophe.

The contemporary world transformation, with all its intense pressures and unforeseen consequences, tends to pull people toward strongly supportive groups. These groups, in turn, particularly with charismatic, inflammatory leadership, may easily become harsh, separatist, and depreciatory toward others. A deadly combination of severe social stress and distinctively hateful, fanatical leadership can produce mass killing, even genocide. Such conditions occur again and again. The seductive justifications for hideous atrocities can be provided to fill in the murderous blanks, as they were by Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Indeed, they can be spread more efficiently and vividly than ever before by advanced telecommunications. Such intergroup tensions may readily be exacerbated by deteriorating economic conditions, erosion of social norms, or mass migration. Hateful attitudes may be directed either toward outsiders or minorities in one's own country—or both.

Now there are great new worldwide opportunities and profound stresses that will affect human development in ways hard to foresee. Surely there is no basis for complacency. The frustrations and uncertainties in a complex, rapidly changing world can trigger scapegoating of highly visible groups—e.g., minorities, immigrants, or government officials—who then become targets of irrational, hateful, or extremist responses. These challenges have serious implications for societies throughout the world. It is crucial to seek factual and analytical bases for policies and practices that could help us to cope with such problems and take advantage of the immense, emerging opportunities in an equitable way.

In view of these momentous developments, the recent rash of "internal" wars and genocides, and the wide scope of our mandate, the Commission has developed a comprehensive approach to preventing deadly conflict. In our view, prevention consists not only of avoiding escalation in a crisis, but also of creating a durable basis for peaceful alternatives. In the long run, we can be most successful in preventing ethnic, religious, and international wars by going beyond ways to avert immediate confrontation between hostile groups to promote democracy, market economies, and the creation of civil institutions that protect human rights. Effective preventive strategies rest on three orientations: early responses to signs of trouble; a comprehensive, forward-looking approach to counteract the risk factors that trigger violent conflict; and an extended effort to resolve the underlying causes of violence. All of these are considered in the Commission's work.

The recommendations of this report are addressed to leaders and governments as well as many elements of the international community, among them the democracies, the United Nations, regional organizations, the business community, the global scientific community, educational and religious institutions, the media, and nongovernmental organizations. Only with the active participation of all these groups can we move toward the vision of an international system for preventing deadly conflict. What we seek is a way of thinking that becomes pervasive in many institutions and in public understanding.

As we examined the relevant institutions, we found them all to be modest in preventive achievements and not strongly oriented to this great mission. Indeed, several have at times done more harm than good in cultivating hatred and inciting violence. Yet the people of the world cannot let that record stand. The stakes are simply becoming too high, the dangers in the next century too great. So we have sought ways to strengthen each actor for prevention, to find good examples (even if rare), and to identify the best practices through which their potential could be fulfilled.

Clearly, the world was unprepared for the genocidal slaughters of Bosnia and Rwanda. After the unparalleled horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, and the unprecedented risks of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, it was reasonable to assume (wishfully) that mass killing would go away by the close of the century. Policymakers of good will and human decency were confounded and often paralyzed by the rush of murderous events in the 1990s. Deep perplexity led to hesitation. The Commission recognizes the dilemma of policymakers and seeks ways to facilitate their tasks in the future. It is not in the interests of nations, large or small, to neglect the emergence of genocide. Such events are not merely unfortunate, in the distant past, or far away. They have immediate, powerful ramifications for all of humanity.

We have come to the conclusion that the prevention of deadly conflict is, over the long term, too hard—intellectually, technically, and politically—to be the responsibility of any single institution or government, no matter how powerful. Strengths must be pooled, burdens shared, and labor divided among actors. This is a practical necessity. We have tried to clarify the tasks and strategies, the tools available, and the opportunities for various actors: who can do what to make a truly civilized world.

In the course of our work, we have considered very hard problems from many perspectives, trying to put old issues in the radically new context of the twenty-first century. These issues span geopolitics, cultural (and even civilizational) differences, terrorism, historic problems of aggression, the behavior of strong powers and the perspective of small countries, special responsibilities of the democracies, the unfulfilled potential of the powerful media and business communities, the shared vulnerability of all humanity, the risks of preventive efforts and the costs of failing to prevent violence, the ubiquitous significance of leadership, individual and group rights, paths to equitable development, and the necessity to build a worldwide culture of prevention that will shape decent human relations at every level.

To be sure, we could not possibly cover all the topics of importance for the great problems addressed in this report. Some of these topics are considered in greater depth in the Commission's collateral publications. We emphasize the significance of these publications, prepared by world leaders and distinguished scholars. They are listed in appendix 4. Others are noted in our extensive references, identifying excellent resource material on a wide range of relevant subjects. Moreover, in the international meetings to be sponsored by the Commission and Carnegie Corporation in the years ahead, we hope to stimulate better ideas by moving this subject higher on the world's agenda.

Given the complexity and sensitivity of the issues addressed in the wide span of the Commission's work, it is inevitable that we encountered differences of opinion. We brought many fields, nations, and kinds of experiences to the endeavor. To a remarkable extent, these differences were reconciled in the course of our work—partly by a relentless effort to get the facts straight, partly by a premium on objective analysis, partly by an open-minded desire to learn from each other and from the world's experience, and partly by a respectful attitude toward the importance and difficulty of our task.

Still, not every Commissioner has equal enthusiasm for every finding and recommendation stated in this report. Certain topics were treated more lightly or more heavily than some would have wished. Yet the convergence has indeed been powerful; the differences are overwhelmed by our fundamental agreement. Indeed, there is a sense in which we were all guided by a commitment to our shared humanity in the face of almost infinite human diversity. It is the future of our shared humanity that impels us to undertake this difficult mission.

To diminish the likelihood of violence, it is important to identify elements of government, social structure, institutions, leadership, and public attitudes that can be used to enhance orientations of caring, concern, social responsibility, and mutual aid within and between groups. Such ends are facilitated by crosscutting relations that bring members of different groups together under favorable conditions on a regular basis, whether within or across national boundaries. It is important that groups develop positive reciprocity in their relationships, that there be perceived elements of mutual benefit from their interaction. Our various reports delineate ways in which such improvements can occur.

For better or worse, this Commission is distinctive in several ways. Its approach to prevention was broad, encompassing political, economic, military, social, and psychological considerations. It used a public health model, with emphasis on primary prevention; its wide-ranging delineation of strategies and tactics of prevention included operational prevention dealing with incipient crises as well as structural prevention dealing with long-term, underlying factors conducive to peace and equitable development (linking security, well-being, and justice). It emphasized the potential of institutions of civil society for these missions—in addition to governments and intergovernmental organizations. It took a long-term and worldwide view of emerging problems and unprecedented opportunities.

People of humane and democratic inclination will need sustained cooperation throughout the world to build systems that will work. Useful models exist, ideas are emerging, analysis is proceeding, and the current turmoil could provide a constructive stimulus for practical arrangements that help us learn to live together at last.

As our children and their children learn about the horrifying mass violence through the ages—at its worst in the twentieth century—we hope to be able to say that at the beginning of the third millennium, the communities of the world planted seeds of cooperation and reconciliation that grew into a system in which mass violence became diminishingly rare. Perhaps this Commission can envision, however dimly, such a precious legacy for future generations.

David A. Hamburg
Cyrus R. Vance
Cochairs