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Early Warning and Early Response, by Susanne Schmeidl and Howard Adelman (eds.)
Howard Adelman
York University
A lot of effort worldwide is underway to create a system of knowledge and programmatic action based on a concept that may be vague and totally ambiguous — namely “early warning”. What is humanitarian early warning about? What benefit does it bring, and how is early warning to be accomplished? We can refer to the long association between early warning and traditional intelligence services which were expected to deliver warnings to their political masters in sufficient time for the political leadership of a state to undertake preemptive action to prevent, deter or, at the very least, mitigate the effects of threatened violent action against one’s own state. In the last two decades, early warning has been associated with humanitarian actions rather than protecting against threats to one’s country’s security. I do not propose to rehearse the development of the concept as it started in humanitarian efforts to anticipate food shortages to enable supplies to be put in place to prevent famine, or the extension of the term to anticipating refugee flows in order to have food and medical supplies as well as tents and water in position to mitigate the suffering of the refugees who generally flee with minimal supplies, and its more latter extension to conflict management to prevent the circumstances which give rise to refugee flows in the first place. Instead, I propose to subject the definition adopted by FEWER, the Forum for Early Warning and Early Response, to a critical examination to unpack its meaning.
Introduction
In The Gorgias, Socrates asks Gorgias what he professes and teaches. What does the power of his art consist in? The question is relevant to the issue of early warning. For a lot of effort worldwide is underway to create a system of knowledge and programmatic action based on a concept that may be vague and totally ambiguous — namely “early warning”. 1 What is humanitarian early warning about? What benefit does it bring, and how is early warning to be accomplished?
We can refer to the long association between early warning and traditional intelligence services which were expected to deliver warnings to their political masters in sufficient time for the political leadership of a state to undertake preemptive action to prevent, deter or, at the very least, mitigate the effects of threatened violent action against one’s own state. The key questions about early warning concerned why the early warnings were not available when the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbour or when the Israelis were caught unawares when Egypt attacked in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The presence or absence of an early warning needed discussion. There was a need for an explanation for that presence or absence, but there did not seem to be a need to define the meaning of ‘early warning’.
In the last two decades, early warning has been associated with humanitarian actions rather than protecting against threats to one’s country’s security. I do not propose to rehearse the development of the concept as it started in humanitarian efforts to anticipate food shortages to enable supplies to be put in place to prevent famine, or the extension of the term to anticipating refugee flows in order to have food and medical supplies as well as tents and water in position to mitigate the suffering of the refugees who generally flee with minimal supplies, and its more latter extension to conflict management to prevent the circumstances which give rise to refugee flows in the first place. Instead, I propose to subject the definition adopted by FEWER, the Forum for Early Warning and Early Response, to a critical examination to unpack its meaning.
Definition
In the FEWER definition, Early Warning is defined as “the communication of information on a crisis area, analysis of that information, and development of potential strategic responses to respond to the crisis in a timely manner.” The term being defined uses the words “early” and “warning”, but the definition refers only vaguely to the timeliness of the information and analysis, and the translation of that analysis into strategic action plans. Presumably, the assumption built into the definition is that the information and analysis, along with the strategic options, will be on time to do something to mitigate or even prevent the crisis. But it could refer to the timing such that the information, analysis and strategic scenarios are developed when people are prepared to listen to them. The timeliness is not then related to the crisis itself as much as the readiness of those who might respond to the crisis to act.
Further, the definition says nothing about a warning. It is not a definition that states when an alarm bell should be set off or who is to set it off or that an alarm need be set off at all. After all, intelligence gathering and analysis and the development of strategic options are undertaken by many academics all the time concerning areas of complex emergencies in the world without anyone assuming the necessity of alerting or warning anyone that a crisis is immanent.
Perhaps we are making too much out of a scrap of words. So let us go back to basics. Why and who wants to know anything about a crisis, and how should that knowledge be obtained? Heraclitus in one of the fragments (B123) extant from his writings said, “Nature loves to hide itself.” Does a crisis hide itself, or is the immanence of the crisis so loud and clear and well pronounced that only a fool could ignore the immanence of the disaster? As one policy analysis said to me, the issue is not knowing that a conflict is about to break out into open violence, but the willingness to do anything about it. The problem is not in the hiddenness out there, but in the desire of those who can do anything to stay unnoticed and hidden.
But the area of the crisis and of those who can respond need not be considered mutually exclusive realms. After all, it is unlikely that a crisis in one area is disconnected from the politics and policies of those who are in a position to respond and mitigate the crisis. I do not, therefore regard early warning simply as the revelation of the character of the objective political cosmos ‘over there’. Rather the quest for defining ‘early warning’ is an exercise in understanding how what is happening over there comes to be known by us ‘over here’. It is not about bringing the sensible knowledge of events to our attention so much as understanding how we attend to those events. The exercise is as much if not more concerned with the minds and spirits of those to whom the knowledge of events is being communicated as it is about the events and actions themselves.
The reason for this is simple. In contrast to early warning related to intelligence analyses focused on threats to the security of our countries, we have little motive to engage in humanitarian early warning. With respect to humanitarian crises and complex emergencies, humanitarian early warning, whatever it is, is not concerned with threats to our security. As the FEWER document spells it out: “early warning is not concerned with a direct threat to the gatherer or analyser of the information or those contemplating a response. Rather, it is concerned with protection of, or the provision of emergency aid to, a population within a territory in which there is an inability or an unwillingness to provide protection by the state with jurisdiction over the territory, either because the state itself or its agents are the victimizers, or because of the breakdown in the state itself. Inherently, early warning is motivated by universal humanitarian rather than national interests, and is focused on issues concerned with inter-ethnic violence, gross human rights violations or genocide.”
Quite a mouthful! Put more simply, humanitarian early warning is about human disasters. Since these events have little to do with what Hobbes called “the foresight of (our) own preservation” (Leviathan, Ch. XII), if the knowledge will do nothing to get ourselves out of the “miserable condition of Warre,” but may rather involve risking the lives of the members of our own commonwealth in such wars through the allocation of peace forces, we have little motivation to attend to these crises. Unless, of course, they can be demonstrated to concern our own security.
If humanitarian early warning is not about preparations for security threats, it is about preparation and responses to humanitarian crises. As noted in the FEWER proposals, Sekerez (1996) stated that, “The UN needs to establish an early-warning system which would require intelligence and planning capacities and which would alert the Security Council for appropriate action and similarly, try to avert it from taking wrong steps.” In addition to preparation, early warning can alert us as to which types of responses are required, those akin to traditional security threats as in Chapter VII of the UN operations, those akin to Chapter VI UN operations related to UN peacekeeping purposes, or the obscure area between Chapter VI and Chapter VII and the ambiguous normative foundations for responses that are said to reside between traditional UN peacekeeping under Chapter VI and enforcement action under Chapter VII (Urquart 1995, p. 3). Finally, early warning is critical to the effectiveness of the response itself, for advanced intelligence can facilitate compromise and the move towards peace between the parties to the conflict since, “it is only when actors are ill-informed about each other’s capabilities or unable to anticipate each other’s beliefs that secession or outside intervention may occur” (Cetiyan 1996).
In other words, early warning is relevant for determining whether anything needs to be done, what needs to be done, whether the response required is one appropriate to a threat to security or one appropriate to a humanitarian need (or somewhere in between), and the effectiveness of what is done.
My concern, however, has less to do with the utility functions of early warning in translating warnings into action, than the more basic question of why we want humanitarian early warnings. This second concern with the motivation for early warning has more to do with how we come to know than what we know, for it is not readily evident that we have any significant motivation to know what is happening at all. Why should we care whether the Azeris of Azerbaijan are preparing to counter-attack and recapture the enclave of Nagorno–Karabakh and the other portions of Azerbaijan “liberated” by the Armenians? Is it our concern for the 400,000 Armenians displaced by the war from Azerbaijan and relocated in the Armenian controlled pocket and its surroundings? Or is it because of our humanitarian concern for the 700,000 Azeris and Kurds who were displaced by the war and now live in miserable conditions of squalor? If the latter, why do the Americans have a policy prohibiting international relief agencies from proffering aid and ameliorating the unimaginable squalor of the displaced persons camps in Azerbaijan? 2
And this is but one crisis among dozens around the globe. Few have much to do with “foresight into our own preservation.” So why should we give a damn? We need a theory of humanitarian early warning that deals with why we need to know and how we come to know as much if not more than what we need to know. In the literal sense of theory in Greek, we need to link theoreion (the place for seeing) with theorema, the sight itself.
Towards a Theory of Early Warning
Why do we want to know something about the place for seeing and how do we obtain the sight? These are the prior questions to the utility functions of early warning discussed above. In answering that question, my focus will be on the evidently easier task of preparing for emergency responses rather than the more difficult task of conflict management.
One of the most striking things about Gerard Prunier’s book, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (Columbia University Press, 1995) was his revelations about the ‘why’ question. Why did the French want to launch Operation Turquoise? They were afraid of an Anglo–Saxon intervention to stop the genocide from South Africa. (P. 281) It was not humanitarianism, but competitiveness and the desire to preserve French honour and influence. They were not motivated by knowledge of the genocide, for in their intervention planning the instigators revealed that they had little knowledge, even of where the war was centred at the time, and what the likely local and worldwide public reaction would be to their intervention. It was as if France had never left the mind set of Louis XIV when the king said:
| To be King is to be the summit of superiority and the elevation of rank is all the more assured when it is supported by unique merit. The great interval which virtue puts between [other men] and him [the king], exposes him in the most beautiful light and with utmost glitter in the eyes of the whole world. All eyes are attached to him alone...everything else crawls, everything else is impotent and sterile. 3 |
The motive for intervention in the Rwandese humanitarian crisis was, for France (according to Prunier) not the welfare of the other but competitive display (exaggerated in Louis XIV’s case by his propensity to add to self aggrandizement and honour the humiliation of the other so that the other was reduced to a crawling nonentity.) Glory to the elites of France in the twentieth century was the watered down version of glory to the Sun King just over two centuries earlier. One either radiated glory or suffered humiliating shame. Self-infatuation was the primary motive of France, not concern with the other.
I do not write or say this to put down France, but to tease out a basic motive for intervention. In the more down-to-earth English phrasing of Thomas Hobbes, “men are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity.” (Leviathan, part 2, ch. 17) Is this inconsistent with humanitarianism? From the latter perspective, the objective world, not pride in oneself, motivates action. The world is one in which individuals are oppressed and violence is the order of the day. The suffering of humanity under such a situation contradicts the law of the heart and the compassion which Rousseau recognized to lie in the heart of most humans.
But there is an apparent contradiction. For the least acquaintance with these situations of violence reveal humans engaged in heartless actions of murder and mayhem. If all or most humans are motivated from compassion with the suffering of their fellows, why is it that these situations which give rise to compassion seem to exemplify the very opposite of compassion — ruthlessness, hard-heartedness, as if those humans engaged in such atrocities were governed by an external demonic force that had taken possession of them.
The contradiction is only apparent. For it is the very cold-bloodiness of the events that are said to arouse the spirit of humanitarianism as those who have faith in compassion undertake to extirpate from the world actions which stand in such contradiction to the law of a heart governed by compassion. In this version, compassionate action is governed, not by pride and a sense of self-aggrandizement, but by “the earnestness of high purpose which seeks its pleasure in displaying the excellence of its own nature, and in promoting the welfare of mankind.” 4
But if it is not pride and self-aggrandizement, it is the display of the excellence of its own nature. And is this not but a different content given to that pride, but pride nevertheless? No. For there is a difference. As in the most exaggerated version of Louis XIV, pride is concerned only with the self, and it is easily connected to the debasement of others. The law of the heart takes pleasure in itself only to the degree that the same law is reflected in all others, in the pleasure of all hearts.
But then why is the primary concern of compassion not with those who give of themselves in love for others? Why is the focus on situations which display a cruel alienation from any sense of compassion? Because it is only in confronting such situations that compassion can demonstrate its superiority to cruelty as a force for change. Cruelty is not necessary, but contingent. It can be defeated. To do so requires surrendering oneself, in the ideal, to the power of compassion as a universal force for good. Exercising compassion is, thereby, the very opposite to pride and self-aggrandizement.
Or so it appears. For though there may be agreement over why we act as humanitarians, there is little agreement over which acts are indeed expressions of that compassion. My heartful action is not yours. Further, what you do is at odds with what my heart dictates. If my intentions are excellent, yours must be detestable for they stand in the way of the realization of my virtue and the relief of the other’s suffering. But compassion is supposed to demonstrate the unity of humans, not the differences and pride in each persons vision of expressing that compassion. Compassion when it is translated into action seems to display as much pride and competitiveness as that exemplified by self-love. Certainly this appeared to be the underlying critique of Volume III of the study on the Emergency Response to Rwanda.
Thus, the demand for coherence and coordination among humanitarian agencies and the insistence on “a single body to set priorities, to raise and distribute resources, and to co-ordinate emergency inputs.” 5 But this a perversion of the law of the heart which each humanitarian agency then opposes. For setting up an overriding institutional system for delivering humanitarian assistance is regarded as a perversion of the essence of compassion and humanitarianism which is said to reside in the heart of each of us and is to be the direct motive for action rather than some bureaucratic rational decision structure. The purveyors of international control and coherence now become the villains, attempting to deform the very essence of compassion. “The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction...It therefore speaks of the universal order as a perversion of the law of the heart and of its happiness, a perversion invented by fanatical priests, gluttonous despots and their minions who compensate themselves for their own degradation by degrading and oppressing others, a perversion which has led to the nameless misery of deluded mankind.” 6
The humanitarian agencies and NGOs may not go to such extremes in name calling, but the message is the same. The international career coordinators are the cause of suffering rather than the instruments for its relief. If they are not quite fanatical priests of the new world order and gluttonous despots, they are at the very least depicted as self-serving bureaucrats. One almost prefers the honesty of the more colourful language. But as long as each humanitarian organization and individual within each organization claims validity for its and his/her own interpretation of which humanitarian intervention is the most appropriate, then self-righteousness will confront any attempt to express the inner law of the heart by means of an external set of rules and an institutional governing system for humanitarian operations.
But then the law of the heart suggests that it is neither a law, since each individual knows in his own heart what a situation demands, nor an action motivated by compassion, since what we have is a “war of all against all”, but one fought in the name of compassion rather than self preservation. What seems to be a principle uniting all humans is, in fact, a cover up, or the universal rule that the public order is indeed a state of war of each against every other. The only distinguishing characteristic of compassionate driven action is that it hides even from itself the true source of its motivation.
In other words, if the motive for engaging in traditional covert intelligence, and the early warning that was expected to follow from such work, was fear for our own safety and pride, and the motive for engaging in humanitarian early warning, and the information, analyses, and scenario creations as a prerequisite thereto, is compassion for the other and pride, the common motive in both cases is pride, the concern with how what we do reflects on who we are and how we appear to others in the world. This does not deny a utility function to humanitarian early warning, but only to insist that motivation is a prior issue to the theoretical understanding of early warning.
How Related to Why
In the spectrum of secret to transparent, early warning information and analysis tends towards the transparency pole in contrast to traditional intelligence analysis which is usually seen to be a matter of very tight secrecy. Recently, I visited the Department of Defence in Ottawa to discuss the early warning plans of FEWER, particularly in reference to West Africa. We were ushered into a space entered through two vault doors. In the glass enclosed security room, the security services shared with me — or rather, gave me a glimpse — of the work they had done in Zaire in collating the variety of information on the movement of refugees in Zaire and translating that information into maps for use by the planned Canadian peacekeeping mission into Zaire. It was hard to see why such information was confidential or secret since nothing in it seemed to relate to security threats against Canadians, yet the pattern of intelligence demanded that I could not obtain copies and that access to the information would have to be “cleared”. In contrast, I e-mailed back our own early warning analyses of refugee movements which had been put on the internet as had all the UN IRIN information on the Great Lakes crisis.
Secrecy is a prerequisite when the motive for early warning is to offset threats to one’s own security. But secrecy seems to have little function in humanitarian early warning, except in those cases where there are possible threats to humanitarian and international personnel in the field. That is why humanitarian early warning has so actively and readily jumped on the use of the internet. EWNET uses the internet to coordinate the information on different crisis areas, on the development of early warning knowledge, and on who is doing what. The internet is the critical tool for covering the various crisis areas and for sharing such information such as that available on IRIN on the Great Lakes Region of Africa.
The various nets (including RefugeeNet) allow researchers in crisis areas, field workers working with NGOs and INGOs, and policy advisers dealing with that crisis, to share information. Though the custom is to allow a broad list to access information, inputs are controlled, and analysis is usually not available to a wide public. But if the ostensible raison d’etre of early warning of man-made crises that result in extensive human suffering is the desire to be better prepared to alleviate such crises when they occur, or better yet, to prevent them from happening in the first place — that is the utility functions of early warning — how do such preparations relate to the motive of pride which frequently undercuts the ability to perform coordinated humanitarian operations?
The internet systems are merely mechanisms for establishing connections. The question of how is answered by noting the way in which ‘what’ is connected to ‘whom’. The easier part, at least theoretically, is to define the types of information needed, the sources, and the means for collecting it. Though there may be some practical difficulties in devising ways to gather and collate vital information in crisis areas, there is no theoretical problem in determining what data is needed. In traditional intelligence work, where the concern is one’s own security and the threat by the other to that security, the emphasis has understandably been on this area because the key information was not readily available, 7 even though numerous studies of intelligence failures have concluded that the real difficulty was not in knowing something was about to happen, but in communicating that information and analysis to key decision makers. 8 However, in humanitarian early warning, precisely because the motivation to respond is relatively low in comparison to security threats, and, further, because it is so much more difficult to develop and coordinate an appropriate response, much more importance must be placed on developing the analysis of the information and communicating that analysis to key decision makers.
In fact, one of the most important aspects of humanitarian early warning is developing the optional responses which might be effective in responding to the crisis. The collection of information can be seen as an educational tool over a long period to convince decision makers that the intelligence analysts know what they are talking about so that policy makers, who are asked today to reallocate scarce resources away from current crises to develop preventive capacity-building, develop the assurance that there is a body of accumulated knowledge about both the crisis area and proven preventive tools that could be effective in dealing with the crisis.
In other words, the major point of early warning information gathering and analysis is not the information and analysis in itself of the crisis area, but the use of that information and analysis to gain the trust of the decision makers and to provide them with effective options. The main issue for humanitarian early warning is not to detect what is going on in a crisis area, though country or region-specific analyses are critical, but to communicate effectively to the decision makers and equip them to enable them to convince others and make decisions.
This means that knowledge of one crisis area is insufficient. The early warning system must have a comparative capacity. From studies of various humanitarian crises, the advantages and disadvantages of a range of individual policy tools useful for prevention must have been distilled based on policy-relevant retrospective studies of the results of preventive responses to crises and their successes and failures. Finally, and what is most difficult, the key information and analysis must focus on the comparative capacities of different agencies and the decision-makers in them and their capacity for undertaking various optional preventive responses. In other words, early warning is more about the responders than about the crises areas, though the analyses of the crisis areas is critical.
An effective early warning system devises appropriate responses. Without an adequate Early Warning system that provides good analysis, proposed responses can be unrealistic due to the lack of any detailed understanding of the issue. Such responses bring humanitarian interventions of any kind into disrepute and undermine all international actions except those based on narrow nation-state interests. Undertaking the latter type of analysis requires a knowledge of the range of means that can address various sources of a crisis, such as ethnic conflicts, gross human rights repression, civil wars, and genocide, and which means are likely to be most effective in given settings. It also requires connecting that knowledge to functioning organizational entities where analysts can assess the applicability of alternative response options to specific situations so that decision-makers can wield their influence and authority to activate preventive measures.
Traditional intelligence was a pre-condition of early warning so that decision makers could make use of the power they had to prevent, deter or mitigate crises. But humanitarian early warning is much more concerned with wielding influence and developing authentic authority in an area than the utilization of power. Hence, different emphases and different tools have to be developed to create an early warning capacity. But like traditional intelligence analyses and early warning, a key ingredient that must be considered is PRIDE. On the one hand, a potential intervenor must be inspired with a sense of pride and responsibility for a leadership role in attending to a humanitarian crisis. On the other hand, that sense of pride must be held in check lest the self-satisfaction in the glory of one’s superior knowledge cast such a blazing light that cohorts are blinded, and influence cannot be used to involve partners in what is essentially a humanitarian task.
Early warning is as much about appealing to pride, while keeping that pride in check, as it is about crisis area information and analysis, and creating scenarios for action.
Endotes
Note 1: As the proposal that we wrote for FEWER states, the G–7 meeting of leaders in Halifax in June of 1995 called for exploring the means to improve the analysis and utilization of disaster and conflict-related early warning information, noting that the issue was not the collection of more information, but the enhancement of the analytical capacity and the process of making that analysis available to decision makers. This G–7 meeting merely echoed the many calls within the UN and outside calling for the creation of a workable early warning system to assist decision makers. Boutros Boutros Ghali in An Agenda for Peace stated that: “Preventative diplomacy needs early warning based on information-gathering and informal or formal fact-finding” (New York, UN 1992, p.13) General Assembly Resolution 46/182 called for: “the systematic pooling, analysis and dissemination of early-warning information.” The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), in the third chapter of their Helsinki decisions, set out the need: “...to have early warning of situations within the OSCE area which have the potential to develop into crises, including armed conflicts” (in A. Bloed (ed) The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe: Analysis and Basic Documents, 1972–1993, Dodrecht, 1993). One recommendation of our (Howard Adelman and Astri Suhrke) Report on Early Warning and Conflict Management in Rwanda as part of the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda was the “Development of an Integrated Humanitarian Early Warning System” (Synthesis Report; Eriksson 1996, p.57). Back.
Note 2: David Rieff, “Case Study in Ethnic Strife,” Foreign Affairs, 76:2, March–April, 1997, p. 129. Back.
Note 3: Oeuvres de Louis XIV, Paris: Treutel and Wurtz, 1806, 2: 67–8, requoted from Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, Prologue. Back.
Note 4: G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, 221. Back.
Note 5: Thomas G. Weiss and Amir Pasic, “Reinventing UNHCR: Enterprising Humanitarians in the Former Yugoslavia, 1991–1995,” Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and Humanitarian Organizations, 3:1, Jan.–April 1997, p. 42. Back.
Note 6: G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, 226 Back.
Note 7: For example, in the Cuban missile crisis, the deployment of the missiles were marked “top secret” (Cf. Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 84, nt. 122.) All messages about the deployment were sent by hand. Only very late in the implementation phase, were the top brass of the military informed. It was only because the Soviets failed to use the camouflage first invented in World War I for such purposes and mask the construction work in Cuba that the air photos of the Americans were able to spot the construction of SAM missile sites as well as the missiles hidden under canvas. Back.
Note 8: As Lebow and Stein (1994, p. 306) state, the key problem was not detecting the threat, but misunderstanding it in both the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and the Yom Kippur war in 1973. Back.
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