Governing Board Member Testifies at Congressional Hearing
On May 7th Dr. Michael S. Lund, BEFORE Governing Board Member, Senior Associate for Conflict and Peacebuilding, MSI Inc, and Consulting Program Manager, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Dr. Lisa Schirch, Director of 3-D Security Initiative and Professor of Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University, testified before the United States House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities.
At the hearing, Dr. Lund and Dr. Schirch made the following three mail points:
- The most effective way to address terrorism and insurgencies is to prevent them from emerging in the first place.
- Preventing state failure and conflicts is more cost effective than having to intervene in internal wars once they have started.
- Prevention actions to strengthen fragile states and to avert conflicts are not only more cost-effective. They have been tried and have succeeded under certain conditions — from which a number of lessons have been learned.
They then recommended that to head off future potential conflicts, the U.S. programs and analytical and decision-making tools be brought together and applied more consistently and robustly — where and when threats are emerging — through coherent USG and multilateral strategies, and suggested that Congress can do this by improving the US Government’s preventive capacity through:
- Support US inter-agency collaboration
- Mandate country-specific fragile state and conflict assessment and planning
- Create budget flexibility to shift resource to early-stage, pro-active programs for security assurance and “conflict-sensitive” development
- Build support for local capacities for prevention
Read, hear, or watch the full and complete testimony of Dr. Lund and Dr. Schirch here:
Testimony Text
Testimony Webcast
Testimony Audio
