BEFORE Governing Board Member Provides Input for USIP Special Report

This fall the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) released a special report, Preventing Violent Conflict: Assessing Progress, Meeting Challenges. In the report Lawrence Woocher, USIP Senior Program Officer, examines conflict prevention as an international norm and the level of political commitment to conflict prevention by world powers. As an expert in conflict prevention BEFORE Governing Board Member Dr. Michael Lund had many conversations with Woocher and provided input on the content for this special report.

While much international attention is focused on reactive approaches to conflict – rebuilding and resolving – prevention does not receive the same level of importance within the international community. The report urges international actors to make prevention a “must do” priority and make a greater effort to respond to warning signs as a way to preempt the eruption of deadly violence. Other key points of the special report include:

• New wars will continue to erupt unabated if greater and smarter efforts are not made to prevent them. Preventing relapse after wars end is insufficient to prevent most new conflicts since post-conflict recurrences constitute only a minority of all conflict outbreaks.
• A wide range of governments, including the United States, and many inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations have made commitments to make serious efforts to prevent violent conflicts that represent a more than adequate normative foundation and supportive political environment for more robust and effective conflict prevention.
• Expanded conflict prevention capacities will not necessarily require new offices or institutions, just focused attention, resources, and a process to spur action in response to warning signs.
• The knowledge required to prioritize and target prevention strategies is fairly well developed. More knowledge is needed however on using conflict prevention tools as a part of empirically grounded strategies.
• Advancing the conflict prevention agenda will require navigating a series of challenges, including the rapidly changing contexts and a set of difficult political and institutional factors that militate against vigorous preventive action.
• The first step toward meeting these challenges is to make prevention a “must do” priority on equal par with resolving active conflicts and rebuilding post-conflict states. Other steps include monitoring existing conflict prevention commitments and developing new political strategies to regularize the practice of prevention.

Learn more about how BEFORE faces the challenge of global conflict prevention based on the work of Dr. Lund’s and other prevention experts here, and take action today to be a part of the prevention solution.