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Global Policy Forum - UN Secretary General Preventing Conflict In The Next Century
By UN Secretary General Kofi Annan
The World in 2000
In the past 20 years we have understood the need for military intervention where governments grossly violate human rights and the international order. In the next 20 years we must learn how to prevent conflicts as well as how to intervene in them. Even the costliest policy of prevention is far cheaper, in lives and in resources, than the least expensive intervention.
This is why we have been pressing the international community to take prevention more seriously. In cost-benefit terms the case for doing this is compelling. A recent study by the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict estimated that the cost to the international community of the seven major wars in the 1990s, not including Kosovo and East Timor, was $199 billion. Add in these two conflicts and $230 billion seems a likely figure.
Effective prevention could have saved most of this huge sum. More important, it could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Time and again, differences are allowed to develop into disputes and disputes allowed to develop into deadly conflicts. Time and again, warning signs are ignored and pleas for help overlooked. Only after the deaths and the destruction do we intervene at a far higher human and material cost, by which time there are fewer lives left to save. Only when it is too late, it seems, do we value prevention.
There are, in my view, three main reasons for the failure of prevention when prevention so clearly is possible. First, the reluctance of one or more of the parties to a conflict to accept external intervention of any kind. Second, the lack of political will at the highest levels of the international community. Third, a lack of integrated conflict-prevention strategies within the un system and the international community. Of all these, the will to act is the most important. Without the political will to act when action is needed, no amount of improved co-ordination or early warning will translate awareness into action.
The founders of the un drew up its charter with a sober view of human nature. They had witnessed the ability of humanity to wage a war of unparalleled brutality and unprecedented cruelty. They had witnessed, above all, the failure of prevention, when prevention was, throughout the 1930s, still possible and every signal pointed to war.
Of course, as realists we must also recognise that in some cases the sheer intractability of conflicts and the obduracy of the warring parties will make intervention unlikely to succeed. But even wars that cannot be stopped once started might well have been avoided with effective preventive policies.
We are under no illusion that preventive strategies will be easy to implement. For a start, the costs of prevention have to be paid in the present, while its benefits lie in the distant future. And the benefits are not tangible - when prevention succeeds, nothing happens. Taking such a political risk when there are few obvious rewards requires conviction and considerable vision. Second, there are real institutional barriers to the institutional co-operation that prevention requires. In national governments and international agencies, departments responsible for security tend to know little about development or governance; those responsible for the latter rarely think of them in security terms. Identifying such constraints is not a counsel of despair. It is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for progress.
The un has long argued that good governance, democratisation, respect for human rights and policies for equitable and sustainable development are the best form of long-term conflict prevention. The changing patterns of global conflict and governance in recent years, particularly with respect to democratisation, provide ample evidence to support our conviction.
More votes, less war
During the 1990s there has been a remarkable and little-noticed reduction in global warfare. More old wars have ended than new ones begun. Between 1989 and 1992 on average eight new ethnic wars began each year; today the average is two a year. Between 1992 and 1998 the scope and intensity of armed conflict around the world declined by about a third. The number of democratically elected governments increased by about the same proportion.
We cannot leap to the conclusion that the increase in the number of democracies has caused the decrease in warfare. Other factors, such as the end of the cold war, surely also played a role (although the two are obviously related). But the evidence is in line with the well-established, if little publicised, finding that democracies have far lower levels of internal violence than non-democracies. This is not really surprising. The non-violent management of conflict is the very essence of democracy. In an era when more than 90% of wars take place within, not between, states, the import of this finding for conflict prevention should be obvious.
Prevention is no panacea. It requires that governments act in good faith and place the welfare of citizens above narrow sectional interests. But we know that some conflict-prone governments see prevention policies, particularly those which stress democratisation and good governance, as a threat to their own power and privilege. For that reason, they are likely to reject them. The fact that prevention will not work everywhere is an argument against naive optimism, but not against actively supporting democratisation, good governance and other preventive policies. These are not only important goods in their own right. They are also among the most potent and cost-effective antidotes to the scourge of war.
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