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USAID Workshop on
Conflict Prevention Management
>> USAID Home >> Conflict Prevention >> June 2000 Workshop
Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Jane Holl LuteExecutive Director,
Role of the America Military Power (RAMP), Association of the United States Army
June 6, 2000
Click here to hear audio clips from this speech.
The speaker opened by stating that she believed that she was addressing a frustrated audience - members of the development community attempting to assess how to delineate the role of the United States in preventing conflicts. There has been a continuing disagreement about the role of the US military in preventing conflict, and some have advocated complex doctrines about when the US should get involved. Instead, a simpler litmus test of American roles and interests would be more productive: to promote well-being for all people.
Religious persuasion, ethnicity, or other traits are not the determining factor in violent conflict. It may explain why groups have disagreements, but it does not explain the slide to violence. Instead, two variables are more valid indicators:
- governance--the relationship of leaders to the people they lead
- direction of leadership (This means that you can foresee the slide toward autocracy, for example, when leaders cancel elections, militaries take over domestic portfolios, capital flight (all early warning indicators.)
It is the motivation and persuasiveness of leaders that turn what would otherwise be riots into full-fledged violent conflicts; this makes conflict a problem of governance, not other traits such as ethnicity or religion, as has been argued by Samuel Huntington and Robert Kaplan.
Two variables make a certain group of people susceptible to conflict: deprivation and discrimination. These two characteristics, however, are merely inchoate feelings of frustration unless they are manipulated by leaders able to motivate the disaffected. Yet the leaders themselves can be manipulated as well. Because of increasing interdependence among states, all wars, including intrastate conflicts, have an international element. Pressure can therefore be brought to bear on leaders of conflicting groups. This ability and desire to apply pressure in crisis situations takes on more importance because civilians are adversely affected by conflict; more civilians are killed in conflict than combatants. For example in World War I, the ratio of combatants to civilians killed was nine to one, since the end of the Cold War, the ratio has been reversed.
Many developing countries are faced with the mounting burden of losing their ability to dominate their respective polities. Specifically, control of lethality (or armed force), capital, and rule-making processes are being transferred to private sector groups or organizations. This has brought government to the local level, but is also shunting the larger state government aside.
While the role of rule-making has been often taken over by private sector groups, it has also been internationalized as well, which has reduced the role of central governments. Governments have come to rely on each other in such supranational issues as global "housekeeping" and justice. Coupled with American dominance of this system, this signifies that US interests can be tied to peaceful resolution of these conflicts.
Two possible models for conflict are emerging: first, a 'Wild West' or 1920's Chicago model, in which combatants engage in violent conflict in order to secure power and to determine the system by which a state is ruled. Post-colonial states tend to go down this road, because colonizers usually fail to prepare the new state for self-governance, and a lack of a 'cleansing war' which settles the question of how a state is to be ruled. The second, and more favorable, model of conflict is a preventive model, which has three imperatives. First, it is important to prevent dangerous factions, coalescing around feelings of deprivation or discrimination, from initiating violent conflict. In order to do this, it is necessary to create 'capable' states - states that are relatively competent in responsible governance, promote pro-market policies, nurture a robust civil society, and encourage rule of law. Second, ongoing conflict must be prevented from spreading. Economic and military assistance to the state or neighboring states may be required. And third, preventing violent conflict from recurring is extremely important. One mechanism for achieving this goal is by creating space between parties in conflict to allow leaders to orient themselves away from conflict.
Obviously, a model of prevention is preferable to a model of conflict. Supporting this model, however, requires keeping in mind two premises: freedom from fear and want is best achieved under a free and democratic form of government; and that while outside aid may not be able to resolve conflict, it does provide the margin of victory in preventing conflict from occurring. An effective strategy for preventing conflict includes the following principles: creating policy in-depth, a presumption of transparency, and providing adequate resources for effectiveness.
Owing to the various complexities associated with foreign aid, a good concept to keep in mind is 'pragmatic prevention', which can be summarized as 'educate young women, employ young men'. U.S. policy has been accused of being unfocused, too stretched, too full of high expectations, and having policy inconsistencies. It also has to make policy choices, or 'triggers' - actual decisions about when to intervene and when not to. Hence, the US expended extensive resources to rescue an American pilot in Bosnia, while not intervening in Rwanda to prevent or stop genocide. When faced with triggers, the U.S. should keep in mind the ideas of pragmatic prevention and its interest in securing the welfare of others.
Transcription of audio clip: "This is a very difficult time to be in power, to be a government. Why? Because all governments, in my judgment, have lost the corner on the market in three key areas where they used to be not only the dominant actors but in many cases the exclusive actors. Governments have lost the corner on the market on the control of lethality, on the control of capital and on the ability to make the rules."
Transcription of audio clip: "The control of lethality, the control of capital and the control of the rule-making process. Governments have lost their ability to dominate these three areas. And where has that power gone? That power has not gone to inter-governmental organizations. No, it has not gone to Boutros-Ghali and his black helicopters alternating between Cairo and Paris and New York. Okay? No. It has gone into private sector hands. In many countries around the world private armies are more significant, not only as a military force, but as a political force and as an economic force. It's very interesting to note that most of the ways these rebel movements come to power is through a populist agenda, bringing goods and services to segments of the population that have been disenfranchised. And, oh, by the way, they're armed with an attitude."
Transcription of audio clip: "Governments have now come together not only to collaborate and cooperate, but to rely on each other in many, many areas where previously they thought they were the only game in town. So the burden of governance has become markedly internationalized as states have pursued sort of three -- progress in three broad areas, global security, global housekeeping and global justice. And within global justice we see the emergence of human rights and the value of the individual in a way that is sort of historically unprecedented in the world. And it's not a 50-year phenomenon, it may -- probably has 150 year roots, perhaps longer. But we are seeing the institutionalization of these realities through government-to-government cooperation, which to me is evidence of the internationalization of governments' burdens."
[This audio clip requires RealPlayerTM. The RealPlayer software is available for free download from RealNetwork at http://www.real.com/player/index.html.]
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