Prepare for a failure to prevent: comments are very welcome

[Barrs, Casey]

That’s right Alan:  conflict prevention efforts might not only fail to prevent conflict—they might on some occasions foster it.  As Michael Lund and his IPPP team ask in Preventing Political Violence: Towards a Model for Catalytic Action, p.6:  “What if the intervention backfires and makes things worse?  What if the intervention triggers renewed violence?  What if nothing happens?”  Arguably, no peacebuilding or conflict prevention effort is ethically complete without contingencies for its failure, right? 

In the course of trying to prevent conflict there can be unintended consequences at the macro and micro levels.  On the national and societal scale, there is a counterintuitive but clear correlation between rising expectations and the incidence of violence.  Any heightened exposure to and awareness of abuses or inequities brought about by conflict prevention efforts could be the prelude to needed reform—or the precipitator of popular anger.  Any efforts to raise international awareness could stir dormant local aspirations through contact with global civil society—while creating the illusion of a safety net through donor pronouncements of “commitment”.  The phenomenon of rising expectations also has its dark corollary in which some groups increasingly expect and fear they will lose out to the changes afoot—and preemptively lash out.  Some suggest that in the worst cases such as Rwanda, Kosovo, and East Timor, our efforts to prevent conflict or urge a certain balance of power might actually have raised fears and expectations that helped trigger the violence.  I’m not a historian or regional expert so cannot really judge the accuracy of that.

There certainly can be micro-level consequences.  My organization, The Cuny Center, was originally founded in 1987 as Intertect by the remarkable aid worker, Fred Cuny.  It was renamed for him after he disappeared in Chechnya in 1995.  One of the most searing experiences of his life came after an earthquake in Guatemala.  Rather than go in and rebuild housing, he created a master carpenter program premised on community mobilization and the widespread training of trainers.  It spread throughout the affected areas in 1976—and then, the Guatemalan military began methodically murdering the master carpenters.  They were killed not because they were builders but because they had become respected community organizers.

If locals in positions as seemingly innocuous as carpentry can be seen as a threat, then certainly those we groom for more overtly activist roles in civil society can be seen as a bigger threat to some.  The very reasons we praise them are the same reasons why others persecute them.  We foster active, self-aware, and independent civil societies.  Self-awareness and activism is responsible for some of the best changes in society and governance imaginable.  And yet, it can trigger some of the worst reprisals imaginable too.

Without a doubt, the support we lend local organizers emboldens them.  And in two very concrete ways this can endanger them.  It may elevate them at the very time death lists of organizers are being drawn up.  And it can cause them and their communities to delay preparations for their own survival which they might otherwise have pursued had they not felt protected by our presence and imprimatur.  Interestingly, some who form international partnerships claim the relationship has this inherent protective aspect.  It is seen as a sort of distant accompaniment which lets potential abusers know that outsiders care.  Too often this becomes another example of rising, but invalid, expectations.  The deterrent limelight can fail to deter, and we have done little to help physically prepare our protégé-partners for the consequences.  The foreign-backed civil societies of Haiti, El Salvador, and many other places have at times been decimated.

Do we fold our tents and go home?

I argue that Plan A is work to prevent conflict and Plan B is prepare to survive it.  I have posed the point with this discussion group before but think I run into a couple basic challenges.  First, Plan B is premised on the possible failure of your Plan A.  Second, supporting the capacity of civilians to survive conflict seems to be the responsibility and the bailiwick of others working in other silos.  Third, bracing for failure might seem counterintuitive—even counterproductive—to the effort of preventing it.     

The first and second points are related:  prevention efforts can indeed fail (the record amply shows) and that makes we who have become bound up in the fates of people far away responsible for any events we might have helped cause or any false sense of security we might have created.  This is not an argument for giving up prevention efforts; rather, it is a call for giving more thought to contingency plans.

The third point is a natural assumption.  Bracing for danger while working to prevent it sounds like a contradictory stance or message.  There are a couple replies to that.  Off in the silo of humanitarian aid there is the fledgling discipline of disaster risk reduction.  Service providers help communities plan for and live with recurrent deadly threats like typhoons, flooding, and earthquakes.  As part of their mitigation planning civilians assess community vulnerability; draw up hazard maps; monitor risks; enhance local early warning through clear command and control; conduct simulation exercises and evacuation drills; identify secure shelter at safe secondary sites; train in first aid and psycho-social care; identify blood types; learn search and rescue procedures; cache supplies; assemble packs for flight; and more.  All of these can also save lives in the advent of violence.

Of course man-made crisis can be much more sensitive.  But bear in mind that your distant colleagues off in the field of service delivery often have comparative advantages in supporting locals’ capacity to survive and even serve others amid violence.  They (local and international aid service providers together) form a huge potential bulwark for preparedness in the remote and unstable areas in which they work.  Generally speaking, they are the most apt have the best access, contacts and most trust on the ground; the best situational awareness and cultural nuance.  They are more apt to have the most appropriate skill sets (especially considering that most deaths during conflict stem from the loss of life-critical sustenance and services).  They are the most apt to have a defensible reason for being in conflicted areas, and perhaps relative autonomy of action. 

That is to say, if you want to be part of a Plan B backing up your plan A, you would need to communicate and work in an interdisciplinary fashion with people in the humanitarian service delivery silo.

If you are still concerned that bracing for conflict is counterproductive or even self-defeating to the goal of preventing conflict, consider what some preparedness measures look like.  Well-grounded service providers might:

 

• Arrange “go & see” visits to, or “come & tell” survivor testimonials from, adjacent areas of conflict.  Tangible and trusted verification is a key to persuasion, and persuasion is a key to local early response.  If we fear facilitating the flow of information we should consider the role of misinformation in fanning conflict.  Rumors can cause people to react in counterproductive or deadly ways.  Moreover, people caught between fighting factions are often fed news both false and inflammatory.  It aims to tempt or incite them to fight. 

      But, as local warning networks in Sri Lanka have shown, local leaders who are armed with facts and proofs may be able to discredit belligerent fear and hate propaganda.  They may be able to dampen the ardor of youth about the real nature of war and warriors with evidence.  These being their own youth, they may be very motivated to scale up information and communication efforts.  La Guardia Indígena in Columbia helps community members, especially the young, resist pressures to join the conflict.

      So too, with better situational awareness (and evacuation readiness) civilians may feel less threatened—thus less prone to preemptively lash out.  Belligerents are the needy ones:  they need civilians to react in certain ways—to be sympathetic, frightened, provoked—or they become marginalized.  This is a form of conflict management down where people live, work and sleep.  People may underestimate or overestimate risk; both states of mind can be dangerous.  Either way, messages about their vulnerability (or not) can be hard-linked to messages about their capacity so they feel neither panicked nor complacent. 

• Relocate slow-moving elderly and infirm to the provisional capitol.  Moving granny away for a while won’t trigger a conflict.
• Reduce instances of children grouping in times and places at which armed groups are known to forcibly recruit them.  Reducing opportunities for conscription won’t likely trigger violence—while in contrast, rich opportunities for abduction do indeed feed it. 
• Women discuss locations and situations to avoid.  They reduce nonessential movement and plan travel groups of optimal size, formation, and composition (including escorts) when they must move.  Women’s microenterprise mobile telephony doubles as communications net for safety purposes.etc. 
• Families discuss and memorize possible flight routes and regrouping points (sequenced rally points in event of intended or unintended separation).  Families the world over who make the same plans knowing full well that another typhoon, flood, or earthquake will come don’t live in a paramilitarized state of fear; they actually go on living their lives, albeit more vigilantly.
• Families preemptively begin to strip some assets.  Steps to protect and/or convert family possessions may include documenting, caching, dispersing, diversifying, dismantling, liquidating, and redeeming assets.  All of these steps can be phased in slowly as needed and then reversed after conflict has passed.  Worried that these steps might be construed as the political or military agenda of one faction or another?  Make the best effort to cast these preparations as a “crime avoidance” campaign that publicly stresses criminality rather than conflict.  Political and criminal violence are very often indistinguishable.  This creates an opportunity to say that the safety measures are in response to thieves and thugs (rather than a political or military entity) which might be deemed less provocative.
• Families begin to preemptively transfer assets either to responders or repositories.  Affinity groups usually serve as “first responders” amid crises.  Moving assets to this support network has multiple benefits.  First, it protects family wealth.  Second, it removes resources that actually invite attack and harm.  Third, it keeps that wealth out of the hands of criminals and belligerents, giving less encouragement and strength to their asset stripping; less fuel for the fire—a form of conflict mitigation that we pay very little attention to.  Fourth, it puts those resources into the hands of trusted first responders, strengthening that network.  This is vital because such nets often become exhausted, thus requiring displaced persons to make dangerous secondary and tertiary flights 
• Safeguard remittance flows.  Remittances exceed all private flows of investment and official development assistance and are countercyclical in that diasporas give more at the very moment when aid agencies, donors, and investors—and we in conflict prevention—withdraw due to imminent crisis.  But families can plan for the conflict-induced constraints on communication and movement that typically disrupt remittance flow.  Take steps to identify fallback cash transfer agents, set up alternative courier systems, agree on default remittance destinations, etc
• Families and communities cache vital supplies along possible lines of flight.
• Local service providers who are being harassed or obstructed by belligerents from provided aid make plans to downgrade their identity, downsize their infrastructure, disperse their workers, supplies, and beneficiaries, and delegate their work.

Upon flight:

• Grab pre-packed “go kits”.  These may include portable currency (real or in barter), nonperishable food, first aid items, adequate clothing, and sheeting for shelter.
• Evacuate along pre-planned flight routes.  Although previously inspected and judged to be safe, scouts must always report ahead from along route and regrouping points.  Use safe movement best practices.
• Alarm to, and coordination with, help (mediators? government troops? peacekeepers?) outside the locality.
• While in transit, respond to any threats with rehearsed evasive steps.  The precedent we have set by teaching landmine awareness to civilians barely scratches the surface.  There are countless other best practices for threat response, many of which we already teach to expatriates—but not to locals.

Such preparedness support can be framed as community risk reduction aimed at helping women, children, and families through emergencies.  Controlling powers may be more likely to see this as concern for vulnerable groups—the traditional rubric of aid work.  Working under the gun is a difficult thing.  The Cuny Center has written about some of the precedents and pedagogies by which service providers and their local counterparts and communities have navigated the risks. 

To my colleagues working so hard on conflict prevention:  I would be the first to agree that such measures as these are not your area of expertise—but stick to my claim that they seem to be part of your responsibility.  Why not consider and talk this over with practitioners in other professions with protective missions.  The point not be lost in any wrangle over tactics is that this is basically a question of ethics, no?

 

As Alan says, reducing the (sometimes inevitable) risk to people seems like a vital issue for a USIP conference on prevention, and USIP has indeed taken up the question before. 

 

Regards,

Casey

 

Mr. Casey A. Barrs

Protection Research Fellow

The Cuny Center

 

-----Original Message-----
From: preventin...@googlegroups.com [mailto:preventin...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Alan J. Kuperman
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2011 1:17 AM
To: Conflict Prevention
Subject: Re: Save the Date: USIP Conference on Preventing Violent Conflict, June 1

 

Casey raises a great point.  And not only do prevention efforts sometimes fail to prevent, sometimes they backfire by escalating violence against noncombatants.  Reducing this risk seems like a vital issue for a USIP conference on prevention.  I'd be happy to present the lessons of my last 15 years of research, as I did this month at a U.S. Naval Academy conference on the ethics of intervention, and as I summarized in this article: blogs.shu.edu/diplomacy/files/archives/Kuperman%20-%20Rethinking%20the%20Responsibility%20to%20Protect.pdf.  A USIP conference would be an especially apt venue for such a talk

because USIP funded my research as a graduate student in the 1990s.

 

best regards,

 

Alan J. Kuperman, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

LBJ School of Public Affairs

University of Texas at Austin

www.utexas.edu/lbj/faculty/alan-kuperman/

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On Apr 21, 1:00 pm, "Barrs, Casey" <cba...@mt.gov> wrote:

> Thanks for this Jonas.

>

> This is a great cast of presenters for the subject of preventing conflict.  Sometimes the good work of ambassadors and under secretaries inspires in at-risk populations a hope that may turn out to be misplaced.  That's not a criticism, just a comment on the nature of a very difficult endeavor.  Will any of your presenters therefore speak to the ways that locals might also be supported in carefully preparing for a failure to prevent conflict?

>

> Casey

>

> Mr. Casey A. Barrs

> Protection Research Fellow

> The Cuny Center