Fwd: Recasting the Warning-Response Problem

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Patrick Meier

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Dec 10, 2010, 1:57:44 AM12/10/10
to preventing-conflict
FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Meyer, Christoph <christo...@kcl.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 1:39 PM
Subject: Recasting the Warning-Response Problem
To: "patric...@tufts.edu" <Patric...@tufts.edu>


Dear Patrick,

 

We thought you might find our recently published article on the Warning-Response Problem useful given your long-standing work in this area:

 

Re-casting the Warning-Response-Problem: Persuasion and Preventive Policy  (International Studies Review (2010), Vol. 12, No 4, pp. 556-578)

 

The paper takes stock of the debate about the so-called warning-response-gap regarding armed conflict within states. It argues that while the existing literature has focused strongly on “better prediction”, it has neglected the analysis of the conditions under which warnings are being noticed, accepted, prioritized and responded to by policy-makers. This has led to a simplistic understanding of how communicative, cognitive and political processes involving a range of actors can influence both the perception as well as the response to warnings. The paper also criticizes that many normative judgments about the desirability of preventive action are suffering from hindsight bias and insufficient attention to balancing problems related to risk substitution, opportunity costs and moral hazard. In response to these deficits, the paper puts forward a modified model of warning as a persuasive process. It can help us to ascertain under what circumstances warning succeed in overcoming cognitive and political barriers to preventive action and to help establishing benchmarks for assessing success and failure from a normative perspective.

 

We wish you a good Christmas Break.

 

Christoph Meyer, Chiara de Franco, John Brante, and Florian Otto

 

 

 

 

***************************

Dr Christoph O Meyer

Senior Lecturer in European Studies

Dept of War Studies

King's College London

Strand, London

WC2R 2LS

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7848 1031

Email: christo...@kcl.ac.uk

Web: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/people/academic/lecturers/meyer/

Homepage: http://dr.christoph.meyer.googlepages.com/

FORESIGHT project: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/foresight


Meyer et al Re-Casting Warning-Response ISR FIN.pdf

Barrs, Casey

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Dec 21, 2010, 12:44:57 PM12/21/10
to preventin...@googlegroups.com, pat...@irevolution.net, Evan Hoffman, christo...@kcl.ac.uk, Lawrence Woocher

December 11, 2010

Hi Patrick,

 

Thanks for passing this great piece, Recasting the Warning-Response Problem: Persuasion and Preventive Policy, along to us.  I know many people, including Lawrence Woocher, will likely agree with the authors’ contention that the oft-heard phrase “lack of political will” is too easy.  It almost takes us off the hook from trying to conceive of an early warning process that gives at least as much attention to the subterranean aspects of persuasion as to a self-evident (seemingly) factual and moral case.

 

It is not their discussion about persuasion (which I thought was fantastically nuanced), but their assumption about prevention that I wanted to respond to.  Early warning has become rather conflated with conflict prevention, no?  Warning can of course be wired to the deployment of troops or to the stockpiling of emergency relief.  But the first seldom happens and the second aims to ameliorate damage done—not avoid it to begin with.  No, somewhere along the way, early warning got into a fairly monogamous relationship with conflict prevention.  I prefer David Nyheim’s assertion that conflict early warning was conceived as a means of protecting and preserving life. [i]  That might sound unobjectionably banal—but the insight is that it does not immediately or exclusively tie early warning to conflict prevention.  There are, in addition to conflict prevention, other complementary and concurrent paths to “protecting and preserving life”.  Such as local preparedness for violence...  Back to that in a minute; first a couple thoughts about the performance of early warning and its nexus with conflict prevention.

 

Many renowned architects and practitioners of conflict prevention have themselves said that, even when capably supported by early warning, its track record has been mediocre.  Since this is not my field I leave it to them to make the judgment.  Their concern about “limited results” applies both to expatriate and indigenous efforts.  (I could use the taxonomy of 1st through 4th generation systems, but will skip it here.)  I am most interested in indigenous efforts at local early warning, so will say a few words about that.  I have read and very much agree with a number of pieces written by Susan Schmeidl and Anna Matveeva.  Inasmuch as they bind early warning to conflict-prevention-conducted-by-civil-society, I think the cautionary conclusions that they have drawn are right.

 

Anna states (I added italics) that, “The ultimate goal of early warning is not to predict conflicts, but rather to prevent them or to facilitate their prevention by others.” [ii]  To that end, Susan cites “some activities that have been identified as suitable for civil society actors”, like fact gathering, peace dialogue, problem-solving, monitoring, advocacy, lobbying, mediation/negotiation, and capacity building in conflict resolution mechanisms. [iii]  With these two widely-held beliefs, early warning is immediately wed to conflict prevention and civil society.  The dye is cast.

 

Certainly there often are segments—those we tend to be most acquainted with—in civil society that possess these capacities.  They try to engage and influence actors and shape events toward peaceful outcomes.  We see (actively look for) and support these locally led efforts at preventing conflict, though our counterparts on the ground do often face challenge and danger.  As Susan notes, “capacities and resources influence one’s approach to early warning, with civil society and grassroots actors being best advised to only take on ‘the tasks it can shoulder’”. [iv]  Anna shares this caveat and further warns that, “For early warning practice the question is ‘who does the early response?’”  This is indeed the question.  The answer reveals how wide or narrow a net we have cast.  Anna continues, “At a practical level, facilitation, negotiation and mediation skills are not sufficiently developed in civil society organizations.” [v]  She finds that, “The capacity of civil society to act appears to be a generic problem.  Civil society in theory has more capacity to respond to events quickly in comparison to the UN, since it is more flexible and is prepared to take on more risks.  In reality, this does not happen often enough.  Time and again organisations confront the fact that that local partners are not trained in early response and are not sure what to do when situations start to deteriorate” [vi]

 

I apologize to both authors for perhaps not framing their findings properly, and also for the fact that I have not read all their good work, so might be missing other or more current points that they have made.  If I understand the thrust of their analysis, (1) the aim of early warning is to serve conflict prevention, (2) conflict prevention on the ground is undertaken by civil society, and (3) civil society, despite the comparative advantages that it might often have over external interveners, can still lack capacity and be overpowered by events.  If one operates under the first two assumptions, then it is easy to agree with the third.  And that means locally led warning-response hits a very hard wall.

 

Perhaps that is why the authors, Christoph Meyer, et. al, of Recasting the Warning-Response Problem, give local capacity for warning-response such little attention?  After noting the work of the Conflict Early Warning and Response Mechanism (CEWARN) and the Foundation for Coexistence (FCE), the authors state that:

 

The underlying rationale of these more recent approaches is to circumvent the problem of being dependent on the political will of an external actor. By involving those who have a stake in preventing the conflict, it is assumed that the warning-response gap is much narrower compared to cases where a third party is the addressee of the warning. Whereas regionalized or localized systems with an integrated response mechanism may provide a solution to the warning-response problem in some conditions, the problem remains that the involvement of external actors might be warranted in other situations. What happens if a conflict escalates to the extent that local players are overwhelmed… or blocked for political reasons? [vii]  (italics added)

 

Although the authors have on one hand “recast the warning-response problem” in a very helpful way, they have on the other hand cast it in an old mold:  warning-wired-to-prevention.  To twist a familiar adage, if your preferred tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.  We often try to help locals deal with escalating tensions—but through our own preferred statist, jurist, and institutional approachesWe hone our mandates for civil-legal engagement, hoping to foster accommodation between protagonists in conflict settings.  We stress convening and negotiation skill sets framed within normative mindsets.  All of these efforts are vital, and locals are often in the forefront of them.  One might call this the more political remit of a civil society sector.  And it is indeed often overwhelmed.

 

But other powerful forms of capacity exist too.  Locals respond to threats of conflict in many additional ways.  Family and village-level efforts to deal with violence occur on a lower canopy, localized and informal, far below official domains where governments and civil society engage each other.  They might have little to do with civic processes between citizens and duty-bearers redressing grievances within the rule of law.  Instead, they occur between unequal parties, often with the weaker trying to calculate which concessions are the least harmful.  And beyond these informal efforts at accommodation lies a vast realm of strategies and tactics to help them avoid violence and the deadly repercussions of it.  This refers to measures—the Cuny Center has documented several hundred of them—for physical safety as well as attaining life-critical sustenance and services.  Early warning is equally vital to these measures.  Civilians’ aim in getting their social units and economic assets out of harm’s way is, very much what Nyheim says the basic aim of early warning is: to protect and preserve life.

 

In every conflict, civilians learn strategies and structures for survival.  This is raw capacity; the often-advantageous positioning, knowledge, credibility and motivation of family and community decision-makers.  It goes very much to the insight of Alexander Austin.  He claimed that, “There are two ways to address the gap between early warning and early response.”  One is to build warning systems “back to front”, to “directly engage... the capacity of the decision makers.”  The other is to build them “as a satellite” around “actual response initiatives” [viii]  Although Austin was not referring to the unconventional survival initiatives of a populace, his point is quite accurate.  Warning that is organically tied to actual decision makers and existing initiatives on the ground has a strong chance of grafting a response.  Sometimes the decision makers are up in civil society or government; sometimes they are down in the villages or slums, directly in harm’s way.  All of them can potentially play a vital role.  As Anna Matveeva has said, “there is no single ‘correct’ method in early warning/response field.” [ix]  Although she was not referring to civilian survival strategies, her point is quite right.

 

It might be hard for us to “recast” the warning-response problem this way; to cast those whom we have often seen as victims (to be acted upon) in a center-stage role.  This is a new script.  Supporting their capacity to face violence in the event that they might one day face it alone, runs counter to our self-image and can seem self-defeating.  It is premised on our failure to prevent conflict—making it personally, professionally, and institutionally hard to embrace.  Yet local efforts at warning and response should be seen as complementary and concurrent to our own.  As Anna notes, there are “different early warning systems - from local to global.”  She adds that, “Each system is valuable, but is best at fulfilling its own task without seeking to substitute what the others do better.  Outsiders have to keep realistic expectations on what a particular system can deliver.” [x]  The truth is that some types of local response strategies have “delivered” millions from the direct and indirect impacts of violence.  (The Cuny Center, together with research partners in the field, is actively documenting civilian self-protection.)  To the extent that their survival responses can benefit from a shorter learning curve and a shorter warning-response gap, more lives can be delivered. 

 

Civilian self-protection is not a panacea.  While it sidesteps many of the problems that face externally led warning and response, it poses its own challenges.  (One of the most vexing challenges happens to mirror what Meyer, et. al, cite in their article: persuasion.  How and when do civilians become convinced they need to prepare; to mobilize and get out of harm’s way?!)  Nor is civilian self-protection easy to support.  Indeed, supporting it can blow back into lethal unintended consequences.  Yet of all protections, locally led efforts for physical safety as well as life-critical sustenance and services will be the last ones standing because they rely on the abilities of the very people who are left standing alone as violence shuts the world out.

 

This is another way to recast the warning-response problem.

 

Casey

 



[i] David Nyheim, Can Violence, War and State Collapse be Prevented? The Future of Operational Conflict Early Warning and  Response Systems, 18 May 2008; p. 7.

[ii] Anna Matveeva, Early Warning and Early Response: Conceptual and Empirical Dilemmas, Issue Paper #1, Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, Den Haag, 2006; pp. 8 and 30.

[iii] Susanne Schmeidl, Early Warning at the Grass-Roots Level: Fine-tuning Early Warning to Context and User-Needs, Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University, presented at the 49th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association San Francisco, CA, 26-29 March 2008; p. 22.

[iv] Susanne Schmeidl, Early Warning at the Grass-Roots Level: Fine-tuning Early Warning to Context and User-Needs, Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University, presented at the 49th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association San Francisco, CA, 26-29 March 2008; p. 6.

[v] Anna Matveeva, Early Warning and Early Response: Conceptual and Empirical Dilemmas, Issue Paper #1, Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, Den Haag, 2006; p. 32.

[vi] Anna Matveeva, Early Warning and Early Response: Conceptual and Empirical Dilemmas, Issue Paper #1, Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, Den Haag, 2006; p. 37.

[vii] Christoph O. Meyer, Florian Otto, John Brante, and Chiara De Franco, Recasting the Warning-Response Problem: Persuasion and Preventive Policy, International Studies Review, 12, International Studies Association, Tucson, 2010, p. 560.

[viii] Alexander Austin, Early Warning and The Field: A Cargo Cult Science?,  Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, Berlin, Aug 2004; p. 14.

[ix] Anna Matveeva, Early Warning and Early Response: Conceptual and Empirical Dilemmas, Issue Paper #1, Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, Den Haag, 2006; p. 7.

[x] Anna Matveeva, Early Warning and Early Response: Conceptual and Empirical Dilemmas, Issue Paper #1, Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, Den Haag, 2006; p. 8.

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