Strategies for Preventive Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution

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Strategies for Preventive Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution： Scholarship for Policymaking

Alexander L. George is Graham H. Stuart Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Stanford University. A specialist on deterrence, crisis prevention and management, and coercive diplomacy, Dr. George worked at the Rand Corporation from 1948 to 1968. His books include Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (1994), Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice of Foreign Policy (1993), and Deterrence in American Foreign Policy (with Richard Smoke, 1975). In 1983, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Five-Year Prize Award and in 1998 won the John Skytte Prize in Political Science.

During the long period of the Cold War, the scholarly community accumulated much knowledge bearing on the problems of managing conflicts typical of that era. Unfortunately, quite a bit of this knowledge and experience does not fit very well the different challenges to peace that are so prevalent in the post-Cold War era.

As you know, the end of the Cold War has created a new geopolitical environment and has spawned many new types of internal conflicts. Such internal conflicts within states now vastly outnumber the more conventional types of war between states. The dynamics of these internal conflicts and ways of avoiding them do not follow the old rules of the Cold War. As a result, policymakers and scholars alike have been faced with the need to develop new knowledge and to find ways of dealing with such conflicts before they erupt into large-scale violence. For, once large-scale violence occurs, it becomes much more difficult for members of the international community杢he United Nations, regional organizations, individual states acting alone or together, and nongovernmental organizations杢o muster the political will and the resources needed for effective conflict resolution and peacemaking.

Hence, it is not surprising that much emphasis is being given in recent years to 損reventive diplomacy敄the essence of preventive diplomacy being the need not only to acquire early warning of incipient conflicts but also to respond promptly and effectively in order to contain conflicts before they erupt into large-scale violence.

This new emphasis on preventive diplomacy is coupled with efforts to make better use of a variety of techniques for conflict avoidance and conflict resolution, techniques such as mediation, peacekeeping, peacemaking, confidence- and trust-building measures, and unofficial so-called 揟rack Two?diplomacy.

Strategies that were relied upon earlier in order to avoid war between states杝trategies such as deterrence and coercive diplomacy杗ow are either largely irrelevant for dealing with most intrastate conflicts or are difficult to implement effectively.
Here, I will not attempt to cover all of the many efforts members of the analytic scholarly community have been making to address these problems. Rather, I would like to focus on the efforts that two groups I have been associated with in recent years have been making to develop new knowledge needed to understand and deal better with the challenges of preventive diplomacy. These are the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, which finished an intensive three-year effort to address these problems, and the less well-known Committee on International Conflict Resolution, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, which I helped to start and for which I serve as chairperson.

First, a few comments on the problem of early warning and response to warning. Together with Jane Holt (1997), I have published a paper on this topic for the Carnegie Commission. We noted that many efforts are underway to identify ways of improving the gathering and processing of early warning indicators. However, we believe that, although efforts to improve warning are important, the fact is that in most conflict situations, humanitarian crises, cases of severe human rights abuses, or acute ethnic or religious tensions sufficient early warning is available. The problem is not lack of early warning but the fact that governments often ignore an incipient crisis or take a passive attitude towards it until it escalates into deadly struggle or a major catastrophe. In other words, the problem is not that governments don抰 know; it抯 that they don抰 act! The logic of warning and the logic of policy response often conflict. The logic of early warning is 搕he sooner one acts in response to warning, the better.? However, policymakers have a deep-eated penchant for putting off hard policy choices as long as possible!

Even when early warning is ambiguous and intelligence specialists cannot predict that a crisis is likely to occur, available warning does provide decisionmakers with an opportunity to avert the crisis, to modify it, or to redirect it in some less-dangerous and less-costly direction.

In our paper on this subject, Holt and I called attention to the 揼ap?between warning and response, and we suggested that policy planners need to develop a rich repertoire of response options, including many actions that could be taken because they entail low risks and low costs.

The failure to respond promptly to incipient crises has led many observers to speak of 搈issed opportunities?for preventive action. As a follow-up to our warning and response paper, the Carnegie Commission initiated a study of missed opportunities. This is a collaborative study under the direction of Professor Bruce Jentleson (1998) of about a dozen cases. The study provides strong evidence that in virtually all of these crises the international community did have an opportunity of some kind to limit if not prevent the conflict. But efforts at preventive action were flawed, inadequate, or even absent.

To enhance lessons drawn from these failures of preventive diplomacy, Jentleson抯 study for the Commission is also examining a number of cases that might well have become deadly conflicts but in which preventive action was taken with relative success杋n other words, the opportunity that early warning provided was not missed. Such cases include Macedonia, the Russia-Estonia conflict over troop withdrawals and the rights of the Russian minority in Estonia, Russian-Ukraine tensions over nuclear weapons and the Crimea and the Black Sea fleet, and the crisis over North Korea抯 development of nuclear weapons. We believe we are on solid ground in arguing that timely and effective diplomacy prevented these conflicts from escalating to severe violence.

The objective of the missed opportunities study is to identify policy lessons that will be useful for missing fewer opportunities in the future.

Another somewhat novel feature of the challenge preventive diplomacy faces in the post-Cold War era is that strategies that were relied upon earlier in order to avoid war between states杝trategies such as deterrence and coercive diplomacy杗ow are either largely irrelevant for dealing with most intrastate conflicts or are difficult to implement effectively. Both of these strategies require that one make threats of sufficient credibility and sufficient potency to persuade an adversary to cease or desist from an objectionable course of action. I emphasize that 搒ufficiency?is a flexible variable. How sufficient the credibility and potency of a threat must be to influence the adversary depends on what one demands of him. The more one demands of the adversary, the stronger his resistance will be, and the more credible and more potent must be the threat of force to persuade him.

This was illustrated by the uneven, mixed record of Western governments?efforts to use threats of force against the Serbs in Bosnia. It became painfully obvious that, for various reasons, Western governments were unable or unwilling to make threats that were either sufficiently credible or sufficiently potent on behalf of demands that the Serbs stop altogether or undo their more outrageous actions. That was indeed an ambitious objective for coercive diplomacy and, as it turned out, the Serbs were more highly motivated to reject such demands than Western governments were to enforce them.

The offer of inducements of an economic, political, and security character can be highly effective in helping to deter nuclear proliferation, prevent nuclear conflict, defend civil and human rights, and rebuild war-torn societies.
On the other hand, when the Western governments made very limited demands on the Serbs, and when they demonstrated unity in their determination and generated sufficiently credible and sufficiently potent threats of force to back up their limited demands, the Serbs largely adhered to the 搇ines in the sand?the Western governments drew. These limited successes of coercive diplomacy occurred on a number of occasions, as when Western governments demanded that the Sarajevo airport be opened for delivery of humanitarian supplies, that air-drops of food and medicine be allowed to take place, and when ultimata were issued regarding the establishment of 搒afe havens?in various parts of Bosnia. These were quite modest successes, to be sure, but they were useful at the time.

Reflecting on this experience, some observers have concluded that in Bosnia-type situations threats of force and use of limited forces can be effective at least in setting some modest limits to intolerable behavior. Thereby, members of the international community can at least draw a line as to what they will not tolerate. While this may be true, the more important lesson is that seizing opportunities for timely preventive diplomacy to head off such wars杝uch opportunities were present in the early stages of the Bosnia crisis杋s of critical importance and that the international community should not fail, as it did fail in Bosnia and later in Rwanda, to act in a timely fashion.

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