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Inclusion prevents conflict

I spent part of the morning listening to presentations on the new UN/World Bank study Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict, which at 341 pages will take me and you a while to digest. Gary Milante of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ably moderated. Here are some of the salient points made at today’s session. I take notes on my phone, so no doubt I’ve missed some nuances and may well have made mistakes, for which I apologize in advance to both readers and presenters in advance.

Chuck Call, American University professor:

1. Violent conflict has been worsening since 2010, largely due to the Middle East and terrorism.
2. Vertical inequality (of income presumably) does not unequivocally correlate with violence, but horizontal inequality (between groups) does.
3. Actors, leaders, and narratives are critical, institutions less so in this report than in the prior one.
4. States are however key actors, but so too are sub-national and regional actors.
5. Main sectors of contestation include land, political power, and services, with the main issue being exclusion.
6. The costs of responding to violence are prohibitive; prevention is a good investment.

Chuck added some thoughts about future research directions that I won’t try to reproduce, except to say that they included the dynamics of exclusion as well as how and when it leads to violence. Here are his powerpoint slides.

Sara Batmanglich, peace and conflict adviser, OECD:

She underlined that the report is a unique joint effort of the UN and World Bank that puts people at the focus and suggests that we need far more attention to their feelings of hope, entitlement, dignity, shame, exclusion, empowerment and frustration, as well as their modes of coping. The report also suggests we need to reexamine how the $181 billion per year in aid from OSCE countries is spent, $74 billion in fragile states but only 1/3 of that on key arenas of conflict. There is an unfortunate bias towards very small (<$10k) and large projects (>$10 million), which is unfortunate since most conflict-relevant projects lie somewhere in that gap. We need to learn to build social cohesion and trust as well as develop economies.

Victoria Walker, assistant director at the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces:

The report emphasizes governance issues, especially for the security sector, where too much of our effort is still devoted to “train and equip” and too little to governance issues like accountability and transparency. We need better indicators for these issues, as well as more focus on gender. Decentralization, which is emphasized in the report, is not only something good but also presents serious challenges from a governance perspective.

Seth Kaplan, who teaches here at SAIS:

1. Leadership is key: it is needed to build trust across divides, promote dialogue and build inclusive institutions.
2. Change depends on forming a coalition of actors committed to moving in a positive (peacebuilding) direction.
3. Incentives are important, but they are not absolutes or unchangeable: they depend on framing and ideas.
4. Group dynamics are important, especially how groups form, evolve and sometimes move towards polarization and mobilization.
5. No state can be successful without national identity, so nationalism is an important force that we need to support.
6. Redistribution of resources/services may be important to reducing conflict, but we need to be careful about backlash from those who lose privileges or resources.
7. Commerce and entrepreneurialism have greater potential than we are currently exploiting for bridging divides.
8. The state is not necessarily the central actor, so we sometimes need to work at the subnational level, to build peace by piece in countries like Somalia and Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as others.

Here are Seth’s slides.

There was only one clear point of contention. Chuck dissented on nationalism: he thought international institutions have no business in the nation-building business, only in state-building.

I was with Seth on that one: in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan, there is no way of avoiding implicit if not explicit support for the central government in its efforts to establish legitimacy with its entire population. And if it is not trying to do that, maybe you shouldn’t be supporting it with international assistance. Of course a country’s citizens and government are primarily responsible for their own identities, but I don’t see how we avoid putting a thumb on that scale.

I look forward to reading the report, which based on these notes sounds pretty interesting.