December 1999
Principles for shifting from emergency response to conflict prevention. Written on behalf of my UNESCO colleagues and myself, this op-ed was used in an internal UNESCO publication. Its points remain on point.
By Larry Seaquist
with Prof. Federico Mayor and Dr. Tom Forstenzer
We are getting used to a constant diet of war. At the moment Chechnya holds the headlines, last week it was East Timor, last month Kosovo. And for those who can handle more than one at a time, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Congo or twenty other hot spots furnish daily doses of killing.
It was not supposed to be this way. “Never again” was the resolve of the designers of the United Nations apparatus. Working in the closing days of the bloody and brutal Second World War they declared their ambition in the UN Charter, “We the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…”
Sadly, the scourge has evolved and multiplied. Untold numbers of people around the world continue to suffer and die in “civil”, intra-national wars. Rarely now is the fighting between armies bound by “laws” of war. Warfare has come home. As neighbor kills neighbor, civilians can be anything but civil and neighborhood militias may be more akin to street gangs than disciplined armies. Not designed for these circumstances, the UN system has preoccupied itself since the end of the Cold War with developing the institutions and skills of crisis response-reacting to yesterday’s tragedy, not preventing tomorrow’s.
UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, also started life with that same war-prevention mission. Harry Truman and other founders saw a need for an institution which could go deeper than politics to the roots of war. They approved a Constitution which opens, “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”
Believing the end of the Cold War would make conflict prevention more important than ever, UNESCO’s outgoing Director-General, Professor Federico Mayor, launched a project to design and demonstrate practical ways of helping the international community learn to move upstream. Working with political, military, and community leaders in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America, we have developed some key insights and practical tools through this transdisciplinary approach:
Peacebuilding is hard, complex work involving everyone. In a century of big wars, cold and hot, we came to think of peace as a military outcome-the result of a successful war or, in the case of the Cold War, the product of a globe-threatening balance of firepower. Only rarely nowadays does superior military force guarantee security, as refugees all over the world will testify. Genuine security-the security of the family and the community-grows in a climate where political leaders and citizens work together in campaigns to solve the civil problems of education, employment, and justice. It is much more difficult to solve the problem of getting clean water into every home in a poor, crowded urban neighborhood than it is for a warlord to equip angry, unemployed and uneducated young men with automatic rifles.
Global security means supporting regional prevention. While there are some common threads among the many different places at risk of sliding into violence, each has its own character, each has its own cast of actors. We have found that each of our conflict prevention projects must be tailored to the local circumstances and culture. Importantly, we have also recognized that, even though “security” is best measured by the security of an individual family and their community, peacebuilding usually requires the close cooperation of a cluster of neighboring states. Poverty, arms and drug trafficking, telecommunications, refugees all cross borders. Rarely is a single locale able to go it alone on a path to peace, democracy, and development. Local prevention requires regional cooperation. And because prevention touches on the essentials of life-education, employment, food, a healthy environment-traditional transactions among diplomats are not enough. Peacebuilding demands cooperation among many government agencies and citizens’ organizations of several neighboring states. The international community should help build these bridges and support these efforts.
We have been too late, too often, but we are not condemned to that off-balance posture. There is some good news:
You can practice for peace just like you practice for war. Military professionals use wargames to test their strategies and prepare for battle. So can peacebuilders. Because so many different players are involved, rehearsal exercises are even more important to prevention than combat. We have run two dozen PeaceGames in several regions among officials, citizens, academics and students. Notably that includes future U.S. military officers at the Military Academy at West Point and the Naval Academy in Annapolis. UNESCO’s work with the Organisation of American States, the Inter-American Defence College and USAID has led to the launch of a Peace Laboratory in Colombia this month. In Central Asia a series of PeaceGames is leading to the development of a regional conflict prevention mechanism.
The good guys outnumber the bad guys. War and human suffering make arresting television. In the news we seem to see nothing but corrupt political leaders, brutal war lords, and willing killers. The most important finding of our work is that, even after fighting breaks out, there are many strong citizen-leaders who care deeply about freedom.
Even in the midst of conflict these stalwarts keep working to create peace and security for their families, their community, and their country. They don’t make the news but they will-if given a little help-make the future.
All this translates into a bottom-line reality: prevention is practical. There is a financial reality too: prevention is much, much less expensive than doing nothing until a conflict erupts and another human tragedy bleeds on TV. There is not enough money in the world to buy our way back out of all the local crises and conflicts that are burning now or can be seen on the horizon. We must become as serious-and as skilled-at mounting cost-effective prevention campaigns as we have been forced to become at caring for the victims after violence has had its day.
It is time to put conflict prevention back at the top of our list of international priorities. We must again embrace the ethics of “never again”. It is possible to move upstream to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” by helping communities talk before the guns speak. That is the meaning of the International Year for the Culture of Peace, put forward by UNESCO and adopted by the UN General Assembly for the Year 2000.
Larry Seaquist is Chairman of the Washington-based Strategy Group and a Senior Advisor to the Director-General, UNESCO. Professor Federico Mayor is the outgoing Director-General of UNESCO. Dr. Tom Forstenzer is the Chief Executive Officer of the Director-General’s Secretariat in Paris. The three have teamed up to explore innovative approaches to international conflict prevention through programs in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.