Conflict Prevention from Rhetoric to Reality: Volume 1: Organizations and Institutions

Abstract

CONFLICT PREVENTION FROM RHETORIC TO REALITY Volume 1: Organizations and Institutions Edited by Albrecht Schnabel and David Garment Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2004. xviii, 438pp, US$75.00 cloth (ISBN 0-7391-0549-3), US$25.00 paper (ISBN 0-7391-0738-0)CONFLICT PREVENTION FROM RHETORIC TO REALITY Volume 2: and Innovations Edited by Albrecht Schnabel and David Garment Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2004. xiv, 444pp, US$75.00 cloth (ISBN 0-7391-0550-7), US$25.00 paper (ISBN 0-7391-0739-9)For global governance skeptics, Darfur is but the latest example of the futility of expecting the international community to practice proactive intervention as a means of preventing escalating conflicts from spinning out of control. Several years of empty diplomatic pronouncements and flaccid UN security council resolutions have had little impact on the ground in Darfur, where the killing continues largely unabated. A clear absence of political will, ongoing concerns over state sovereignty, and the unwillingness to contemplate the use of force in the name of conflict prevention are slowly pushing Darfur onto the growing list of cases where the international community has appeared helpless as political crisis slides into mass slaughter. And if the international community is unwilling to act when faced with compelling evidence of ongoing genocide, the possibility of external intervention to head off violent conflict before crises push their way onto the world's television screens seems even more remote.While providing few easy answers to what, specifically, should have or might have been done to head off violent conflict in Darfur or elsewhere, Albrecht Schnabel and David Garment's two-volume edited collection does make a strong case that, as the title of chapter puts it, conflict prevention is happening. While failures of prevention in particularly difficult and intractable cases such as Darfur and Rwanda grab the media headlines, the gradual, incremental, and largely technocratic development of conflict prevention skills and mechanisms within international organizations may represent, in Michael Lund's words, one of the 'best kept secrets' of the post-Cold War era (vol. 1, 291). The two volumes, the result of a multiyear research project, represent an ambitious and encyclopedic overview of the current state of international conflict prevention efforts. Significantly, the work makes a concerted effort to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of conflict prevention, and to show how theoretical insights can, and are, being translated into practice by the range of actors in the conflict prevention field.Thematically, the first volume focuses on organizations and institutions, examining the state of various international and regional mechanisms for conflict prevention as well as the extent to which both the and the practice of conflict prevention have been mainstreamed into the work of various institutions. The second volume, subtitled Opportunities and innovations, reflects both on the widening range of institutions, including nongovernmental organizations and corporations, now active in the conflict prevention field, and on the expanding range of issues, including terrorism, with which conflict prevention is now concerned. Together, the two volumes represent a work of determined optimism based on the twin convictions that not only is conflict prevention possible, but that institutional, long-term efforts specifically targeted at the prevention of violent conflicts have become more than wishful thinking (vol. 1, 3).Most of the collection's contributors, however, skirt a more fundamental question: do conflict prevention efforts actually prevent violent conflict? Here, the work is on somewhat shakier empirical ground. To be fair, this problem is hardly unique to these volumes. Linking cause and effect in conflict prevention is partly the problem of the dog that didn't bark (how do we know that it was a particular prevention strategy that averted the conflict, and not some other factor or combination of factors? …