International Cooperation in Early Warning and Conflict Prevention Global V Regional Approaches – Un and Eu Models

Abstract

This article analyses the cooperation and the correspondence of the UN and EU's early warning approaches in a comparative manner and explains how early warnings activities relate to preventive policies and how the latter are integrated into their organisational programming. Furthermore, it surveys the literature on early warning and response strategies applied 0y international institutions and organisations and draws evidence from authors' experience in creating EW systems under the UNDP programmes in different countries. The article argues that the EU and UN early warning and conflict prevention models represent a mixture of top-down and 0ottom-up systems with complex network dynamics, partially overlapping and partially independent incremental policies. This process leads to a greater dialogue than in conflict prevention and contri0utes to a very slow 0ut simultaneous change in the way that actors operate in crisis and post-conflict settings. Finally, it also evaluates strengths and weaknesses of the applied warning and response mechanisms and addresses some of the constraints to response and development strategies.