Results and Recommendations from the Experience 
of the EU Conflict Prevention Network

Introduction

It took a long time before peace studies on the one hand and policy makers on the other recognized the challenge of dealing with apparently ,,small scale“ wars in the Third World. This has dramatically changed over time. However, so far, little systematic use has been made of already existing expertise (by area studies specialists and others) as an entry point towards the understanding, prediction and eventually prevention of violent conflicts in the Third World. There is a shared responsibility for a lack of communication between policy-makers and researchers. Even objectively it could be difficult to bring together two worlds that too often stay apart, but - as CPN’s experience has shown - efforts can be made.

This presentation wants to touch on three issues: first briefly on Business in Conflict Situation as the overall subject of the conference, secondly, on effects of development co-operation on conflict dynamics as the subject of this panel, and thirdly, on some general results and recommendations from the experience of CPN as an academic network.

Business in Conflict

CPN has only recently begun to work systematically on this issue. Let me start with what one of our experts has listed as main requirements with regard to business and conflict prevention:

1. To adopt and apply conflict prevention approaches to business practice, companies require an understanding of the business case - i.e. that
   participating in conflict prevention has a positive impact on their ability to
   provide services and generate profits;
2. A framework which they can use to help determine their involvement in conflict prevention;
3. Familiarity with the conflict prevention process and their role in it;
4. Relevant skills and tools to enable their involvement; and
5. Adherence to guidelines and regulations that encourage private sector participation in conflict prevention.

A company with these five requirements would be able to mainstream conflict prevention through its business practice.(1)

However, variations maffer: “The impact may be more reputational than operational for multinational oil companies, in Angola for example, whereas for a locally owned banana plantation in the heart of Muslim Mindanao in the Philippines the threat of violent conflict to the day to day operation of the business is the overriding impact. Similarly, the impact of each of these companies on the conflict is very different, The banana plantation can be a positive or negative influence dependent largely upon its employment policies and its day to day relationships with Muslim and Christian groups. It may also have local contacts with parties to the conflict that could be utilised and could play a role in lobbying other actors for change.”(2)

International agencies. governments and civil society organisations need to put their heads together with those companies championing these processes to explore how best to develop more practical experience and how to distil learning from this practical experience into global policies that will create a supportive environment for corporate engagement in conflict prevention. Where tax payer’s money is spent in „private-public partnerships“ conflict prevention should definitely be on the agenda.

At the same time, existing policies and guidelines need to be tightened to help provide the space for this work to happen, to provide some protection from less scrupulous competitors and to help the process of policy dialogue between the private sector, government and civil society on what will continue to be sensitive and highly complex challenges in countries vulnerable to violent conflict.

The EU, our client, has made some steps into acknowledging the importance of such issues, but the debate is not yet well advanced. The new Cotonou Agreement contains much private sector language which is a major break with decades marked by exclusive government to government relations. Inter alia it provides for a systematic involvement of the private sector in the political dialogue(3), in practice the EU delegations on the ground are not well equipped to follow this line, In its recent communication on conflict prevention the Commission acknowledges the role of the private sector and the need to promote the OECD guidelines for Multinational Enterprises to behave responsibly when operating abroad.(4) The text is not very explicit otherwise.

Effects of Development Co-operation on Conflict Dynamics

Since several years conflict prevention and peace building is constantly moving upwards in the list of priorities of policy makers in donor countries and international organisations with regard to their policy towards developing countries. However doubts remain if this is just rhetorically so. Consequently it is difficult to have a clear assessment on the effectiveness of development co-operation in this field. The overall impression is that conflict prevention is still not ,,mainstreamed“ in respective organisations. There are several indicators to prove this:

1. The policy planning process has - at best - slightly changed in order to take care of conflict and peace;
2. Embassies or representatives on the ground are not sufficiently prepared to implement a conflict preventive policy (human resources and expertise, training, supervision, analytical tools);
3. There are few efforts to reconcile the most prominent objectives of a) conflict prevention and b) poverty reduction;
4. Only rarely does ”political dialogue” use appropriate procedures to mitigate conflict risks - one-size-fits-all approaches dominate;
5. ”New” or regionally specific challenges to peace and security are not appropriately addressed;
6. Some actors refrain from engaging in genuine conflict prevention and prefer post-conflict reconstruction, like the World Bank, but this tendency is accentuated in other cases as well.

There is no doubt that a learning process on these issues in some countries and organisations has started, but it may not make sufficient progress. The main reasons for the lack of progress are bureaucratical by nature and there are as well doubts on the political will at least for some actors. However, there are good reasons for being a bit more optimistic concerning at least the potential influence of development assistance on conflict prevention, if it is handled in a complementary way to other policies: diplomacy, security policy and even justice and home affairs. A closer co-ordination in the field of public private partnership and conflict prevention is - by the way - a promising approach that can generate conflict mitigating effects.

Results and Recommendations From the Experience of CPN as an Academic Network

Some of the lessons to be learned from CPN can be drawn from its own fate. CPN has started as a pilot project in 1997 and should be turned into a semi-institutional project starting in September 2000; the three years-contract with SWP, Germany’ s major think tank on international relations, was prematurely ended by the European Commission and will run out at the end of the year while we have good reasons to think that this is not related to the quality of our work or lacking responsiveness from our side. We believe that there are structural reasons for this.

1. The creation of CPN was decided on a political level with the European Parliament playing a pivotal role, but in day to day practice and finally in the decision on structure and orientation CPN depended too much on one single unit in DG RELEX (Directorate General for Foreign Relations) of the European Commission. This meant lack of independence and lack of feedback, E.g.: CPN wanted to discuss a promising approach in a workshop on “conflict prolonging factors in Africa” in summer 2001 with Commission officials and senior experts, here we would have drawn extensively on the “war economy” debate - the project was unilaterally aborted by the Commission without giving any explanations.(5) This dependence finally led to the complete and unilateral demise of the project. The first lesson to be learned is: keep the autonomy of research networks; the second: insist on dialogue and constant feedback.

2. In the context of a lack of content-related competence on the side of its counterparts and a lack of a ”policy advice culture” this institutional construction proved to be too weak to assure sustainability of what remains a good idea: a “go-between” approach associating a network of (mostly academic) experts to practical needs. The next lesson to be learned is: you need a minimum human capacity on the side of the practitioners to make co-operation with academics work. The much highlighted problems of Third World countries to absorb foreign aid could also be found with regard to COM practitioners and their ability to absorb policy advice. Capacity-building would be one standard recommendation here and there. Another one: Insist on appropriate level of understanding in the bureaucratic apparatus.

3. There is still a big need for better co-ordination between different EU policies. CPN started by being much more closely associated to DG Development and was finally administered in a narrow way by DO RELEX. We had the feeling that the need for outside expertise was better understood at DG Development. However, there needs to be an openness by decision-makers that they can not deal with complex conflicts on their own and in their department only. E.g. conflicts involving diaspora funding need to involve not only development agencies, but as well justice and home affairs staff; small arms should involve the colleagues of DG Trade etc.

4. Bureaucrats believe they know “their” country better than independent researchers, particularly those who rarely travel to conflict zones. After all it is them who get daily reports from their embassies - or delegations in the case of the EU (a quality control of those reports is rare). They often feel “badly served” by academic experts who use a hermetic language, too much differentiation, footnotes and much less recommendations that would fit their needs and constraints. To be sure: There is some truth in these allegations. On the other hand, researchers miss a satisfactory level of refinement in intellectual discourse of their counterparts, disregard practioners who usually work only for a limited period of up to 3 years on a given country and hate to simplify complex issues. They feel frequently treated badly by practitioners who ask for immediate solutions where the range of open questions is rather expanding on a daily basis. Here as well, these allegations are true to a large extent. Lessons to be learned include the necessity of a systematic introduction to bureaucratic constraints on the one hand. The basic respect owed to outside experts on the other hand should be in the interest of practitioners themselves since the same experts shape their reputation in their writings for the outside world.

What CPN found out in its work on development co-operation and conflict prevention more generally is

5. Bureaucratic organisations still lack awareness of conflict risks associated with their own behaviour in Third World countries. They would often not acknowledge the need to be better trained in issues of conflict prevention or even only the need to be better informed by outside analytical support - while this accounts in turn for a lack of awareness. In some respect development aid organisations remain hermetic and try to deal with new challenges on a mere rhetorical level, Bureaucratic organisations tend to react, however, when sufficiently challenged by outside criticism and when faced with clear political directives. This affitude might not be very different from the one by big international companies. The recommendation for political actors and advocacy groups alike is therefore: perseverance in pushing the paradigm of conflict prevention.

6. Doubts remain as to the effectiveness of conflict preventive approaches while they are barely tested. It is true that there are some fundamental methodological problems to prove that individual outcomes and developments could be ascribed to specific causes with any precision, given the large number of actors, projects and other factors involved. It is in fact difficult to know whether a preventive measure prevented an event that would not have occured in the absence of this measure.(6)  Cooperation on such a subject seems therefore filled up with doubts as to the usefulness of the overall approach, while only a deeper involvement from both sides would help refining a) practical approaches and measures, b) methods of evaluation and, c) quality of scientific research on those topics.

7. CPN conducted a study on its own products back in 1999(7). It proved that ,,an impressive array of measures to create the conditions for long-term peaceful development is recommended in CPN’s studies that include: support for regional co-operation; assistance for the strengthening of civil society; assistance for building democratic institutions; assistance and encouragement of respect for human and minority rights; support for economic reforms that are transparent and equitable; use of political dialogue to encourage peaceful internal and external dispute resolution and use of political conditionality; co-ordination with other international actors, These recommended policies are also broken down further according to the type of root causes or aggravating factors at stake, ranging from lack of government legitimacy to regional instability. Specific recommendations are submitted as well, which reflect the particular concerns stemming from each country’s problems such as migration flows, diplomatic isolation or corruption.“ Since this study our recommendations have tended to become more specific responding to the very concrete needs of our clients. Recommendations with regard to the private sector were rarely the most prominent ones, although a recent study on the Georgian province Javakheti had this focus very strongly.(8) And some much expected recommendations on business aspects could be found in a study on small arms.(9)

8. It is recommended across many CPN studies that the EU should focus on directing its efforts towards supporting the reform of the State, with emphasis on law and order areas. Nevertheless, bringing the state back into the picture should not hamper the efforts made towards the development of non-state actors including a viable civil society, nor should it prevent the strengthening of the regional and local level of administration. Emphasis is put on the international dimensions of the issues discussed which imply that in many cases, a long-term solution to a conflict should go via a regional or sub-regional approach Again, private business actors are rarely recommended partners or targets of - in particular EU - activities. 

9. “Thinking conflict” (or “thinking conflict prevention”) becomes quickly essential in all our thinking on large parts of the Third World (in particular: Africa) for empirical reasons: in many respects Africa has become the continent of conflict and the outlook to alter this picture is not very promising. A drastic change towards research on associated topics and practical activities at least in countries/sub-regions at risk seem unavoidable. It is still desirable to overcome numerous obstacles and to foster synergies between research and practice. Both sides are invited to take the necessary steps, including the institutionalisation of discussion forums. Concrete areas of co-operation include the regional adaptation of Early Warning Indicators and Conflict Impact Assessment tools for specific regions or conflict patterns and a whole range of other subjects cited above.

10. In a CPN study on poverty and conflict it is recommended to look into “entitlement demands” of groups, the nature of their claim-making capacities, as well as government responses to these claims. This study focuses strongly on the state and it rightly does, but it could be argued that the private sector is itself an actor with claims and at the same time a potential alternative to the state in providing goods and services and might merit some more attention from this perspective.

11. In a CPN study on unintended consequences of Humanitarian Assistance additional research on the methodology aimed at assessing these unintended consequences was recommended.(10) There is some work on this issue including on the consequences of Humanitarian Assistance to local markets and therefore private sector businessmen, but this might still not be detailed enough.

12. CPN has also conducted investigation into corporate world activities to mainstream conflict prevention in their own operations.(11) Most firms of our sample were engaged in the oil business and their responses were rather evasive pointing to general questions of corporate social responsibility and environmental standards and giving conflict prevention a very much secondary role.

We certainly lack more concrete insights, e.g. for the role of direct investments in countries at risk, on the effectiveness of codes of conduct, on the potential complementarity of big enterprises and donor governments in delegitimating irresponsible behaviour of local actors, etc. And we probably can learn from commercial risk assessments for early warning systems. We should expect the private sector to invest more time and capacity in this field. After all, at least the major economic players need a stable environment to do their business.

Finally a word on the principle of ownership: this term has been much abused in conflict prevention and peace-keeping when it was invoked to defend non-action. However, the local actors’ will to wage war or engage in peace remains one core element in the conflict equation. This should be reflected in our dealings with business in conflict. Here as well, local actors, local entrepreneurs are key. And programmes of public private partnership should investigate much more into the capacities as well as economic and political agendas of local business partners with regard to conflict and peace.
 

Notes

1) Phil Champain: Assessing the Corporate Sector in Mainstreaming Conflict Prevention, in: Luc van de Goor / Martina Huber: Mainstreaming Conflict Prevention, CPN Yearbook 2001, Baden-Baden 2001 (forthcoming)
2) ibid.
3) Partnership agreement between the Members of the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States and the
E uropean Community and its Member States, signed in Cotonou, on 23 June 2000. Interestingly Article 6 (2) already states "Recognition by the parties of non-governmental actors shall depend on the extent to which they address the needs fo the population, on their specific competencies and whether they are organised and managed democratically and transparently."
4) Communication by the European Commission on Conflict Prevention, 11 April 2001.
5) The perspective on conflict prolonging factors is a potentially fertile one in our debate. Private business plays always a role in conflict, but conflicts change their shape over time, new dynamics, resources (including humanitarian aid) and actors are coming in etc. So ,,war entrepreneurs" may ask themselves "what's the next business?"
6) See Hugh Miall: Preventing Potential Conflicts. Assessing the Impact of Light and Deep Conflict Prevention in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in Michale Lund/Guenola Rasamoelina (eds.): The Impact of Conflict Prevention Policy (CPN Yearbook 1999/2000), Baden-Baden 2000, p. 23-45.
7) Espen Barth Eide and Karen SmithMapping Out the Knowledge Accumulated within CPN's Products. A Lessons learned survey (SWP-CPN, Selected contributions 9), Ebenhausen 1999.
8) Oksana Antonenko: Assessment of the Potential Implications of Akhalkalaki Base Closure for the Stability in Southern Georgia, EU Response Capacities (CPN Briefing Study; September 2001).
9) Sami Faltas in Cooperation with Holger Anders: Development Activities Relevant to Small Arms and Light Weapons. A Compilation of Policy Recommendations (CPN Briefing Paper, October 1999).
10) Geoff Loane/Céline Moyroud (eds.): Tracing Unintended Consequences of Humanitarian Assistance: The Case of Sudan, . Field Study and Recommendations for the Europena Community Humanitaraian Office (CPN), Baden-Baden 2001, p.85.
11) Record of Preventive Capacities. Mainstreaming Conflict Prevention. A Survey by the Conflict Prevention Network, published with the support of the Swedish Foreign Ministry, September 2001 (Corporate World Fact Sheets).

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