Prevention, Fast and Slow: Why the Prevention Narrative Still Won’t Work

Dr Alexandra Bohm (Lincoln Law School) and Professor Garrett Wallace Brown (Leeds POLIS and ECR2P) examine the link between atrocity prevention and the role of the international community in perpetuating the conditions of mass violence.

There has been increased focus within the R2P community on atrocity prevention over military intervention. We argue, in a recent article in the Global Responsibility to Protect Journal, that whilst this is welcome, it does not represent a paradigmatic shift in thinking about atrocity causes and solutions. This is because the recent focus on prevention has largely failed to examine the role of the international community in creating systemic conditions that perpetuate or help to enable atrocities.

Policymakers and academics have explored R2P’s Pillar II (International Community assistance), offering a range of preventative measures so that the international community can better fulfil its prevention assistance responsibilities. These offerings are largely short-term and focus on problems within the state where violence occurs, dealing only superficially with long-term causes and the ways in which the international community is a contributing factor in eroding state resilience against mass atrocity.

As an alternative, we examine a number of ways in which key actors of the international community contribute to determinants of mass violence (including atrocities) and offer recommendations for how they could better discharge their long-term preventative responsibilities by first reforming their own practices. A better understanding of the international community’s role in contributing to systemic, long-term causes of violence will enable key actors to begin the process of making systemic changes that filter down to support stronger, more resilient state structures. This will lessen the need for short-term prevention and reaction measures.

The Secretary-General’s yearly reports on R2P at times acknowledge long-term structural prevention issues, but these are not followed by an analysis of how to achieve long-term prevention. Instead, the reports’ focus pivots on encouraging short-term changes within a state rather than long-term changes in the international community’s behaviour. Several reports mention the root causes of uneven economic growth and distribution of resources, and the importance of national state welfare measures to act as a safety-net (e.g. Implementing the Responsibility to Protect, 2009, State Responsibility, 2013, and Accountability for Prevention, 2017). But the reports do not examine how growth and welfare are hindered by the international community, nor how they could be enabled via international policy reforms.

Measures in the name of prevention have included putting pressure on perpetrators, encouraging the signature of international treaties, or welcoming peacekeeping missions. However, these are largely more short-term interventions and do not address the question of economic growth or supporting domestic equality through welfare measures (to reduce horizontal inequality – a recognised causal factor associated with mass atrocity).

Currently, prevention measures considered more long-term include good governance training and capacity-building in relation to weak state structures, assuming that the international community can play a positive role in providing these things. This underplays the negative relationship between state resilience to atrocity triggers and international community assistance, and the complex global–local relationship that plagues international community efforts under the international community assistance pillar of R2P.

For example, overseas development assistance (ODA) is suggested as a prevention measure that can incentivise actors not to commit atrocities. Yet, research (e.g. Dichter, 2003) on ODA points to its role in increasing inequalities and social divisions, which are part of the causal matrix of atrocities. Even if aid were truly a source of development and equality, the money received by poor states is dwarfed by protectionism in markets by wealthy states, massively weakening a state’s economic ability to meet local needs.

Furthermore, loan conditionality from institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) can in fact prevent states from enacting social security measures to strengthen national structures and resilience, the opposite of what is envisaged in the Secretary General’s reports.  These contributing factors from the international community have been shown as key factors associated with mass violence in the former Yugoslavia (e.g. Orford, 1997) as well as Rwanda (e.g. Verwimp, 2003), among others.

Similarly, the international community’s pursuit of arms sales to (and support of) problematic regimes, and the pursuit of economic interests despite the predictable adverse effects on national structures in states where atrocities are a risk (e.g. Big oil in the Nigeria Delta), suggests that the international community could “put its own house in order” before seeking to educate ‘irresponsible’ and high risk states. Whilst it is difficult to prove a causal link between the international community’s economic interventions into troubled states and the risk of violence springing from the resulting socio-economic deprivation, we argue that there is compelling evidence of such a link and that this merits more attention than it has previously received.

What would it look like for the international community to “put its house in order”? Addressing global development and horizontal inequality is no simple matter, but there is a significant amount of literature (e.g. Caney, 2008) within academia addressing global duties of redistributive justice from high income to lower income settings. These duties are argued for whether or not there is a link to violence generally or atrocities specifically, and we argue that the burgeoning link only strengthens arguments in favour of distributive justice.

As well as promoting mutually consistent development, creating mutually consistent trade relations without subsidies and problematic tariffs would help the project of global development writ large, thus giving states the economic ability to help themselves. Preventing capital flight and closing global tax loopholes would also raise much of the funding needed for weaker states to meet their Pillar I prevention obligations, including welfare safety nets and self-development programmes. A genuine commitment to controlling the global arms trade might take some time for its positive effects to show, but it would make a real difference to the ability of actors to carry out atrocities (as well as demonstrating the international community’s genuine commitment to reducing violence).

These reforms might seem unlikely. But the very fact that international community actors show no interest to make these reforms - but prefer to carry on business as usual - should sound a note of caution about there being any genuine interest in long-term, systemic, violence and atrocity prevention. It also signals that better enquiries regarding whose interests are served by continuing with the current short-term agenda need to be made and exposed. As a start, a normative list of reforms can serve as a starting point from which practice should be guided.

Garrett Wallace Brown is Chair in Political Theory & Global Health at the University of Leeds’ POLIS. He is Co-Lead for the University of Leeds Health Theme and Chief Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations. He researches, and is published widely, in the fields of Cosmopolitanism and Global Justice as well as Global Health Policy and Global Health Financing.

Alexandra Bohm is a Senior Lecturer in Law in the University of Lincoln’s College of Social Science.  She undertook her training contract and then practised as a solicitor with Norton Rose LLP from 2003-2007, before gaining a Masters and then PhD at the University of Sheffield.  Her research critiques R2P and the use of military force for humanitarian purposes.

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