The International Crisis Group is one of the world’s most influential peace and security NGOs. They work with governments and others around the world in an attempt to prevent and resolve conflict.
In a , the group discussed its top conflict-prevention strategies, which it says are becoming increasingly important.
“After a period of relative calm, an upsurge of crises is testing the international system, pitting major powers and regional players against one another and highlighting the weaknesses of preventive diplomacy,” the report warned.
Richard Gowan was a lead contributor to the report, and is an expert on international relations and conflict prevention.
The Feed caught up with him to discuss the best ways to stop conflict before it starts.
1 – Know what’s happening on the ground
Gowan said predicting a crisis and understanding power dynamics was crucial to resolving conflicts as soon as possible, or even before they start.
He said that leaders desperate to hold on to power, restless police and military forces, and regional or ethnic divisions, were all red flags.
Gowan also said that neighbouring countries often have the potential to inflame situations by intervening, sometimes posing as peace-keepers.
Russia has claimed its intervention in neighboring Ukraine is humanitarian. Source: AAP
2 – Maintain relationships with all parties
Having ongoing relationships with key players was also important, Gowan said, so that those relationships could be used to diffuse potential conflicts pre-emptively.
“Before last year's Nigerian presidential elections, there were a lot of fears that supporters of President Goodluck Jonathan would resort to serious violence if he lost,” Gowan told The Feed. “ICG and others gathered a lot of information on local political leaders gathering weapons and preparing to fight.”
Armed with that forewarning, diplomats were able to leverage their relationships to defuse potential triggers.
"A lot of Western diplomats thought that Bashar al Assad would avoid all-out war in Syria because he seemed quite Westernised and spoke English."
“A series of international figures, including John Kerry and Kofi Annan, visited Jonathan and emphasized the need to avoid violence. When he ultimately did lose in the polls, he stepped down very quickly and graciously - and Nigeria stayed calm,” Gowan said.
It doesn’t always work though. Richard Gowan said diplomats and NGOs had to be clear-eyed about the strength of their influence.
“Sometimes we put too much trust in relationships with unreliable leaders,” he said. “In 2011, a lot of Western diplomats thought that Bashar al Assad would avoid all-out war in Syria because he seemed quite Westernised and spoke English. In fact he was ready to fight to the death from a very early stage in the conflict.”
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan's peaceful transfer of power is seen as a success of international preventive diplomacy. (AAP) Source: AAP
3 – Build frameworks to channel international diplomacy
Gowan told The Feed that in a complex world, where power lies with multiple countries, it is increasingly important to bring major players together through international institutions and frameworks.
“A lot of current mechanisms for multilateral crisis management, like the UN Security Council, have lost credibility in recent years over issues like Syria,” Gowan said. “But in an increasingly multipolar world, it is more important than ever to try to get big powers and regional players together as early as possible in a crisis situation to look for diplomatic ways out.”
He said the most obvious recent example of ‘framework diplomacy’ bringing about a success was the nuclear deal with Iran, which brought together the US and Iran, with five other major powers, to negotiate a solution to the standoff.
The group included Russia and China, which worked on the agreement with the US despite other ongoing differences on Syria, the Ukraine and the South China Sea.
Syria, on the other hand, had been a failure of framework diplomacy, he said.
“For the early years of the war, the US and Europeans tried to sort out the conflict through the Security Council,” he said. “But they excluded Iran from negotiations until last year [and] Russia deliberately dragged out the diplomatic process to help Assad.”
US Secretary of State John Kerry talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif after the IAEA verified Iran has met all conditions under the deal. (AP) Source: AP
4 – Strategic planning and communication
“This is the area where most preventive diplomacy goes wrong,” Gowan told us. “There is little time for strategic planning, and politicians and diplomats have to make stuff up on the fly.”
Leaders and diplomats need to think through the potential ramifications of their statements, and game out possible reactions by all parties. They should be mindful of the signals they are sending, and take care not to box themselves in down the track.
“Sometimes they send messages on the spur of the moment – like President Obama's demand that Assad should go in 2011 – that make peacemaking much harder later on,” he said.
“I'd actually cite an Australian example as a good bit of crisis planning,” Gowan said. “When Timor-Leste was falling apart after UN peacekeepers left in 2006, John Howard publicly put the navy on alert to offer support before there was any request for help from Dili. Putting the navy on standby and signalling to the Timorese leaders that help was available was a smart choice.”
The US president's demand that Assad step down was unhelpful, Gowan says. (AAP) Source: AAP
5 – Creating pathways to peace
"In a lot of cases, the essential pathway to peace is to carve out some sort of power sharing agreement between leaders who would otherwise launch a civil war,” Gowan said.
“Good examples are from Kenya in 2008, when Kofi Annan mediated a power-sharing deal after contested elections, and Afghanistan in 2014, when the US got Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah to work together,” he said.
It can take work, however. Warring parties in Syria have been attempting to negotiate a solution for years. Peace talks between rebels in Yemen and the government they forced out of the country have also failed.
Gowan said the International Crisis Group also sees agreements on resource sharing – not just power sharing – as important steps to resolving international flashpoints.
“You need a deal on managing Libya's energy wealth to help ensure peace there,” he said, “and while the short-term priority in the South China Sea is avoiding accidental clashes, ASEAN and China need to come up with a common plan for sharing its resources too.”
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