The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2019 31 into yet another manmade disaster. (More information about this workshop can be found at the PKSOI website: https://pksoi. armywarcollege.edu/conferences/psotew/.) We shared personal experiences of successful and unsuccessful efforts, and we discussed the challenges prevention efforts face, as well as what's involved in plan- ning and implementing such operations. The following is a selection of some of the most salient observations and con- clusions that surfaced during our deliberations. Toward Preventive Stabilization Establishing conflict pre- vention as a rigorous discipline on the continuum of response to conflict—from ordinary political disagreements to violent hostility and war—is a work in progress. As Robert Jenkins, U.S. Agency for International Development’s deputy assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, noted in a plenary ses- sion, the U.S. military classifies stabilization operations as part of “irregular warfare”—as opposed to state-vs.-state conventional warfare. Yet even though irregular warfare (stabilization and counterterrorism and counterinsurgency) has today become the norm, compared to the vast literature on prevention of conven- tional conflict, “preventive stabilization” is barely recognized as a concept and has received relatively little attention from analysts, strategists and policymakers. Importantly, in the Carlisle discussions we drew only minimally from experience based on the United States’ and NATO’s anomalously huge long-term interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, though they nonetheless offer lessons on how and how not to carry out interventions (arguably more on the latter). Various members of the workshop had spent decades in Central America, as well as Peru, Haiti, Indonesia, Sudan and Yemen, among other locations, and this gave the group’s discussion a somewhat different perspective than the work of analysts whose primary experience is in Afghanistan and Iraq. Building on the practical experiences of the different attendees at the workshop, we sought to define preventive stabilization more precisely, discuss some of the challenges it presents, review lessons learned and identify criteria for its successful implementation. Defining prevention. Pre- ventive stabilization is different from “pure” development pro- gramming, namely, long-term funding designed to improve health, education, governance and prosperity—i.e., “a rising tide lifts all boats” approach for improving the lives of many. It is not humanitarian assis- tance—directed at populations affected by a disaster, natural or manmade—either. For purposes of this analysis, we define post-conflict stabili- zation assistance as “aid to support reestablishment of safe and secure environments and to construct or reconstruct critical infrastructure and restart economic activity.” In light of this, what does “preventive stabilization” entail? The group did not reach a clear consensus, although we con- curred that examples from USAID’s Office of Transition Initia- tives, Canada’s START program (now the Peace and Stability Operations program) and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development projects sometimes seem to apply. Some participants cited programs conducted by USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement—for example, working with police and social groups in Central American slums run by gangs. But those cases seemed to be actual stabilization missions rather than preventive missions, as the gangs are already clearly armed opponents of the government and local leadership. Development dollars do not equal prevention. The primary ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/MHJ