The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

32 SEPTEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL challenge of preventive stabiliza- tion, most practitioners agree, is not insufficient funding for development. Although devoting more resources to development assistance might well be worth- while in its own right, increasing local access to education and boosting incomes will not magi- cally resolve societal conflicts. In fact, unequal development (when, for instance, investment pours in from outside the conflict zone for resource exploita- tion—oil, diamonds, timber, etc.) can actually exacerbate exist- ing frictions into open war. More dollars alone won’t solve the conflict patterns. Good prevention is hard to find. It is difficult to come up with clear examples of preventive stabilization. As practitioners, we are almost always funded and arrive only after conflict has consumed a country, not before. Ironically, we practitioners might not have heard of successful preventive efforts—precisely because they were successful. And, participants noted, even if you are there as a prevention measure, it is very difficult to prove that you averted an adverse outcome. We did discuss some instances of modest interven- tion that may have stopped a return to violence during a pause or lull in the cycle of ongoing violence. In Haiti, according to a participant who worked there with the Haiti Stabilization Initiative in 2008, a group of street leaders working with the initiative said they were tired of being used as rent-a-mobs by political actors. They there- fore voted to run the bagman of a businessman’s political party out of the Cité Soleil slum as a message that they were no longer in the violence-on-demand business. When the capital was con- vulsed by food riots that threatened to topple the government later that year, only one poor neighborhood did not participate in the violence: Cité Soleil. Another practitioner reported a similar experience in Indo- nesia. When interreligious violence in Central Sulawesi province finally subsided after four years of intermittent fighting, the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group launched attacks to rekindle tensions. The USAID staff, along with some of their implement- ing partners, facilitated dialogue between Christian and Muslim community leaders, helping both groups realize that it was an outside group that was trying to shatter the precarious peace. This headed off a return to large-scale violence. How do you know when to intervene? Identifying incipient conflict or low-level conflicts before they become the sort of stabilization crisis that we have so often failed to resolve is a major challenge. How does one distinguish the conflict that is healthy political friction, or at least controllable disagreement, from the conflict that will become an all-consuming cancer? Is Sudan about to break down, or is it simply going through another difficult transi- tion? How about Venezuela? Or Thailand? There are ongoing efforts to identify “fragile states” using readily available indicators, but there is still no agreement on which indicators are significant predictors. And, of course, local conflicts are by definition “local.” In other words, they don’t draw attention to themselves early on. Competition for atten- tion and funds. When working in Haiti following the United Nations intervention, David Becker often heard from the slum dwellers: “You are only here spending money because we finally started fighting back.” Or, “Until the gangs started to kidnap rich businessmen’s kids, no one cared about us.” They were not entirely wrong. Preventing instability is simply not interesting for most donor countries. Western democracies tend to be self-absorbed—their priorities center around their own relatively immediate interests, and those interests (and funding) seldom call for intervening in a foreign land. Unless the conflict has grown to the point that it threatens the stability of a neighboring state, weakens an allied government or is risking the lives of millions, it is probably not going to be a priority. This problem is complicated by the fact that funding preven- tion programs would probably mean diverting money from exist- ing crisis response funds, creating bureaucratic wars even before the conflict has broken out on the ground. “Preventive stabilization” is barely recognized as a concept, and it has received relatively little attention from analysts, strategists and policymakers. David Becker, at right, hears from local leaders in Cité Soleil, Port au Prince, in 2009. COURTESYOFDAVIDBECKER