Ruth Leger Sivard has surveyed armed conflict from 1500 to 1990. She finds a steady increase in the number of conflicts from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and a much larger increase in war deaths over the centuries-with the twentieth century being by far the most bloody. Her data show a significant increase in the annual number of conflicts starting in the late 1970s, and they reach a post-World War II high in the early 1990s (see Figure 1).17
Although the overall outlook for preventing conflict has improved during the last ten years, the level of conflict has been fairly constant. Reliable historical evidence is ambiguous, however. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's annual register of major armed conflict-defined as organized violence between competing groups that has killed at least 1,000 people-shows a slight decline in the number of major armed conflicts since the end of the Cold War. But overall the picture suggests a relatively constant pattern over the past decade (see Table 2).18 These wars include intrastate conflicts; indeed, the overwhelming majority of entries falls in that category.
In short form, the three types of wars and potential wars are: wars involving nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction; interstate wars; and intrastate wars. A long answer would have a more elaborate taxonomy of the various pathologies because no single treatment fits all. For wars in each category we ask what has been done to prevent them and what more could be done. We also ask who has taken preventive action and who else could take preventive action.
Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction pose potentially the most deadly form of conflict. With the end of the Cold War, the likelihood of a species-threatening nuclear war has mercifully declined-but it has decidedly not been eliminated. With the collapse of the Soviet command and control state, and the consequent availability of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials for rogue states or terrorist groups, the likelihood of a single nuclear device or a dozen devices being exploded in the next decade has actually increased.19 In addition, despite the extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1997 for the indefinite future, a number of states still pursue nuclear weapons programs, for example, India, Iran, and Pakistan.
During the Cold War the challenge of preventing nuclear war was manifest most acutely in the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The danger of nuclear war was contained in several ways. First, deterrence worked. During much of the Cold War, a stable mutual deterrence relationship was widely (though not universally) regarded as one of the best safeguards against nuclear war. Second, arms control reduced risks of war by imposing restraints on forces and operations that managed the strategic balance and minimized the possibility of inadvertent or accidental nuclear war. Third, dialogue and détente dampened differences. In the Soviet-American context, the nuclear danger was to a large extent a function of relations between the two superpowers. Increasingly, meetings, summits, and regular communications tempered the Soviet-American relationship and contributed to a political environment in which the parties came to understand that they shared an interest in avoiding the major nuclear war of which they would be the first victims. The risk of misunderstanding and miscommunication was significantly reduced in comparison with the darkest Cold War years. Finally, promotion of norms and creation of regimes advanced the cause. During the Cold War, the threat of nuclear proliferation was addressed by trying to promote the norm of nonproliferation and by creating a treaty-based regime to help support that norm.
The first item on the current agenda for action should be massive cooperation on denuclearization with Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union to contain "loose nuclear weapons" and weapons-usable nuclear materials and to reduce the size of nuclear arsenals. Second, current nonproliferation regimes should be extended and strengthened, including reinforcement of the indefinite extension of the NPT, ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), cessation of the production of fissile materials, support for the Wassenaar Arrangement (the international successor to the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls [CoCOM]), strengthening of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), and enforcement of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Third, intense diplomacy and coercion will be required to prevent additional countries from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, for example, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea.
In sum, what is required is a renewed, across-the-board effort to establish norms that push nuclear weapons off center stage and into the background so that they play no active role in international politics. Taboos and norms against biological and chemical weapons must be enhanced. The recent victory in establishing the CWC should give new impetus to efforts to outlaw possession of biological weapons as well.
Interstate wars have been the main conflicts of the last several thousand years of history and are not likely to become extinct. Interstate war is almost "unthinkable" today in Western Europe, which has enjoyed five decades of peace after several centuries of interstate warfare. But the post-Cold War world saw a very big war in the Gulf in 1991; 1995 would likely have seen a war between Iraq and Kuwait (assisted by its friends), had Iraq not been successfully deterred. Interstate wars in the decade ahead may be fought by India and Pakistan (with the risk that the war might become nuclear); Greece and Turkey; Israel and Syria; Azerbaijan and Armenia; North and South Korea; and Eritrea and Ethiopia.
During the five decades since World War II, the efforts to prevent interstate wars have been striking and successful. While there is no established set of categories of action for preventing deadly conflict, to suggest the array and extent of actions that have been taken, primarily by the major democracies, we review the record under the following headings:
(1) Deterrence of aggressor states.
(2) domestic political and economic reform of states.
(3) arms control.
(4) developing an open international economy.
(5) strengthening international institutions promoting norms and cooperative security relations.
(6) preventive diplomacy, mediation, and arbitration.
Deterrence of Aggressor States
Deterrence, which may take the form of an alliance or a unilateral step, prevents
deadly conflicts by threatening to pose unacceptable costs on states that initiate
them. Such measures have included:
Domestic Political and Economic Reform of States
Promotion of democracy, human rights, minority rights, and the rule of law has
reduced the likelihood of deadly conflict. Because democracies rarely fight
one another, the number of potential wars has fallen. In addition, growing economic
prosperity has reduced the probability of war. Notable examples of such reforms
are:
Arms Control
Arms control has three objectives: to make war less likely; to make preparing
for war less costly; and to make war less destructive. The first two objectives
were the main focus of U.S.-Soviet Cold War arms control agreements; today efforts
to control "loose nukes" and prevent proliferation continue that emphasis. The
Chemical Weapons Convention and Biological Weapons Convention extend this focus.
Arms control measures to eliminate or reduce conventional weapons in Europe
and other regions, and the recent ban on land mines, extend this agenda into
promising new arenas. Among these agreements are the:
Developing an Open International Economy
Economic interdependence and open trading systems encourage peaceful relations
between states and promote prosperity-and even, perhaps, democracy-thus reducing
the potential for conflict. Among the most important economic initiatives have
been the:
Strengthening International Institutions Promoting Norms and Cooperative
Security Relations
Emphasizing the importance of international norms of peace and cooperation,
international institutions help prevent conflict by fostering a sense of accountability
to the norms, and creating an environment in which a state may fully realize
all of its national interests only by participating in the institutions and
adhering to the normative international structure. Examples of such institutions
are:
Preventive Diplomacy, Mediation, and Arbitration
Preventive diplomacy, mediation, and arbitration attempt to facilitate agreements
to resolve disputes that could cause deadly conflict. Examples of such mediation
include:
Future preventive diplomacy should include:
Intrastate wars-civil, ethnic, religious, or communal-are the most prevalent today and the least addressed (see map and table, appendixes A and B). The map suggests several factors shared by intrastate conflicts that other conflicts lack, even though they may be similar in most other respects. The simplest explanation identifies intrastate conflicts in territories where empires recently collapsed (states on the border of the former Soviet Union and in Africa) or where multiethnic states are democratizing and pluralizing. Other factors include the collapse of imperial arrangements that imposed order; the emergence of states with arbitrary borders; multiethnic and religious populations; weak or nonexistent institutions of government and authority; absence of established procedures for succession; and no traditions, habits, or experience in self-government. Beneath these proximate causes lie many deeper and longer-term enabling factors, including intrastate security concerns; distribution of ethnic groups; discriminatory political institutions; exclusionary national ideologies; intergroup and elite politics; failing economies; discriminatory economic systems, economic development and modernization; patterns of cultural discrimination; and problematic group histories.22
What "normally" prevents intrastate deadly conflict? Either of two conditions: a functioning state or imposed order. The study of international relations defines a state as an entity that "exercises a monopoly of legitimate violence within its borders."23 Thus where states are functioning, they prevent internal conflict. In many instances, however, they do so in ways that violate the minimum standards of justice. Tibet is devoid of large-scale, organized deadly conflict, but devoid also of justice. Kosovo also had order without justice, until the outbreak of violence in March 1998, after which it has had neither.
Order imposed by an outside power is a second traditional means of preventing deadly conflict. Imposition of order by a colonial power, such as Belgium in Rwanda from 1916 to 1962, or by a central government on outlying states or provinces-such as Belgrade under Tito in Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1980 and the Soviet Union in Chechnya, Tajikistan, and Eastern Europe-has avoided war for long periods.
Within societies, the absence of deadly conflict (i.e., organized killing) is a function at least of the capacities of state organs exercising and threatening violence to maintain order, the demands of individuals who are subject to these state organs, and outside interference that provides encouragement, supplies, weapons, and other sources of support. Once again, in seeking "order" questions about "justice" cannot be avoided.
In addressing the challenge of intrastate conflict, what can be done? Fifty years ago, this question was rarely asked. When it was asked, the answer was usually "nothing." Conflicts within states were considered strictly internal affairs and subject to international prohibitions against other states' interference. But as Shridath Ramphal, cochairman of the Commission on Global Governance, has argued, "Several of the elements of the nation-states system have become less credible, less assertive, less defining, even less hallowed. Sovereignty, self-determination, even non-intervention have had to yield some of their innocence. We still speak of them in the language of orthodoxy, but we know that global realities have curbed their claims, that they no longer reflect universal truths or represent undiluted norms."24
Today there is more of a consensus that the international community has a legitimate interest in preventing conflict within states, provided that the outcome is just. The questions are what to do, who should take action, how should they be motivated to act, and how can they ensure that they prevent deadly conflict with justice.
Our short list of actions follows. We divide the list into actions for operational prevention, when a crisis is looming, and structural prevention, long-term measures to prevent crises, such as support for democratization and market economies. Many of the actions suggested above for the prevention of interstate conflict are equally applicable for intrastate conflict, and they are included again here for the sake of completeness.
Operational Prevention
Structural Prevention