David A. Hamburg
December 1999
Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly
Conflict
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Carnegie Corporation of New York established the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict in May 1994 to address the looming threats to world peace of intergroup violence and to advance new ideas for the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict. The Commission is examining the principal causes of deadly ethnic, nationalist, and religious conflicts within and between states and the circumstances that foster or deter their outbreak. Taking a long-term, worldwide view of violent conflicts that are likely to emerge, the Commission seeks to determine the functional requirements of an effective system for preventing mass violence and to identify the ways in which such a system could be implemented. The Commission is also looking at the strengths and weaknesses of various international entities in conflict prevention and considering ways in which international organizations might contribute toward developing an effective international system of nonviolent problem solving.
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are similar to Reports to the Commission but address issues that are more time-sensitive
in nature.
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Copyright 1999 by Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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The Ditchley Conference summary and Note by the Director are copyright 1999
by The Ditchley Foundation and reprinted with permission.
01 00 99 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Overview: The International
Community, Democratization, and Conflict
Prevention
The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict set out in 1994 to answer
three questions: What are the problems posed by deadly ethnic, nationalist,
and religious conflict within and between states, and why is outside help often
necessary to deal with these problems? What can be done to prevent deadly conflict?
and Who should do the work? In the two essays in this volume, reprinted from
the 1993 and 1994 annual reports of Carnegie Corporation of New York, I presented
my views on the crucial importance of conflict prevention in today's world and
on how it might be approached, both by mobilizing organizations and institutions
worldwide and by strengthening the education of our children in conflict resolution.
Now, considering the past five years of the Commission's work, the civil wars
that raged during that time, and those that will evidently continue into the
next century, I feel even more strongly about international involvement for
conflict prevention, and particularly the involvement of the democracies. In
this overview I discuss the essential role of the international community in
conflict prevention and the importance of democratization, issues that I touched
on in the following essays.
WHY ANTAGONISTS OFTEN NEED HELP
There are several reasons why it is hard for antagonists to sort out major
problems on their own:
Contending parties all too often have little knowledge of conflict resolution, lacking the insights and institutions that might effectively cope with the problems.
Decision making in these conflicts tends to be impaired by intense emotions.
Over time, moderate elements on each side tend to lose out as a polarizing process occurs.
If the conflict cannot be resolved early, a segment of each side is likely to resort to violence as an organizing principle; physical destruction is seen as necessary to achieve group goals and the arming of hatred becomes increasingly attractive.
In these circumstances, parties on both sides are increasingly likely to invoke historical and cultural myths that build self-esteem and fan the flames of animosity for the other.
Revenge motives tend to grow, and current and historic prejudices translate
into rage and desire for retaliation, particularly if they are manipulated by
charismatic, demagogic leadership, as in the former Yugoslavia.
Thus, it is not unusual for problems to get so dangerous that they cannot be handled safely without outside help.
What kind of outside help is likely to be perceived as legitimate, fair-minded,
and competent? These considerations will become singularly important in the
world of the twenty-first century with its widespread destructive capacity.
The opportunity to intervene in a serious conflict when it has not gone far
down the road of danger and degradation is a consummation devoutly to be sought.
In problems of modern deadly conflict, an ounce of prevention is worth a ton
of cure.
CAN WE CONSTRUCT A SYSTEM FOR INTERGROUP CONFLICT
RESOLUTION?
In the kind of world that is emerging, it becomes very attractive to think
in terms of international cooperative security. A cooperative international
security regime to prevent the deadliest conflicts would require components
such as:
A strong orientation to prevention through early warning of emerging conflict, including the capacity for objective analysis of potential warning signals
An information system monitoring "hot spots," providing early warning about buildup of weapons and the intensification of danger
Reliable, systematic mechanisms for illuminating analysis based on deep knowledge of the area and of similar conflicts elsewhere
Visible, respected forums for discussion of problematic, disputed issues involving all the relevant parties; and drawing the world's attention to the basic facts in a responsible way
Opportunities for conflict resolution that are widely perceived as fair and could promptly be brought to bear on international and other intergroup grievances
Organized settings to encourage the expression of grievances in ways that foster empathy and restraint, utilizing to the extent possible culturally accepted mechanisms for reconciliation
Agreed-upon principles and techniques for participation in the cooperative
system that provide benefit for all; an array of political, economic, technological
and psychological incentives and sanctions that can be brought to bear on contending
parties before they have crossed the threshold of mass violence
This is a tall order. It may well require catastrophes before such a cooperative
security system can be created--e.g., a "small" nuclear war or a series of Yugoslavia-type
conflagrations. Perhaps the international community is most likely to learn
by disaster.
THE COMMUNITY OF ESTABLISHED DEMOCRACIES
The established democracies have learned to live and work together peacefully. The examples include NATO, the G-7, the Marshall Plan, the international financial institutions, and a variety of other shared and largely successful activities. The question is whether they can now become more effective in dealing with deadly conflict on a consistent basis, especially developing mechanisms of prevention.
The democracies could take the lead in formulating norms of decent behavior for all humanity with respect to such matters as proliferation, development, human rights, and democracy. They could include some emerging democracies in these considerations and, to the extent possible, the entire international community. Such norms of decent behavior could be spread widely throughout the world in this era of pervasive communication and they might well be widely appealing to people in most countries. In any event, the capacity of the community of established democracies to establish a system for prevention of the deadliest conflicts needs to be explored--and related to the capacity of the UN for such a system.
The democracies may act with the approval of and on behalf of the United Nations, or they may act in cooperation informally with the UN. Of course, such actions need not be military. Much more often they will be political and/or economic and in other modalities. In almost all cases, it will be important for the democracies to consult widely. This could be put on a systematic basis so that many other governments and nongovernmental organizations would have a good idea about the considerations leading to a particular action and could participate if appropriate. The mode of operation would be democratic in spirit across all national boundaries. Over time, representation of principles embodied in the day-to-day work of the democracies might spread throughout the world.
Just as Europe was poor and smashed after World War II, and very much in need
of economic and social development, so too are many other countries in need
of similar development at this time. In retrospect, it is all too easy to assume
that the recovery of Europe and Japan--and the emergence of Germany and Japan
as democracies--was a more or less automatic process. It was not. On the contrary,
it took a great deal of ingenuity and international cooperation to bring about
these highly desirable outcomes. Now there is need to build a world security
system in which economic growth can occur with fairness and cultural diversity
can be protected.
THE GROWING DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY AND VIOLENCE PREVENTION
For such a fortunate community with so much relevant experience in coping with the problems of modern societies, the democracies have a moral imperative to address in a systematic, deliberate, long-term way the path to democratization around the world. What can be done to foster a democratic atmosphere and to build institutions for nonviolent problem solving throughout the world?
New, emerging, and fragile democracies need help to strengthen the political and civic infrastructure. Technical assistance and financial aid can build the requisite processes and institutions, and public education can familiarize people with the processes and institutions of democracy: elections at both the national and local level; legislative bodies at the national and local levels, including support services; the rule of law embodied in an explicit legal framework, including a written constitution; an independent judiciary with the capacity to implement laws fairly; oversight institutions for public accountability; professional political and public administration; civilian institutional capacities to deal with security questions, both within and beyond the borders of the country; special measures to protect individual human rights, minority groups, and vulnerable sectors; mechanisms to deal with conflict that can be perceived as fair to all and effective in preventing violence; political parties, with no attempt to favor one party over another so long as they are all within the democratic family; the institutions of civil society (nongovernmental) to address important issues of concern to the population, such as working conditions, the environment, and human rights; science and technology for development; and independent media. Fragile democracies can be jeopardized by natural disasters, harsh ethnic conflicts, or authoritarian foci within the society, and the established democracies will have to decide when and how to protect them.
International mediation at an early stage could usefully be developed as an art form beyond present efforts. Building new democracies will probably include the fostering of innovative institutional arrangements that can take account of the greatest sensitivities likely to engender serious conflict and concomitantly accommodate ethnic diversity. A system of early warning would help the democracies recognize a fragile democracy slipping into crisis. Their embassies might serve as focal points in each emerging democracy for intellectual, technical, and moral support, not only in building democratic institutions in good times, but also for preventing deadly conflict when warning signals become clear.
The compelling danger of weapons proliferation will sooner or later get the attention of the democratic community. In the present context, it is worth considering human rights and democratic institutions as criteria for intervention. That is, the less democracy and the less protection of human rights, then the less tolerance of the international community for any weapons buildup. With respect to authoritarian regimes, it is a reasonable working assumption that the arms will be used in a violent way before long, both internally on the subjects of a repressive regime and externally in threatening or going to war with other countries.
The experience of Zambia in the early 1990s illustrates the way in which the advent of democracy can prevent a civil war. In this case, a peaceful transition occurred from an authoritarian state--run for a long time by a single leader--to a multiparty democracy. Of course, the long-run consolidation of democracy in such a very poor country with minimal democratic conditions will be difficult and crucial. But outside help proved to be useful, mainly coming from nongovernmental, highly respected organizations like The Carter Center. Such organizations have become increasingly concerned with helping nations on the precipice deal with conflicts within their own nations, particularly those arising out of the reawakening of old, lingering prejudices and the political exploitation of harsh, ethnic nationalism.
Such efforts call for a commitment to the inherent legitimacy of the society. This legitimacy is built on leadership that reflects the wishes of the people; attitudes respecting human rights and mechanisms that protect human rights; a personal stake for individuals in the future of the nation so that sacrifices can be made in the nation-building process; and perhaps most important of all, tolerance for diversity, including religious and ethnic differences. Democracy is able to cope well with conflict nonviolently through institutional mechanisms. It is a game that all can play with reasonably good results so long as all accept the rules of the game--and the rules of the game are agreed upon and updated periodically by common consent. Such ideas are attractive in virtually all cultures once they are understood.
Democracies need to communicate the crucial aspects of the democratic experience. They can demonstrate how to take different political arguments into account, to accommodate the views of different sectors of the society, to work out choices that are fair to all, to be aware of mechanisms for nonviolent conflict resolution. The democracies can help create an atmosphere in which ideals are meaningful and worth striving for even though hard to attain, where there is faith in successive approximations over time toward a better way of life.
There is great need for highly skillful mediators or pre-mediators who enter into disputes, however informally, as a reasonably objective outside party trying to help contending parties see that they have similarities as well as differences, that they have the capacity, intelligence, and decency to find common ground. It is particularly important to develop a consensus around processes for sorting out difficult problems and to move toward institutions that can make such processes reliable and readily available. In short, from an early stage in democracy building, it is important that people understand the possibilities for nonviolent conflict resolution and the value of accommodation, that in the long run cooperation can often lead to greater benefits than conflict, that superordinate goals of compelling value to all concerned can be achieved only by cooperation. Examples from other countries in other regions give a reality to this possibility. Leaders of emerging democracies should see these processes firsthand to get a vivid sense of how the system can work.
There is a great need, all the way from fundamental principles to operational details, to educate for democracy. Indeed, in the era of modern telecommunications, it might be feasible to have a worldwide democratic network under highly respected auspices--perhaps a mix of governmental and nongovernmental supporters. Such a network could present many interesting examples of ongoing efforts to build and strengthen democratic institutions in rich and poor countries alike. This could be done in a variety of languages and adapted to many cultures. In a relatively short time, it might be feasible to enhance the level of understanding throughout the world of what is involved in democracy and its potential benefits for all.
Winston Churchill remarked that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. In this century the decline of tyranny and the expansion of representative and responsive government are signs of a developing capacity to prevent deadly conflict. Combined with the sharpening focus on human rights and social justice and growing economic well-being, the conditions for conflict prevention are improving. We must pool our strengths to extend these achievements and forge together an enduring peace in the next century.
Preventing Contemporary Intergroup Violence
David A. Hamburg
The world of the next century will be different in profound respects from any
that we have ever known before--deeply interdependent economically, closely
linked technologically, and progressively more homogenized through the movement
of information, ideas, people, and capital around the world at unprecedented
speed. At the same time, it will be more multicentric in the devolution of economic,
political, and military power to smaller adaptable units. Some nations will
undergo a perilous fragmentation, as the centralizing forces that once held
people together are pulled apart and traditional concepts of national sovereignty
and nationhood are contested, sometimes violently. How these tendencies will
be reconciled is far from clear.
President's essay, reprinted from the 1993 annual report of Carnegie Corporation
of New York. The president's annual essay is a personal statement representing
his own views. It does not necessarily reflect the foundation's policies.
One of the most striking facts of our time is the way technology has come to dominate and organize our lives, presenting unimaginable benefits, opportunities, and choices within a matter of decades, yet unleashing the destructive power of advanced weaponry that in an instant of history can do immense damage, even destroy humanity.
While the more complex and contradictory world that we have entered is of our own making, we often approach its problems with the biological orientations and emotional responses of our ancient ancestry, bringing attitudes, customs, and institutions that were formed largely in earlier times and that are perhaps no longer appropriate. Foremost is our tendency as a species toward prejudice, egocentrism, and ethnocentrism. In these times of rapid world transformation, as people have flowed like floodwaters across the earth, families, social support networks, old ways of forming group solidarity, and other traditional patterns of living have been strained or broken apart. Many individuals feel a heightened sense of uncertainty and insecurity. Some react with exaggerated intolerance of the outside world or with violence toward those who are seen as alien and threatening. Political demagogues can readily inflame these feelings in a context of severe vulnerability.
The historical record is full of every sort of slaughter based on the human capability to make invidious distinctions between in-groups and out-groups often associated with the frustration of fundamental drives, deeply felt beliefs about identity, or a sense of jeopardy to group survival. In this century, a period of the most rapid industrialization and wrenching transition, human slaughter far exceeds any that has gone before. Just since the United Nations was formed in 1945, there have been upwards of 150 small-scale wars resulting in more than 20 million dead and easily four times that many disabled or displaced. Millions have perished at the hands of their own countrymen in Cambodia, Indonesia, Burundi, Rwanda, Nigeria, Paraguay, Tibet, Uganda, Angola, and the Sudan. Most recently the former Yugoslavia has generated at least 150,000 dead and more than two million refugees.
Today worldwide, fed by the powerful currents of aggressive ethnic nationalism,
there is a virtual epidemic of armed civil or intranational conflict the kind
often thought of as "internal" but that can readily spill over the borders of
nation-states. While international attention has been on the savage fighting
in Bosnia, long-simmering antagonisms among deeply mingled ethnic groups have
come to the surface in the successor states to the Soviet Union, exacerbated
by the harsh economic conditions that prevail there as well as by the erosion
of social norms. Hundreds of such nationality "hot spots" exist in these vast
territories. Sixty-five million people in the former Soviet Union do not live
in their primary areas of origin, and many are fearful about their treatment
as minorities in the new nations. The international community is only just beginning
to realize the potential gravity of these various conflicts. Russia herself,
with her huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, has shown serious signs of instability.
Intergroup conflict is an ancient part of the human legacy, and tyrants have long understood how to exploit for their own ends the human tendency to attribute malevolence primarily or solely to other groups, deflecting anger onto the hated others, who are blamed for all their troubles. Many different political, social, economic, and pseudoscientific ideologies have been mobilized to support hostile positions toward those who are outside the primary community or who deviate from community norms.
All that is very old and once upon a time may have been adaptive, but these characteristics of our species have become exceedingly dangerous, primarily because of the enormous destructive power of the advanced weaponry we have created. Weapons themselves do not cause dangerous conflicts, but their availability in large quantities can easily intensify and prolong such conflicts. The use of sophisticated technology, moreover, enhances the risk that the consequences of local wars will become regional or global.
While nuclear warheads, which can be carried by missiles with tremendous accuracy over great distances, represent the ultimate in human violence, the increased killing power of enhanced conventional, chemical, and biological weapons also has the potential for making life everywhere miserable and disastrous. In the past, no matter how ferocious the conflict, humanity could not destroy itself even if it wanted to. Now it can. One of the most serious problems the world will face in the next decade is the proliferation throughout the world of these modern deadly weapons or the knowledge and technical capability for making them and the looming possibility that they will be used.
In this post-Cold War environment of many small wars and potentially large ones, a new approach to international problem solving may be needed. The system of international diplomacy that evolved over the past two centuries focused on power relations between nation-states. Yet the risks, costs, casualties, and tragedies of the twentieth century should tell us, if nothing else does, that this may be far from an optimal system for dealing with conflict between peoples of the same nation or the problem of weapons proliferation.
ATTACHMENTS AND AGGRESSIONThe capacity for attachment and the capacity for violence are fundamentally connected in human beings. We fight with other people in the belief that we are protecting ourselves, our loved ones, and the group with which we identify most strongly. Altruism and aggression are intimately linked in war and other conflicts. My lifetime has witnessed terrible atrocities committed in the name of some putatively high cause. Yet there have also been vivid examples of the reconstruction of societies, major reconciliations, and real enlargement of opportunities for substantial segments of a population. What are the conditions under which the outcome can go one way or the other? If we could understand such questions better, maybe we could learn to tilt the balance in favor of a stable, enduring peace among human groups in the twenty-first century.
Even though in-group/out-group distinctions are ubiquitous in human societies, easy to learn and hard to forget, there is certainly the possibility that we humans can learn to minimize these tendencies. This may be one of the crucial roads we have to travel in order to cope with conflict in the transformed world of the future. Can we find a basis for common human identification across a diversity of cultures and national groups?
Below, I try to sketch some promising lines of inquiry and innovation that
bear strongly on the two-sided coin of human cooperation and conflict and that
suggest ways the world's institutions can cope with burgeoning threats to international
peace. It is worth considering how the various approaches to the prevention
of the deadliest conflicts and the promotion of international cooperation might
be strengthened, particularly in light of superordinate goals essential for
the future of humanity and our habitat.
Given the myriad possibilities for world conflagration, the nature and sources of human conflict are deserving of the most careful and searching attention. Yet, until quite recently they have not been a major focus of systematic analysis and even today are rather marginalized in the world's great research and educational institutions. The scientists and scholars heavily engaged in such inquiry have been largely lacking in support. The field of ethnic conflict resolution, moreover, is relatively new and weakly institutionalized. The international community has nothing like an effective system for preventing the deadliest conflicts.
The powerful sectors of society everywhere, for their part, have tended to be complacent about such matters and to see them as someone else's problem, far away. Avoidance often substitutes for foresight, authority for evidence, and blaming for problem solving. The capacity for wishful thinking, as it is for self-justification, seems boundless in matters of human conflict.
All this may be beginning to change now, stimulated by deep concerns about the dangers of contemporary conflict and by the belated recognition of the ubiquity of killing and maiming in human experience. Conflicts have become everyone's business. The idea that states and peoples are free to conduct their quarrels, no matter how deadly, is outdated in the nuclear age and in a shrinking world where local hostilities can rapidly become international ones with devastating consequences. Similarly, the notion that tyrants are free to commit atrocities on their own people is rapidly becoming obsolete.
A substantial body of careful empirical research on conflict resolution and international peacemaking, detailing the historical experience with forms of negotiation, mediation, arbitration, recognition, and power sharing is at last beginning to emerge, and the results are providing new insights and guidelines useful to practitioners. It is apparent that there is no single approach to conflict resolution that offers overriding promise. Just as the sources and manifestations of human conflict are immensely varied, so too are the approaches to understanding, preventing, and resolving conflicts.
The field can benefit from more dynamic interplay between theory and practice. The great challenge is to move with a sense of urgency to organize a broader and deeper effort to understand these issues and, above all, to develop more effective ways in the real world of preventing and resolving conflicts short of disaster.
Additionally, there needs to be serious worldwide education about forms of
nonviolent problem solving that can generate public support. The price of resolving
international disputes by force of arms is becoming too high; even putative
winners are beginning to recognize this unwelcome fact. But finding workable
alternatives that are broadly acceptable, particularly in the realm of preventive
systems, will challenge the international community beyond any prior experience.
While it is certainly not beyond possibility to move this subject higher on
the agenda of this nation and others, it will require a much deeper grasp of
the dangers among leadership groups and the general public than now exists.
SOVEREIGNTY AND SELF-DETERMINATION
Most people everywhere live in multiethnic societies. Worldwide there are several thousand ethnic groups versus fewer than two hundred nation-states. In Europe, as in Africa, national borders were in large part imposed by external powers without regard to geography or shared ethnicity. Conditions were created in which members of the same identity group were split apart, leaving open the possibility that all groups could make territorial claims on each other. If now every ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or cultural group sought to establish its own nation, there would be no limit to fragmentation precipitating violence, immense suffering, and a flow of refugees on an unimaginable scale.
Sometimes in the modern world it is possible to separate out ethnic groups that wish to have their own nation-state and create a situation in which borders essentially coincide with a living space of that particular group; but this is unusual. Although secession may be carried off democratically and peacefully, as in Czechoslovakia, this is rare, and the quest to create a separate state or redraw borders will usually prove to be a chimera.
The attractive concept of self-determination was given an idealistic boost after both world wars, but the conflict in Bosnia shows how dangerous sudden secessions, rationalized on the basis of self-determination, can be. The creation of new states by sudden secession may trigger fierce fighting not only within a country but also across international borders. There is ample evidence of this in the states of the former Soviet Union, where the problem is complicated by an immense armory of highly destructive weapons. So the concept of self-determination will have to be reassessed in light of contemporary circumstances, and the conflicting values involved clarified and dealt with peacefully.
Beyond this, there is an urgent need to create the conditions under which various identity groups can sort out their differences and learn to live in a state of harmonious interaction with their neighbors. Ways must be found to foster self-esteem, meaningful group membership, and internal cohesion without the necessity for harsh depreciation of out-groups and without resort to violence in the event of a clash of interests.
A fundamental requisite of mutual accommodation is development of a genuinely
free civil society within a democratic framework, where there is truly equal
citizenship, respect for human rights, protection against the abuse of power,
freedom to express differences openly and constructively, and a fair distribution
of opportunities. Many paths to mutual accommodation are possible: nonviolent
agreed secession; peaceful, negotiated territorial border revision; federation
or confederation; regional or functional autonomy; and respected cultural pluralism,
within each nation and across national boundaries. Each case presents a particular
set of opportunities and constraints, and each solution will inevitably be reached
only after painful deliberation, taxing the patience and support of all. Whatever
the outcome, it must eventually satisfy the reasonable claims of most citizens,
though not necessarily the intolerant militants or extremists.
SHARED GOALS OF A SINGLE WORLDWIDE SPECIES
To an increasing extent, we will have to learn to broaden our social identifications in light of shared interests and superordinate goals across all of humanity. We must come to think of ourselves in a fundamental sense as a single interdependent, meaningfully attached, extended family. This is in fact what we are; but to state this is not to assimilate it as a psychological reality.
Superordinate goals have the potentially powerful effect of unifying disparate groups in the search for the vital benefit that can be obtained only by their cooperation. Such goals can override the differences that people bring to the situation.
What could constitute shared goals of this extraordinary significance? The avoidance of nuclear destruction is one. Protection of the environment is emerging as another, since it may well come to involve jeopardy to the human habitat. The creation of new forms of community, social cohesion, and solidarity in the face of the vast impersonal modern society we have wrought is another. The threat of worldwide economic deterioration might also become salient. At a regional level, the desire to improve economic prospects can impel two or more nations to cooperate in the development of agriculture, transportation, electricity, and water resources, increasing confidence and mutually beneficial interdependence.
These are mainly survival goals, updated to the modern era, where the reference for adaptation goes beyond the sense of belonging in the immediate valued group to identification with a much larger unit or ideal. The current, worldwide epidemic of severe ethnic conflict should help us realize that we are all in this huge leaking boat together in a gathering storm.
The ancient propensity toward narrow identity, harsh intolerance, and deadly
intergroup conflict will confront us with new dangers in the next century and
challenge us as never before. By the same token it will create a great opportunity
to identify the fundamental properties of superordinate goals and their myriad
possibilities in the world of small- and large-scale wars that have proven so
contagious in recent years. How can all of humanity benefit, indeed survive,
by adopting new attitudes, practices, and institutions?
CHANGING PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY
In the period following World War II, the international community put all too little emphasis on the protection of minority rights. Concepts of self-determination, sovereignty, and the sanctity of borders prevented outsiders from mediating ethnic tensions within or between states. International law on self-determination limited itself primarily to anticolonial movements.
When international intervention did occur, it was usually associated with partisan superpower support in the context of Cold War rivalry. In this environment and with its almost infinite respect for the nation-state, the United Nations was virtually helpless to intervene in most serious conflicts. Mediation by governments or nongovernmental organizations in intergroup conflicts also tended to occur only after fighting had erupted between opposing groups. This was the case in the Arab-Israeli disputes, Nagorno-Karabakh, Yugoslavia, and the Sudan.
But with the ending of the Cold War, the growth of a dynamic and interdependent world economy, and the blurring of national boundaries by modern communication and transportation, nations have an opportunity to deal cooperatively with world problems unhampered by ideological rivalries. In particular they can now address seriously the paradoxically hostile separatism that is stirring up new conflicts around the world. They can begin to deal with the severe ecological damage and resource depletion, huge disparities between rich and poor, and denial of aspiration that are at the heart of much of intergroup violence.
Some experts, drawing on years of study and diplomatic experience in dealing with serious conflicts, envision a shift taking place in the nature of international relations from the traditional power-oriented, authoritarian, and controlling model toward one that is more complex and multifaceted, in which mutually beneficial political and economic relations are of growing importance.
The older paradigm took it for granted that human beings were overwhelmingly selfish and therefore would respond mainly to coercion. Interests were defined narrowly in terms of power. This can now usefully be enlarged to a broader view that is more sympathetic to basic human needs for physical and economic security, social justice, and political freedom. Such a view relies less on coercive measures and more on the clarification of fundamental concerns and underlying common interests and on ways to change political environments toward democracy.
An indication of a shift in the paradigms of diplomacy is the recent willingness of states to yield some historically sensitive sovereign prerogatives in the interests of achieving larger political and economic benefits. But progress here is hard-won and subject to regression with little notice.
Still, the remarkably peaceful ending of the Cold War might in due course
provide the basis for a new system of international, democratic, nonviolent
problem solving aimed ultimately at prevention of the deadliest conflicts. This
is an immense challenge to serious thinkers, penetrating analysts, and innovative
practitioners.
A POST-COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM
If aggrieved groups have recourse to a respected external authority, whether governments, multilateral institutions, nongovernmental organizations, or other bridge-building or mediating links, they might be less likely to engage in secessionist activities or appeal to their ethnic kin from outside to come to their rescue. Whatever can nurture a more cosmopolitan identity rather than a parochial, narrowly defined ethnic identity will be helpful in the long term.
To this end, the international community can formulate general standards for resolving disputes and for satisfying self-determination claims to a reasonable extent, in the context of an existing state if feasible. It can develop a preventive orientation, monitoring "hot spots," analyzing the potential sources of conflict, and becoming involved early as conflicts emerge. It can analyze ways in which economic access to and participation in the international economy can help ensure adherence to standards of decent behavior in intergroup relations. It can encourage ways of facilitating the growth of mutually beneficial loose associations or confederations.
A new international consensus toward conflict prevention and resolution could support the provision of visible, respected forums for the expression of grievances among the relevant parties and of organized settings that foster empathy and restraint, in which culturally accepted techniques for reconciliation are used to the maximum extent possible. It could instill a process of joint problem solving in which representatives of the different groups mutually explore their respective interests, basic needs, and fervent aspirations. It could have a means of identifying shared goals such as regional economic development and aid in the building of inclusive democratic institutions.
Such a consensus could lead to mechanisms for organizing an ongoing series of reciprocal goodwill gestures; for drafting possible agreements, even modest next steps, that show the possibility of finding common ground in a mode of civil discourse; for building institutions where parties can learn about negotiation and democratic ways of coping; and for utilizing multilateral, regional, and nongovernmental resources to create incentives and skills for negotiation, cooperation, and help with economic development.
These desiderata could apply to the resolution of a wide range of large, intergroup
conflicts, spanning traditional international relations and contemporary ethnic
tensions. But what entities could implement such an international system for
preventing the deadliest conflicts? The United Nations? The community of established
democracies? Some interplay between the two? Other international mechanisms?
There is a growing interest by the international community in the possibility of broadening the role of the United Nations. With its legitimacy as the most significant global institution striving for democratic ideals oriented toward a peaceful world order, it might usefully intervene in some "internal affairs" to prevent deadly conflict, render humanitarian assistance, and aid transitions to more democratic systems of governance.
In January 1992, for the first time in the history of the institution, a special meeting of the Security Council of the United Nations was held at the level of heads of state. It was a summit meeting called to examine the functions of the UN, particularly with respect to conflict resolution. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was asked to prepare a plan for strengthening the capacity of the UN to engage in preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and peacekeeping. This was an unprecedented occasion and expressed a strong commitment to the original purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter drawn up a half century earlier.
The secretary-general responded some months later with a remarkable document, An Agenda for Peace, which drew upon many ideas and proposals from member states, regional and nongovernmental organizations, and individuals. Some aspects of the document are groundbreaking. In it Boutros-Ghali took note of changes in the concept of sovereignty: "The time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty . . . has passed; its theory was never matched by reality. It is the task of leaders of states today to understand this and to find a balance between the needs of good internal governance and the requirements of an ever more interdependent world."
The secretary-general put emphasis on fact-finding and analysis--to identify at the earliest possible stage the circumstances that could produce serious conflict--and on the need for preventive diplomacy to resolve the most immediate problems, with attention to underlying causes of conflict. While placing a high priority on the UN's having an early warning system and the means for early intervention, he did not ignore the necessity for it to deal effectively at later stages with its more familiar functions of peacemaking and peacekeeping. Improvement in the former could include strengthening the role of the International Court of Justice (the principal judicial organ of the UN) and introducing confidence-building measures, economic assistance, and, if necessary, sanctions and the use of military force. Boutros-Ghali considered the increased demands on the UN for peacekeeping and the complex organizational changes that will be necessary if the UN is to be more effective in these domains.
He also considered preventive deployment, which goes beyond earlier UN practice. There may be circumstances that justify deploying forces prior to the outbreak of fighting, if such help is requested by governments or parties to the fighting. The aim is to limit or control the violence, help ensure that security is maintained, assist in conciliation efforts, even establish a demilitarized zone before a conflict is well established, and provide humanitarian assistance.
To the functions he was asked to comment on, the secretary-general added a fourth category--postconflict peacebuilding--having the aim of constructing a more durable foundation for peace. The creation of a new environment after a conflict is the counterpart of preventive diplomacy before conflict. While preventive diplomacy seeks to identify at the earliest stage the circumstances that could produce a serious conflict and remove the sources of danger, postconflict peacebuilding aims to prevent a crisis from recurring. It emphasizes, as does preventive diplomacy, cooperative efforts to cope with underlying economic, social, and humanitarian problems.
The secretary-general's report underscored the importance of joint efforts to nurture democratic practices and, by implication, democratic institutions, since so many countries in a state of conflict have had little or no democratic experience. Similarly, in many arenas there is a need for the UN to provide technical assistance in the rebuilding phase and to place the conflicting parties on a sounder economic basis for their own internal development. As a practical matter, Boutros-Ghali cited the problem of how to get rid of the millions of mines that now litter the lands where conflicts have gone on. Doing so will restore not only agriculture and transportation but hope and confidence so that citizens can participate fully in the rebuilding. The secretary-general recognized the importance of working with regional organizations and the nongovernmental sector in carrying out such functions.
Implementing this agenda will necessarily be difficult and the obstacles formidable. If the United Nations is to play these roles effectively, it will require much more substantial and dependable financial and political support than it has ever received before. For this to happen there will need to be a much higher level of public understanding about the UN's current functions and its potential than now exists. And there will need to be some changes in structure and function.
The United Nations is not, and never will be, a world government. It is an
intergovernmental organization of sovereign states that seek common ground for
cooperation in their long-term self-interest. It is perforce large and multifaceted,
disparate in its composition and in the outlook of its members, and emotionally
charged from its past history and from current difficulties in the world. As
such, it cannot be an optimal instrument for all efforts at preventive diplomacy
or conflict resolution. Nevertheless, if it did not exist, something very much
like it would have to be invented. There simply has to be a comprehensive, worldwide
forum for global issues. Surely it is time to consider how some of its functions,
and the components and mechanisms within it, could be extended, and new ones
created if necessary, in order to strengthen the hand of the international community
in preventing highly lethal conflicts.
The democracies of Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia have shown that they can live together peacefully even as they compete. On the other hand, they have failed badly in certain situations, such as Bosnia. Increasingly they are likely to take the lead in formulating international norms of conduct with respect to intergroup relations, the proliferation of highly lethal weaponry, economic development in poorer nations, human rights, and the growth of democratic institutions. They have the technological, economic, and political strength to establish such norms even if tyrannical governments are offended.
The established democracies may act on such issues with the approval of or on behalf of the UN, or they may cooperate with it informally. Usually their actions will be political and economic in nature rather than military. In almost all cases they will need to consult widely with each other on a systematic basis.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a prime example of the ability of
established democracies to work together--initially to counteract an aggressive
Soviet Union, provide for European security, and foster German recovery in a
democratic mode. Could a similar alliance, involving a wider coalition of democracies,
be organized to ensure security on a worldwide basis, fuel economic growth with
fairness, protect cultural diversity, and foster democratic values?
As important as the United Nations is, there are other organizations of the international community that could be effective in preventing deadly conflicts. The involvement of the permanent members of the UN Security Council may be crucial for some regional conflicts, as in Cambodia, but other disputes may be handled at the regional level. The potential of regional mechanisms for dispute resolution in intergroup conflicts deserves serious attention in the next decade. The European Community, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe and its European Court of Human Rights, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Organization of American States, the Organization of African Unity, and the Arab League all need strengthening in this regard.
Various specialized international organizations, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the Law of the Sea Tribunal, can play a useful role in resolving disagreements surrounding a particular set of issues. Bilateral arrangements can also be created to adjudicate disputes between nations. The U.S.-Iran Claims Tribunal demonstrated that two hostile nations with different languages, laws, and goals were able to settle matters of considerable importance to both sides.
Nongovernmental organizations can also play an important part in resolving
disputes, cooperating with the UN and with regional organizations. Former President
Jimmy Carter, for example, has established through The Carter Center in Atlanta
an international network for mediation and conflict resolution.
The scientific community is probably the closest approximation we now have to a truly international community, sharing certain basic interests, values, and standards as well as a fundamental curiosity about the nature of matter, life, behavior, and the universe. The shared quest for understanding is one that has no inherent boundaries. In any situation of potentially serious conflict, the scientific outlook can contribute to the construction of a framework for conflict resolution and for building a peaceful world. It takes a world view that embodies multiple truths, not some simple ultimate truth; it seeks evidence, and it is prepared to learn from experience. This same empirical spirit is frequently helpful in defusing passions aroused by social conflict. It provides one of the pathways toward a broader-than-conventional perspective that can be learned by all peoples and that can build bridges across cultures.
In the realm of scientific research, the interactions of biological, psychological,
and social processes in the development of human aggressiveness leading to violent
conflict must constitute an important frontier in the decades ahead. A shared
commitment to the humane uses of science and technology could offer a great
vista of hope.
This analysis suggests the importance of having cross-cutting or overlapping group memberships in the modern world. Cross-cutting relations are those that connect subgroups of society or connect nations in ways that overcome in-group/out-group distinctions and prejudicial stereotypes. They involve the opportunity for members of alien, suspicious, or hostile groups to spend time together, to work together, to play together, and even to live together for extended periods of time, gaining a sense of shared humanity.
On the international level, there must be concerted efforts to expand favorable contact between people from different groups and nations. Some measure of comprehension of a strange culture is vital. Educational, cultural, and scientific exchanges can be helpful. At a deeper level, joint projects involving sustained cooperation can provide, if only on a small scale, an experience of working together toward a superordinate goal. There are many ways to break down antagonisms between groups or, preferably, prevent them from arising in the first place. International organizations can do much to promote empathic personal contact and overlapping loyalties that cut across in-group/out-group antagonisms.
Those of us who have a deep sense of belonging in groups that cut across ethnic
or national lines may serve to bridge different groups and help others move
toward a wider sense of social identity. Building such bridges will need many
people interacting across traditional barriers on a basis of mutual respect.
Nothing in our history as a species would suggest there is a readiness for such
a wider sense of personal identity; yet it must be possible to engender this
in the next century and to do so on a broader scale than ever before.
There are other ways to create positive connections between groups. Families, schools, community organizations, religious institutions, and the media throughout the years of human growth and development are pivotal institutions that can shape attitudes and interpersonal skills toward either decent relations or hatred and violence. In the twenty-first century it will be necessary in child raising to put deliberate, explicit emphasis on developing prosocial orientations and a sense of worth based not on depreciation of others but on the constructive attributes of oneself and others. Taking turns, sharing, and cooperating, especially in learning and problem solving: these norms, established on a simple basis in the first few years of life, can open the way to beneficial human relationships that can have significance throughout a person's life.
A secure attachment of infant to mother or other adult caregiver provides a crucial foundation for the development of prosocial behavior. It is important to focus on the nature of parental behavior that can promote or retard these tendencies. Not only schools but religious and community organizations should foster positive reciprocity, cross-cutting relations, awareness of superordinate goals, and a mutual aid ethic in children and adolescents. The largely unfulfilled educational potential of the media can also be helpful in improving intergroup relations, as "Sesame Street" has shown. These same generic orientations and skills can be extended from childhood all the way up through adulthood to membership in larger units, possibly even including international relations in due course.
The painfully difficult effort to achieve decent, fair, peaceful relations
among diverse human groups is an enterprise that must be renewed. While weapons
of mass destruction pose the greatest danger, economic decline and environmental
degradation will be a growing challenge to survival for many in the years ahead.
People of humane and democratic inclination will need sustained cooperation
throughout the world to build effective systems for dealing with these great
problems. Ideas are emerging, analysis is proceeding, useful models exist. The
current turmoil could provide a constructive stimulus for practical arrangements
that help us learn to live together at last.
Education for Conflict Resolution
Can We Learn to Live Together?
David A. Hamburg
In the fall of 1994, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union,
reflected on a decade of intense involvement with political leaders all over
the world. One of his outstanding conclusions was the large extent to which
they see "brute force" as their ultimate validation. His observation, based
on abundant experience, highlights a long-standing, historically deadly inclination
of leaders of many kinds from many places to interpret their mandate as being
strong, tough, aggressive, even violent. For all too many, this is indeed the
essence of leadership.
President's essay, reprinted from the 1994 annual report of Carnegie Corporation
of New York. The president's annual essay is a personal statement representing
his own views. It does not necessarily reflect the foundation's policies. This
essay is based on a presentation made in June 1994 at a Nobel symposium.
Gorbachev, in control of a vast nuclear arsenal, not to speak of immense power in conventional, chemical, and biological weapons, was wise enough not to interpret his own leadership in terms of brute force. But the world is full of leaders who do. More and more often, they will have massive killing power at their disposal in the twenty-first century. Look at the scale of slaughter in Rwanda with penny-ante weapons!
It is time to take seriously the remark of Archibald MacLeish in the aftermath of World War II: "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed." He was writing about the mission of the emerging international institutions that were vividly mindful of the carnage of World War II and the Holocaust, but his words apply to the furious small wars of today.
The human species seems to have a virtuoso capacity for making harsh distinctions between groups and for justifying violence on whatever scale the technology of the time permits. Moreover, fanatical behavior has a dangerous way of recurring across time and locations. Such behavior is old, but what is historically new and very threatening is the destructive power of our weaponry and its ongoing worldwide spread. Also new is the technology that permits rapid, vivid, widely broadcast justifications for violence. In such a world, human conflict is a subject that deserves the most careful and searching inquiry. It is a subject par excellence for public understanding. Yet today's education has little to say on the subject. Worse still, education almost everywhere has ethnocentric orientations.
Can we do better? Can we educate ourselves to avoid conflict or peacefully
resolve it? Is it possible for us to modify our attitudes and orientations so
that we practice greater tolerance and mutual aid at home and in the world?
Perhaps it is unlikely. But the stakes are so high now that even a modest gain
on this goal would be exceedingly valuable. This essay explores a few, and only
a very few, of the possibilities brought to light by recent inquiry and innovation.
The examples are meant to be evocative--better ones may well be available. They
are meant to move this subject higher on the world's agenda.
INSIGHTS INTO INTERGROUP HOSTILITY
The challenge is immense. Both in field studies and experimental research by social scientists, the evidence is very strong: We humans are remarkably prone to form partisan distinctions between our own and other groups, to develop a marked preference for our own group, to accept favorable evaluations of the products and performances of the in-group, and to make unfavorable evaluations of other groups that go far beyond the objective evidence or the requirements of a situation. Indeed, it seems difficult for us to avoid making invidious distinctions even when we want to.
Orientations of ethnocentrism and prejudice are rooted in our ancient past and were probably once adaptive. Over the millennia, our estimate of personal worth if not our very survival has been built on the sense of belonging to a valued group--a sense that seems to go hand in glove with the impulse to assign negative value to those who are not of our group. Both these tendencies historically have been reinforced by parental and social education beginning in early childhood in nearly every human society.
Today, reinforcement occurs at home, in the schools, in the streets, and in the mass media. The cumulative effect of widespread frustrating conditions also exacerbates the development of prejudice and stereotyped thinking. Political firebrands put gasoline on the embers. Worldwide, the education received from multiple sources is still remarkably ethnocentric. In some places ethnocentrism and prejudice are inflamed by official propaganda, the cultivation of religious stereotypes, and political demagoguery, leading to intergroup violence that is justified in the name of some putatively high purpose.
The global outburst of intergroup violence, with its explosive mixture of
ethnic, religious, and national strivings, is badly in need of illumination.
People everywhere need to understand why we behave as we do, what dangerous
legacy we carry with us, and how we can convert fear to hope.
MUST CHILDREN GROW UP HATEFUL? A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE
Education, via the family, schools, the media, and community organizations, must be turned into a force for reducing intergroup conflict. It must serve to enlarge our social identifications in light of common characteristics and superordinate goals. It must seek a basis for fundamental human identification across a diversity of cultures in the face of manifest conflict. We are, in fact, a single, interdependent, meaningfully attached, worldwide species.
The question is whether human beings can learn more constructive orientations toward those outside their group while maintaining the values of group allegiance and identity. From an examination of a great deal of laboratory and field research, it seems reasonable to believe that, in spite of very bad habits from the past, we can indeed learn new habits of mind.
There is an extensive body of research on intergroup contact that bears on this question. For example, experiments have demonstrated that the extent of contact between groups that are negatively oriented toward one another is not the most important factor in achieving a more constructive orientation. Much depends on whether the contact occurs under favorable conditions. If there is an aura of mutual suspicion, if the parties are highly competitive or are not supported by relevant authorities, or if contact occurs on the basis of very unequal status, then it is not likely to be helpful, whatever the amount of exposure. Contact under unfavorable conditions can stir up old tensions and reinforce stereotypes.
On the other hand, if there is friendly contact in the context of equal status, especially if such contact is supported by relevant authorities, and if the contact is embedded in cooperative activity and fostered by a mutual aid ethic, then there is likely to be a strong positive outcome. Under these conditions, the more contact the better. Such contact is then associated with improved attitudes between previously suspicious or hostile groups as well as with constructive changes in patterns of interaction between them.
Other experiments demonstrate the power of shared, highly valued superordinate goals that can only be achieved by cooperative effort. Such goals can override the differences that people bring to the situation and often have a powerful, unifying effect. Classic experiments readily made strangers at a boys' camp into enemies by isolating them from one another and heightening competition. But when powerful superordinate goals were introduced, enemies were transformed into friends.
These experiments have been replicated in work with business executives and
other professionals with similar results. So the effect is certainly not limited
to children and youth. Indeed, the findings have pointed to the beneficial effects
of working cooperatively under conditions that lead people to formulate a new,
inclusive group, going beyond the subgroups with which they entered the situation.
Such effects are particularly strong when there are tangibly successful outcomes
of cooperation--for example, clear rewards from cooperative learning. They have
important implications for child rearing and education.
DEVELOPING CONSTRUCTIVE ORIENTATIONS IN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
Ameliorating the problem of intergroup relations rests upon finding better ways to foster child and adolescent development. This fact should present crucial new opportunities to educate young people in conflict resolution and in mutual accommodation.
Pivotal educational institutions such as the family, schools, community-based organizations, and the media have the power to shape attitudes and skills toward decent human relations or toward hatred and violence. If they really wish to be constructive, such organizations need to utilize the findings from research on intergroup relations and conflict resolution. They can use this knowledge in fostering positive reciprocity, cross-cutting relations, superordinate goals, and mutual aid.
Education everywhere needs to convey an accurate concept of a single, highly interdependent, worldwide species--a vast extended family sharing fundamental human similarities and a fragile planet. The give-and-take fostered within groups can be extended far beyond childhood to relations between adults and to larger units of organization, even covering international relations.
All research-based knowledge of human conflict, the diversity of our species,
and the paths to mutual accommodation constitutes grist for the education mill.
What follows is a sketch of some possibilities for making use of many different
educational vehicles for learning to live together within nations and across
national boundaries.
Fostering Prosocial Behavior in Early Life
In the context of secure attachment and valued adult models, provided by either a cohesive family or a more extended social support network, a child can learn certain social norms that are conducive to tolerance and a mutual aid ethic. Children can learn to take turns, share with others, cooperate (especially in learning and problem solving), and help others in everyday life as well as in times of stress.
These norms, though established on a simple basis in the first few years of life, open the way toward constructive human relationships that can have significance throughout the life span. Their practice earns respect from others, provides gratification, and increases confidence and competence. For this reason, both family care and early intervention programs need to take account of the factors that influence the development of attachment and prosocial behavior. This is important in parent education, in child care centers, and in preschool education.
There is research evidence, both from direct observation and experimental studies, that settings that promote the requirements and expectations of prosocial behavior do in fact strengthen such behavior. For example, children who are responsible for tasks helpful to family maintenance, as in caring for younger siblings, are generally found to be more altruistic than children who do not have these prosocial experiences.
In experimental studies, typically an adult (presumably much like a parent)
demonstrates a prosocial act like sharing toys, coins, or candy that have been
won in a game. The sharing is with someone else who is said to be in need though
not present in the experimental situation. The adult plays the game and models
the sharing before leaving the child to play. The results are clear. Children
exposed to such modeling, when compared to similar children in control groups,
tend to show the behavior manifested by the models, whether it be honesty, generosity,
or altruism. Given the child's pervasive exposure to parents and teachers, the
potential for observational learning in this sphere as in others is very great.
Prosocial behavior is particularly significant in adaptation because it is likely
to open up new opportunities for the growing child, strengthen human relationships,
and contribute to the building of self-esteem.
Empathy Training
Empathy, defined as a shared emotional response between observer and subject, may be expressed as "putting oneself in the shoes of another person." Empathy training has been tested with eight- to ten-year-olds in elementary school classrooms. In one program, children were given thirty hours of exercises in small groups of four to six. Activities were designed to increase their skill in identifying emotional responses and in taking the perspective of another. The intervention group was compared with two kinds of control groups.
The participants in empathy training showed more prosocial behavior, less
aggression, and more positive self-concept than did children in either control
group. This elementary school training model may provide a guide for the enhancement
of empathy in other contexts--for example, in learning to take the perspective
of other ethnic or religious groups. In any event, responding empathically in
potential conflict situations helps to reduce hateful outcomes.
A Framework for Conflict Resolution in the Schools
Much of what schools can accomplish is similar to what parents can do--employ positive disciplinary practices, be democratic in procedure, teach the capacity for responsible decision making, foster cooperative learning procedures, and guide children in prosocial behavior in the various spheres of their lives. They can convey in interesting ways the truth of human diversity and the humanity we all share. They can convey the fascination of other cultures, making understanding and respect a core attribute of their outlook on the world--including the capacity to interact effectively in the emerging global economy.
Professor Morton Deutsch of Teachers College, Columbia University, a distinguished scholar in conflict resolution, has delineated programs that schools can use to promote attitudes, values, and knowledge that will help children develop constructive relations throughout their lives. Such programs include cooperative learning, conflict resolution training, the constructive use of controversy in teaching, and the creation of dispute resolution centers.
In his view, constructive conflict resolution is characterized by cooperation, good communication, perception of similarity in beliefs and values among the parties, acceptance of the other's legitimacy, problem-centered negotiations, mutual trust and confidence, and information sharing. Destructive conflicts, in contrast, are characterized by harsh competition, poor communication, coercive tactics, suspicion, perception of basic differences in values, an orientation to increasing power differences, challenges to the legitimacy of other parties, and personal insecurity.
Efforts to educate on these matters are most effective where there is a substantial,
in-depth curriculum with repeated opportunities to learn and practice cooperative
conflict resolution skills. Students gain a realistic understanding of the amount
of violence in society and the deadly consequences of such violence. They learn
that violence begets violence, that there are healthy and unhealthy ways to
express anger, and that nonviolent alternatives to dealing with conflict are
available and will always be useful to them.
Cooperative Learning
A substantial body of information during the past two decades has been generated from research on cooperative learning. These efforts stem in part from a desire to find alternatives to the usual lecture mode and to involve students actively in the learning process. They are inspired, moreover, by a mutual aid ethic and appreciation for student diversity. In cooperative learning, the traditional classroom of one teacher and many students is reorganized into heterogeneous groups of four or five students who work together to learn a particular subject matter, for instance, mathematics.
Research has demonstrated that student achievement in cooperative learning activities is at least as high as--and often higher than--it is in traditional classroom activities. At the same time, cooperative learning methods promote positive interpersonal relations, motivation to learn, and self-esteem. These benefits are obtained in middle grade schools and also high schools, for various subject areas and for a wide range of tasks and activities.
In my view, there are several overlapping yet distinctive concepts of cooperative
learning that offer a powerful set of skills and assets for later life: learning
to work together; learning that everyone can contribute in some way; learning
that everyone is good at something; learning to appreciate diversity in various
attributes; learning complementarity of skills and a division of labor; learning
a mutual aid ethic. There is good reason why cooperative learning has lately
stimulated so much interest. It deserves more widespread utilization along with
continuing research to broaden its applicability.
Early Adolescence: Learning Life Skills
The Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development's Working Group on Life Skills Training, chaired by Dr. Beatrix Hamburg, in 1990 provided the factual basis and organizing principles on which such interventions can be based. It also described a variety of exemplary programs.
One category of life skills is being assertive. An example of assertiveness is knowing how to take advantage of opportunities--for example, how to use community resources such as health and social services or job training. Another aspect is knowing how to resist pressure or intimidation by peers and others to take drugs, carry weapons, or make irresponsible decisions about sex--and how to do this without spoiling relationships or isolating oneself. Yet another aspect of assertiveness is knowing how to resolve conflict in ways that make use of the full range of nonviolent opportunities that exist. Such skills can be taught not only in schools but in community organizations.
Required community service in high schools, indeed even in middle grade schools,
can also be helpful in the shaping of responsible, sharing, altruistic behavior.
It is important to have serious reflection on such community service experience,
to analyze its implications, and to learn ways to benefit from setbacks. How
we help others is crucial. "Help" must not imply superiority over others but
rather convey a sense of being full members of the community, sharing a common
fate as human beings together. This orientation can usefully be an important
part of parent education as well. As the development of parental competence
increasingly comes to be based on explicit courses of education and preparation
for parenthood, the elements of caring for others, of reciprocity and of mutual
understanding must be a key part of the task.
Violence Prevention in Adolescence
A public health perspective suggests that the prevention strategies that have been successful in dealing with other behavior-related health problems, such as smoking, may be applicable to the problem of adolescent violence. Adolescent experimentation with behavior patterns and values offers an opportunity to develop alternatives to violent responses. A pioneering example is provided by the Boston Violence Prevention Program--a multi-institutional initiative with the goal of reducing fights, assaults, and intentional injuries among adolescents. It trains providers in diverse community settings in a violence prevention curriculum, promotes incorporation of this curriculum into service delivery, and creates a community consensus supportive of violence prevention. The program targets two poor Boston neighborhoods characterized by high violence rates. Its four principal components are curriculum development, community-based prevention education, clinical treatment services, and a media campaign.
The curriculum was first developed in 1983 by Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith. It acknowledged anger as a normal and potentially constructive emotion; alerted students to their high risk of being a perpetrator or victim of violence; helped students find alternatives to fighting by discussing potential gains and losses; offered positive ways to deal with anger and arguments; encouraged students to analyze the precursors of fighting and to practice alternative conflict resolution by playing different roles; and created a classroom climate that is nonviolent.
During the initial stages of curriculum development, it became clear that intervention in the schools alone was insufficient. In 1986 a community-based component was initiated in which community educators provided violence prevention training to youth-serving agencies. Additional materials included informational flyers, a videotape, a rap song, cartoon characters, church sermons, and Sunday school sessions.
The project seeks to reach as many community settings as possible, including multi-service centers, recreation programs, housing developments, police stations and courts, religious institutions, neighborhood health centers, and schools. There is a referral network for health, education, and social services. The community campaign has produced television and radio public service announcements, posters, and T-shirts using the slogan, "Friends for life don't let friends fight." It focuses on peer influences and the responsibility that friends have for helping to defuse conflict situations. It also includes a public television documentary.
Violence prevention efforts of such a systematic and extensive sort are very
recent. It would be surprising if the first efforts were highly successful,
because of the great complexity and difficulty of the tasks in terribly impaired
neighborhoods. One clear finding is that the adolescents--and especially disadvantaged
males--are urgently in need of dependable life skills and constructive social
supports that foster health, education, and decent human relationships.
Television and Prosocial Behavior
Research has established causal relationships between children's viewing of either aggressive or prosocial behavior on television and their subsequent behavior. Children as young as two years old are facile at imitating televised behaviors. Television violence can affect a child's behavior at an early age and the effects can extend into adolescence. In general, the relationship between television violence and subsequent viewer behavior holds in a variety of countries. Cross-national studies show this in countries as diverse as Australia, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United States.
There is some research evidence that television need not be a school for violence--that it can be used in a way that reduces intergroup hostility. The relevant professions need to encourage the constructive use of this powerful tool to promote compassionate understanding, nonviolent problem solving, and decent intergroup relations.
Television can portray human diversity while highlighting shared human experiences. It can teach skills that are important for the social development of children and do so in a way that both entertains and educates. So far we have had only glimpses of its potential for reducing intergroup hostility.
Professor Gerald Lesser at Harvard University has summarized features of the children's educational television program, "Sesame Street," that are of interest in this context. The program originated in the United States in 1969 and appears today in 100 other countries. Each program is fitted to the language, culture, and traditions of a particular nation. The atmosphere of respect for differences permeates all of the many versions of "Sesame Street."
Research from a variety of countries is encouraging. For example, the Canadian
version of "Sesame Street" shows many sympathetic instances of English- and
French-speaking children playing together. Children who see these examples of
cross-group friendships are more likely to form such friendships on their own
than are children who do not see them. The same is true for Dutch, Moroccan,
Turkish, and Surinamese children who see "Sesame Street" in Holland. The findings
suggest that appealing and constructive examples of social tolerance help young
children to learn such behavior. These are tantalizing results, making us wish
for a wide range of similar programming and experimentation.
LEARNING FROM ALL KINDS OF CONFLICTS
Processes of conflict resolution in any sphere should be examined for their implications in other spheres. It may well be that understanding the processes of conflict resolution between groups within a nation will concomitantly enhance our ability to reduce conflict between nations--and vice versa.
Are there lessons to be learned from decent human relations in various spheres
of life? Abundant experience and study at the level of interpersonal relations
and small-group and community relations provide a way of thinking about decent
relations between large groups and even nations. What are the major requirements?
Each party needs a basis for self-respect, a sense of belonging in a valued
group, and a distinctive identity.
Each party needs dependability of communication with the other.
Each party needs from the other a recognition of some shared interests and
the fact of interdependence.
Each needs civil discourse, including the ability to understand the perspective
of the other--even if they do not always agree. Disagreements can also be considered
in a civil way. And both parties need to keep in mind their common humanity
even--and especially--in times of adversity.
Each party has the possibility of earning the respect of the other--in a differentiated
way, admiring some attributes but not others.
Boundaries for competition and disagreement can be recognized, even if they
are sometimes dimly seen.
When boundaries fundamentally have to do with violence, each party can seriously
consider and reconsider from time to time the balance between interests of self
and the interests of the other.
Such concepts of decent human relations have considerable operational significance
in daily living. On the whole, they serve the human species well at various
levels of social organization. Could we learn to utilize them in relations between
ethnic groups and even adversarial powers? The experience of ending the Cold
War suggests that this may be possible.
THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
The growing threat of prejudicial ethnocentrism as a path to hatred, violence, and mass killing has to emerge as one of the major educational challenges of the next century, with international institutions playing an important role. The international community can be a powerful force in broad public education on the entire problem of intergroup violence. It can help and reward conflict resolution leaders, build education systems worldwide, and provide useful, sensitive, early intervention.
It is of utmost importance for contending parties throughout the world to be educated on the nature, scope, and consequences of ethnocentric violence, particularly the action-reaction cycles in such violence, with the buildup of revenge motives; the tendency to assume hatred as an organizing principle for life and death; and the slippery slope of proliferation, escalation, and addiction to hatred and killing that emerges so readily in festering intergroup conflict.
Adversaries need to grasp how violent extremists and fanatics tend to take increasing control of the situation; they need to face up to the probable degradation of life--even annihilation--that will occur for all concerned in areas of intense fighting. The international community must make these dangers clear and vivid in the minds of populations involved in potential hot spots.
The policy community in much of the world is not deeply familiar with the principles and techniques of conflict resolution. It must become so, with the United Nations and the secretary-general playing one of the leading roles. The United Nations, respected widely throughout the world, could do more than it has done historically to educate publics to the need and possibilities for resolving conflicts without violence. The secretary-general has a bully pulpit of formidable proportions.
Among other initiatives, the UN can sponsor world leadership seminars in cooperation with qualified nongovernmental organizations such as universities and research institutes. These leadership seminars might well include new heads of state, new foreign ministers, and new defense ministers.
Ongoing leadership seminars could also clarify how the UN and other institutions
and organizations can help. Given the contemporary climate, it is singularly
important that such seminars deal objectively and in a penetrating way with
problems of nationalism, ethnocentrism, prejudice, hatred, and violence. Through
the leadership seminars and a wider array of publications, the UN can make available
the world's experience bearing on conflicts in general and on particular conflicts;
on the responsible handling of weapons by governmental leaders and policymakers;
on the likely consequences of weapons build-up, especially weapons of mass destruction;
on the skills, knowledge base, and prestige properly associated with successful
conflict resolution; on economic development, including the new uses of science
and technology for development; and on cooperative behavior in the world community,
including the handling of grievances.
THE GLOBAL REACH OF RADIO AND TELEVISION
The role of media is a powerful one, for better and for worse. Books, films, music, television, and radio all carry a variety of messages, both cognitive and emotional. The power of the mass media, and particularly television, has revised our concept of what constitutes reality.
Television directs attention to a subject beyond any previous medium's ability. It has the power to focus on one situation and instantly raise the world's awareness. Unfortunately, this power can be and often is used to exacerbate conflict. Terrorists, for instance, have long recognized the power of television to give a small, fanatical group international exposure to their cause.
Political power is more and more associated with media coverage. The primacy of television's linkage with political power was well demonstrated in the recent revolutionary events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, when control of television output was at the center of the struggle.
Television has immense latent capacity as a force for global transformation. The medium is deeply international, readily crossing boundaries. Each side in a war may be able to watch the other's television broadcasts. In divided Germany, most East Germans watched West German television, which provided an effective antidote to Communist government propaganda. With new digital technologies and more powerful satellites, it will be increasingly difficult to isolate a country from the global media. Cable News Network already has had a powerful effect through its global news distribution and extensive use of live broadcasting from sites on every continent. Although this was most vivid during the Gulf war, it is a daily fact of life on a global basis.
Television has great potential for reducing tensions between countries. It can be used to demystify the adversary and improve understanding. A Cold War example was provided by U.S.-Soviet spacebridge programs--live, unedited discussion between the two countries made possible by satellites and simultaneous translation. Starting in 1983, U.S.-Soviet spacebridges linked ordinary American and Soviet citizens in an effort to overcome stereotypes. Beginning before the Gorbachev era, they provided an opening to his policy of glasnost. Later, Internews' "Capital to Capital" program, broadcast simultaneously on ABC and on Soviet and Eastern European television, joined members of Congress and the Supreme Soviet for uncensored debate on arms control, human rights, and the future of Europe. These spacebridge programs were seen by 200 million people at a time. Ted Koppel's "Nightline" program on ABC was dynamic in settings of this sort, especially between the United States and South Africa and between the United States and the Soviet Union. The dramatic "Nightline" town meeting between Palestinians and Israelis in 1988 showed how television can foster reasonable dialogue on tender issues even among old adversaries.
Independent, pluralistic media are vital for democracy. They are the main vehicles for clarifying issues and for the public to understand candidates. In the first post-Soviet Ukrainian election, President Leonid Kravchuk had total control over television throughout the process, whereas other candidates had hardly any access to it. Such elections cannot be considered free and fair. International election monitors must therefore observe access to the media as well as the voting itself.
Radio is exceedingly important because it reaches virtually everyone everywhere almost all the time. Hate radio has been all too effective in inciting violence--remember its role in Rwanda and Bosnia. What about reconciliation radio?
How can the international community foster education via the mass media with respect to prejudice, ethnocentrism, and conflict resolution? Leaders like the extremists in the former Yugoslavia reap political gain from stirring intense hatred among their people. The world is full of ethnic entrepreneurs and skillful demagogues putting acid on the scars, playing on ethnocentric sentiments for their own political purposes, and utilizing electronic media to get their messages across. By doing so they gain power, wealth, and high status. Is it possible to go over the heads of such leaders to educate their publics directly about paths to conflict resolution? After all, it is the rank-and-file citizenry that absorbs the terrible beating of these wars, not the leadership.
Can television and radio help in preventing or coping with deadly conflict within nations? What would be involved in such education? First and foremost, conveying the consequences of continuing on the path of hatred and violence. Television and radio could illuminate slaughter in various areas, both nearby and far away, where ethnocentric violence has gone unchecked and where the consequences for all participants have been far more dreadful than envisioned in the initial phase when wishful thinking predominated. Let adversaries see the disastrous course they are on now, one that others have followed, and how much worse it can get the further it is pursued. Let them not be shielded from the consequences of atrocities in the way most Germans were in the events of the Holocaust.
Conflict areas need independent television and radio news channels broadcasting throughout the region. Mass media communication, not only about the consequences of ethnocentric violence, but also about the possibilities for conflict resolution, and the willingness of the international community to help, should become a vital component of the problem-solving machinery in ethnic conflicts.
Television and radio can also be useful in conflict resolution by clarifying how others have succeeded in achieving it: documentaries, for example, on the experiences of Western Europe after World War II, or programs on the transformation of Germany and Japan without revenge by the United States. Let those in hot spots learn about the best of what conflict resolution, civilized human relationships, and democratic institutions have done in the twentieth century and could do for them in the twenty-first.
In principle, it should even be possible to establish a nongovernmental International Educational Telecommunications System that would effectively link organizations in many nations to sources of creative audiovisual learning materials. There could be an active pool of material over a wide range of content and format generated for a variety of purposes, mainly on peace and democracy, in rich and poor countries alike.
Financing might be provided to the new system through a mix of governmental and private funds from many nations. The highest standards could be ensured by an international commission of impeccable standing. The system would both provide venture capital for creative programming and carefully select the best available material from the world's broadcasting storehouse.
It might present basic concepts, processes, and institutions on a level perhaps
comparable to that of National Public Radio in the United States or the British
Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. This could be done in a variety
of languages and adapted to many cultures. In a relatively short time, it might
be feasible to enhance the level of understanding throughout the world of what
is involved in democracy and its potential benefits for all--especially in providing
reliable ways of coping with ubiquitous human conflicts without resorting to
mass violence.
A CALL FOR RESEARCH AND LEADERSHIP
Let me close with a crucial question for the human future: Can human groups achieve internal cohesion, self-respect, and adaptive effectiveness without promoting hatred and violence? Altogether, we need to strengthen research and education on child development, prejudice, ethnocentrism, and conflict resolution to find out. We must generate new knowledge and explore vigorously the application of such knowledge to urgent problems in contemporary society.
Nowhere should the responsibility for promoting social tolerance be taken more seriously than among leaders of nations--not only in government but in business and media and other powerful institutions. They bear a heavy responsibility, all too often evaded, for utilizing the vehicles of mass education for constructive purposes. They can convey in words and actions an agenda for cooperation, caring, and decent human relations.
There is little in our very long history as a species to prepare us for this
world we have suddenly made. Perhaps we cannot cope with it--witness Bosnia
and Rwanda. Still, it is not too late for a paradigm shift in our outlook toward
human conflict. Perhaps it is something like learning that the Earth is not
flat. Such a shift in child development and education throughout the world might
at long last make it possible for human groups to learn to live together in
peace and mutual benefit.
MEMBERS OF THE CARNEGIE COMMISSION ON PREVENTING DEADLY CONFLICT
David A. Hamburg, Cochair
President Emeritus
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Cyrus R. Vance, Cochair
Partner
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett
Gro Harlem Brundtland
Former Prime Minister of Norway
Virendra Dayal
Former Under-Secretary-General and
Chef de Cabinet to the Secretary-General
United Nations
Gareth Evans
Deputy Leader of the Opposition
and Shadow Treasurer
Australia
Alexander L. George
Graham H. Stuart Professor Emeritus
of International Relations
Stanford University
Flora MacDonald
Chairperson
International Development
Research Centre
Donald F. McHenry
University Research Professor of Diplomacy
and International Affairs
Georgetown University
Olara A. Otunnu
President
International Peace Academy
David Owen
Chairman
Humanitas
Shridath Ramphal
Cochairman
Commission on Global Governance
Roald Z. Sagdeev
Distinguished Professor
Department of Physics
University of Maryland
John D. Steinbruner
Senior Fellow
Foreign Policy Studies Program
The Brookings Institution
Brian Urquhart
Former Under-Secretary-General
for Special Political Affairs
United Nations
John C. Whitehead
Chairman
AEA Investors Inc.
Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan
Chairman, Board of Trustees
Aga Khan University and Hospital--Karachi
Special Advisor to the Commission
Herbert S. Okun
Visiting Lecturer on International Law
Yale Law School
Former U.S. Representative to the German
Democratic Republic and to the UN
Jane E. Holl, Executive Director
Members of the Advisory Council
Morton Abramowitz Ali Abdullah Alatas
Minister for Foreign Affairs
Republic of Indonesia
Graham T. Allison
Douglas Dillon Professor of Government
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Robert Badinter
President Emeritus
Constitutional Council of France
Carol Bellamy
Executive Director
United Nations Children's Fund
Harold Brown
Counselor
Center for Strategic and
International Studies
McGeorge Bundy*
Scholar-in-Residence
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Jimmy Carter
The Carter Center of Emory University
Lori Damrosch
Professor of Law
Columbia University School of Law
Francis M. Deng
Senior Fellow
Foreign Policy Studies Program
The Brookings Institution
Sidney D. Drell
Professor and Deputy Director
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Stanford University
Lawrence S. Eagleburger
Senior Foreign Policy Advisor
Baker Donelson Bearman & Caldwell
Leslie H. Gelb
President
Council on Foreign Relations
David Gompert
Vice President
National Security Research
RAND
Andrew J. Goodpaster
Chairman
The Atlantic Council of the United States
Mikhail S. Gorbachev
The Gorbachev Foundation
James P. Grant**
Executive Director
United Nations Children's Fund
Lee H. Hamilton
United States House of Representatives
Theodore M. Hesburgh
President Emeritus
University of Notre Dame
Donald L. Horowitz
James B. Duke Professor of Law and
Political Science
Duke University School of Law
Michael Howard
President
International Institute for Strategic Studies
Karl Kaiser
Director
Research Institute of the German Society
for Foreign Affairs
Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker
Baker Donelson Bearman & Caldwell
Sol M. Linowitz
Honorary Chairman
The Academy for Educational Development
Richard G. Lugar
United States Senate
Michael Mandelbaum
Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy
The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
The Johns Hopkins University
Robert S. McNamara
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense
William H. McNeill
Professor Emeritus of History
University of Chicago
Sam Nunn
Partner
King & Spalding
Olusegun Obasanjo
President
Africa Leadership Forum
Sadako Ogata
The High Commissioner for Refugees
United Nations
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar
Former Secretary-General
United Nations
Condoleezza Rice
Provost
Stanford University
Elliot L. Richardson
Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
Harold H. Saunders
Director of International Affairs
Kettering Foundation
George P. Shultz
Distinguished Fellow
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace
Stanford University
Richard Solomon
President
United States Institute of Peace
James Gustave Speth
Administrator
United Nations Development Programme
Desmond Tutu
Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town
James D. Watkins
President
Consortium for Oceanographic Research
and Education
Elie Wiesel
President
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity
I. William Zartman
Jacob Blaustein Professor of International
Organizations and Conflict Resolution
Director of African Studies and Conflict Management Programs
The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
The Johns Hopkins University
David A. Hamburg, cochair of the Commission,
is president emeritus of Carnegie Corporation of New York, having served as
president of the Corporation from 1983 to 1997. In addition to holding academic
posts at Stanford and Harvard universities, he has been president of the Institute
of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. He has also been president and chairman
of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr.
Hamburg has served on the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and currently
serves on the Defense Policy Board of the U.S. Department of Defense. He is
also a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology.
He has long been concerned with the problems of human aggression and violence,
especially with violence prevention and conflict resolution, and he is the author
or coauthor of numerous publications on these subjects.
PUBLICATION ORDER FORM
To order a free report mail or fax this form to: Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, 1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 715, Washington, DC 20036-2103; Phone: (202) 332-7900; Fax: (202) 332-1919; e-mail: pdc@carnegie.org
__ David A. Hamburg, Preventing Contemporary Intergroup Violence, April 1994.
__ David A. Hamburg, Education for Conflict Resolution, April 1995.
__ Comprehensive Disclosure of Fissionable Materials: A Suggested Initiative, June 1995.
__ Larry Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives, December 1995.
__ Andrew J. Goodpaster, When Diplomacy Is Not Enough: Managing Multinational Military Interventions, July 1996. (Web only)
__ John Stremlau, Sharpening International Sanctions: Toward a Stronger Role for the United Nations, November 1996.
__ Alexander L. George and Jane E. Holl, The Warning-Response Problem and Missed Opportunities in Preventive Diplomacy, May 1997.
__ John Stremlau with Helen Zille, A House No Longer Divided: Progress and Prospects for Democratic Peace in South Africa, July 1997. (Web only)
__ Nik Gowing, Media Coverage: Help or Hindrance in Conflict Prevention, September 1997.
__ Cyrus R. Vance and David A. Hamburg, Pathfinders for Peace: A Report to the UN Secretary-General on the Role of Special Representatives and Personal Envoys, September 1997.
__ Preventing Deadly Conflict: Executive Summary of the Final Report, December 1997.
__ Gail W. Lapidus with Svetlana Tsalik, eds., Preventing Deadly Conflict: Strategies and Institutions, Proceedings of a Conference in Moscow, Russian Federation, April 1998.
__ Douglas E. Lute, Improving National Capacity to Respond to Complex Emergencies: The U.S. Experience, April 1998.
__ Scott R. Feil, Preventing Genocide: How the Early Use of Force Might Have Succeeded in Rwanda, April 1998.
__ John Stremlau, People in Peril: Human Rights, Humanitarian Action, and Preventing Deadly Conflict, May 1998.
__ John Stremlau and Francisco R. Sagasti, Preventing Deadly Conflict: Does the World Bank Have a Role? July 1998.
__ Tom Gjelten, Professionalism in War Reporting: A Correspondent's View. Report to the Commission, July 1998. (Web only)
__ Edward J. Laurance, Light Weapons and Intrastate Conflict: Early Warning Factors and Preventive Action, August 1998.
__ Donald Kennedy, Environmental Quality and Regional Conflict, December 1998.
__ George A. Joulwan and Christopher C. Shoemaker, Civilian-Military Cooperation in the Prevention of Deadly Conflict: Implementing Agreements in Bosnia and Beyond, December 1998.
__ Essays on Leadership (by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, George Bush, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Desmond Tutu), December 1998.
__ M. James Wilkinson, Moving Beyond Conflict Prevention to Reconciliation: Tackling Greek-Turkish Hostility, June 1999.
__ Graham Allison and Hisashi Owada, The Responsibilities of Democracies in Preventing Deadly Conflict: Reflections and Recommendations. July 1999.
__ Preventive Diplomacy, Preventive Defense, and Conflict Resolution: A Report of Two Conferences at Stanford University and The Ditchley Foundation. September 1999.
Name_____________________________________________________________
Title_________________ Institution_______________________________
Address__________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
Phone______________Fax________________E-mail_____________________
To order Timothy Sisk, Power Sharing and International Mediation in Ethnic Conflicts (copublished with the United States Institute of Peace), contact USIP at 1-800-868-8064 or 1-703-601-1590 for ordering information.
To order Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East; The Price of Peace: Incentives and International Conflict Prevention; Sustainable Peace: The Role of the UN and Regional Organizations in Preventing Conflict; Turkey's Kurdish Question; The Costs of Conflict: Prevention and Cure in the Global Arena; Light Weapons and Civil Conflict: Controlling the Tools of Violence; Opportunities Missed, Opportunities Seized: Preventive Diplomacy in the Post-Cold War World; and The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation; books in the Commission series published by Rowman & Littlefield, please contact the publisher at 1-800-462-6420 or 1-301-459-3366.
PUBLICATIONS OF THE COMMISSION
David A. Hamburg, Preventing Contemporary Intergroup Violence. Founding Essay of the Commission. April 1994.
David A. Hamburg, Education for Conflict Resolution. April 1995.
Comprehensive Disclosure of Fissionable Materials: A Suggested Initiative. Discussion Paper. June 1995.
Larry Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives. Report to the Commission. December 1995.
Andrew J. Goodpaster, When Diplomacy Is Not Enough: Managing Multinational Military Interventions. Report to the Commission. July 1996. (Web only)
Timothy Sisk, Power Sharing and International Mediation in Ethnic Conflicts (order from copublisher, United States Institute of Peace), 1996.
John Stremlau, Sharpening International Sanctions: Toward a Stronger Role for the United Nations. Report to the Commission. November 1996.
Alexander L. George and Jane E. Holl, The Warning-Response Problem and Missed Opportunities in Preventive Diplomacy. Report to the Commission. May 1997.
John Stremlau with Helen Zille, A House No Longer Divided: Progress and Prospects for Democratic Peace in South Africa. Report to the Commission. July 1997. (Web only)
Nik Gowing, Media Coverage: Help or Hindrance in Conflict Prevention. Report to the Commission. September 1997.
Cyrus R. Vance and David A. Hamburg, Pathfinders for Peace: A Report to the UN Secretary-General on the Role of Special Representatives and Personal Envoys. Report of the Commission. September 1997.
Preventing Deadly Conflict: Final Report. (Full Report and Executive Summary.) Report of the Commission. December 1997.
Gail W. Lapidus with Svetlana Tsalik, eds., Preventing Deadly Conflict: Strategies and Institutions. Proceedings of a Conference in Moscow, Russian Federation. Report to the Commission. April 1998.
Douglas E. Lute, Improving National Capacity to Respond to Complex Emergencies: The U.S. Experience. Report to the Commission. April 1998.
Scott R. Feil, Preventing Genocide: How the Early Use of Force Might Have Succeeded in Rwanda. Report to the Commission. April 1998.
John Stremlau, People in Peril: Human Rights, Humanitarian Action, and Preventing Deadly Conflict. Report to the Commission. May 1998.
John Stremlau and Francisco Sagasti, Preventing Deadly Conflict: Does the World Bank Have a Role? Report to the Commission. July 1998.
Tom Gjelten, Professionalism in War Reporting: A Correspondent's View. Report to the Commission. July 1998. (Web only)
Edward J. Laurance, Light Weapons and Intrastate Conflict: Early Warning Factors and Preventive Action. Report to the Commission. August 1998.
Donald Kennedy, Environmental Quality and Regional Conflict. Report to the Commission. December 1998.
George A. Joulwan and Christopher C. Shoemaker, Civilian-Military Cooperation in the Prevention of Deadly Conflict: Implementing Agreements in Bosnia and Beyond. Report to the Commission. December 1998.
Essays on Leadership (by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, George Bush, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Desmond Tutu). Perspectives on Prevention. December 1998.
M. James Wilkinson, Moving Beyond Conflict Prevention to Reconciliation: Tackling Greek-Turkish Hostility. Report to the Commission. June 1999.
Graham Allison and Hisashi Owada, The Responsibilities of Democracies in Preventing Deadly Conflict: Reflections and Recommendations. Discussion Paper. July 1999.
Preventive Diplomacy, Preventive Defense, and Conflict Resolution: A Report of Two Conferences at Stanford University and The Ditchley Foundation. Perspectives on Prevention. October 1999.
Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East; The Price of Peace: Incentives and International Conflict Prevention; Sustainable Peace: The Role of the UN and Regional Organizations in Preventing Conflict; Turkey's Kurdish Question; The Costs of Conflict: Prevention and Cure in the Global Arena; Light Weapons and Civil Conflict: Controlling the Tools of Violence; Opportunities Missed, Opportunities Seized: Preventive Diplomacy in the Post-Cold War World; and The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation are books in the Commission series published by Rowman & Littlefield. Please contact the publisher at 1-800-462-6420 or 1-301-459-3366.
Carnegie Commission on
PREVENTING DEADLY CONFLICT
Carnegie Corporation of New York
1779 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Suite 715
Washington, DC 20036-2103
Phone: (202) 332-7900 Fax: (202) 332-1919
e-mail: pdc@carnegie.org
On the Web: www.ccpdc.org