Impidiendo un Conflicto Mortal

ARCHIVES OF GENERAL PSYCHIATRY Preventing Deadly Conflict The Critical Role of Leadership David A. Hamburg, MD; Alexander George, PhD; Karen Ballentine, MPhil Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1999;56:971- 976.

ABSTRACT This article emerged from the work of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Washington, DC. The commission addressed several fundamental questions: (1) What are the problems posed by deadly conflict, and why is outside help often necessary to deal with these problems? (2) How can disputes be resolved peaceably? (3) Which strategies work best? (4) Who can do what to implement these preventive strategies? Borrowing from the model of preventive medicine, the commission detailed a repertoire of the most promising political, economic, military, and social tools and strategies that can be mobilized by the international community to assist vulnerable societies in the development of sustainable and equitable arrangements for managing diversity and resolving disputes peacefully. From a comparative examination of intransigent and destructive intergroup conflicts, the commission found that the failure to prevent conflict is most often not a failure of foreknowledge or capacity but of political will. Effective political leadership is often the critical variable for successful prevention. This article seeks to illustrate how the social and behavioral sciences may be usefully applied to the problems encountered by leaders when confronted by the challenges of preventing deadly conflict.

FOR WORSE AND FOR BETTER: LEADERSHIP MATTERS In an essay1 for the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (CCPDC), Mikhail S. Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, reflected on his rich experience with political leaders from all over the world. He was deeply struck by the considerable extent to which these leaders see "brute force" as the ultimate validation of their authority. His observation underscores the historical tendency of many kinds of leaders from many places to interpret their mandate as being strong, aggressive, even violent. For all too many, this is indeed the essence of leadership.

They have massive killing power at their disposal, a power that threatens to increase in the coming century. This is true not only of national leaders but also of subnational group leaders.

Large- scale conflict between groups—like conflict between states—requires the deliberate mobilization efforts of determined political leaders. Without such leadership, members of ethnic, communal, or religious groups who find themselves in adverse circumstances—for example, profound socioeconomic inequality, political oppression, and even deep intergroup animosity—do not spontaneously resort to warfare to retain redress. They tend instead to seek out nonviolent means for improving their condition and resolving disputes, yet incendiary leaders can readily subvert such efforts and mobilize their followers for violence and hatred.

The other side of this coin is the critical importance of international leadership for effective prevention of deadly conflict. That is why the CCPDC emphasizes that "although the prevention of deadly conflict requires many tools and strategies, bold leadership and an active constituency for prevention are essential for these tools and strategies to be effective."2 (p156) So, for worse and for better, leadership is crucial.

Unfortunately, scholars and policymakers know far more about the role of leaders in stimulating ethnic, communal, and international conflict than in how they might help to diminish it. What is needed is a deeper understanding of the critical determinants of the kind of leadership that can contribute to the prevention of violence between groups, nations, and states.

International leaders can help prevent deadly conflict by mediating disputes, mobilizing international coalitions and domestic constituencies in support of peaceful resolutions, and supplying the financial and military resources needed to make such resolutions stick. They can call attention to the dangers posed by unfettered intergroup violence, tap into latent public inclinations for prevention, and educate the public about nonviolent ways to settle disputes. Most important, they can help build the political will necessary to mount an effective response to conflict- prone situations.

The leadership needed to prevent deadly conflict is not confined to the political sphere. Leaders of other powerful institutions and social sectors, such as religion, business, and the mass media, can also make a profound difference. Indeed, they often have provided the critical restraint of moral and legal accountability on political leaders otherwise tempted to resort to violence.

Effective leadership for conflict prevention means drawing on the best intellectual, technical, and moral resources available and applying them with creativity and determination to address both the proximate and underlying sources of large- scale, organized violence. A useful analogy is offered by recent developments in public health. Here, leadership in science, medicine, and government has helped to dramatically reduce the incidence of many incurable diseases through preventive measures such as immunization and education about the benefits of diet, exercise, and not smoking.

THE PERSISTENCE OF DEADLY CONFLICT

A decade ago, Mikhail Gorbachev came before the United Nations and proclaimed what was in essence the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Since that time, the threat of imminent nuclear confrontation has radically diminished, while the decline of superpower riva lry has exposed a broader trend of long- term decline in the incidence of interstate war. Still, the potential for interstate war remains, as is shown by the recent escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and nuclear weapons as well as the eruption of hostilities between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Even as interstate conflicts have declined, brutal wars within states continue unabated.

As illustrated by the dismal record of events in places such as Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Chechnya, Georgia, Nagorno- Karabakh, and more recently in Congo (Zaire), and Kosovo, massive and deadly intrastate conflicts show little sign of

resolving themselves anytime soon. According to one recent study,3 91 of 96 conflicts that have occurred in the post–Cold War era have been intrastate conflicts. Beyond the immediate human toll in casualties and forced refugees, internal wars wreak havoc on the foundations of social order, economic development, and regional security, further imperiling the health, welfare, and safety of those fortunate enough to survive the immediate violence. All too often, these conflicts leave to the next generation a legacy of hunger, disease, social chaos, economic scarcity, and political instability—a legacy that can perpetuatethe seeds of bitterness and hopelessness, making renewed violence much more likely.4 (pp7- 10) TOWARD A PREVENTIVE REGIME: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE Some might conclude that such conflicts, because endemic, are inevitable, and that there is no constructive role for the outside world to play in seeking to prevent, reduce, and resolve them. This fatalism is, we believe, not only unwarranted but misguided. As summed up recently in the final report of the CCPDC, an international body of specialists that included 2 of us (D.A.H. and A.G.), The world can do far better in preventing deadly conflict than the record of this century suggests. . . . [D]eadly conflict is not inevitable [and] . . . does not emerge inexorably from spontaneous human interaction. . . .

Preventing deadly conflict is possible. The problem is not that we do not know about incipient and large- scale violence, it is that we often do not act. Yet, experience from "hot spots" around the world shows that the potential for violence can be defused through the early, skillful, and integrated application of political, diplomatic, economic, and military measures.2 (pxvii) Today, however, humanity is engaged in the rapid proliferation of lethal weaponry, including nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, new communications technologies provide extremists of all kinds with an enhanced capacity to spread fear and hatred and incite people to violence. In taking up the urgent challenge of preventing deadly conflict, the CCPDC adopted an approach that is distinctive in several respects. While suggesting practical improvements to keep active conflicts from escalating, the CCPDC set its sights beyond the common focus on short-term crisis management to the more fundamental task of averting outbreaks of mass violence altogether. Borrowing from successful public health practices, the CCPDC endeavored to complement and extend the delivery of emergency first aid with a comprehensive, long- term, and global system of primary prevention. Accordingly, the CCPDC developed a detailed repertoire of the most promising political, economic, military, psychological, and social tools and strategies at the disposal of the international community, tools that can be mobilized to help vulnerable societies develop sustainable, equitable, and effective arrangements for managing diversity and resolving disputes peacefully. 2 , 5-9 During the 3- year course of its work, the CCPDC drew on the growing body of scholarly knowledge from the social and behavioral sciences to achieve a clearer understanding of the sources of large- scale violence and to arrive at workable strategies for its mitigation and prevention. As many behavioral studies 10-12 have shown, violent intergroup conflict, be it on the interstate or intrastate level, owes

much to the human pro pensity to identify with strongly supportive groups as well as to severe environmental or societal stress, deep insecurity, and harsh deprivation.

These are major factors that influence intergroup dynamics toward virulent in- group and out- group distinctions. When such stresses impinge on ethnically or communally heterogeneous societies, individual survival can easily become equated with the survival of one's group, and the survival of one's group, with aggressive behavior aimed at defeating or eliminating rival groups. Much scholarly work on war and social conflict finds these eventsto be the result of complex interactions between long- term structural factors, such as social inequality, political oppression, and economic deprivation, and more proximate causes, such as economic shock, regime change, and related security dilemmas as well as deliberate acts of gross injustice and political demagoguery. 13-15 Ideally, a concerted scientific effort to address the problem of deadly conflict would begin with a rigorous identification of variables from the widest possible number of cases, proceed to a systematic testing of the validity of causal propositions under a range of different conditions, and from this basis, produce nuanced and calibrated policy responses. Only by clarifying the causal mechanisms underlying instances of violent conflict will research permit the development of more precise intervention techniques to improve the yield of desired outcomes. As every situation and contingency is to some extent unique, even the best theories and models will remain limited; they can aid but c annot substitute for informed judgment.16 In the longer term, strengthening basic research on the causes of massive conflict is crucial if prevention is to make meaningful progress. But the practical necessity of preventing deadly conflict often strains the limits of existing knowledge, thereby presenting a difficult trade- off between the need to know and the need to act.

Fortunately, this trade- off need not be absolute. In the realm of public health, preventive measures against cardiovascular disease and some forms of cancer have been implemented despite the fact that their precise mechanisms of pathogenesis remain unclear. To prevent disease, we need not wait for signs of manifest illness; often, it is enough to identify high- risk behaviors and other early warning signs. So it is with efforts to prevent deadly conflict. Despite our limited understanding of causal processes, we know enough about the factors involved to identify high- risk situations and to undertake early and effective action. In the view of the CCPDC, effective preventive strategies rest on 3 principles: (1) early responses to signs of trouble, (2) a comprehensive, forward-looking approach to counteract the risk factors that trigger violent conflict, and (3) an extended effort to resolve the underlying causes of violence. Accordingly, the CCPDC has advocated a comprehensive regimen of prevention in which immediate or "operational" strategies to intervene in, reduce, and resolve ongoing conflicts are augmented by sustained efforts at "structural prevention," or strategies that address the longer-term socioeconomic, political, cultural, and institutional deficits that render affected populations vulnerable to the conflict-provoking potential of sudden political and economic shocks.2 (pp69- 104) A comprehensive preventive enterprise necessarily entails the sustained cooperation of a variety of institutional and individualactors, including relevant international organizations—especially the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, the mass media, multinational business interests, and key elements of the scientific and educational communities. Recent experience has shown that success is more likely to occur when the specialized resources of different agencies and actors are pooled in a coordinated effort in which the burdens and risks of preventive engagement are broadly shared.2 (pp105- 149), 17 (pp164- 180), 18 (pp203- 223).

As essential as all of these contributors are, however, there can be no substitute for the vital role played by states and their leaders. Historical evidence and recent experience underscore the critical role of political leadership in the choice between

war and peace. We now turn our attention to this topic in the hope of stimulating inquiry into these crucial problems.

LEADERS, DEADLY CONFLICT, AND PREVENTION Contemporary scholarship in history and political science, as well as psychology and psychiatry, makes abundantly clear that leadership not only matters but is often the critical determinant of whether nations or groups pursue their interests, values, and security through violent or cooperative means. Despite the popular belief that today's ethnic and communal conflicts are the direct result of irremediable ancient hatreds, research19-21 into these events has shown that large- scale conflict between groups requires the deliberate mobilization efforts of determined political leaders. If this scholarship is correct and leadership choices are often the critical variable between peace and war, then it makes little sense to treat leaders and leadership as an analytical constant. Yet this is precisely what much contemporary conflict analysis does: at one extreme, by characterizing all ethnic or communal elites as inherently and irreparably bad or mad, or at the other, by assuming that all are instead rational actors engaged in the instrumental pursuit of self-interested ends. Such blanket assumptions often translate into misconceived policy options. To know, for example, whether punitive sanctions, positive inducements, or some mix of the two would be an effective deterrent to aggressive leaders, and thus an apt preventive response, knowledge of situational givens is not enough; we must also have a firm grasp of the individual leader whose behavior we desire to change. For this reason the methods and insights of psychiatry and of cognitive, clinical, and social psychology must be brought to bear in broader social science investigations into violent conflict. By integrating actor-specific knowledge that incorporates the preferences, cognitive maps, leadership styles, and other discrete attributes of particular leaders with situation- specific knowledge, the behavioral sciences can fill a current analytical lacuna as well as contribute to the development of more nuanced preventive strategies.22 IMPROVING LEADERSHIP FOR PREVENTION The finding that leaders are crucial to the mobilization of intergroup conflict opens possibilities for influencing the aims, attitudes, calculations, and behavior of ethnic and communal leaders—hence, the potential for intergroup conflict—through thirdparty or outside mediations. It also highlights the potential of international leadership for sustained and meaningful third- party efforts at conflict prevention. Yet it is precisely this kind of bold and effective third- party leadership, whether on the part of popular representatives, state leaders, or internationalofficials, that is too often found wanting in the face of today's deadly conflicts.

A common explanation for this apparent leadership deficit is aptly captured by the title of a recent study on the collectiv e failure of international diplomacy to forestall interethnic violence during the breakup of Yugoslavia: Triumph of the Lackof Will. 23 Effective preventive action is less often a problem of foreknowledge or capacity than it is of leadership commitment and political resolve. As a description of the woefully inadequate response of an otherwise powerful international community to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the horrific genocide in Rwanda, "lack of will" captures the essence of the matter, and it underscores the fact that, in the post–Cold War world, the failure to prevent deadly conflicts is first and foremost a political failure. As explanations go, however, lack of will is not a particularly illuminating one, for it only

begs further questions of what that will is and why it is missing in the first place. The effect is to suggest that political will is some mysterious property that operates beyond the realm of human choice and social action, thereby reinforcing fatalism and passivity.

If the past performance of the international community is to be improved, and if political will is the critical factor, then more effort must be made in understanding what it actually comprises. A useful first step is to recognize that political will is better understood as a property of the dynamic interaction between leadership psychology and political context. As one astute scholar has observed: Usually absent from discussions of "political will" is the notion that it is something that must be generated. By contrast, it is normally treated as if it were an unchangeable trait of government and intergovernmental organizations, which is either present or absent. In fact, "lack of political will" simply refers to a government's current estimate of the advantages and disadvantages of following a certain course of action. It is essential to remember that such estimates are open to influence from other governments and from civil society.18 (p248) The idea that political will is something that must be generated and that it accrues from the conscious deliberation of policymakers offers a promising starting point for analyzing the impediments to more effective leadership for prevention and to the ways they may be overcome. Rather than take lack of will as a given, this dynamic perspective calls our attention to real- world variations in the incidence, nature, and efficacy of third- party interventions, as well as to the complex array of cognitive, normative, analytical, and institutional factors that shape the specific decision situations of critical actors as they choose among policy options.24 However, there is a paucity of research on the role of leadership in mobilizing and sustaining third- party efforts to prevent deadly conflict.17 (pp163-167) Just as more attention has been paid to the causes of conflict rather than to the ways it might be prevented, so too we know far more about the role of leaders in whipping up ethnic and communal conflict than in "whipping it down" or averting it altogether.25 This is a difficult research task, compounded by the fact that many third- party interventions are undertaken as quiet diplomacy, the full dimensions of which are not always known, and by the methodological challenge of explaining the "dogs that don't bark."17 (pp78- 94) In consequence, we have few firm empirical data on which sorts of leaders undertake preventive action, when and why they do so, and which leadership strategies and decision- making processes work best and under what sorts of conditions, domestic as well as international.

The task of uncovering the psychological and other determinants of leadership for violence prevention is not impossible. Scholars specializing in the study of leadership and foreign policy decision making have already generated a number of concepts, approaches, and hypotheses that may be usefully applied to the particular problems encountered by political leaders when confronted by the challenges of prevention. On the level of the policy-making process, for example, scholarly analysis has documented the deleterious effects that poorly designed intelligence- gathering mechanisms and decision procedures can have on the formulation and implementation of sound policies. Cognitive pathologies such as group think, mirror

imaging, risk aversion, and wishful thinking, while common to a wide variety of decision situations, are more pronounced in some settings than others, depending on the institutional arrangements, personal dynamics, and policy problems specific to the actors in question. It is well established, for example, that hierarchical intelligence bureaucracies and standardized routines of information gathering tend to encourage conformity at the expense of innovation, thereby jeopardizing accurate analysis and foreclosing the range of feasible policy options available to decision makers. Likewise, tendencies toward group think and wishful thinking are exacerbated in crisis situations, such as outbreaks of massive conflict that may call for a military response, because of the tendency for crisis decision making to contract to small groups of advisors at the highest levels of authority and because group consensus provides psychic relief for the combined pressures of risk, urgency, and ambiguity.24, 26 Such diagnoses have helped to identify a number of corrective measures to improve current efforts to accurately anticipate and interpret imminent conflict situations and to ensure an adequate range of timely and appropriate responses. Foreign policy bureaucracies could, for example, be restructured to permit regular communication between a greater number of official and informa l sources of early warning, especially those with greatest proximity to and local knowledge of potential conflict situations.2 (pp43- 47), 4 (pp16- 20) Similarly, a wider range of sound policy options that link early warning to early response might be stimulated by introducing career incentives that reward intelligence professionals for initiative, creativity, and innovation.17 (p164) Finally, given the finding that cognitive pathologies are aggravated in times o f crisis, it would be appropriate for decision makers to devote more institutional resources to constructing a plan for long- term structural prevention and a fuller repertoire of operational contingencies for crisis management before such crises occur, that is, when there is greater opportunity for thoughtful reflection and considered analysis of policy options, requisite resources, and expected trade- offs.2 (pp39- 104) The problem of devising sound policy options pales in comparison with the difficulties that political leaders often encounter in mobilizing broad- based support for concerted and decisive action to forestall deadly conflict. Particularly within modern democratic states, the constraints that competitive domestic politics and political legitimacy impose on state leaders as they contemplate whether and how to act in the face of deadly conflicts can be formidable. According to the conventional wisdom, a preoccupation with getting and keeping votes is the single most important reason why leaders of otherwise capable states have lacked political will to intervene decisively to prevent foreign conflicts. Here the reasoning is that because mass publics are apathetic about global affairs, or because they are unsure about how preventing conflict in remote lands serves their own nation's interest, vote-conscious leaders will be risk averse.

Careful research suggests, however, that much of this view rests on questionable assumptions. One such assumption concerns the supposedly isolationist content of popular attitudes; however, numerous surveys of American public opinion indicate that instead of rigid isolationism and/or widespread apathy, most Americans are reasonably well informed about global affairs and are supportive of US participation in multilateral endeavors, especially when the goal is to provide humanitarian assistance to civilian populations in distress.27-29 How mass publics evaluate any particular proposal for intervention abroad will depend on a number of factors, such as the scope and intensity of the conflict itself, the severity of the regional and global threat it poses, the feasibility of the preventive action, its anticipated costs, and above all, how these issues are presented for public deliberation.

These findings have important implications for leadership. They confirm that public opinion is not as rigid a constraint on foreign policy options as some believe. Public opinion, if properly mobilized, can offer critical support for leaders who engage in preventive actions. While policymakers frequently complain that dra matic mass media coverage of foreign conflicts, such as that of Somalia, forces political leaders to follow media- driven public pressure, research has shown otherwise. In fact, media coverage is decisive in framing foreign policy choices only when decision makers have demonstrably failed to establish a publicly coherent policy stance. In cases in which political leadership is bold and decisions are clear, mass media coverage loses its ability to "wag the dog."30-31 Even in our media-driven age, leaders still possess the authority and stature to formulate difficult policy choices for public deliberation, all the more so when these choices concern high- stakes foreign policy challenges.

The same observations can be applied to the question of the national interest—a phrase that wary policymakers often invoke to justify inaction in the face of deadly conflicts. Such appeals are all too often formulated in the vaguest of terms, terms that treat the national interest as if it were a self- evident, singular, and eternal standard for policy choice that needs no further public discussion. However, the reality has been otherwise: the substantive content of a country's national interest is typically the product of a publicly deliberated compromise between multiple values and diverse—often competing—conceptions of the proper ends and means of foreign policy, conceptions that remain open to the changing nature of both the domestic consensus and the international context. Far from being objective or given, the priorities that make up the national interest must be identified, defined, and explained.

Since the end of the Cold War, a common refrain among American scholars and policymakers is that, in the absence of the stark threat of nuclear holocaust, we no longer have an agreed- upon paradigm for understanding our national interests. This lack of firm consensus makes our leaders more uncertain of how to respond to deadly conflicts and, indeed, of whether to respond at all. However, it may be that the fundamental problem is not a lack of agreement over national interests, but rather the persistence of Cold War mind- sets that narrowly equate vital interests with military strength and physical survival. For most states today, and especially for those of the developed world, direct military attack and physical survival are no longer in serious question. As a result, greater possibilities and means are now available for attending to the protection of those interests and values that do remain threatened, in particular, socioeconomic development, human well- being, and democratic governance. By defining national interests in narrow terms of basic survival, political leaders may be setting a threshold for international engagement that is so high it effectively prohibits them from identifying and addressing the more diffuse but nevertheless dangerous threats that unf ettered conflicts pose to regional and international peace and security.32 What is needed is a new way of formulating these choices. What is needed is a broader conception of the national interest, which affirms the complementarity of national security and global well- being, and which appreciates that the promotion and defense of core international values is as vital to national security today as maintaining a robust military defense. It is precisely times such as these, when national interests are up for grabs, that offer the greatest opportunity for decisive leadership.

CONCLUSIONS The accumulated scholarly research on political leadership, complex decision making, and crisis management offers practical lessons that can improve the ability of leaders to mobilize support for international preventive action. Just as there are ways to

enhance the receptivity of the decision- making process to early signs of imminent conflict and opportunities for early mediation, so too there are ways in which entrepreneurial leaders can effectively tap public dispositions to generate both a broader culture of prevention and focused support for specific preventive policies: by drawing on fa miliar analogies such as preventive medicine, by identifying the wider range of alternatives to all or nothing conceptions of crisis intervention, by expanding traditional conceptions of national interest, and by educating their respective publics窶馬ot only about the benefits of global preventive efforts, but also about the high costs of continued inaction in the face of grave dangers.

There are still many important questions about political leadership and its relevance to preventing deadly conflicts for which the social and behavioral sciences have not yet found answers. We do know, however, that without such innovative political leadership, deadly conflicts that might have been prevented will continue unabated, taking their high toll in human lives, sustainable development, and hard- won international norms of human justice and democratic governance.

AUTHOR INFORMATION Accepted for publication March 18, 1999.

Corresponding author: David A. Hamburg, MD, President Emeritus, Carnegie Corporation of New York, 437 Madison Ave, 26th Floor, New York, NY 10022.

From the Carnegie Corporation of New York, New York, NY (Dr Hamburg and Ms Ballentine); and Stanford University, Stanford, Calif (Dr George).

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