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How Do We Prevent War and State Murder

by E. Wayne Nafziger and Raimo Väyrynen

Since the end of the cold war, civil wars and state violence have escalated, resulting in millions of deaths. Past failures from Afghanistan to Zaire/ Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) indicate the importance of prevention strategies. The most promising are long-term economic approaches, institutional peace-building, defence of human rights, and third-party presence in the conflict zone. A recently published WIDER study, The Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave 2002) provides an analysis and an inventory of instruments for donors, international agencies, and developing countries to prevent humanitarian emergencies.

Sources of Emergencies

Emergencies have numerous sources. Both greed and grievances from wealth and power discrepancies drive emergencies. Important economic contributors are low average income, protracted economic stagnation and decline, chronic international deficits, large income inequality, and conflict over mineral exports (as in DRC, Angola, and Liberia).

Political contributors include government exclusion of particular ethnic communities, rule by entrenched minorities, and a tradition of violent conflict. Many states experiencing emergencies have weak or failing governments and face a breakdown in public order and services. The lack of personal security and uncertainty about the future drives people to opposing camps.

Most deaths from emergencies are not from insurgent action but from government sponsored or organized killing. Amid war and scarcity, ruling elites may benefit economically from spearheading genocide or tolerating crime and mass murder in co-operation with militias, war profiteers, and ethnic champions. Stopping deadly political violence requires changing the balance between benefits and costs.

Economic Stagnation and Emergencies 

Slow or negative growth puts ruling coalitions on the horns of a dilemma. Political elites can expand rent seeking, but that contributes to further stagnation, threatening political legitimacy and stability. Or they can reduce the allies they support, risking opposition by those losing benefits. Either strategy, amid economic crises, exacerbates the potential for repression, insurgency, and ultimately humanitarian emergencies.

In the long run (a decade or more), accelerating economic growth reduces the risks of emergencies. Enhancing growth requires changes in the international economic order, which encompasses economic relations and institutions linking people from different nations, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization, bilateral and multilateral trade, aid, banking, exchange, and capital movements. Improving the world order enhances global peace and stability, and the economic development of both rich and poor countries.

Changing Economic Policies

​​During the last 20-25 years the IMF and World Bank undertook stabilization and adjustment policies, setting conditions for loans of last resort in virtually every developing country. Conditions included privatization, deregulation, wage and price decontrol, trade and financial liberalization, and monetary, fiscal, and exchange-rate policies. For the IMF, when inflation is 20 per cent or less annually, restoring growth should take precedence over policies such as draconian spending reductions and monetary restrictions. Orthodox disinflationary policies may aggravate social tensions leading to emergencies. Adjustment policies need to be subject to open debate to reflect the priorities of the host country.

Poor, inegalitarian, and weak Third World states, with the support of the international community, must strengthen their institutions by developing an impartial legal system, enhancing financial institutions, increasing taxing capacity, investing in basic education and infrastructure, UNHCR/ P.Benatar7 creating resource and exchange markets, targeting programmes for weaker segments of the population, and devising democratic institutions that accommodate and co-opt the country’s various ethnic communities.

Agricultural land disputes, landless discontent, and unequal land distribution increase the risk of emergencies. One preventive measure is equitable land distribution together with policies supporting small-scale agriculture. In addition, secure property and use rights contribute to safeguarding land productivity and reducing deadly political violence. Where vested interests block land redistribution, more modest agrarian reform, such as reform of tenancy terms, can reduce rural poverty. Donors can provide the extra resources, making reforms feasible.

Domestic Management

The prevention of emergencies must start at home. The external management of such crises cannot make up for domestic resource mobilization, public order, and robust political and legal institutions. Domestic strategies are particularly effective if they cater to basic human needs (health, nutrition, and education), promote inclusive social policies, and enhance citizens’ political rights and the public accountability of the rulers. The most important causes of emergencies are bad policies and criminal behaviour by elites, difficult to alter from outside. Examples of the relative impotence of external intervention are predatory and repressive actions by Iraq’s and Zimbabwe’s governments that increase disease and hunger.

The Role of the International Community

Recently donor governments and international financial institutions, in response to demands for justice and legitimacy, have reoriented their policies to promote human rights, gender equality, and good governance that reduce violence. However, external involvement may be too cautious and late to be effective. While external players may subcontract conflict prevention and humanitarian action to NGOs with new modes of civil-military co-operation, at times NGOs face intractable political tangles, especially in collapsing states.

Over the long run, the most effective preventive strategies include stable socio-economic development, environmental protection, secure property rights, enforceable economic legislation, accountable and inclusive political institutions, and respect for basic human rights. Implementing such strategies is difficult, partly because globalization has marginalized many peripheral areas. The absence of constructive international engagement leaves these areas to their own devices, frequently giving local dictatorial elites the chance to pursue their agendas.

The North tends to react only when its people are directly affected or the humanitarian consequences of the local crises are too severe to be overlooked. Punitive reactions include economic sanctions and military interventions that exacerbate rather than resolve humanitarian problems. International programmes address humanitarian crises and peace-building through separate compartments of development aid and the rebuilding of war-torn nations. In Afghanistan alone reconstruction is estimated to cost US $10-15 billion, roughly equal to annual US aid to the entire developing world.

The amount of aid is not correlated with emergencies, and many poor countries are hampered by a high dependence on aid, reducing domestic initiative, technical learning, and export orientation. Still aid to smooth abrupt external price and income shocks, reschedule debt of non-predatory states, diminish food insecurity, invest in education, and support long-term agricultural research and technology has high payoffs, requiring more aid than present. In giving aid, rich countries and international agencies need coherent preventive policies undertaken in concert with local leaders.

E. Wayne Nafziger, University Distinguished Professor of Economics, Kansas State University was Senior Research Fellow at WIDER in 1996-98. Raimo Väyrynen is Professor of Government and International Studies, University of Notre Dame, and was WIDER Senior Research Fellow in 1996-98. They are the editors of The Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies, Palgrave for UNU/ WIDER (2002).