Forum Crisis Prevention (Ed.) Editorial office: Reiner Steinweg
Examples of Successful War and Civil War Prevention An overview
Work in Progress
http://www.crisis-prevention.info
Updated 13 November 2015
„Work in progress“ means that the Internet entry hereby made available will continually be completed. We kindly ask readers for suggestions and/or contributions to other cases, and to make corrections and additions to the present texts, provided that something essential has been omitted. We ask you to bear in mind that all the authors had been asked to confine themselves to the key points, i.e. the most important facts, as in encyclopedia. Only if similar conflicts in two neighbouring countries were dealt with, a somewhat larger size was allowed. For countries marked with NN in the table of contents authors are still needed! For ideas, contributions, and additions or corrections (also in English or French) please contact our editorial team at reiner.steinweg@liwest.at. Examples from earlier historical periods are also welcome! Contributions are identified by name at the end. References are also deliberately kept short. They give the reader an initial orientation for subsequent more detailed information. Most entries will contain references for further reading. When enough examples are filed, the aim is to create an English and a French version and publish a multilingual brochure which will be handed out to political offices dealing with such issues in Berlin, Brussels and elsewhere .
Table of Contents
Updated: 21 April 2016
Outline and Justification for the Project
In public debates successful prevention of war has low priority. As a rule inter- and intra-national tensions and crises are dealt with as long as their outcome is uncertain and the “writing of war is on the wall”. If, on the other hand, a war has been averted successfully, the case is no longer of interest to the general public and the media. Nevertheless, the statement, „Prevention is the Alpha and Omega“, made by Lothar Brock, prof. em. at Frankfurt Goethe University and director of the Research Group of the Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research, on 20 September 2015, still stands. Lothar Brock made this statement at the Biberach Symposium on the occasion of Dieter Senghaas’s 75th anniversary, one of the founding fathers of German peace and conflict research. The result of the lack of public interest in successful crisis prevention is that those cases are rarely investigated even in peace research. Especially the general mind takes almost no notice. So the opportunity to learn from those cases for similar future constellations of conflict and to provide adequate provisions is lost. At the same time the far-reaching consequences of the disastrous attitude is reinforced that “there is no remedy against war”. Therefore Forum Crisis Prevention tries to collect concise and comprehensible descriptions of successful prevention of wars and and of civil wars. Each of those contains some case history and recommendations for further reading. Prevention here means, 1) prevention of war, civil war or early stages of those (violent conflicts between large communities) and2) practices for the time after war which have prevented resurgence of conflict for at least 10 years. This does not mean that in the coexistence of the affected ethnic and / or social groups all problems and tensions must have been solved. The aim is to publish a booklet on prevention where different authors present a variety of case studies. It has been decided not to discuss all favourable factors that have also contributed to success as such special circumstances can almost always be found. Here the question is not whether such circumstances existed or not, but rather, if given the right circumstances, the opportunity was seized to engage in timely intervention, which is by no means always the case. And some of these favorable circumstances, e.g. the clear will on all sides to avoid an escalation into war, can in fact be delibertately facilitated into being! This is precisely the purpose of the collection. The planned brochure is meant to encourage and maximise preventative actions, as well as to stimulate increasing popular pressure on governments for these to make a concerted effort of engagment in more proactive, peaceful measures for the deescalation of conflicts. The same is true for the webpage, until the brochure gets printed. Both are indicated as ‘work in progress’. All too often in the last 100 years leading politicians instead of taking a preventative stance became fatalistic and decided ‘to let things take their course’. This was true, for example, in 1914 (Chancellor Bethman-Holweg in Berlin), in 1999 with respect to Kosovo, in 2003 with respect to Iraq and in 2011 in Libya, where resolutions were forced through air strikes, and other forms of military interventions, whose devastating and long term consequences often only become apparent many years after ‘victory’ had been proclaimed. Especially we want to thank Saskia Thorbecke, who started the present collection at the request of Forum Crisis Prevention, once she had finished a similarly structured, model and much-used overview for the book „Nonviolent Action – Experience and Analysis“ (ed. in 2011 by Reiner Steinweg and Ulrike Laubenthal) on particularly prominent and successful nonviolent actions since the 17th century. The current collection is structured along similar lines of this her previous publication, which gave an excellent and very useful, reader friendly set of examples of successful nonviolent interventions from the 17th Century onwards. Without Saskia Thornbecke’s extraordinary preliminary work, the present core of this planned collection would not have materialized. We are asking all readers both for suggestions and proposals for the improvement of this draft and for additional examples even from earlier periods of human history, and also for further possible authors who we could contact.
Linz, August 2014, revised November 2015 Reiner Steinweg