The Responsibility to Prevent

A Report to Congress from the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers)

By Bridget Moix and Trevor Keck (October 2008)

Full Report (pdf)

Summary Recommendations for the next Congress

Executive Summary

The next Congress and administration will have a historic opportunity to rebuild U.S. foreign policy structures to better meet the challenges of the 21st century. While the number of major armed conflicts around the world has been declining in recent years, the nature of deadly violence has changed significantly, requiring both new policy approaches and a new foreign policy toolbox.

Civilians have become not only the major casualties, making up eighty to ninety percent of conflict victims, but are also increasingly targeted in wars. Once defined as “non-traditional threats,” weak and failing states, civil insurgencies, genocide and ethnic cleansing, environmental crises, and conflicts over resources in an increasingly inequitable world are now far more common than state-to-state military engagements, and require much more than traditional military approaches.

Foreign policy experts, military leaders, and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle now agree that the U.S. needs to strengthen its civilian tools for engaging the world and addressing today’s security threats. Turning that growing consensus into real policy change, however, will require new investments in nonmilitary tools to protect civilians and help prevent deadly conflict.

In 2005, the United States joined a majority of the world’s governments in affirming for the first time the “responsibility to protect” civilians from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The endorsement of the responsibility to protect, or R2P, was an important step in building a new global norm for the protection of civilians. While the responsibility to protect lies first and foremost with national governments, the international community has now agreed to act when a state is unable or unwilling to protect its people.

In 2007 Congress requested reports from the Departments of State and Defense assessing the ability of the United States to train and guide an international intervention force in keeping with the responsibility to protect. While much attention is focused on the possibility of military intervention to stop atrocities once they are underway, the original concept of the responsibility to protect included three core elements: prevention, reaction, and rebuilding. Of these three, the original R2P commission stated in its report, “Prevention is the single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect.”

Rather than focusing on late intervention through military force, Congress should work to strengthen civilian tools and structures that can prevent conflicts from becoming violent and address the conditions that may lead to genocide. Such an approach would save both lives and money. According to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the international community could have saved $130 billion during the 1990s and averted direct military interventions by employing preventive approaches to conflicts in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, the Persian Gulf, Cambodia, and El Salvador.

This report, The Responsibility to Prevent, offers Congress an independent assessment of U.S. capacities to peacefully manage conflicts before they escalate into genocide or mass atrocities. The core recommendations, if implemented effectively, would not only save billions of dollars and thousands of lives, but also avoid the many pitfalls of 11th-hour military intervention.

The Prevention Gap

Unfortunately, as the report demonstrates, an assessment of the U.S. ability to help prevent genocide and mass atrocities reveals a dangerous capacity shortfall. This prevention gap includes severe underresourcing of civilian diplomacy; ineffective use of development assistance; and a lack of support for international prevention, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding. An increasing militarization of U.S. foreign policy also creates obstacles to effective prevention.

Despite widespread recognition of the need for more robust diplomatic and development capacities, the administration and Congress continue to starve civilian agencies while pouring money into the military. The result: military force remains the principle tool available to the United States to address crises. As former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili pointed out on the eve of NATO’s military campaign in Kosovo, “What we are doing to our diplomatic capabilities is criminal. . . . By slashing them, we are less able to avoid disasters such as Somalia or Kosovo and therefore we will be obliged to use military force still more often.”

To fill the prevention gap, the incoming Congress and administration should begin dedicating significant resources and political will to averting genocide, mass atrocities, and deadly conflict before they occur. The best protection is prevention. Creating the capacity to prevent will also generate greater political will to address potential crises before they erupt into violence. Without the proper tools, the best intentions will offer little hope for effective action.

This report proposes a three-part prevention plan to build robust U.S. civilian and international capacities, including:

1. U.S. diplomacy and conflict management
A new civilian-led foreign policy initiative dedicated to strong diplomacy and prevention of deadly conflict is needed to reassert U.S. leadership in promoting peace and stability. Enhanced diplomacy and conflict-management capacities should include doubling of well-trained and deployable State Department personnel, periodic country conflict assessments, and strengthened civilian crisis response capacity.

2. Enhanced development assistance to address root causes and mitigate conflict
Development aid can play a key role in helping prevent deadly conflict, strengthen democratic societies, and build state capacities to fulfill the responsibility to protect. The United States should bolster its official development aid, untie and demilitarize assistance, increase the number of technical development personnel, and increase funding for peacebuilding and conflict sensitive development programs.

3. U.N. and multilateral prevention, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding
The international community needs strengthened capacities to prevent violent conflict, protect civilians, and build peace. The United States should meet its obligations to the United Nations, lift the peacekeeping cap, help fund the U.N. Peacebuilding Commission, and support increased regional capacities, starting with the African Union.

Fulfilling the responsibility to protect requires renewed attention and investment in tools to prevent atrocities and deadly conflict. Filling the prevention gap should be a foreign policy priority of the next administration and Congress.

As Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently noted, “It is by preventing, rather than reacting, that we can truly fulfill our shared responsibility to end the worst forms of human rights abuses."

Read the full report (pdf).