“UNU/WIDER Research on the Causes and Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies”

Knowledge for What: Policy Research on Conflict Prevention & Peace-Building Symposium

Rockefeller Brothers Fund Conference Center

Pocantico, New York

September 12-14, 1999

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of complex humanitarian emergencies - human-made crises, in which large numbers of people die and suffer from war, physical violence (often by the state), and refugee displacement - has escalated, leaving scores of people dead, starving, and homeless. Many others could be affected in the next few years unless we introduce corrective preventive measures.

Responses to this scourge have mostly concentrated on ex-post interventions, i.e. interventions carried out after the conflicts have arisen. Moreover, most analyses of the causes of such emergencies have focused on such factors as ethnic animosity, deteriorating environmental conditions, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the plummeting of aid, or structural adjustment. While not irrelevant, these explanations are partial and overlook the ex-ante impact of failed development policies and institutional collapse.

The research comprised political and economic analyses, case studies, and econometric analysis by 45 scholars under the auspices of UNU/WIDER and Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. We drew on leading specialists in economic development, economic stabilization, the environment, criminal behavior, political decay, and on specific Third World countries involved in war to identify the long-term causes of and early measures to reduce the risk of emergencies. Our work emphasizes the importance of protracted economic stagnation and decline, high and rising inequality (especially inequalities among distinct social groups, including those associated with government exclusion), high military spending, rule by entrenched minorities, state failure, and predatory rule in causing wars. Slow or negative growth puts pressure on ruling elites, reducing the number of allies and clients they can support and tending to undermine the legitimacy of the regime. For the largest portion of violence results not from insurgent action but from the policies of governing elites, who often use repression to forestall threats to the regime. Moreover, in low-income countries, once conflict has begun, certain groups gain economically from the fighting and this tends to perpetuate it or lead to renewed fighting after a “resolution” appears to have been reached.

The researchers argue in favor of shifting the policy focus to the ex ante prevention of humanitarian by means of appropriate economic and social development policies. These include strengthening civil society and reforming political institutions, improving the capability of the state to collect taxes and provide basic services, undergoing agrarian reform and land redistribution, accelerating economic growth through domestically-planned macroeconomic stabilization and structural adjustment, protecting the position of weaker segments of the population, and redesigning aid to be more stable, predictable, and oriented to a coherent national plan and to long-term, locally-oriented, agricultural research and technology.

To influence policy and action, UNU/WIDER presented its findings to missions, delegates, and the Secretariat of the United Nations, and (with Sida) sponsored a policy conference with representatives from the World Bank, UN agencies, the European Commission, and numerous international NGOs. While the responses varied, several UN personnel were attracted by evidence that sound economic development policies reduced military and security expenses.

E. Wayne Nafziger, UNU/WIDER (1996-98) and Kansas State University