Associate Professor Jessica Piombo's latest research examines the strategies third-party mediators used to resolve the Burundian civil war and weighs their effectiveness for crisis management in the short-term and peace-building in the long-term. Her research will help policy-makers create broad-based approaches to resolving conflicts in Africa.
Executive Summary
This project evaluates a conundrum facing those making and implementing foreign policies in the U.S. government and elsewhere, whether, in devising policies to address complex security crises, to focus on comprehensive programs that influence the fundamental drivers of conflict (root causes) or to pursue a more limited strategy that seeks to respond to the symptoms of violence. It explicitly focuses on the twin issues of when and why the policy community may take one approach over the other, and what tradeoffs the chosen strategy then creates. The project explores these issues by analyzing the dynamics in a particular subset of policies: mediation strategies employed by third party interveners in violent civil conflict. The project assesses the choices and consequences of different strategies for conflict mediation as a microcosm for debates over whether those responding to conflict should focus their efforts on addressing the fundamental drivers of conflict or the symptoms of conflict once it occurs.
The analysis aims to extract insight into the effects of different approaches to conflict resolution and intervention, with the goal of helping to inform policy decisions across the range of programs and agencies that address issues of African security. The case first analyzes the strategies adopted by third-party mediators responding to the Burundian civil war, identifying when they attempted to address root causes as opposed to seeking to halt violence and addressing the immediate symptoms of conflict. Second, the paper investigates how these strategies affected the course of the conflict and the outcomes of their mediation efforts. This paper lays out the consequences of the choices made by mediators on the process of peace negotiations in Burundi, explicitly comparing across various attempts to resolve the Burundian civil war.
The lessons of the Burundi case suggest that fundamental issues must be addressed if a conflict is to be fully resolved, rather than managed. Delaying the resolution of root causes until after peacemakers have exited the situation can enable powerful groups to avoid addressing the issues. After the peacemaking and negotiations process ends, there is less international attention and pressure, so the ability to perpetuate the status quo is enhanced. The difficulty is that the issues that fomented conflict in the first place may prove too sensitive to be introduced into negotiations when the conflict is either ongoing or very recent.
The Burundian case shows that core issues may still be addressed by subsequent processes even if they are excluded from the negotiations process. However once domestic peace processes supplant third party interventions, addressing root causes is likely to take a lot longer when the core issues are not even opened during the third-party facilitated negotiations phase. Eliminating consideration of key root causes might be necessary for peace negotiations to proceed, but this choice often delays the attainment of a fully consolidated peace settlement. In Burundi, multiple side-negotiations processes were created to deal with some of these fundamental issues. Militant groups maintained a state of war while those parallel processes were ongoing, extending the duration of the conflict.
Ultimately those crafting and implementing conflict response strategies are left with a sensitive tradeoff: including extremely sensitive core issues may prevent progress in peace talks, but excluding those issues and focusing on process and conflict management creates a peace process with significant defects. There may be no right or wrong approach; it may just be a matter of which tradeoff is the necessary one to eventually get to a peaceful outcome. These defects may be addressed through follow-on negotiations, which prevent them from completely derailing the peace process. The tradeoff may prolong some aspects of the conflict, though if not addressed at all, in the worst cases excluding root causes could eventually lead to re- militarization as groups attempt to resolve the fundamental problems.
The analysis suggests that policy responses to conflict that focus on the short-term requirements for conflict cessation will merely contain a conflict rather than truly settle it. If the fundamental issues that drive conflict are left unresolved, then in the longer term conflict is likely to break out repeatedly. The U.S. foreign policy community should therefore have an appreciation for the fact that true conflict resolution requires a broad-based approach that integrates various instruments of foreign policy in order to addresses both the drivers and consequences of conflict. What these instruments are (economic policy, social engineering, political assistance, military assistance, etc) will be dictated by the context of the particular conflict that is being addressed by the external actors. If such an approach is beyond the means or scope of policy implementing agencies, then they should be prepared to remain in a crisis response mode, responding to the effects of violent episodes once they occur.
This suggests concrete policy approaches in which different tiers of conflict can be best addressed by specific actors. In the short term, strategies would focus on crisis response: intervention and/or diplomatic engagement to stop fighting and propel negotiations processes; demobilization to disarm and repatriate combatants; and humanitarian assistance to displaced populations. In the longer term, policies shift to longer term projects that attempt to proactively reduce factors that underlie many conflicts, such as economic inequalities, poverty, and corrupt or closed political systems. These programs therefore focus on economic support packages to aid reconstruction and address structural imbalances, reduce the insecurities and persecutions that created population displacement, and political advisors to assist in political and institution building.
This report is the product of a collaboration between the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Advanced Systems and Concepts Office and The Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.
- Report Number ASCO 2010 008