WAR FOE OF DEVELOPMENT, DEVELOPMENT BEST FORM OF CONFLICT-PREVENTION SECRETARY-GENERAL TELLS WORLD BANK STAFF
Press Release
SG/SM/7187
WAR FOE OF DEVELOPMENT, DEVELOPMENT BEST FORM OF CONFLICT-PREVENTION SECRETARY-GENERAL TELLS WORLD BANK STAFF
19991019This is the text of the Secretary-General's address to World Bank staff in Washington, D.C., today:
It is a great honour to be invited to give the first in your new programme of United Nations Lectures.
The World Bank has been an essential part of the United Nations system throughout its history. Its mission, to enable all the worlds peoples to enjoy the benefits of development, and to rescue billions of our fellow human beings from poverty, is an essential part of the mission of the United Nations itself.
So it should go without saying that we work closely together and engage in a constant exchange of ideas - and indeed of personnel. As some of you may have noticed, I recently poached one of your former vice-presidents to administer the United Nations Development Programme. By setting up this series of lectures you are, in a sense, returning the compliment. I hope we can have smaller discussion groups on specific policy issues as well. Both sides have much to gain from the exchange.
The founders of the United Nations clearly recognized the connection between the struggle for peace and security -- where victory spells freedom from fear -- and the struggle for economic and social progress, where victory spells freedom from want.
Since then there have been five decades of real progress on both fronts. The world as a whole is both more peaceful and more prosperous than it was in 1945. But that progress has not been equally shared.
Nearly half the human race - an estimated 2.8 billion people - is still struggling to survive on less than two dollars a day.
And according to one estimate, five and a half million people have died in war during the 1990s. Many times that number have had their lives ruined - by injury, by the loss of their loved ones, by being driven from their homes or by the destruction of their property.
The vast majority of these conflicts occur in the developing world.
Most of the worlds 20 poorest countries have experienced significant violent conflict in the past decades. In Africa, out of
45 countries where the United Nations has development programmes, 18 are experiencing civil strife and 11 are in varying stages of political crisis.
Clearly, war is not the only cause of poverty, and poverty by itself does not cause war. If it did, all poor countries would be at war. Thank God, most of them are not.
Nor is inequality in itself a sufficient explanation for conflict. The relationship is much more complex than that.
But one thing is indisputable: development has no worse enemy than war.
Prolonged armed conflicts dont only kill people: they destroy a countrys physical infrastructure, divert scarce resources and disrupt economic life, including food supplies. They radically undermine education and health services.
A war of national liberation or self-defence may sometimes bind a nation together - albeit at a cruel and unacceptable human cost. But almost all todays conflicts are civil wars, in which civilian populations are not incidental casualties but direct targets. These wars completely destroy trust between communities, breaking down normal social relations and undermining the legitimacy of government -- not to mention investor confidence. They are also harder to end, because the opposing sides have to live together after the peace, rather than withdrawing behind state borders.
Wars between states, fought with expensive modern weaponry, are very destructive but do at least tend to be short-lived: think of the Gulf War in 1991 or the Kosovo conflict this year. But todays more typical wars are fought in poor countries, with weapons which are cheap and easy to obtain. The misery of these wars can be sustained for years, or even decades: think of Afghanistan, Angola, Sudan.
Much of our work at the United Nations is devoted to coping with the immense suffering caused by these conflicts, and the search for ways to settle them peacefully.
The search is always long, and often thankless - but not as hopeless as the headlines might make you think. During the past nine years, three times as many peace agreements have been signed as in the previous three decades. Some have failed, often amid great publicity, but most have held.
Success, however, brings with it new tasks and problems: what we in the United Nations call post-conflict peace-building. This has been a major innovation of the 1990s, and something of a growth industry.
From Namibia and El Salvador to Kosovo and East Timor, you and we are working side by side, along with local government officials, non- governmental organizations (NGOs) and citizens groups, to help provide emergency relief, demobilize combatants, clear mines, organize elections, encourage reconciliation, build impartial police forces and re-establish basic services. Most difficult but most important of all, we are trying to rebuild relationships - that precious capital of trust within and between communities which is the first casualty of every war, and the hardest thing to restore. There has been much talk of bridging the gap or managing the transition between these tasks and longer-term development efforts. But increasingly, I think, we understand that the two are not separate. Crisis management and peace-building have to be part of a development strategy. If countries wait until all their conflicts and crises are settled before embarking on such a strategy they are likely to wait forever.
But how much better it would be, Ladies and Gentlemen, if we could prevent these conflicts from arising in the first place.
I shall not waste time trying to persuade you of that with facts and figures, because none of you would disagree. No one doubts that prevention is desirable. What some question is whether it is feasible, or whether decision-makers will ever have long enough time horizons to take it seriously. It is even said that convincing politicians to invest in conflict prevention is like asking a teenager to start saving for a pension.
I believe such cynicism is misplaced, but there is a need for humility. Even if we did receive all the resources we need for prevention, we should not overestimate our powers.
Unless the government and people of a country are genuinely willing to confront the problems that may cause conflict, there is not much that even the best informed and most benevolent outsiders can do.
This is not a counsel of despair, simply a note of necessary caution.
What is clear is that to succeed in preventing wars we need to understand the forces that create them.
Of course these are complex, and - as usual - there is a lot of disagreement among scholars who have studied them. But on some key points a consensus is beginning to emerge.
First, no one single factor can explain all conflicts - and therefore no simple nostrum can prevent them all. Prevention policies must be tailored to the particular circumstances of the country or region, and must address many different issues at the same time.
Secondly, most researchers agree that it is useful to distinguish structural or long-term factors, which make violent conflict more likely, from triggers, which actually ignite it.
The structural factors all have to do with social and economic policy, and the way that societies govern themselves. It is here that the link between security and development policy is most obvious.
A major study by the United Nations University, to be published later this year, suggests that simple inequality between rich and poor is not enough to cause violent conflict. What is highly explosive is what the authors of the study call horizontal inequality: when power and resources are unequally distributed between groups that are also differentiated in other ways - for instance by race, religion or language. So-called ethnic conflicts occur between groups which are distinct in one or more of these ways, when one of them feels it is being discriminated against, or another enjoys privileges which it fears to lose. Economic stagnation or decline - sometimes caused by factors quite outside a governments control, such as deterioration in the terms of trade -- do make conflict more likely. As resources get scarcer, competition for them gets fiercer, and elites use their power to retain them at everyone elses expense.
And when economic decline is prolonged -- especially when it starts from an already low base - the result can be a steady degeneration of the states capacity to govern, until the point where it can no longer maintain public order.
So the fact that political violence occurs more frequently in poor countries has more to do with failures of governance, and particularly with failure to redress horizontal inequalities, than with poverty as such. A well-governed poor country can avoid conflict. It also, of course, has a better chance of escaping from poverty.
Even where these long-term factors are present, actual conflict requires a short-term trigger.
Often this takes the form of a deliberate mobilization of grievances by rival elites, with the careful cultivation of dehumanizing myths within one group about another group, propagated and amplified by hate-media.
At the very edge of war, relatively small events which appear to confirm these myths can provide the spark to ignite full-scale violence. And once it has started, whole communities become gripped by hate and fear. Each action by one tends to reinforce the fears of the other.
Often it is the state, or the group that controls the state, which initiates large-scale violence, as a response to non-violent protests by opposition groups. This is not surprising, because governments are usually better armed than their opponents, at least at the beginning of a conflict. However strong their grievances, people seldom take up arms in sufficient numbers to defeat the state unless they are driven to it by violent repression.
But many wars have more to do with greed than with grievance -- as several recent studies have shown, including one done here in the Banks Research Department. War can be profitable for some, especially where it involves control over valuable export commodities like diamonds, drugs or timber. Where governments are weak, and legitimate economic opportunities are few, resort to violent crime may seem a logical alternative to destitution, especially for unemployed youth. And when such criminal violence occurs on a large scale - and is resisted, as it must be, by the state -- it can all too easily escalate into civil war.
So what can we do about all this?
First of all, if horizontal inequality is indeed a major cause of conflict, then obviously our policies must seek to reduce it. Yet until very recently, development policy tended to ignore this problem. As a result, some policies which were meant to enhance growth have had the unintended consequence of aggravating this kind of inequality, thus increasing the risk of instability and violence.
That is one reason why I welcome Jim Wolfensohns call for the Bank and its partners to start asking hard questions about how we can best integrate a concern for conflict prevention into development operations. And I am interested to hear that the British Government is now actively discussing the idea of conflict impact assessments. The idea is that before adopting a particular policy, or imposing a particular type of conditionally, you would check, through a process of consultation, that that policy will reduce the danger of conflict in a country - or at least not actually increase it.
Like a lot of good ideas, this seems common sense once you have thought of it. But in the past it has not been done.
Secondly, if conflict is often caused by different groups having unequal access to political power, then it follows that a good way to avoid conflict is to encourage democracy - not the winner-takes-all variety, but inclusive democracy, which gives everyone a say in decisions that affect their lives.
During the 1990s, largely as a result of the end of the cold war, there have been two remarkable changes in the international system. First, the number of democratic states in the world almost doubled between 1990 and 1998. And second, the number of armed conflicts in the world declined -- from fifty-five in 1992 to thirty-six in 1998.
That second statement may seem surprising, when each of us can reel off a list of horrific conflicts, from Bosnia to Sierra Leone to East Timor.
But the truth - so far entirely missed by the media - is that more old wars have ended than new ones have begun.
Of course the increase in the number of democracies is not the sole cause of the decline in the number of wars. Other factors, not least the ending of cold war ideological conflicts, have also played a role. And in some cases peace may have made democratization possible, rather than the other way round. But a number of studies do show that democracies have very low levels of internal violence compared with non- democracies.
When you think about it, that is what you would expect. Democracy is, in essence, a form of non-violent conflict management. But a note of caution is in order. While the end result is highly desirable, the process of democratization can be highly destabilizing - especially when states introduce winner-take-all electoral systems without adequate provision for human rights. At such times different groups can become more conscious of their unequal status, and nervous about each others power. Too often, they resort to pre-emptive violence.
But that should not discourage us from urging the right sort of democratization, as part of our development policies.
Good governance, of course, means much more than democratization in a formal political sense. Another very important aspect of it is the reform of public services -- including the security sector, which should be subject to the same standards of efficiency, equity and accountability as any other public service. This has rightly become an issue of increasing concern to the Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and several important donor states.
Conflict is much less likely to occur in a state if all its inhabitants feel that their lives and property are made safer by the work of the security services. Conflict is more likely when a significant group of citizens feels excluded from the security services, and exploited or terrorized by them.
If I could sum up my message this afternoon in one sentence, it is that human security, good governance, equitable development and respect for human rights are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. If war is the worst enemy of development, healthy and balanced development is the best form of conflict prevention.
The case for allocating more time and resources to development policies such as I have outlined is compelling. It is cost-effective, and it can save millions of lives. But it will not be easy.
The costs of prevention have to be paid in the present, while its benefits lie in the distant future. Moreover, the benefits are intangible: they are the wars and disasters that do not happen. Yet there has been a great upsurge of interest in prevention over the past few years, among donor states as well as international organisations. We must build on it.
The World Bank and the United Nations have learned much together during the past decade, but there is much more learning still to be done.
We must learn how to work better with each other, with the other parts of the United Nations system, with governments and with NGOs.
We must also learn from each other, never thinking that our own particular group or agency is the sole repository of wisdom.
Above all, we must learn from the people of developing countries. Each country, each province, even each village has its own particular problems, but also its own insights and inspiration.
I believe the single most valuable quality, for diplomats and development economists alike, is the ability to listen.
And now its my turn to listen to you.
Thank you very much.
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