Moving the Needle on Prevention Through Improved Early Warning

August 28, 2014

Yesterday, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 2717 (2014), ostensibly committing itself "to better utilizing all tools of the United Nations system to ensure that warning signs of impending bloodshed [are] translated into 'concrete preventative action.'" Among many phrases and clauses, that resolution included the following:

Calling attention to the importance of early awareness and consideration of situations which may deteriorate into armed conflicts, and emphasizing that the United Nations, including the Security Council, should heed early warning indications of potential conflict and ensure prompt and effective action to prevent, contain or end conflicts, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations,

In light of that admonition, the Security Council

14.  Encourages the Secretary-General to continue to refer to the Council information and analyses which he believes could contribute to the prevention of armed conflict, including on cases of serious violations of international law, including international humanitarian law and human rights law, and on potential conflict situations arising, inter alia, from ethnic, religious and territorial disputes, poverty and lack of development;

It's reasonable to be cynical about resolutions like this one. The U.N. resolves to do lots of things that don't end up happening. As Lawrence Woocher described in a report prepared for the Office of the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide nearly 10 years ago (here), there are many bureaucratic impediments to producing useful early warning of mass atrocities and then acting on them. Our system is not going to solve all the problems enumerated in that report, of course, but it can move the needle on one of them. In his report Woocher notes that:

Several scholars have concluded that the politics at the UN—internal bureaucratic rivalries as well as resistance by UN member states—have made creation and maintenance of a significant analytic/[early warning] capacity nearly impossible.

What if the UN doesn't have to create and maintain that capacity because it already exists elsewhere? That's the point of our system. Early warning isn't even close to sufficient for effective prevention, but it is necessary. If we and like-minded efforts can provide the UN and other organizations aspiring to prevent mass atrocities with earlier and more accurate assessments of risk, we can marginally expand the time, and thus the range of tools, available for preventive action. That's not a solution, but it is an improvement.