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“Why don’t they listen?” Micro and Macro-Perspectives on
the Success and Failure of Warnings about Intra-State
Conflict1
Christoph O. Meyer, John Brante, Chiara de Franco, Florian Otto
King’s College London
Paper prepared for the SGIR ECRP 7th
Pan-European International Relations
Conference, 9-11 September 2011, Stockholm
Draft: Please do not cite without permission of the authors
Comments welcome
Abstract
The paper aims to reinvigorate and advance the debate about the warning-response
gap by proposing and applying a novel analytical and normative approach. It suggests
combining micro with macro-level definitions of “success” and studying the
conditions underpinning it: The micro-level perspective investigates the cognitive
impact of individual warnings and the factors which can help to explain under what
conditions warnings about the escalation of violent conflict are noticed, accepted and
prioritised. We conduct the first empirical test of a modified persuasion model of
warning impact through two case studies of relative success (Darfur) and failure
(Georgia). The warning producer’s perspective does not necessarily equate, however,
to having a “normatively successful” warning-response organisation or system. The
paper sets out the normative requirements across four stages, involving forecasting,
communicating, prioritising and deciding to mobilise and elaborates on conducive
conditions for each of them. It then draws on our practitioner research to argue that
current international and national warnings-response practices tend to suffer from i)
contested knowledge bases with regard to forecasting conflict; ii) asymmetric
relationships between warning producers and consumers, iii) poorly managed
conflicts within organisations over the ends and means of preventive policy, and
finally iv) countervailing incentives on decision-makers to act early.
Corresponding Author:
Dr Christoph O Meyer
Dept of War Studies
King's College London
Strand, LondonWC2R 2LS
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7848 1031
Email: christoph.meyer@kcl.ac.uk
1 The project benefits from financial support from the European Research Council (No 202022). More
information is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/foresight.
2
1. Introduction
What does it take to enable action aimed at preventing the outbreak of violent
conflict? The most frequent answer is “knowledge” about which regions, countries or
areas within countries are most prone to experience the escalation of violence within a
time-period that allows for preventive action. Substantial efforts in the academic field
have thus focused on improving the accuracy and specificity of forecasts about armed
violence, highlighting its importance to effective early warning (Schrodt and Gerner
2000; Hegre and Sambanis 2006; Rost, Schneider et al. 2009; Gleditsch and Ward
2010; Goldstone, Bates et al. 2010; Raleigh 2010). In contrast to the manifold and
sustained scientific efforts in forecasting conflict over the past decades, very little
attention has been focused on understanding how knowledge claims concerning
potential risks of intra-state violence turn into warnings and when such warnings are
noticed, prioritised and acted upon by actors with relevant authority and instruments.
The answers to these questions are highly relevant in the context of the literature
broadly concerned with the ‘warning-response-gap’ (Adelman and Suhrke 1996;
George and Holl 1997; Cockell 1998; Lund 1998; Carment and Schnabel 2003;
Jentleson 2003), which is variously attributed to decision-makers’ inherent lack of
political will to bear risk for humanitarian causes, dysfunctional media coverage
(Jakobsen 2000), or indeed the lack of ‘actionable’ as compared to ‘accurate’
forecasts. It is also an important question to current efforts by international
organisations as well as some national governments to improve their early-warning
and response processes, structures and capabilities of action (Brahimi 2000; Prime
Minister's Strategy Unit 2005; Council 2007; OSCE 2009)
3
The paper approaches the warning-response problem through a modified version
of persuasion theory suggested by Meyer, Otto, Brante and de Franco (Meyer, Otto et
al. 2011). They have argued that for both normative as well as analytical reasons
warning impact cannot be adequately investigated in terms of outcomes on the
grounds, but requires attention to prior problems of reception, attention, prioritisation
and decision to mobilise, each of which poses particular challenges for warning
producers and consumers. Furthermore, Meyer et al (2011) proposed a tentative
model to capture different variables that are thought to influence when individual
warnings are likely to have an impact.
The present paper argues that the present model is helpful to investigate in a more
nuanced fashion the impact of particular warning messages of particular sources and
highlight those factors that are amendable to chance. Yet, the model cannot account
for the underlying structural features of the warning-response gap and is insufficiently
sensitive to the normative preconditions relating to good judgements and evidence
underpinning preventive policy. More specifically, the paper highlights and elaborates
on four factors which cause problems in the warning-response linkage, each of which
cuts across and influences different variables in the micro-level persuasion model of
warning: i) the contested knowledge basis of early warning about conflicts and its
consequences; ii) dysfunctional relationships between warning producers and
consumers; iii), missing mechanisms for managing horizontal disputes over goals and
means of preventive policy; iv) and countervailing incentives to act early. We draw on
the results from semi-structured interviews among relevant practitioners within
national governments, international organisations, NGOs and the news media. In
addition, we have conducted a survey among practitioners within international
4
organisations with a conflict prevention brief to measure more accurately some of the
main variables and determine differences in impact.
2. Investigating the Causes of the Warning-Response Gap: Linking Micro
and Marco-Explanations
We define warning as a communicative act with the intention to raise a given
recipient’s awareness about a potential threat to a valued good or interest in order to
enhance her ability to take preventive or mitigating action (Belden 1977; Chan
1979:104). In order to analyse the role and impact of warnings, be it on the micro or
macro-level, it is important to understand that warnings generally contain three
interlinked judgments, two of which are diagnostic and one prescriptive (May and
Zelikow 2006; Brante 2010). The first judgment is the knowledge claim about what is
likely to happen, the second is an assessment of why the consequences of this forecast
should concern a given recipient (the ‘so what’-question) and thirdly, an explicit or
implicit judgment about whether existing policy is working and how it might need to
be changed in order to prevent harm to a valued good or interest (Betts 2007).
Boundaries between warning and non-warning are de-facto blurred, not least because
a number of factors can lead to a situation in which analyst “A” thinks s/he has
delivered a warning, whereas a given decision-maker “B” fails to interpret it as such.
The decisive feature is the intention of the warning communicator to change the
attitudes of recipients about a given problem, which makes it different from general
reporting, indicator monitoring etc.
Warnings that reach decision-makers can originate from a range of different
sources, who compile them according to different rules, using different channels and
aiming at a range of difference audience. One can distinguish between “in-house” and
5
“out-of the field warning” as far as governments and international organizations are
concerned. The first category comprises formal warnings products and processes,
which are guided by clear rules about who is coordinating warning about which issue,
using which information, liaising with whom and within what time-scale. The prime
example are watch-lists compiled by various actors in order to warn decision-makers,
but also to guide further analysis and contingency-planning.2 Other written warnings
originate from national intelligence services, embassies, special envoys and military
commanders in the field, sometimes within regular reports, sometimes through ad-hoc
communications such as cables. ‘In-house warnings’ may also be communicated in a
very personal, informal and face-to-face manner such as officials sending ad-hoc
emails, picking-up the phone, meetings and briefings. Out of the field warnings can
originate from global NGOs such as the International Crisis Group, specialized think-
tanks such as the International Institute of Strategic Studies, or individual experts
associated with universities and other research bodies. Finally, out-of-the field
warnings stems from news agencies and mass-market news media, including
international lead media such as CNN, the New York Times, and the Financial Times.
This diversity of sources and formats is relevant both for the micro-perspective of
assessing the impact of a particular warning from a particular source, but also for
wider investigations that look at the accumulative and combined impact of warning
messages, which may cluster in time and contradict or reinforce each other to varying
degrees. In the following we will argue that warning about intra-state conflict and its
impact can be best analysed by a combination of micro and macro-theoretical lenses.
2 The EU has a “watch-list” compiled by the PSC with input from Commission Member States, the UK
the (“Countries at Risk-Report”) and the US the NIC Instability Watch list as well as the Atrocity
Watchlist. The problem with the lists is that despite the fact they are being classified, being on the list
may have negative implications for particular countries and thus result in lobbying from both those
countries and their “friends”. The result is that political judgements play often a similarly important
role to who is on the list as technocratic assessments of relative state fragility or probability of conflict.
6
Micro-Perspective: Warning as Persuasion
The micro-theoretical perspective conceptualises warning as a special case of
persuasion and seeks to investigate both process and impact, incorporating a range of
different factors and variable as explained further below (Meyer, Otto et al. 2011).
Firstly, this perspective is helpful for tracing with much more nuance the cognitive
impact of warnings over time. Meyer et al (2011) have suggested distinguishing
cognitive impact in terms of notice, attention, acceptance, prioritisation and decision
to mobilise, each of which poses some distinct challenges for the actors involved in
the warning-response nexus.
Secondly, the perspective is also helpful in post-mortems when warnings did not
lead to preventive action to ascertain potential failures of the system and apportion –
and if appropriate blame – between warning producers and consumers. Did the
warning reach the right recipients? Was the warning clear and specific enough and the
source credible? What did other sources say? How great was the competition for
decision-makers attention and resources at a given point in time? We know from
similar enquiries in the domain of risk research that the tendency is always to blame
the “operator”, the last person whose action or inaction caused or failed to prevent a
disaster, rather than seeing the systemic and organisational origins of the accident and
judging operator performance in the context of the information and conditions
prevailing at the time. Many public inquiries and much academic writing after major
humanitarian catastrophe’s tends to involve unrealistically demanding expectations
about which warnings should have been heeded and which actions should have been
taken in order to prevent casualties. That is, in hindsight, the focus tends often to be
on policy change as the expected impact of warning. Following the previous point, we
7
argue that more modest expectations are appropriate where success is defined as a
belief or cognitive change on a scale of varying levels. A focus on persuasion at the
micro-level illuminates the problems emerging at the interface of producers and
consumers of warnings and the non-trivial problems for decision-makers in dealing
with uncertainty, message contradictions and competing demands for attention and
resources.
Thirdly, even though the micro-perspective on warning as persuasion is analytical
in nature, not a normative, it can help to investigate boundary problems between the
notion of persuasion, which is ultimately build on the autonomy of the receiving
individual to change his beliefs, and coercion, which puts persuasion targets under
undue pressure to change their mind and act in a certain way. These dynamics could
be at play when preventive policy turns out to be based on shaky or incomplete
evidence, formulated in a rushed and haphazard fashion, and leads to unintended or
undesirable consequences.
Finally, from a practitioner’s point of view understanding these conditions is
invaluable to experts who want to communicate their knowledge effectively to one or
more relevant recipients within a largely given set of conditions, including the
relationship between the warning producer to the warning communicator and the
contextual factors influencing receptivity on the side of the recipients. The perspective
can help the expert to better tailor the message to a recipient’s preconceptions and
interests, choose the right channel or set of channels to overcome various filters, and
decide when to communicate in order to hit a temporal window of cognitive
readiness. It can also help recipients to better understand some of the obstacles
warning communicators are facing such as impressions of inapproachability, their
8
reactions to the delivery of bad-news and how their own cognitive and motivational
biases can influence their acceptance and prioritisation of warning intelligence.
The substantive theory about when warning messages are likely to persuade a
given recipient is contained in the work by Meyer, Otto, Brante and de Franco (2011).
Persuasion is a well-established field of research in the area of social psychology and
political communication, but has not yet been applied to the problem of studying the
impact of warning about impending conflicts. It goes back to the pioneering work of
Janis and Hovland at Yale (Hovland, Janis et al. 1959; Perloff 2008) on the factors
which make a message persuasive for a given recipient. To increase its fit with the
particular characteristics of warnings communication about intra-state conflict, Meyer
et al. have modified the standard model contained in many psychology textbooks,
revolving around the variables connected to message, source and recipient factors. In
doing so, they have drawn on insights from intelligence studies about the failure of
strategic warning (Jervis 1976; Betts 1978; Jervis 2010) and risk research about the
failure to prevent disasters and ‘predictable surprises’ (Perrow 1999; Posner 2004;
Perrow 2007; Bazerman and Watkins 2008; Gerstein and Ellsberg 2008).
Since the model is fairly self-explanatory and space limited, we will not seek to
explain each of the variables contained in the model.
9
Figure 1: Model of Warning about Intra-State Conflict as Persuasive Discourse
Warning
Communcator
• Experience
• Motivation
• Skill
Message Content
• Certainty
• Actionability
• Intelligibility
• Emotional
appeal
Filtering
Mechanisms
• Professional
Norms
• Culture of
Organisation
• Available
Resources
Source
Perceptions
• Formal Status
• Expertise &
Track-Record
• Interest bias
Message
Channels
• Interpersonal
• Bureaucratic
• Mediatised
Warning
Recipient
• Cognitive
Capacity
• Pre-existing
beliefs
• Motivation to
Process
Warning
Impact
1. Notice
2. Attention
3. Acceptance
4. Prioritisation
5. Mobilisation
Relationship between Warner and Warnee
• Hierarchical and power differentials
• Knowledge differentials
• Frequency, length and nature of interactions
Contextual Factors
• Degree of competition from other issues
• Compatibility with political agenda
• Similarity of issue to influential lessons learnt
• Resonance/Dissonance with other messages
10
The Macro-Perspective: Warning as Knowledge in Policy-Making
The macro-theoretical perspective looks at the warning response problem through
the normative prism of evidence-based policy-making at the level of organisations
and systems. It starts from the premise that knowledge helps democracies to reach a
set of goals more efficiently and effectively than alternative ways of conceiving
policy. It does not advocate expert-rule in all areas of risks, but embraces the
expectation that the best available relevant expertise should have be given a voice and
a fair hearing in policy-making, especially in those areas were expertise is most
relevant to policy-success (Sunstein 2005; Boswell 2008). Furthermore, we posit that
knowledge-based policy should not just pertain to the analysis of present problems,
but should be able to learn also from forecasts about emerging problems and take
appropriate and proportionate action to manage these risks, thereby substantially
reducing the probability of harm and the costs of dealing with it (Ascher 1978; Ascher
2009).
Whereas the micro-perspective is interested in the “success” of individual
warnings from the warning producers’ perspective, the macro-theoretical perspective
looks at overarching patterns of warning-response processes over time and across
different warning sources and recipients. It seeks to identify the underlying cognitive,
communicative and decisional challenges underpinning “good” preventive policy and
helps to illuminate why warnings in particular policy areas and across different
national and international settings tend to fail already at the cognitive level,
notwithstanding legitimate reasons for not acting. It foregrounds the systemic features
of the warning-response gap; those that cannot be tackled and circumvented by
individual warners or recipients, but may be amenable through concerted and
11
sustained efforts of warning producers, warning consumers and other actors affected
by and interested in the outcomes of preventive policy.
We argue that a “good” warning-response process depends on “good” judgements
made at four interlinked stages: forecasting, communicating warnings, prioritisation
and deciding to mobilise (See Figure 2).3 Each of these stages poses particular
challenges to the actors involved and problems at one stage are likely to radiate
through subsequent as well as preceding stages. Normative problems in one stage
such as forecasting, create problems of down the line and vice-versa as warning-
responses processes constitute recurrent patterns among a limited set of actors within
a policy field.
The quality indicators of forecasting according to this model relates to the ability
of experts, theories and methods to produce accurate, reliable and sufficiently specific
forecast about the probability and impact of a harmful event. This is particularly
difficult as there is usually a trade-off between specificity and accuracy. Forecasts
which are vague about, for instance, safety thresholds for jet-engines affected by
volcanic ash, are of no use to policy-makers seeking to take precautionary measures.
Similarly in the case of intra-state conflict, it matters greatly to questions of both
receptivity and prioritisation among recipients whether forecasts say “it is more likely
than not” that there will be “some kind of conflict in Country A in the next five
years”, or whether forecasts are able say “with 90 percent confidence interethnic
violence is likely to erupt within the next three months in the Western region of
country A and will cause more than 200,000 casualties until the end of the year”.
There is a fine line to be tread between the problems of experts misrepresenting
knowledge in order to better meet end-users’ expectations and the risks of not being
3 One judgement at the individual level in foreign policy see Renshon, S. A. and D. W. Larson (2003).
Good judgment in foreign policy : theory and application. Lanham, Md., Rowman & Littlefield..
12
listened to altogether as the knowledge content and format makes it useless for the
purpose of warning and preventive policy. In order to know how to draw and re-draw
this line, forecast producers depend on regular interactions with end-users to learn
what kind of information would be most useful, but also for educating them about the
boundaries of what is “knowable”. In order to preserve this fine line, researchers and
their institutions need to be relatively free from having to seek short-term impact of
forecasts to the detriment of a convincing long-term track-record. They need to aim
for a high batting average, rather than maximising publicity by getting one extreme
forecast right. On the other hand, research institutions and projects involved in
forecasting should not fall into the trap of “assumption drag” (Ascher 1978) by failing
to question old assumptions and discount new trends as implausible. Instead, they
should encourage a culture of dissent and questioning in order to increase the
likelihood of spotting the “black swans” (Taleb 2007), events which go against
conventional wisdom, but afterwards appear utterly predictable when looking at the
evidence again.
Forecasts have no impact at all unless they are communicated in a way that allows
recipients to receive and adequately process them. Warnings which are both useful
and credible to recipients need to be oriented towards the recipients’, not the warners’
interests, they need to be intelligible to the recipient and they need to be timely in
order to allow the consumer sufficient lead-time for preventive or mitigating action.
The literature in the area of risk research offers several suggestions about the
conditions, which facilitate good warning practice. Firstly, warning producers need to
be autonomous in their professional judgement from warning consumers, otherwise
their judgements about when and how to warn will be influenced by recipients’ ability
to punish inconvenient warnings or reward convenient ones. Secondly, a variation of
13
the problem are misaligned financial or political incentives on warners, which
gradually “poison” their warning practice so that recipients cannot be sure anymore
that the warning is based on the best possible judgement and the recipients’ interest in
mind. A good example are conflicts of interests that haunted accountancy firms in the
1990s (Enron) and Rating Agencies in the wake of the credit crunch of 2008
(Bazerman and Watkins 2008; Gerstein and Ellsberg 2008). Finally, we know from
communications studies that all forms of communication, including warnings, need to
be tailored as far as possible to targeted recipients and intended effects. For this to
work within government there needs to be frequent interactions and dialogue between
warning producers and consumers to minimise the potential for misunderstanding
through “tribal tongues” (Lowenthal 1992) and allow warners to take recipients
worldviews and motivations and current agenda into account.
Warnings compete for cognitive, bureaucratic and social resources with other
forms of advocacy. Whether a warning should be prioritised or not requires good
judgements about whether a given warnings is credible, urgent and important enough
to be prioritised vis-à-vis other demands. Such decisions are most easily taken in
settings where a single actor, rather than a multitude of actors with potentially
divergent ideas about what is important and urgent, have the final responsibility for
them. Ascher has rightly pointed out that forecasting has been much more attractive to
business than in politics, because business tend to agree on the goal of action
(maximising profit) and have a clear locus of final decision-making (the Chief
Executive Officer). In the absence of such a consensus and a single decision-maker,
reaching an appropriate level of prioritisation requires well working mechanisms for
reconciling such conflicts among relevant stakeholders, for instance, the different
implications arising from a warning about intra-state conflict in an African countries
14
as seen from the UK Foreign Office (economic, influence), the Ministry of Defence
(security, alliance), and the Department for International Development (humanitarian,
stability, international law). In multinational organisations these conflicts are made
even more complex by a second-layer of national interests and predispositions as
shown by Brante (2010).
Finally, prudent decisions to mobilise for prevention involve judgements about
the feasibility, proportionality and justness of different courses of preventive and
mitigating action versus inaction. Ideally, preventive action deals with a problem
before it manifests itself and requires more costly and risky measures of crisis
management. However, we also know from case studies in the area of risk
management and precautionary politics that the cure can be worse than the disease, a
case in point being the US governments rushed vaccination programme against swine
flu in 1974, which left hundreds of people paralysed. A number of plausible reasons
exist for why governments or international organisations may decide that they do not
have the right instruments or the sufficient material or political resources to
effectively deal with a problem. Similarly, in some situations of growing tensions
botched mediation attempts can increase the probability and gravity of conflicts ,
rather than decrease them, while other situations are generally not ripe for outside
involvement (Zartman 2005; Meyer, Otto et al. 2011). Problems of fairness are raised
by the issue of temporal discounting as well as by the redistributive costs of
preventive action. Some security measures protect one constituency from harm, but
raise risks for another community, whereas some measures resolve on type of
problem, but create larger risks in the medium to long-term. The conducive factors to
good judgements about when and how to mobilise are a consensus among recipients
about what constitutes effective preventive action and incentives for relevant actors to
15
invest resources today for a larger gain later. For the case of developing countries and
genuinely farsighted policy (5 years plus) Ascher (Ascher 2009) has made a series of
suggestions about how governments may isolate themselves from counter-productive
short-term pressures and how they may shorten the horizon of the future.
16
Figure 2: Four Challenges to Warning Success: Judgement Quality and
Conducive Conditions
Challenge Judgement Quality
Indicators
Conducive Conditions
Forecasting
• Accurate
• Specific
• Reliable
• Regularised interaction between
researchers and end-users to continuously
balance accuracy and specificity
• Orientation towards establishing a long-
terms positive track-record of forecasting
• Analytic culture that rewards dissent,
questioning, and ex-post evaluation
Warning
• Intelligible
• Timely
• Other-regarding
• Professional autonomy of warners
• Regular interactions & dialogue with
warning consumers
• Alignment of interests between warners
and warnees
Prioritising
• Credible
• Urgent
• Important
• Single locus for prioritisation decisions on
the recipient side
• Consensus on hierarchy of ends
• Effective structures for resolving conflicts
over ends
Decision to
Mobilise
• Feasible
• Proportionate
• Farsighted
• Consensus on most effective means &
availability of these means
• Protection from counter-productive short-
term incentives
• Short-term incentives to reward
appropriate preventive action
17
3. The Micro-Dimension of the Warning-Response Problem: An Illustration
of Success and Failure
Since the persuasion model was largely based on secondary literature (Meyer et al,
2011), this paper is interested in test-driving the model, not in the sense of rigorously
examining it under all imaginable conditions, but to explore whether it can help us to
make sense of relative failures and success of warnings about violent conflict. We will
use two case studies two illustrate how the various factors can come into play and use
counter-factual reasoning to explore which factors are more important than others.
Despite the fact that both warnings studied below turned out with hindsight to be
accurate, it is worth emphasising that warning “success” is here defined from the
perspective of the warner’s intention, not in terms of whether the warner “should”
have been justifiable been listened to and believed by the warning recipient.
1. Relative Success: US Official and Darfur
The conflict in Darfur, a region in the West of Sudan, witnessed in 2003/2004 a
major humanitarian catastrophe as a result of indiscriminate violence unleashed by the
government sponsored Arab militia group Janjaweed against the civilian population,
following attacks by two black-African rebel movements. At the height of the conflict
between February 2003 and early 2004, hundreds of thousands civilians were killed
and more than 2 million made homeless. Despite these depressing statistics, Darfur
cannot count as a clear cut case of failure to warn or act as is argued in some of the
literature. In fact, a plausible case can be made that the conflict could have produced
even more casualties and suffering had not some preventive and mitigating measures
been taken by a number of actors in late 2003, most notably by the US-Agency for
International Development (USAID) and the US president himself.
18
We have found evidence of high warning impact at the highest level of the US
government as a result of a briefing by Andrew Natsios on the escalating violence in
Darfur, the Administrative Head of USAID at the time, to a Deputies Meeting in late
2003 – substantially before Darfur had hit the news media headlines in early 2004
(Otto, 2004). The deputies’ meeting is the second highest formation underneath the
full-cabinet. Natsios’ briefing was so effective that the National Security Advisor
went immediately afterwards to see the Secretary of State who then joined him in
briefing the president about the unfolding crisis. According to our sources, the
briefing substantially changed President Bush’s attitude about the seriousness and
importance of the conflict and led to the authorisation of additional resources for
humanitarian relief as well as political pressure through a series of telephone calls by
the US President to his Sudanese counterpart. Military intervention was seriously
contemplated, not least because of the Iraq fall-out, dismissed as a feasible option.
Why was the briefing so effective and how did Natsios manage to get the attention
of the deputies in the first place? Natsios combined a series of characteristics that
made him a particularly credible source to senior decision-makers. First, he had the
expert credentials as a result of having written extensively about humanitarian
catastrophes (Cambodia) and warned about the 1997 famine in North Korea while
working for the Charity World Vision. His reputation was further bolstered as a result
of being the Head of USAID, which brings with it access to high-quality information,
especially of first hand origin. He noted himself that his credibility depended on
having been physically in the country and met with local officials (interview,
September 2009). Secondly, and in our view more importantly, Natsios was a well-
known figure in the Washington policy community with good contacts to key
individuals in the Republican administration. His good reputation was not just due to
19
his expertise, but only rooted in his background as a veteran of the US military who
had seen active service in the first Gulf War. he military background marked him out
from humanitarian organisations, who were generally perceived to have a self-
interested stake in warning about conflict, Participants were highly receptive because
they knew that the individual concerned was highly conscious of the limited resources
of the President and would therefore not warn about an impending humanitarian
catastrophe unless he was really convinced about its gravity and larger political
significance for the US administration.
Moreover, if we look at the message factors, Natsios apparently delivered a highly
effective presentation tailored to the high-profile audience, mixing hard facts and
first-hand intelligence with visual representations through graphs, depicting forecasts
about the rapidly rising numbers of victims of the fighting. And here contextual
factors come in. His graphs went right up to November 2004, which was the date for
the next US Presidential elections. It implied that the President would face the risk of
his re-election campaign being overshadowed by a major humanitarian catastrophe
that would challenge his leadership credentials. This timing factor was crucial for
speed with which the message from the Deputies Meeting was passed on up to the
President as it elevated a warning about a humanitarian disaster in a country of minor
strategic significance to the US to the level of an issue with potential to seriously
damage the President’s chances for a second term in office.
Again, it is difficult to disaggregate the relative importance of the various factors
with any degree of certainty, but we believe that his military background and his
formal status as head of a major US agency were indispensable factor to his
credibility, and certainly more so than his previous and long-standing writing on this
topic. Both factors illustrate two typical variables contained in persuasion theory. It is
20
more difficult to assess what role timing played. What if the briefing had taken place
in 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11 and years before the next election campaign? We
know from the literature and interviews that the President, in contrast to some other
members of his cabinet, felt quite strongly about preventing mass atrocities, but one
must doubt given the competition for attention at the time whether a) the issue would
have reached him as quickly as it did and b) that he would have invested as much
personal resources into pressuring the conflict parties to stop their campaign. There
would have been also much less public pressure to act later on given the news media
preoccupation with 9/11 and the “new” threat of jihadist terrorism.
2. Relative Failure: EU Official and Georgia
The case of Georgia 2008 has been justifiably characterised as a case of strategic
surprise for the EU. It costs the lives of at least 365 people on both sides, hundreds of
casualties, millions of damage and from the perspective of the EU to a major crisis in
its relations to Russia and the failure of its policy vis-à-vis Georgia. It also locked the
Union in a costly monitoring mission in the region (EUMM), which is likely to
proceed for quite some time. While the EU, under the French Presidency, did succeed
to broker a ceasefire that prevented further escalation, it is conceivable that clearer
signals to both Georgia and Russia and a more forceful involvement on the ground
could have prevented the war, or at least postponed it. However, as John Brante has
shown in his paper (2010), member states failed to arrive at joint threat perceptions
regarding the likelihood of a Georgian attacks and Russia counter-attack despite a
number of warnings being communicated throughout the preceding year flagging the
risk of a serious deterioration. He traces the problem of warnings to divergent
21
cognitive and political predispositions among member states. If we focus on the
micro-level of individual warnings and their impact how these play-out in conjunction
with other variable contained in the model. For instance, there was the case of an EU
official who felt compelled to send an urgent and forceful warning about the high
probability of an outbreak of war in Georgia to his superior, an official with direct
access to senior decision-makers, three weeks before it actually happened. The
warning did not lead to any response from that official or further prioritisation of the
warning, except afterwards for a number of congratulatory emails from other
colleagues who had also received the message in copy.
Why did the warning fail to make an impact in terms of acceptance and
prioritisation? First, we can discount the possibility that the warning itself was not
clear about the harmful events that were expected and why. There were, however,
problems with the choice of the channel and source credibility. The warning was
formulated in an email, rather than directly conveyed to the recipient. Oral warnings,
be they face-to-face or via the phone are seen as superior in impact to anything
written. As one other EU official specialised on early warning said: “If you write
something, you have already lost”. Emails, even if highlighted as important, can more
easily be disregarded and compete with many others for attention. But why did the
official in question chose to communicate by email? The reason can be found in the
relationship he had with his direct superior, who happened to be for idiosyncratic
reasons three hierarchical levels above him. He described the official as someone who
is ‘rather old school, formalistic and did not really invite frequent contacts (…) there
were very few if any individuals who could pick up the phone and approach him in
this direct way, so I felt the maximum I could do was to send this email message to
him’. In addition, the warning official felt that his message would not be welcome by
22
his superior, because of ‘a certain prejudice with regard to Russia and certain ideas
about Russia which did not really coincide with my own’. This perception was partly
rooted in having worked with him before, but also tied to the warning recipient’s
nationality which belongs to the “Friends of Russia”-Group, whereas the warner’s
nationality was linked to the “New Friends of Georgia”-Group (for labels see John
Brante’s paper, 2010). He felt that if his superior was Polish for instance, he “would
have probably taken it seriously and used that and told his representative to the PSC
to raise a stink and make sure that we send red-signals to Moscow to tell them we
know what you are up to, we are not going to stand for this, you can expect sanctions
and problems with your relationship to the EU as a result” (interview, March 2010).
Perhaps, but on the other hand, one can also see reasons why even a Polish senior
official might have found it difficult to prioritise and take full ownership of the
warning message: firstly, the official had not been recently to the region but received
the information through his national contacts, he had not formal responsibility for
Georgia and was not very senior as compared to other warners such as the EU Special
Representative, Peter Semneby.
As John Brante shows in his paper (2010), Semneby did have some impact with
his personal briefings of the High Representative Solana and at least some of the
ambassadors of EU member states in the Political and Security Committee, but even
with a warner of high status and frequent access to top-officials, with good access to
information and a brief that included warning about conflict in Georgia, one could
find that the contextual conditions were quite disadvantageous to high warning
impact. There had been previous warnings in previous summers, particularly from
Georgian sources about war being imminent, which, after nothing much had
happened, led to a degree of warning-fatigue among some political actors and
23
associated all other warners negatively with what was seen Georgian slightly
hyperbolic advocacy. Furthermore, the political agenda from the outgoing and
incoming presidency was to “re-invigorate the Union’s relations with Russia, and this
was an issue that was given higher priority than engaging in the frozen conflicts in the
South Caucasus”. The problem was not just existing political agenda, but also that the
judgements underpinning key beliefs about Russian and Georgian behaviour were
wrong and that the West had contributed to these tensions through his own policies on
Kosovo recognition and the roadmap of Georgian NATO membership. So both the
“friends of Russia” as well as the “friends of Georgia” were afflicted by a motivated
biased against acknowledging (i) that Russia would take a military steps within a
small window of opportunity to expose Georgia as an untrustworthy ally to the West
and send a strong signal to other break-away republics (ii) that Georgia would have so
little confidence in the EU or the US that it would ignore their council and seek re-
integration by military means. These contextual conditions strongly suggest that even
if the official’s warning had been successful in persuading his superior that war was
imminent, the senior official himself would have encountered major difficulties in
convincing his colleagues from other countries to accept the warning or even to
support measures to threaten Russia with sanctions for its clandestine campaign to
provoke and then defeat Georgia and simultaneous pressures on Georgia.
24
4. The Macro-Dimension of the Warning-Response Problem: Four Causes of
Failure
Following on from the previous discussion of the four challenges to effective
warning and response and the conducive conditions gleaned from the literature in
other policy-fields, this section seeks to explore some of the key structural problems
in the area of warning about intra-state conflict. The following discussion is based on
semi-structured interviews conducted with 45 practitioners from the US intelligence
and policy community, the UK government, the EU, the UN and the OSCE, NGOs in
Washington, London and Brussels and journalists working for leading quality dailies.
In addition, we have conducted a survey among relevant practitioners among the UN,
the EU and the OSCE.
1. Contested Beliefs in the Nature and Potential of Forecasting
One of the key inhibiting factors in the warning response process remains the
contested nature of knowledge about whether forecasts about emerging conflicts are
sufficiently accurate and precise to base policy on. This is not necessarily a comment
on the quality of long-standing academic work in the field, but an observation of
prevalent perceptions and practices in the international policy-community.
Practitioners from think-tanks as well as from within government involved in warning
about conflict expressed various degrees of scepticism about the ability of the best
methods and theories to forecast accurately when conflicts will escalate and to what
extent. This is also borne out by the responses to our survey question, which asked
respondents about their confidence to forecast different aspects relating to the
escalation of intra-state violence. None of the experts were “highly confident” on any
of the issues, but were least confident on questions of “when” conflicts would escalate
(50 percent not confident, and only 11 percent confident) and on the “magnitude of
casualties” arising from the conflict were two th
consider that respondents were practitioners involved in their daily work with
warnings about conflict
finding for perceptions of the state of the art in the area.
It also tallies with a finding by a major review
warning and conflict prevention by the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit
was staffed by a number of seconded officials from the relevant ministries
Minister's Strategy Unit 2005
the systematic academic study of conflict, civil war and instability is
(…) [a]s a result the data and analysis of the incidence, impacts and trends in conflict
and instability is incomplete and unreliable, reducing the accuracy of analysis of
preventive and operational effectiveness, and patterns of crisis recurrence”. It traces
(50 percent not confident, and only 11 percent confident) and on the “magnitude of
casualties” arising from the conflict were two thirds were “not confident”. If we
consider that respondents were practitioners involved in their daily work with
within international organisations, this is a problematic
finding for perceptions of the state of the art in the area.
It also tallies with a finding by a major review of the international state of early
warning and conflict prevention by the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit
was staffed by a number of seconded officials from the relevant ministries
Minister's Strategy Unit 2005). It concluded that “[d]espite a relatively long history,
the systematic academic study of conflict, civil war and instability is
[a]s a result the data and analysis of the incidence, impacts and trends in conflict
and instability is incomplete and unreliable, reducing the accuracy of analysis of
preventive and operational effectiveness, and patterns of crisis recurrence”. It traces
25
(50 percent not confident, and only 11 percent confident) and on the “magnitude of
irds were “not confident”. If we
consider that respondents were practitioners involved in their daily work with
, this is a problematic
of the international state of early
warning and conflict prevention by the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, which
was staffed by a number of seconded officials from the relevant ministries (Prime
espite a relatively long history,
the systematic academic study of conflict, civil war and instability is still immature
[a]s a result the data and analysis of the incidence, impacts and trends in conflict
and instability is incomplete and unreliable, reducing the accuracy of analysis of
preventive and operational effectiveness, and patterns of crisis recurrence”. It traces
26
this state of affairs to the fragmentation of research activities, researchers focusing on
individual countries and regions and the commercial sector using operating with
“variable levels of analytical rigour” and methods which remain secret for
commercial reasons” (ibid).
In early warning about conflict there is no single universally accepted competent
source of warning about intra-state conflict as compared to other areas of international
affairs (such as the WHO for pandemics and IPCC for climate change), but many
different competing, complementary and overlapping sources in both the public and
private sector, each producing quite different kinds of products using different methos
and data. This creates a lot of noise in the system, raises problems of overwarning and
makes source credibility more difficult to establish.4 Even in the US, the system with
the most highly developed quantitative systems with high performance scores as well
as dedicated structure for early warning, we found considerable skepticism among
senior practitioners about the actual credibility and usefulness of such warnings. One
former security advisor told us that he had “never learnt anything useful” from the
dedicated warnings products and that he tends to trust more individuals with relevant
expertise and recent experience in a country. This view has been echoed by a number
of our interviews, which shows a deeply ingrained culture of knowledge among senior
diplomats tied to individuals, their track-record and networks, rather than the quality
of methods, theories, models and data sources. We do find a degree of generational
gap here with some of the younger officials trying to convince their older and more
senior colleagues to pay attention to new open-source evidence gathered through new
technological means or the outcomes of highly structured, indicator based risk
4 The only possible exception is the International Crisis Group for the NGO sector. It is the most
frequently mentioned source of warning among practitioners within international organisations. It is,
however, also clear that their analysis is not based on scientific models, but relies on building up
reputation through qualitative analysis and a degree of specialisation on some countries and regions.
27
assessment processes. These younger and less senior officials find that their
credibility is highly circumscribed because of their “lack of experience”, regardless of
the quality of the evidence or methods they use. The dominant belief in the
community, particularly the segment of which that matters for conflict prevention, is
that theory and data-based forecasting of conflict is relatively unreliable and
unspecific and that there is single authoritative source of warning, only a few
individual sources with expertise in particular countries and regions. This has
inevitably negative implications for the prioritisation and mobilization stages of
preventive policy and confirms the vitality of the decision-maker as the “last analyst”
syndrom, who will remake all the judgements underpinning intelligence according to
his or her own beliefs and sources.
2. Asymmetric Relationship between Warning Producers and Consumers
If warning communicators want to avoid their warning being ‘lost in translation’
between the worlds of analysis and policy-making, they need to tailor it in a way that
is intelligible to recipients and convey it at a time when recipients are receptive to it.
Unfortunately, the relationship between warning producers and consumers in the area
of conflict and instability regularly produces cognitive gaps and suffers in some
organisations and settings from misaligned incentives. One of the main causes of
misunderstandings arises from the insufficiently regular interaction between warning
producers and decision-makers, which would enable warning producers to appreciate
users’ worldviews, interests and the competitive nature of the political process. Our
survey finds that almost half of our respondents do have regular and frequent
interactions with relevant decision-makers. Considering that our sample consists to
two thirds of practitioners at the level of desk officers and analysts one could think
this is a relatively positive finding
practitioners in International Organisations so we would expect to find lower levels of
interactions in larger and more stratigied
France.
elatively positive finding. On the other hand, the survey has focused on
practitioners in International Organisations so we would expect to find lower levels of
and more stratigied bureaucracies such as the US, UK, and
28
. On the other hand, the survey has focused on
practitioners in International Organisations so we would expect to find lower levels of
bureaucracies such as the US, UK, and
29
Table 1: On the basis of your own professional experience of working with
recipients/consumers, please assess how often the following statements apply?
Always Very often Sometimes Rarely
Don’t
know
1 My organisation prefers
to provide a consensus
view rather than to
highlight analytical
disagreement.
3,3% (6) 50,0% (9) 16,7% (3) 0,0% (0) 0,0% (0)
2 Analysts feel that they
can reach their own best
judgments without
worrying about negative
reactions from the
hierarchy.
11,1% (2) 27,8% (5) 27,8% (5) 27,8% (5)
5,6% (1)
3 There is a frequent
interaction between
producers and consumers
of warning in a collegial
atmosphere.
0% (0) 27,8% (5) 55,6%
(10) 16,7% (3) 0,0% (0)
4 There is a clear division
between the work of
producers and consumers
of warning.
16,7% (3) 50,0% (9) 16,7% (3) 11,1% (2) 5,6% (1)
Table 1 also seems to indicate relatively high level of self-perceived knowledge
among warning producers about different aspects relevant to framing “good” warning
messages as elaborated before, except for the questions relating to recipients’ world
views. The problems with regard to in-house warning seem to be related not so much
to the lack of knowledge among warners about recipients, but to the asymmetries of
the relationship itself. If we look at the responses to question 2, we can see that many
of the potential warning indicators feel that they cannot reach their best judgement
because of “negative reactions from the hierarchy”. A majority of respondents
describes “punishment” as a real problem to communicating objective judgements.
This is also borne out in our qualitative interviews and the second of our case studies
already discussed in this paper. Warning producers usually have a clear sense of what
they can say and how they can say it without being penalised. In other words, they
could communicate more effectively in terms of gaining attention, but they are aware
of the threat this poses to their perception by their superiors and within the
30
organisations. Organisational cultures and the personalities of individual managers
vary of course, but the data do show that warnings about intra-state conflict are
perceived to be potentially dangerous territory by experts within the administration as
it can easily grate with organisational cultures and dominant policy agendas. We
believe that this asymmetric relationship and the limited professional autonomy of
warners leads on balance to less warnings, less explicit and specific warnings and
fewer warnings which benefit from quick and direct access to relevant decision-
makers.
As far as out-of-the field warning is concerned, the qualitative interviews among
the more senior foreign affairs practitioners demonstrated a high degree of scepticism
with regard to warnings originating from the NGO community. They are being
perceived as biased as warnings benefit their public profile, which tends to increase
donations, and because preventive action involves the dispersal of aid that may
benefits them financially. There is also a perception that their exhortations for some
kind of action lack an appreciation of what is important as well as what is politically
feasible and effective on the ground, which underlines the point made earlier that
good warnings needs to be credible not just with regard to forecasting conflicts, but
also with regard to the relative gravity of its different consequences to different
recipients as well as the potential, costs, and risks of different kinds of preventive
action.
The only organisation that according to our interviews and survey responses seems
to have breached the cultural divide between the humanitarian and the national
security/foreign affairs community is the International Crisis Group. Its relative
success lies in the close interaction between country and region experts and former
senior decision-makers sitting on its board who can sensitise analysts to which kind of
31
analysis is relevant when, which hot-buttons to push and which recommendations to
make to whom.
3. Unresolved conflicts over what “what matters most” and “how to act”
We have argued before that prioritising judgements about whether a warning is
credible, urgent and important are unavoidable, but are substantially hampered if there
is: (i) no consensus about policy goals; (ii) no central decision-making locus; or (iii) at
least a working mechanism for resolving conflicts over priorities. This unfortunately
seems to be a wide-spread problem in early warning about violent conflict. In contrast
to policy areas where one institution is charged with monitoring risks connected to a
phenomenon that has direct and uniform negative effects (e.g. pandemics, flooding,
famine), warning Western governments about conflicts in foreign countries raises
inevitably questions about the relative importance of an impending disaster. The
obvious humanitarian answer to rank conflict situations solely by the criterion of the
scale of casualties (or human suffering) they are likely to cause, will not satisfy all the
relevant players in foreign policy-making. Different interviewees framed the question
of interest in terms of whether their country has “equity” in a given foreign country or
region, suggesting a hard-nosed cost-benefit calculation. Our interviews as well as the
survey (see below) indicate that countries and specific situations are judged against
multiple criteria of relevance such as the risk of an impending conflict to lead to a) a
loss of political influence on regime and region, b) increased refugees flows to the
home country c) harm to the national economy/champions, d) threats to national
security, d) negative effects on diasporas or a range of less predictable idiosyncratic
reasons which may still play a role in particular cases. Our survey among IOs
practitioner does indicate that the scale of expected casualties does seem to matter a
lot (55 %), but not quite a
than concerns about immigrations. If we consider that each conflict has its own
unique causes and dynamics and thus t
consequences, the quest for finding and applying a common yardstick for prioritising
warnings becomes even more difficult.
One important reason for the
institutionalisation of such interests in the form of
each with relevant instruments for conflict prevention at their disposal, but each with
different priorities for what phenomenon in particular
where. The existence of such competing priorities is not surprising, but hardly any
organisation dedicated in some way to the preservation of peace
solution to resolving the conflict over
lot (55 %), but not quite as much as the loss of influence and not substantially more
than concerns about immigrations. If we consider that each conflict has its own
unique causes and dynamics and thus tends to produces its own idiosyncratic set of
consequences, the quest for finding and applying a common yardstick for prioritising
warnings becomes even more difficult.
One important reason for the divergence in yardsticks lies of course in
alisation of such interests in the form of different departments or ministries
each with relevant instruments for conflict prevention at their disposal, but each with
ferent priorities for what phenomenon in particular they most like to prevent
The existence of such competing priorities is not surprising, but hardly any
dedicated in some way to the preservation of peace seems to fou
solution to resolving the conflict over priorities in a quick and efficient way, and thus
32
s much as the loss of influence and not substantially more
than concerns about immigrations. If we consider that each conflict has its own
ends to produces its own idiosyncratic set of
consequences, the quest for finding and applying a common yardstick for prioritising
in yardsticks lies of course in
different departments or ministries,
each with relevant instruments for conflict prevention at their disposal, but each with
they most like to prevent and
The existence of such competing priorities is not surprising, but hardly any
seems to found a
quick and efficient way, and thus
33
contribute a dependable link between analytical and problem-solving processes.
Indeed, the already mentioned review of prevention in the UK noted the imbalance
between the massive efforts devoted to information gathering and analysis vis-à-vis
the relatively inefficient, haphazard and cumbersome process of generating “strategic
options” as a result of ‘the structural difficulties of multi-disciplinary working
between departments. This issue was also identified as the main challenge in all
countries and international institutions consulted” (Prime Minister's Strategy Unit
2005). This weakness at the prioritisation stage tends to produce delays and confusion
in contingency planning and action and induces problems at the mobilisation and
implementation stage. Problems are further compounded by our observation that few
of the governmental warnings are explicitly connected to the available instruments
and hardly any explore systematically contingencies relating to the relative impact
and consequences of acting in different ways. Instead contingency-planning comes
rather late in the process when assessments about relative importance have already
been made and warnings may have already failed at prior stages.
Public warnings are even less suited for taking decisions about how to prioritise.
Most of the news media pieces which could be qualified in some way as warning had
very little to say about what political actors should do to prevent escalation, what the
consequences would be and why one course of action was better than alternatives.
Even more problematically, news media pieces tended to be very vague about what
was likely to happen when and how likely such an outcome was. Public forecasts
were often hedged in various ways in order to avoid being proven wrong, but this very
caution makes them less useful for audiences to decide about the probability and
gravity of a potential problem. Neither could we see any evidence in public discourse
34
that warnings were put in a comparative perspective, avoiding hard arguments about
why one impending crisis in one country is more important than another.
4. Countervailing Incentives to Act Early
At the heart of the dilemma facing decision-makers, particularly those oriented to
and dependent on national constituencies, is the inverse relationship between the
political potency of warning and the feasibility of action. The first generally increases
over time as evidence and media coverage tends to mount with escalating violence,
while the second generally decreases as the costs and risks tend to increase. On the
one hand, decision-makers “do not like to be taken by surprise” as Wallensteen (1988:
88) points out. They run the risk of “mounting public pressure to ‘do something’ just
at a time as the available options have narrowed to the politically least palatable and
practically most risky and costly. Politicians may thus appear ignorant, incompetent,
impotent or heartless vis-à-vis the electorate and their peers (…)” (Meyer, Otto et al.
2011). Yet, electorally accountable decision-makers will still tend to delay decisions
to mobilize beyond what would be prudent until a point when two conditions are
fulfilled: Firstly, the evidence concerning the trajectory of violence has become
virtually indisputable even for those who normally question the knowledge basis of
forecasts. Once that stage is reached, decision-maker will face less opposition to
action within the foreign policy machinery and less risks that they will be blamed for
overreaction when action turns out to be more costly and less effective than
anticipated. The second condition is that the news media need to have elevated
warnings to a level of public visibility as to be politically relevant, either because of
reputational damage for opposing action or for offering opportunities to claim credit
for effective crisis management and international leadership to “save lives”. The
35
problem with attempts of claiming public credit for acting genuinely early are
threefold: first, the public may not have been aware that there was the probability of
major problem in the first place; secondly, they do not feel particularly affected by
conflict as such unless the consequences are sufficiently clear to them, and thirdly,
even if preventive policy was successful political actors will find it difficult to
communicate this success as some of the most effective instruments of preventive
policy such as mediation depend on secrecy to work effectively as Wallensteen as
pointed out (2002), enabling conflict parties to build-up trust and reach compromises.
Florian Otto’s study of media coverage of the Rwanda and Darfur cases (Otto
2010) has confirmed that mediated warning has been late and certainly significantly
later than governmental warnings. On the other hand, he shows how lead international
newspaper coverage can reach a high salience and frame the conflict in a way that
encourages action from decision-makers. Taking these disincentives together,
politicians can be expected to wait with mobilizing action until forecasts have reached
a high level of certainty, warnings have reached a certain frequency and uniformity
and different stake-holders in the policy-process have converged in their assessment
of why this particular problem needed to be prioritized in terms of governmental
deliberations. By that time, however, violence may have escalated unexpectedly
quickly and news media pressure to act reaches a volume and salience that decision-
makers go from being under-reactive to being overreactive, hastily implementing
measures that may be disproportionate or raise news risks.
Given these asymmetric incentives the most noteworthy issue is perhaps not so
much that senior decision-makers will tend to wait longer than is good for either their
own or foreign citizens. It is rather that the warning-response process is still premised
on the notion of convincing top-decision-makers before meaningful action could start.
36
In fact, in many other areas of risk management early warning and preventive action
have been placed outside of the realm of party politics and situated in regulatory
bodies that can both monitor risks and take the appropriate action according to their
mandates. The OSCE’s High Commission on National Minorities is probably the
closest the international community has come to this ideal and both the UN and the
EU offer some protection from counter-productive incentives given that their officials
do not generally face elections. But even these bodies have often limited budgetary or
political autonomy to act in a preventive fashion. A closely related exception are
bodies designed for rapid humanitarian relief, such as USAID or ECHO, but they
engage in mitigation, not prevention and even they struggle to pre-position assets and
act genuinely early at the first sign of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The underlying problem is the absence of a consensus that preventive action is
always and to everyone desirable. This debate is again not necessarily unique to the
risk of intra-state war, but can be seen also in other areas of precautionary politics
where critics point out that preventive action is disproportionate, produces new kinds
of risks or magnifies others and poses moral dilemmas relating to democratic
participation and justice (Sunstein 2005). Yet, there is at least a degree of consensus
that knowledge plays a key role in identifying risks and that preventive action is,
prima facie, desirable. In the area of conflict prevention, however, not only do experts
argue that these trade-off exist as well (Luttwak, 1999; Stedman, 1995), but, more
fundamentally, no normative consensus exists to ban any use of armed force within
states by non-state actors, given the legacy of previous struggles for self-
determination against colonialism, freedom from oppression and racial discrimination
as well as ethnic and religious survival. The UN’s Responsibility to Protect-Doctrine
can be seen as an attempt to formulate and implement a minimum consensus about
37
which forms of violence are uniformly unacceptable, but the prize for this (still
fragile) consensus is the shift from prevention to mitigation. Forecasting violence
amongst humans is difficult enough, but stopping behavior that fits certain legal
definitions before it has actually occurred is an even more vexing challenge.
5. Conclusion
The paper aimed to reinvigorate the debate about the warning-response gap by
suggesting and applying a novel analytical as well as normative model. It approached
the problem from two intertwined perspectives: The micro-level perspective looked at
the cognitive impact of individual warnings and the factors which can help to explain
when warnings about the escalation of violent conflict are noticed, accepted and
prioritised. We test drove the tentative model developed by Meyer et al (2011) with
the help of two case studies which illustrated the complex interplay of key factors and
the difficult judgements involved by individuals on both sides of the warning-
response divide. These case studies did not claim to epitomise the totality of warning-
response processes in various cases and nor could they. Substantially more research
will be needed to investigate in more depth how applicable the model genuinely is
across time, cases and organisational settings and whether it can be made more
parsimonious. But we believe that the paper has shown that the micro-perspective can
help to encourage more nuanced empirical investigations of warning-response
dynamics which inform after-the-fact judgements about what could be legitimately
expected of both decision-makers and warners in the event of violent conflict
escalating.
38
It can also inform practice in the field by shifting the emphasis away from self-
referential optimising of data and methods to better understanding the persuasive
impact of warning messages: What are the audience’s salient interests and concerns
and how can I frame the warnings to resonate with these interests? What are their
predispositions and ways of processing information and is there a way of altering
them, for instance, through guidance and simulation exercises? Which policy
instruments do they have at their disposal, what is the lead-time for their deployment
and what do decision-makers think about their effectiveness and efficiencies in
various situations? When is it best to avoid politicisation and work through personal
contacts and briefings and when is grass-roots mobilisation required? For decision-
makers and organisation interested in increasing their receptivity to warnings, the
model foregrounds another set of questions: what signals are we sending, consciously
and unconsciously, to potential communicators about the desirability of warnings? To
what extent are we aware of how organisational culture, cognitive biases and political
motivations influence what we regard as evidence, who is considered credible and
what is considered risky? How far do we plan ahead and do we have the instruments
in place to react to new contingencies?
The macro-perspective highlights that warning success in terms of impact is not
the same has having a warning-response system which meets key normative
requirements. The paper discussed what these requirements are in four different stages
of the process and elaborated on some of the conducive conditions for them. We then
drew on our empirical work with practitioners to argue that current international and
national warnings-response practices tend to suffer from i) contested knowledge basis
with regard to forecasting conflict; ii) asymmetric relationships between warning
producers and consumers, iii) poorly managed conflicts within organisations over the
39
ends and means of preventive policy, and finally iv) countervailing incentives on
decision-makers to act early.
These findings could be helpful to current attempts to reform early warning and
response procedures and systems and to better interlink them. They point to the
importance of establishing institutions and fora for synthesising, validating and better
communicating the state of the art in conflict forecasting. Our work supports long-
standing proposals to create an IPCC-like process at the UN to establish what
forecasts about conflict can and cannot do and where further coordinated research is
needed. Other avenues for addressing the systemic features of the warning-response
gap relate to more investment in decision-support and contingency planning at an
earlier stage, more professional autonomy and protection for warners, stronger
encouragement for analytical cultures of dissent and questioning as well as better and
earlier news media coverage of impending conflicts. The macro-perspective may,
however, also help to recognise that warnings and preventive policy by Western
governments and International Organisations are inherently difficult and politically
contentious. This does not mean either can afford to give-up on becoming better, but
it does highlight the need for more realism in the debate about warning response.
40
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