Guide is intended for policy-makers and practitioners at all levels, and represents a recently-assembled body of knowledge on the origins and life cycle of conflicts, an array of tools for conflict prevention and mitigation, and a set of strategies for applying those tools effectively.
Focus is on conflicts in the Greater Horn of Africa. Guide is funded as part of the USA’s Greater Horn of Africa Initiative, and hosted on the Conflict Prevention Web.
Guide aims to:
- Discuss the causes of violent conflict, distinguishing between systemic or structural conditions, proximate or enabling factors, and immediate triggering events.
- Examine the nature and ingredients of violent conflict compared to peace in order to suggest leverage points for action and to look at gradations of conflict within societies or in relations between nations and dividing a typical conflict’s life cycle into initial, middle and end phases
- Describe the processes and stages through which violent conflicts escalate out of peaceful conditions.
- Compile a list of 90 policy tools that third parties and national actors have used to prevent and mitigate conflicts in differing functional areas—official diplomacy, non-official diplomacy, military measures, economic and social development, political development and governance, judicial or legal processes, communications and education.
- Profile 25 policy tools in depth, examining their implementation, conflict context, strengths and weaknesses, and illustrating their usage with case studies from within and outside of the Greater Horn region.
- Discuss multi-tooled strategies for selecting and applying policy tools to prevent or mitigate particular conflicts.