The Role of Foreign Assistance in Conflict Prevention

The Rationale for Change and a Vision for the Future
The human species demands, at minimum, a certain quality of life. Human rights should be protected, pluralism advocated, oppression avoided, and children given a chance to live life to the fullest. To the extent that many countries cannot yet do this, the international community should reach out in friendship to help. The international community has two roles in promoting this quality of life:
Putting out fires when they are just starting.

Building capacity to help others deal with problems in non-violent ways.
The international community needs attitudes, insights, institutions, and resources to implement a farsighted, proactive approach of assistance, cooperation, and education for countries in trouble. Many will welcome such an approach, even if ambivalently. For the small number of countries that are intransigent toward outsiders, mired in hatred, and controlled by tyrants, the international community should continually seek to draw them into the community of nations, while containing and deterring as necessary with forceful means.

Foresight is necessary to prevent conflict. The international community should take the initiative to assist countries in acquiring the necessary attitudes, concepts, skills, and institutions for resolving internal and external conflict. It should be proactive in helping them build the political and economic institutions of democracy.
In offering such help, the international community will need to engage moderate, constructive, and pragmatic leaders who are committed to humane and democratic values. While such leaders exist all over the world, their situation is often precarious. The international community can assist these leaders by providing a support network, which will, over the long run, help build institutions capable of meeting basic human needs and coping with conflicts that arise in the course of human interactions. It is important to realize that the world will never be conflict-free. Ways must be found to deal with conflict, short of mass violence.

Fulfilling the promise of democracy requires informed, proactive, and sustained efforts to prevent deadly conflict through just solutions and improved living conditions. There is a positive correlation between open market economies and democratic transitions. It is difficult to conceive of a long-term, flourishing market economy in the twenty-first century in the absence of a democratic political system because participation in the world economy requires openness in the flow of information, ideas, capital, technology, and people.

Civil society builds democracy by allowing the evolution of democratic values through non-violent conflict. Groups compete with each other and with the state for the power to carry out their specific agendas. Within the context of institutionalized competition, tolerance and acceptance of opposition develop. Civil society provides the opportunity for coalitions of individuals to undertake innovative activities, e.g., in the service of equal opportunity or protection of human rights.

Inter-American Summit on conflict resolution education

Tri-C’s Global Issues Resource Center and The Organization of American States will host a four-day Inter-American Summit on Conflict Resolution Education in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, March 14-15, 2007.
This event will bring together government representatives from among the 50 states and 34 countries of the Americas and their non-governmental organization partners who have legislation or policies in place to deliver conflict resolution education at the K-12 level and in colleges of teacher education.
This first-ever Summit offers a dynamic opportunity to develop a hemispheric infrastructure throughout the Americas to advance the work in the fields of conflict resolution education and peace education.
The Summit will bring together policymakers and educators representing regions across the United States and select member countries of the OAS representing North, Central, South America and the Caribbean. These national and international educators will exchange program best practices, evaluation methodology, creation of policy implementation structures, and consideration of obstacles to success.

Summit workshops, panels and round table discussions will be led by distinguished teams of policymakers and educators from among the 34 countries of the Americas, Europe, and the 50 states. These international experts bring the most current updates on innovative models that advance conflict resolution education. They will brief attendees on their state-wide and/or national CRE policies and best practices in building the structures needed for K-12 and higher education policy success. This global perspective will inspire new collaborations among nations, states and individuals to further the educational mission.

Natural Resources in Conflict

Wars need money. Natural resources such as timber, diamonds and minerals play an increasingly prominent role in providing this money, which is often used to fund armies and militias who murder, rape and commit other human rights abuses against civilians.
Global Witness' Natural Resources in Conflict team works to break the links between natural resources and conflict by influencing international, regional and national policies after carrying out in-depth investigations. Our work consists of:
Campaigning to prevent future conflicts, and curbing current ones, by denying combatants any income from the trade in natural resources. Global Witness' past successes in this field include closing off the lucrative timber trade of both Charles Taylor's despotic regime in Liberia and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the conflict diamonds campaign, which gave rise to the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme to prevent the trade in conflict diamonds, all of which have hastened the end of some of the world's most brutal wars. Currently, Global Witness is researching the trade in diamonds and cocoa in Cote d'Ivoire.
Working in post-conflict countries such as Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to ensure that crucial investment in the natural resource sector is equitable, sustainable, transparent and non-corrupt, and brings long-term benefit to the state and the population, thereby helping to prevent the seeds of future conflict.
Reforming international policy, especially pushing for the international community, at UN level, to adopt a definition of conflict resources which could be used to trigger action to prevent natural resources from fuelling conflict, and which could form the basis of revised national laws allowing people who trade in conflict resources to be prosecuted.