In numbers
It is an old lesson of public health that preventing illness is better, and usually cheaper, than treating it. The same is true of violent conflict. Yet when it comes to war, the world still spends most of its effort and money after the damage is done.
In 2018 the United Nations and the World Bank published Pathways for Peace, their first joint study of conflict prevention. Its central finding was that prevention is cost-effective. Modelling a range of scenarios, the authors estimated that effective prevention could save between US$5 billion and almost US$70 billion a year. The figures are estimates, as the authors acknowledge, but the case is clear: acting early is not only humane, it is good value.
The study also stressed that spending on prevention is only a fraction of what is spent on crisis response and reconstruction. Five years later, a UN statement marking the report’s anniversary noted that only about four per cent of official development assistance goes to conflict prevention. Most of the world’s attention still arrives after the fighting has begun.
The United Nations has tried to change this balance. In April 2016 the Security Council and the General Assembly adopted matching resolutions on “sustaining peace”, describing it as a goal and a process that includes preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict. The principle is agreed. The practice lags behind.
Why is prevention so hard to fund? Partly because success is invisible. A war that does not happen produces no headlines, no images and no thanks. Partly because the benefits arrive slowly and are widely shared, while the costs are immediate and fall on particular budgets. And partly because prevention depends on many small actions, in schools, communities, courts and markets, that do not fit neatly into one programme.
Prevention also works best when people have tools other than violence. Research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan on 323 campaigns between 1900 and 2006 found that nonviolent campaigns succeeded in about 53 per cent of cases, compared with about 26 per cent for violent ones. Nonviolent action is not passive. It is a disciplined way of pursuing change without destroying the society one hopes to improve.
At the Global Peace Institute, London, we call our approach preventive peace: peace treated as a daily practice, learned and taught from childhood to the highest levels of leadership, rather than a settlement reached only after harm has been done. Three priorities follow from it.
First, education. Children and young people can learn to listen, to disagree without humiliating one another and to settle disputes fairly. These skills are the first line of prevention, and they are inexpensive to teach.
Second, early attention to grievance. Exclusion, injustice and humiliation are the soil in which violence grows. Institutions that hear complaints early, from local councils and schools to employers and community leaders, prevent far more than they are given credit for.
Third, steady investment. Prevention cannot be switched on in a crisis. It needs modest, reliable funding over years, and it needs to be valued even when its success is measured in things that did not happen.
Governments, donors and businesses spend heavily on recovery because the cost of conflict is plain to see. The cost of prevention is smaller, but it must be paid in advance. The evidence says it is worth paying. The question is whether we have the patience to act before the headlines begin.
GPIL Editorial pieces set out the view of the Global Peace Institute, London.
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