While Western leaders fiddle deafly, our world burns. Since the cold war’s end, over 4 million people have died in violent conflict, one in 200 persons is a refugee or displaced person, 1.3 billion people live in poverty. Between 1992 and 1996, arms exports rose from 25,000 million to 110,000 million dollars (U.S.), and the nuclear threat resulting from loose or non-existent controls and trafficking in nuclear weapons increased, despite claims to the contrary. Such are the findings of the Final Report of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.

Created in 1994, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict spent three years investigating the post–cold war mixture of drift and violence. The commission was composed of sixteen international leaders and scholars experienced in conflict prevention resolution. Aiding them was a forty-two-member international Advisory Council, along with the Executive Director and staff of the Carnegie Corporation. However vast their collective experience and knowledge, about two-thirds of the fifty-eight members are American or Western European. East Asians as well as Eastern Europeans are nearly absent, while there are only three Africans and a handful from the Indian subcontinent. Even more striking is the lack of women, with only two serving as commissioners and a mere handful serving as advisors. Corporate capitalism, by contrast, is well represented. This is predominantly a white, male, capitalist, Eurocentric commission, which inevitably presents a narrow—yet hopefully a workable—Final Report.

One of the main strengths of Preventing Deadly Conflict is its opposition to the present global policy drift. After three years of studying deadly conflict, the commissioners laid out three main observations: (1) deadly conflict is not inevitable; (2) conflict stems from deliberate political decisions; and (3) since 1990, deadly conflict usually occurs within, not between, states (while noting that intrastate conflict can easily become interstate). From these observations emerges a blueprint for deterring deadly conflict, utilizing two broad prevention strategies—structural and operational.

Structural prevention is peace building within troubled countries. It “comprises strategies to address the root causes of deadly conflict..., ensur[ing] that crises do not arise...or that, if they do,they do not recur” (69). Appropriate strategies are generally of two types: the use of “international regimes” such as the United Nations to manage state interaction; and the development within states (using outside help) of peace-engendering social conditions. It becomes clear that the commissioners’ bedrock structural strategy entails turning non-Western, Third World nations into Western-style states. As the commissioners put it, “prevent[ing] the emergence of deadly conflict...is done by creating capable states with representative governance based on the rule of law, with widely available economic opportunity, social safety nets, protection of fundamental human rights, and robust civil societies” (xviii).

Operational prevention comprises strategies and tactics aimed at stopping violence when it appears imminent. The commissioners see early warning followed by immediate engagement as vital to success. Several elements are involved:

1) a lead player—an international organization, country or even a prominent individual around which or whom preventive efforts can mobilize; 2) a coherent political-military approach to the engagement designed to arrest the violence, address the humanitarian needs of the situation, and integrate all political and military aspects of the problem; 3) adequate resources to support the preventive engagement; and, particularly applicable to intrastate conflict, 4) a plan for the restoration of host country authority. (40) Admitting that this model is not foolproof, the commissioners believe that it has the potential to create a diplomatic window for peaceful resolution. NATO leaders in their recent campaign in Yugoslavia may have read this report and were, in any case, following its recommendations; their actions and the consequences will provide us a test for such interventionism.

The commissioners admit to borrowing their methodology from public health models for controlling contagious disease. “Just as in the practice of good medicine,” they say, “preventing the outbreak, spread, and recurrence of the disease of deadly conflict requires timely interventions with the right mix of political, economic, military, and social instruments” (35). Yet, if one wished to prevent any disease’s outbreak, its causes would have to be known. Anyone looking into Preventing Deadly Conflict for an analysis of what causes the “disease” of deadly conflict would be gravely disappointed. A major weakness in this report is that it devotes only five pages to this subject! In the book’s executive summary (a highly recommended, well-organized, thirty-page brief) the authors write:

Many factors and conditions make societies prone to warfare: weak, corrupt, or collapsed states; illegitimate or repressive states; acute discrimination against ethnic or other social groups; poorly managed religious, cultural or ethnic differences; politically active religious communities that promote hostile and divisive messages; political and economic legacies of colonialism or the Cold War; sudden economic and political shifts...; lack of resources...;large stores of weapons and ammunition; and threatening regional relationships. (xviii)

In the presence of these background factors, conflict is unleashed “when long-standing grievances are exploited by political demagogues” (xviii). In the commission’s view, “mass violence almost invariably results from the deliberate violent response of determined leaders and their groups ...” (29). Blaming demagogues may be at odds with the sociological analysis of violence given earlier. The blanket statement that violence results from leadership decisions is also reminiscent of early twentieth-century Wilsonian moral internationalism, dividing the world between good and evil men.

Like true Wilsonians, the Carnegie commissioners ultimately rely on an international organization to prevent deadly conflict. In fact, the entire Final Report is colored in the hues of World War I–era international liberalism. Borrowing from Sir Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (1910), they assume a free-trade capitalism backed by World Bank largess will engender world peace (and only grudgingly, it seems, do they even admit to global capitalist inequality ever producing conflict). Their preventive medicine comes from the Union of Democratic Control, G. Lowes Dickinson, and Wilson’s 14th Point: they present a League of Nations–like panacea, whereby democratic capitalist states through the United Nations intervene to thwart aggression and send in peacekeepers to prevent any recurrence of its deadly contagion. This is all very interesting and may, in our postcommunist age, be an efficacious prescription. Time will tell. Yet, an overuse of untested medicine can prove harmful. Imperialism, world hegemony, megacorporation dominance, and cultural suppression are all names for the damage they may do.

Although the commissioners claim their Final Report on Preventing Deadly Conflict is a global prescription, most of the examples of deadly conflict presented, in numerous photographs, boxes, tables, and charts, relate to Third World interstate or intrastate wars. Granted, preventing deadly conflict, relieving human suffering, protecting human rights, and seeking justice within the Third World are praiseworthy, and the commissioners ought to be applauded for their sincere search for peace. Granted too that the sincerely internationalist mentality found within these pages is refreshing. The planet is “shrinking,” and we are becoming a global village in need of global cooperation. As Elise Boulding noted in a recent book, we need a global civic culture and need to educate for an interdependent world. The Carnegie commissioners understand this and believe the United Nations must play a leading role in the transition from a divided world of narrowly defined national interests to one that is integrated with shared global interests. In that sense, this is a book for the future and ought not be summarily dismissed.

Yet, three glaring issues demand further attention. First, even if this public health model works on preventing deadly conflict within and among Third World states, can we depend on it to prevent conflict among developed nations—especially between great powers? The commissioners make no mention of this contingency, as if wars between great powers are a thing of the past. Second, we find too simple a political model operating in this report: one in which world leaders are willing to unbalance their national budgets, offend domestic political interests, and trample on sovereignty while risking both military and civilian casualties—all in the name of abstract justice. Third, like the League of Nations’ founders in 1919, their internationalist prescription presupposes a healthy capitalist system. A global economic downturn such as seen in the 1930s would undoubtedly disrupt the commissioners’ prevention blueprint, just as the Great Depression doomed the League. The commissioners assume that a capitalist world-system is, or can be made, fully reliable and largely nonviolent. That this assumption is never questioned is a significant shortcoming of this otherwise stimulating analysis of preventing violent conflict.