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USAID Workshop on
Conflict Prevention Management
>> USAID Home >> Conflict Prevention >> June 2000 Workshop
LUNCHEON ADDRESS
"Do No Harm: Foreign Aid and Conflict Prevention"Dr. Mary Anderson
June 6, 2000
Click here to hear an audio clip from this speech.
"Do No Harm," or the Local Capacities for Peace Project, comes semantically from a meeting with doctors who actively used health as a tool for peace. The "Do No Harm" idea comes from a drive to create a Hippocratic oath for development workers. The notion behind the oath, both for doctors and development practitioners, is that harm can be done in the long run. With the oath, doctors commit to learning through their own experiences.
To this point, five lessons can be drawn from Do No Harm. First, conflicts occur for many, many reasons, from the "good" to the "bad," and there are many different levels of commitment to conflict on the part of those involved. A good reason for conflict might be that physical confrontation is the only way to achieve liberation or put down a repressive regime. There is, put simply, a large range of reasons. In addition, a wide continuum of people's commitment to conflict exists. While the leaders may be committed, many people may not be. Yet even when a populace is disassociated from conflict, war is often the only option. There is little space for objection, or withdrawal from the process of conflict mobilization. Wars are framed in terms of power; by nature, they are a struggle for power. The choice it to dominate or be dominated. Often times, however, people are not as committed to war as their leadership. If they see the conflict as a manipulated process, people can be helped. On the other hand, deep ideological commitment does not invite a helpful intervention. Practitioners must find ways to gauge the level of commitment in order to gauge whether wars can be prevented.
Second, more people do not fight wars than do. A vast majority of countries encumbered by problems and reasons that might lead to conflict simply do not explode in conflict. In other words, real barriers to conflict exist. Third, outsiders do have great influences on a conflict situation. Many involved in conflict have counted on the United States for guidance of one form or another. Similarly, development agencies have an impact on the likelihood of warfare, whether they mean to or not. If a society is conflict prone, our aid or lack of it will have an effect. To withdraw from an area or to stay has major influences on the situation.
Fifth, there are sets of institutions, systems, and processes in all societies that link people across subgroup divisions. These can be shared interests and common practices. Such a norm can be called "functional harmony." Conversely, there are also shared systems and processes that divide people. International aid affects the things that divide and unite people, particularly in case where conflict has already begun. Shared benefits, in fact, should be the bedrock of conflict prevention language. Instead, the language has often emphasized one side over another. The development community must come to a better understanding of the things that unite and divide in a particular society.
Aid influences connectors and dividers in several important ways. First, there are distribution effects. In a situation in which groups are pitted against one another, "who" we give "what" is tremendously important. Second, there are marking effects. Assistance has influence on wages, prices, and profits and can increase the incentives for people to dominate each other. Third, there are substitution effects. If donors assume responsibility for institutions and systems, they effectively free up local populations to concentrate on warfare or mechanisms of conflict. Caretaking liberates time and resources necessary for conflict. Fourth, there are legitimization effects. International assistance can legitimize war leaders, institutions of war, and war mechanisms.
Donors and the international assistance community do possess the tools to address conflict prevention. Health, for example, is a connector. Health workers often cross lines of conflict and have the freedom to operate on different sides. Donors must examine how their aid increases or promotes divisions in a society. So far, there has been a dramatic failure to do so. Early warning systems tend strongly to focus on dividers, not on connectors. In other words, donors should look at the positive cases, the countries in which connectors seem to have outweighed the dividers. Why have Kenya, Burundi, and Albania, to name but a few, remained relatively stable compared to their neighbors? Truly, knowledge about connectors is a form of conflict prevention.
Questions and Answers
Q: Are connectors actually forms of cooperation?
A: Connectors are often not seen by the actors involved as such. Electricity grids, for example, are shared by two sides in conflict out of necessity, but they should be seen as connectors by outsiders. Connectors can be shared values, common experiences, or shared symbols and occasions.
Q: Can connectors actually have negative effects? A caste system could be an example of this.
A: A caste system is not a connector, but a divider. On the other hand, negative connectors do exist, like mafias. Obviously, donors need to be careful about supporting negative connectors.
Q: Should donors and assistance groups avoid working with social bandits?
A: This falls under the legitimization issue. Sometimes the international assistance community cannot avoid working with social bandits. The critical issue is how donors work with them. Do bandits provide any kind of stability? Often, aid can relate to the legitimate parts of illegitimate rulers (e.g. warlords). There are good examples of this.
Q: Why has their been such a poor understanding of dividers and connectors til this point?
A: Generally, analysts were so aware of the complexities and problems behind a conflict that they could not see the positives, or connectors, which readily exist.
Q: How can donors and NGOs institutionalize Do No Harm lessons?
A: There needs to be a culture for change in the organizations themselves. There also need to be individuals in agencies who effect big change.
Transcription of audio clip: "International foreign aid when it's provided in the context of a conflict or a context of any society becomes a part of that context. And in the way in which it's delivered, it affects the things that divide people either feeding into them, reinforcing them, strengthening, exacerbating them. Or it can reduce the intergroup divisions, the things that divide people. And it interacts with the connections, either acknowledging them, recognizing them, building on them, supporting them, and reinforcing them or ignoring them and thereby undermining them. It's such a simple little way of getting a handle on the way in which aid comes into societies."
[This audio clip requires RealPlayerTM. The RealPlayer software is available for free download from RealNetwork at http://www.real.com/player/index.html.]
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