2) Investing in Prevention: An International Strategy to Manage Risks of Instability and Improve Crisis Reponse, by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit

This almost 200-page report from the British government is trying to be several things at once: a digest of the academic literature on what makes states unstable, a suggested best-practice manual for other governments and international organisations wanting to make a difference to states at risk from instability, and an agenda from one part of the British government which the Cabinet Office (or at least the Strategy Unit) hope they can get the other (unnamed) British government actors to buy into. The whole thing is on-line here (PDF).

There’s a lot to like in this report. The author clearly had a good time finding alliterative checklists of conclusions (all emphasis below is in the original text):

“First, a sophisticated understanding of the specifics of a country or region is essential as a basis for effective action.
Second, the scale of engagement needs to increase to ensure that sufficient resources are deployed in priority stability investments.
Third sustained support is needed to ensure that resources committed actually achieve the intended effect.
Fourth, systemic and coherent engagement across different types of actors (military, diplomatic, development, rule of law, etc.) and the international community is necessary.

and, if you can alliterate on the letter “i”,

The first strategic response is investing in stability by building country capacity and resilience.
The second strategic response is aligning incentives of domestic power-brokers with stability.
The third strategic response is to increase international responsibility…
Improving response to crises is the fourth strategic response.

That pretty much summarises the main conclusions, which are partly a wish-list for what the whole international community could do better, but also an agenda for the UK’s presidency of the G8 this year and of the EU from July to December. The one specific and concrete policy innovation suggested is a new “Partnership for Stability” arrangement, between the UK (and its partners) and countries at risk of instability. I was also interested in the concept of a “Special Advocate” for individual cases of countries at risk, though the text seems more to be describing best-practice scenarios of what happens at the moment rather than elaborating the idea for future development and deployment.

There are a number of insights that I found interesting. For instance, along with a table of those countries whose 1998 real per capita income is at levels last reached in 1960 or earlier (13 in Africa, also Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela), the shocking observation that “evidence suggests prolonged economic decline of a decade or more is usually the result of conscious decisions by elite groups”. Another point: having one or two key natural resources is usually a recipe for instability (Botswana is singled out as an exception). Another point: “Ethnic dominance – having one or two large ethnic groups – makes a country more at risk than when there is a greater degree of ethnic diversity.” The likely destabilising effects in the next few years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, of climate change, and of trade reform (especially as regards sugar). The massive shortfall in provision of personnel for international peacekeeping missions. (This last will be no news to , I suspect.) And I found the sections on “aligning incentives of domestic power-brokers” coherent and convincing, once I got past the throat-clearing (though I missed any reference to the role of the intelligence services here or elsewhere).

With all of that, I found a few rather surprising weaknesses. The first is that it has not been adequately proof-read. Occasional sentences – “The EU and NATO have provided strong external stabilising for middle and eastern European countries after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact” – don’t even sound as if they were written by English speakers. (Another example: “In countries at risk of instability, these institutions are of ten [sic] either not able or are [sic] not designed to stop the change process from turning violent.”) One graph which, according to the text, should show that the number of worldwide conflicts has fallen since 1946 clearly demonstrates the opposite.

And I was troubled by specific inaccuracies on the cases that I happen to know something about: a statement strongly implying that all Albanian violence in Kosovo and Macedonia is irredentist in motivation misses most of the picture, as I’ve argued at length elsewhere