“why don’t they listen?” micro and macro-perspectives on ... file1 “why don’t they...

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“Why don’t they listen?” Micro and Macro-Perspectives on

the Success and Failure of Warnings about Intra-State

Conflict1

Christoph O. Meyer, John Brante, Chiara de Franco, Florian Otto

King’s College London

Paper prepared for the SGIR ECRP 7th

Pan-European International Relations

Conference, 9-11 September 2011, Stockholm

Draft: Please do not cite without permission of the authors

Comments welcome

Abstract

The paper aims to reinvigorate and advance the debate about the warning-response

gap by proposing and applying a novel analytical and normative approach. It suggests

combining micro with macro-level definitions of “success” and studying the

conditions underpinning it: The micro-level perspective investigates the cognitive

impact of individual warnings and the factors which can help to explain under what

conditions warnings about the escalation of violent conflict are noticed, accepted and

prioritised. We conduct the first empirical test of a modified persuasion model of

warning impact through two case studies of relative success (Darfur) and failure

(Georgia). The warning producer’s perspective does not necessarily equate, however,

to having a “normatively successful” warning-response organisation or system. The

paper sets out the normative requirements across four stages, involving forecasting,

communicating, prioritising and deciding to mobilise and elaborates on conducive

conditions for each of them. It then draws on our practitioner research to argue that

current international and national warnings-response practices tend to suffer from i)

contested knowledge bases with regard to forecasting conflict; ii) asymmetric

relationships between warning producers and consumers, iii) poorly managed

conflicts within organisations over the ends and means of preventive policy, and

finally iv) countervailing incentives on decision-makers to act early.

Corresponding Author:

Dr Christoph O Meyer

Dept of War Studies

King's College London

Strand, LondonWC2R 2LS

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7848 1031

Email: [email protected]

1 The project benefits from financial support from the European Research Council (No 202022). More

information is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/foresight.

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1. Introduction

What does it take to enable action aimed at preventing the outbreak of violent

conflict? The most frequent answer is “knowledge” about which regions, countries or

areas within countries are most prone to experience the escalation of violence within a

time-period that allows for preventive action. Substantial efforts in the academic field

have thus focused on improving the accuracy and specificity of forecasts about armed

violence, highlighting its importance to effective early warning (Schrodt and Gerner

2000; Hegre and Sambanis 2006; Rost, Schneider et al. 2009; Gleditsch and Ward

2010; Goldstone, Bates et al. 2010; Raleigh 2010). In contrast to the manifold and

sustained scientific efforts in forecasting conflict over the past decades, very little

attention has been focused on understanding how knowledge claims concerning

potential risks of intra-state violence turn into warnings and when such warnings are

noticed, prioritised and acted upon by actors with relevant authority and instruments.

The answers to these questions are highly relevant in the context of the literature

broadly concerned with the ‘warning-response-gap’ (Adelman and Suhrke 1996;

George and Holl 1997; Cockell 1998; Lund 1998; Carment and Schnabel 2003;

Jentleson 2003), which is variously attributed to decision-makers’ inherent lack of

political will to bear risk for humanitarian causes, dysfunctional media coverage

(Jakobsen 2000), or indeed the lack of ‘actionable’ as compared to ‘accurate’

forecasts. It is also an important question to current efforts by international

organisations as well as some national governments to improve their early-warning

and response processes, structures and capabilities of action (Brahimi 2000; Prime

Minister's Strategy Unit 2005; Council 2007; OSCE 2009)

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The paper approaches the warning-response problem through a modified version

of persuasion theory suggested by Meyer, Otto, Brante and de Franco (Meyer, Otto et

al. 2011). They have argued that for both normative as well as analytical reasons

warning impact cannot be adequately investigated in terms of outcomes on the

grounds, but requires attention to prior problems of reception, attention, prioritisation

and decision to mobilise, each of which poses particular challenges for warning

producers and consumers. Furthermore, Meyer et al (2011) proposed a tentative

model to capture different variables that are thought to influence when individual

warnings are likely to have an impact.

The present paper argues that the present model is helpful to investigate in a more

nuanced fashion the impact of particular warning messages of particular sources and

highlight those factors that are amendable to chance. Yet, the model cannot account

for the underlying structural features of the warning-response gap and is insufficiently

sensitive to the normative preconditions relating to good judgements and evidence

underpinning preventive policy. More specifically, the paper highlights and elaborates

on four factors which cause problems in the warning-response linkage, each of which

cuts across and influences different variables in the micro-level persuasion model of

warning: i) the contested knowledge basis of early warning about conflicts and its

consequences; ii) dysfunctional relationships between warning producers and

consumers; iii), missing mechanisms for managing horizontal disputes over goals and

means of preventive policy; iv) and countervailing incentives to act early. We draw on

the results from semi-structured interviews among relevant practitioners within

national governments, international organisations, NGOs and the news media. In

addition, we have conducted a survey among practitioners within international

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organisations with a conflict prevention brief to measure more accurately some of the

main variables and determine differences in impact.

2. Investigating the Causes of the Warning-Response Gap: Linking Micro

and Marco-Explanations

We define warning as a communicative act with the intention to raise a given

recipient’s awareness about a potential threat to a valued good or interest in order to

enhance her ability to take preventive or mitigating action (Belden 1977; Chan

1979:104). In order to analyse the role and impact of warnings, be it on the micro or

macro-level, it is important to understand that warnings generally contain three

interlinked judgments, two of which are diagnostic and one prescriptive (May and

Zelikow 2006; Brante 2010). The first judgment is the knowledge claim about what is

likely to happen, the second is an assessment of why the consequences of this forecast

should concern a given recipient (the ‘so what’-question) and thirdly, an explicit or

implicit judgment about whether existing policy is working and how it might need to

be changed in order to prevent harm to a valued good or interest (Betts 2007).

Boundaries between warning and non-warning are de-facto blurred, not least because

a number of factors can lead to a situation in which analyst “A” thinks s/he has

delivered a warning, whereas a given decision-maker “B” fails to interpret it as such.

The decisive feature is the intention of the warning communicator to change the

attitudes of recipients about a given problem, which makes it different from general

reporting, indicator monitoring etc.

Warnings that reach decision-makers can originate from a range of different

sources, who compile them according to different rules, using different channels and

aiming at a range of difference audience. One can distinguish between “in-house” and

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“out-of the field warning” as far as governments and international organizations are

concerned. The first category comprises formal warnings products and processes,

which are guided by clear rules about who is coordinating warning about which issue,

using which information, liaising with whom and within what time-scale. The prime

example are watch-lists compiled by various actors in order to warn decision-makers,

but also to guide further analysis and contingency-planning.2 Other written warnings

originate from national intelligence services, embassies, special envoys and military

commanders in the field, sometimes within regular reports, sometimes through ad-hoc

communications such as cables. ‘In-house warnings’ may also be communicated in a

very personal, informal and face-to-face manner such as officials sending ad-hoc

emails, picking-up the phone, meetings and briefings. Out of the field warnings can

originate from global NGOs such as the International Crisis Group, specialized think-

tanks such as the International Institute of Strategic Studies, or individual experts

associated with universities and other research bodies. Finally, out-of-the field

warnings stems from news agencies and mass-market news media, including

international lead media such as CNN, the New York Times, and the Financial Times.

This diversity of sources and formats is relevant both for the micro-perspective of

assessing the impact of a particular warning from a particular source, but also for

wider investigations that look at the accumulative and combined impact of warning

messages, which may cluster in time and contradict or reinforce each other to varying

degrees. In the following we will argue that warning about intra-state conflict and its

impact can be best analysed by a combination of micro and macro-theoretical lenses.

2 The EU has a “watch-list” compiled by the PSC with input from Commission Member States, the UK

the (“Countries at Risk-Report”) and the US the NIC Instability Watch list as well as the Atrocity

Watchlist. The problem with the lists is that despite the fact they are being classified, being on the list

may have negative implications for particular countries and thus result in lobbying from both those

countries and their “friends”. The result is that political judgements play often a similarly important

role to who is on the list as technocratic assessments of relative state fragility or probability of conflict.

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Micro-Perspective: Warning as Persuasion

The micro-theoretical perspective conceptualises warning as a special case of

persuasion and seeks to investigate both process and impact, incorporating a range of

different factors and variable as explained further below (Meyer, Otto et al. 2011).

Firstly, this perspective is helpful for tracing with much more nuance the cognitive

impact of warnings over time. Meyer et al (2011) have suggested distinguishing

cognitive impact in terms of notice, attention, acceptance, prioritisation and decision

to mobilise, each of which poses some distinct challenges for the actors involved in

the warning-response nexus.

Secondly, the perspective is also helpful in post-mortems when warnings did not

lead to preventive action to ascertain potential failures of the system and apportion –

and if appropriate blame – between warning producers and consumers. Did the

warning reach the right recipients? Was the warning clear and specific enough and the

source credible? What did other sources say? How great was the competition for

decision-makers attention and resources at a given point in time? We know from

similar enquiries in the domain of risk research that the tendency is always to blame

the “operator”, the last person whose action or inaction caused or failed to prevent a

disaster, rather than seeing the systemic and organisational origins of the accident and

judging operator performance in the context of the information and conditions

prevailing at the time. Many public inquiries and much academic writing after major

humanitarian catastrophe’s tends to involve unrealistically demanding expectations

about which warnings should have been heeded and which actions should have been

taken in order to prevent casualties. That is, in hindsight, the focus tends often to be

on policy change as the expected impact of warning. Following the previous point, we

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argue that more modest expectations are appropriate where success is defined as a

belief or cognitive change on a scale of varying levels. A focus on persuasion at the

micro-level illuminates the problems emerging at the interface of producers and

consumers of warnings and the non-trivial problems for decision-makers in dealing

with uncertainty, message contradictions and competing demands for attention and

resources.

Thirdly, even though the micro-perspective on warning as persuasion is analytical

in nature, not a normative, it can help to investigate boundary problems between the

notion of persuasion, which is ultimately build on the autonomy of the receiving

individual to change his beliefs, and coercion, which puts persuasion targets under

undue pressure to change their mind and act in a certain way. These dynamics could

be at play when preventive policy turns out to be based on shaky or incomplete

evidence, formulated in a rushed and haphazard fashion, and leads to unintended or

undesirable consequences.

Finally, from a practitioner’s point of view understanding these conditions is

invaluable to experts who want to communicate their knowledge effectively to one or

more relevant recipients within a largely given set of conditions, including the

relationship between the warning producer to the warning communicator and the

contextual factors influencing receptivity on the side of the recipients. The perspective

can help the expert to better tailor the message to a recipient’s preconceptions and

interests, choose the right channel or set of channels to overcome various filters, and

decide when to communicate in order to hit a temporal window of cognitive

readiness. It can also help recipients to better understand some of the obstacles

warning communicators are facing such as impressions of inapproachability, their

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reactions to the delivery of bad-news and how their own cognitive and motivational

biases can influence their acceptance and prioritisation of warning intelligence.

The substantive theory about when warning messages are likely to persuade a

given recipient is contained in the work by Meyer, Otto, Brante and de Franco (2011).

Persuasion is a well-established field of research in the area of social psychology and

political communication, but has not yet been applied to the problem of studying the

impact of warning about impending conflicts. It goes back to the pioneering work of

Janis and Hovland at Yale (Hovland, Janis et al. 1959; Perloff 2008) on the factors

which make a message persuasive for a given recipient. To increase its fit with the

particular characteristics of warnings communication about intra-state conflict, Meyer

et al. have modified the standard model contained in many psychology textbooks,

revolving around the variables connected to message, source and recipient factors. In

doing so, they have drawn on insights from intelligence studies about the failure of

strategic warning (Jervis 1976; Betts 1978; Jervis 2010) and risk research about the

failure to prevent disasters and ‘predictable surprises’ (Perrow 1999; Posner 2004;

Perrow 2007; Bazerman and Watkins 2008; Gerstein and Ellsberg 2008).

Since the model is fairly self-explanatory and space limited, we will not seek to

explain each of the variables contained in the model.

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Figure 1: Model of Warning about Intra-State Conflict as Persuasive Discourse

Warning

Communcator

• Experience

• Motivation

• Skill

Message Content

• Certainty

• Actionability

• Intelligibility

• Emotional

appeal

Filtering

Mechanisms

• Professional

Norms

• Culture of

Organisation

• Available

Resources

Source

Perceptions

• Formal Status

• Expertise &

Track-Record

• Interest bias

Message

Channels

• Interpersonal

• Bureaucratic

• Mediatised

Warning

Recipient

• Cognitive

Capacity

• Pre-existing

beliefs

• Motivation to

Process

Warning

Impact

1. Notice

2. Attention

3. Acceptance

4. Prioritisation

5. Mobilisation

Relationship between Warner and Warnee

• Hierarchical and power differentials

• Knowledge differentials

• Frequency, length and nature of interactions

Contextual Factors

• Degree of competition from other issues

• Compatibility with political agenda

• Similarity of issue to influential lessons learnt

• Resonance/Dissonance with other messages

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The Macro-Perspective: Warning as Knowledge in Policy-Making

The macro-theoretical perspective looks at the warning response problem through

the normative prism of evidence-based policy-making at the level of organisations

and systems. It starts from the premise that knowledge helps democracies to reach a

set of goals more efficiently and effectively than alternative ways of conceiving

policy. It does not advocate expert-rule in all areas of risks, but embraces the

expectation that the best available relevant expertise should have be given a voice and

a fair hearing in policy-making, especially in those areas were expertise is most

relevant to policy-success (Sunstein 2005; Boswell 2008). Furthermore, we posit that

knowledge-based policy should not just pertain to the analysis of present problems,

but should be able to learn also from forecasts about emerging problems and take

appropriate and proportionate action to manage these risks, thereby substantially

reducing the probability of harm and the costs of dealing with it (Ascher 1978; Ascher

2009).

Whereas the micro-perspective is interested in the “success” of individual

warnings from the warning producers’ perspective, the macro-theoretical perspective

looks at overarching patterns of warning-response processes over time and across

different warning sources and recipients. It seeks to identify the underlying cognitive,

communicative and decisional challenges underpinning “good” preventive policy and

helps to illuminate why warnings in particular policy areas and across different

national and international settings tend to fail already at the cognitive level,

notwithstanding legitimate reasons for not acting. It foregrounds the systemic features

of the warning-response gap; those that cannot be tackled and circumvented by

individual warners or recipients, but may be amenable through concerted and

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sustained efforts of warning producers, warning consumers and other actors affected

by and interested in the outcomes of preventive policy.

We argue that a “good” warning-response process depends on “good” judgements

made at four interlinked stages: forecasting, communicating warnings, prioritisation

and deciding to mobilise (See Figure 2).3 Each of these stages poses particular

challenges to the actors involved and problems at one stage are likely to radiate

through subsequent as well as preceding stages. Normative problems in one stage

such as forecasting, create problems of down the line and vice-versa as warning-

responses processes constitute recurrent patterns among a limited set of actors within

a policy field.

The quality indicators of forecasting according to this model relates to the ability

of experts, theories and methods to produce accurate, reliable and sufficiently specific

forecast about the probability and impact of a harmful event. This is particularly

difficult as there is usually a trade-off between specificity and accuracy. Forecasts

which are vague about, for instance, safety thresholds for jet-engines affected by

volcanic ash, are of no use to policy-makers seeking to take precautionary measures.

Similarly in the case of intra-state conflict, it matters greatly to questions of both

receptivity and prioritisation among recipients whether forecasts say “it is more likely

than not” that there will be “some kind of conflict in Country A in the next five

years”, or whether forecasts are able say “with 90 percent confidence interethnic

violence is likely to erupt within the next three months in the Western region of

country A and will cause more than 200,000 casualties until the end of the year”.

There is a fine line to be tread between the problems of experts misrepresenting

knowledge in order to better meet end-users’ expectations and the risks of not being

3 One judgement at the individual level in foreign policy see Renshon, S. A. and D. W. Larson (2003).

Good judgment in foreign policy : theory and application. Lanham, Md., Rowman & Littlefield..

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listened to altogether as the knowledge content and format makes it useless for the

purpose of warning and preventive policy. In order to know how to draw and re-draw

this line, forecast producers depend on regular interactions with end-users to learn

what kind of information would be most useful, but also for educating them about the

boundaries of what is “knowable”. In order to preserve this fine line, researchers and

their institutions need to be relatively free from having to seek short-term impact of

forecasts to the detriment of a convincing long-term track-record. They need to aim

for a high batting average, rather than maximising publicity by getting one extreme

forecast right. On the other hand, research institutions and projects involved in

forecasting should not fall into the trap of “assumption drag” (Ascher 1978) by failing

to question old assumptions and discount new trends as implausible. Instead, they

should encourage a culture of dissent and questioning in order to increase the

likelihood of spotting the “black swans” (Taleb 2007), events which go against

conventional wisdom, but afterwards appear utterly predictable when looking at the

evidence again.

Forecasts have no impact at all unless they are communicated in a way that allows

recipients to receive and adequately process them. Warnings which are both useful

and credible to recipients need to be oriented towards the recipients’, not the warners’

interests, they need to be intelligible to the recipient and they need to be timely in

order to allow the consumer sufficient lead-time for preventive or mitigating action.

The literature in the area of risk research offers several suggestions about the

conditions, which facilitate good warning practice. Firstly, warning producers need to

be autonomous in their professional judgement from warning consumers, otherwise

their judgements about when and how to warn will be influenced by recipients’ ability

to punish inconvenient warnings or reward convenient ones. Secondly, a variation of

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the problem are misaligned financial or political incentives on warners, which

gradually “poison” their warning practice so that recipients cannot be sure anymore

that the warning is based on the best possible judgement and the recipients’ interest in

mind. A good example are conflicts of interests that haunted accountancy firms in the

1990s (Enron) and Rating Agencies in the wake of the credit crunch of 2008

(Bazerman and Watkins 2008; Gerstein and Ellsberg 2008). Finally, we know from

communications studies that all forms of communication, including warnings, need to

be tailored as far as possible to targeted recipients and intended effects. For this to

work within government there needs to be frequent interactions and dialogue between

warning producers and consumers to minimise the potential for misunderstanding

through “tribal tongues” (Lowenthal 1992) and allow warners to take recipients

worldviews and motivations and current agenda into account.

Warnings compete for cognitive, bureaucratic and social resources with other

forms of advocacy. Whether a warning should be prioritised or not requires good

judgements about whether a given warnings is credible, urgent and important enough

to be prioritised vis-à-vis other demands. Such decisions are most easily taken in

settings where a single actor, rather than a multitude of actors with potentially

divergent ideas about what is important and urgent, have the final responsibility for

them. Ascher has rightly pointed out that forecasting has been much more attractive to

business than in politics, because business tend to agree on the goal of action

(maximising profit) and have a clear locus of final decision-making (the Chief

Executive Officer). In the absence of such a consensus and a single decision-maker,

reaching an appropriate level of prioritisation requires well working mechanisms for

reconciling such conflicts among relevant stakeholders, for instance, the different

implications arising from a warning about intra-state conflict in an African countries

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as seen from the UK Foreign Office (economic, influence), the Ministry of Defence

(security, alliance), and the Department for International Development (humanitarian,

stability, international law). In multinational organisations these conflicts are made

even more complex by a second-layer of national interests and predispositions as

shown by Brante (2010).

Finally, prudent decisions to mobilise for prevention involve judgements about

the feasibility, proportionality and justness of different courses of preventive and

mitigating action versus inaction. Ideally, preventive action deals with a problem

before it manifests itself and requires more costly and risky measures of crisis

management. However, we also know from case studies in the area of risk

management and precautionary politics that the cure can be worse than the disease, a

case in point being the US governments rushed vaccination programme against swine

flu in 1974, which left hundreds of people paralysed. A number of plausible reasons

exist for why governments or international organisations may decide that they do not

have the right instruments or the sufficient material or political resources to

effectively deal with a problem. Similarly, in some situations of growing tensions

botched mediation attempts can increase the probability and gravity of conflicts ,

rather than decrease them, while other situations are generally not ripe for outside

involvement (Zartman 2005; Meyer, Otto et al. 2011). Problems of fairness are raised

by the issue of temporal discounting as well as by the redistributive costs of

preventive action. Some security measures protect one constituency from harm, but

raise risks for another community, whereas some measures resolve on type of

problem, but create larger risks in the medium to long-term. The conducive factors to

good judgements about when and how to mobilise are a consensus among recipients

about what constitutes effective preventive action and incentives for relevant actors to

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invest resources today for a larger gain later. For the case of developing countries and

genuinely farsighted policy (5 years plus) Ascher (Ascher 2009) has made a series of

suggestions about how governments may isolate themselves from counter-productive

short-term pressures and how they may shorten the horizon of the future.

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Figure 2: Four Challenges to Warning Success: Judgement Quality and

Conducive Conditions

Challenge Judgement Quality

Indicators

Conducive Conditions

Forecasting

• Accurate

• Specific

• Reliable

• Regularised interaction between

researchers and end-users to continuously

balance accuracy and specificity

• Orientation towards establishing a long-

terms positive track-record of forecasting

• Analytic culture that rewards dissent,

questioning, and ex-post evaluation

Warning

• Intelligible

• Timely

• Other-regarding

• Professional autonomy of warners

• Regular interactions & dialogue with

warning consumers

• Alignment of interests between warners

and warnees

Prioritising

• Credible

• Urgent

• Important

• Single locus for prioritisation decisions on

the recipient side

• Consensus on hierarchy of ends

• Effective structures for resolving conflicts

over ends

Decision to

Mobilise

• Feasible

• Proportionate

• Farsighted

• Consensus on most effective means &

availability of these means

• Protection from counter-productive short-

term incentives

• Short-term incentives to reward

appropriate preventive action

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3. The Micro-Dimension of the Warning-Response Problem: An Illustration

of Success and Failure

Since the persuasion model was largely based on secondary literature (Meyer et al,

2011), this paper is interested in test-driving the model, not in the sense of rigorously

examining it under all imaginable conditions, but to explore whether it can help us to

make sense of relative failures and success of warnings about violent conflict. We will

use two case studies two illustrate how the various factors can come into play and use

counter-factual reasoning to explore which factors are more important than others.

Despite the fact that both warnings studied below turned out with hindsight to be

accurate, it is worth emphasising that warning “success” is here defined from the

perspective of the warner’s intention, not in terms of whether the warner “should”

have been justifiable been listened to and believed by the warning recipient.

1. Relative Success: US Official and Darfur

The conflict in Darfur, a region in the West of Sudan, witnessed in 2003/2004 a

major humanitarian catastrophe as a result of indiscriminate violence unleashed by the

government sponsored Arab militia group Janjaweed against the civilian population,

following attacks by two black-African rebel movements. At the height of the conflict

between February 2003 and early 2004, hundreds of thousands civilians were killed

and more than 2 million made homeless. Despite these depressing statistics, Darfur

cannot count as a clear cut case of failure to warn or act as is argued in some of the

literature. In fact, a plausible case can be made that the conflict could have produced

even more casualties and suffering had not some preventive and mitigating measures

been taken by a number of actors in late 2003, most notably by the US-Agency for

International Development (USAID) and the US president himself.

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We have found evidence of high warning impact at the highest level of the US

government as a result of a briefing by Andrew Natsios on the escalating violence in

Darfur, the Administrative Head of USAID at the time, to a Deputies Meeting in late

2003 – substantially before Darfur had hit the news media headlines in early 2004

(Otto, 2004). The deputies’ meeting is the second highest formation underneath the

full-cabinet. Natsios’ briefing was so effective that the National Security Advisor

went immediately afterwards to see the Secretary of State who then joined him in

briefing the president about the unfolding crisis. According to our sources, the

briefing substantially changed President Bush’s attitude about the seriousness and

importance of the conflict and led to the authorisation of additional resources for

humanitarian relief as well as political pressure through a series of telephone calls by

the US President to his Sudanese counterpart. Military intervention was seriously

contemplated, not least because of the Iraq fall-out, dismissed as a feasible option.

Why was the briefing so effective and how did Natsios manage to get the attention

of the deputies in the first place? Natsios combined a series of characteristics that

made him a particularly credible source to senior decision-makers. First, he had the

expert credentials as a result of having written extensively about humanitarian

catastrophes (Cambodia) and warned about the 1997 famine in North Korea while

working for the Charity World Vision. His reputation was further bolstered as a result

of being the Head of USAID, which brings with it access to high-quality information,

especially of first hand origin. He noted himself that his credibility depended on

having been physically in the country and met with local officials (interview,

September 2009). Secondly, and in our view more importantly, Natsios was a well-

known figure in the Washington policy community with good contacts to key

individuals in the Republican administration. His good reputation was not just due to

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his expertise, but only rooted in his background as a veteran of the US military who

had seen active service in the first Gulf War. he military background marked him out

from humanitarian organisations, who were generally perceived to have a self-

interested stake in warning about conflict, Participants were highly receptive because

they knew that the individual concerned was highly conscious of the limited resources

of the President and would therefore not warn about an impending humanitarian

catastrophe unless he was really convinced about its gravity and larger political

significance for the US administration.

Moreover, if we look at the message factors, Natsios apparently delivered a highly

effective presentation tailored to the high-profile audience, mixing hard facts and

first-hand intelligence with visual representations through graphs, depicting forecasts

about the rapidly rising numbers of victims of the fighting. And here contextual

factors come in. His graphs went right up to November 2004, which was the date for

the next US Presidential elections. It implied that the President would face the risk of

his re-election campaign being overshadowed by a major humanitarian catastrophe

that would challenge his leadership credentials. This timing factor was crucial for

speed with which the message from the Deputies Meeting was passed on up to the

President as it elevated a warning about a humanitarian disaster in a country of minor

strategic significance to the US to the level of an issue with potential to seriously

damage the President’s chances for a second term in office.

Again, it is difficult to disaggregate the relative importance of the various factors

with any degree of certainty, but we believe that his military background and his

formal status as head of a major US agency were indispensable factor to his

credibility, and certainly more so than his previous and long-standing writing on this

topic. Both factors illustrate two typical variables contained in persuasion theory. It is

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more difficult to assess what role timing played. What if the briefing had taken place

in 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11 and years before the next election campaign? We

know from the literature and interviews that the President, in contrast to some other

members of his cabinet, felt quite strongly about preventing mass atrocities, but one

must doubt given the competition for attention at the time whether a) the issue would

have reached him as quickly as it did and b) that he would have invested as much

personal resources into pressuring the conflict parties to stop their campaign. There

would have been also much less public pressure to act later on given the news media

preoccupation with 9/11 and the “new” threat of jihadist terrorism.

2. Relative Failure: EU Official and Georgia

The case of Georgia 2008 has been justifiably characterised as a case of strategic

surprise for the EU. It costs the lives of at least 365 people on both sides, hundreds of

casualties, millions of damage and from the perspective of the EU to a major crisis in

its relations to Russia and the failure of its policy vis-à-vis Georgia. It also locked the

Union in a costly monitoring mission in the region (EUMM), which is likely to

proceed for quite some time. While the EU, under the French Presidency, did succeed

to broker a ceasefire that prevented further escalation, it is conceivable that clearer

signals to both Georgia and Russia and a more forceful involvement on the ground

could have prevented the war, or at least postponed it. However, as John Brante has

shown in his paper (2010), member states failed to arrive at joint threat perceptions

regarding the likelihood of a Georgian attacks and Russia counter-attack despite a

number of warnings being communicated throughout the preceding year flagging the

risk of a serious deterioration. He traces the problem of warnings to divergent

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cognitive and political predispositions among member states. If we focus on the

micro-level of individual warnings and their impact how these play-out in conjunction

with other variable contained in the model. For instance, there was the case of an EU

official who felt compelled to send an urgent and forceful warning about the high

probability of an outbreak of war in Georgia to his superior, an official with direct

access to senior decision-makers, three weeks before it actually happened. The

warning did not lead to any response from that official or further prioritisation of the

warning, except afterwards for a number of congratulatory emails from other

colleagues who had also received the message in copy.

Why did the warning fail to make an impact in terms of acceptance and

prioritisation? First, we can discount the possibility that the warning itself was not

clear about the harmful events that were expected and why. There were, however,

problems with the choice of the channel and source credibility. The warning was

formulated in an email, rather than directly conveyed to the recipient. Oral warnings,

be they face-to-face or via the phone are seen as superior in impact to anything

written. As one other EU official specialised on early warning said: “If you write

something, you have already lost”. Emails, even if highlighted as important, can more

easily be disregarded and compete with many others for attention. But why did the

official in question chose to communicate by email? The reason can be found in the

relationship he had with his direct superior, who happened to be for idiosyncratic

reasons three hierarchical levels above him. He described the official as someone who

is ‘rather old school, formalistic and did not really invite frequent contacts (…) there

were very few if any individuals who could pick up the phone and approach him in

this direct way, so I felt the maximum I could do was to send this email message to

him’. In addition, the warning official felt that his message would not be welcome by

22

his superior, because of ‘a certain prejudice with regard to Russia and certain ideas

about Russia which did not really coincide with my own’. This perception was partly

rooted in having worked with him before, but also tied to the warning recipient’s

nationality which belongs to the “Friends of Russia”-Group, whereas the warner’s

nationality was linked to the “New Friends of Georgia”-Group (for labels see John

Brante’s paper, 2010). He felt that if his superior was Polish for instance, he “would

have probably taken it seriously and used that and told his representative to the PSC

to raise a stink and make sure that we send red-signals to Moscow to tell them we

know what you are up to, we are not going to stand for this, you can expect sanctions

and problems with your relationship to the EU as a result” (interview, March 2010).

Perhaps, but on the other hand, one can also see reasons why even a Polish senior

official might have found it difficult to prioritise and take full ownership of the

warning message: firstly, the official had not been recently to the region but received

the information through his national contacts, he had not formal responsibility for

Georgia and was not very senior as compared to other warners such as the EU Special

Representative, Peter Semneby.

As John Brante shows in his paper (2010), Semneby did have some impact with

his personal briefings of the High Representative Solana and at least some of the

ambassadors of EU member states in the Political and Security Committee, but even

with a warner of high status and frequent access to top-officials, with good access to

information and a brief that included warning about conflict in Georgia, one could

find that the contextual conditions were quite disadvantageous to high warning

impact. There had been previous warnings in previous summers, particularly from

Georgian sources about war being imminent, which, after nothing much had

happened, led to a degree of warning-fatigue among some political actors and

23

associated all other warners negatively with what was seen Georgian slightly

hyperbolic advocacy. Furthermore, the political agenda from the outgoing and

incoming presidency was to “re-invigorate the Union’s relations with Russia, and this

was an issue that was given higher priority than engaging in the frozen conflicts in the

South Caucasus”. The problem was not just existing political agenda, but also that the

judgements underpinning key beliefs about Russian and Georgian behaviour were

wrong and that the West had contributed to these tensions through his own policies on

Kosovo recognition and the roadmap of Georgian NATO membership. So both the

“friends of Russia” as well as the “friends of Georgia” were afflicted by a motivated

biased against acknowledging (i) that Russia would take a military steps within a

small window of opportunity to expose Georgia as an untrustworthy ally to the West

and send a strong signal to other break-away republics (ii) that Georgia would have so

little confidence in the EU or the US that it would ignore their council and seek re-

integration by military means. These contextual conditions strongly suggest that even

if the official’s warning had been successful in persuading his superior that war was

imminent, the senior official himself would have encountered major difficulties in

convincing his colleagues from other countries to accept the warning or even to

support measures to threaten Russia with sanctions for its clandestine campaign to

provoke and then defeat Georgia and simultaneous pressures on Georgia.

24

4. The Macro-Dimension of the Warning-Response Problem: Four Causes of

Failure

Following on from the previous discussion of the four challenges to effective

warning and response and the conducive conditions gleaned from the literature in

other policy-fields, this section seeks to explore some of the key structural problems

in the area of warning about intra-state conflict. The following discussion is based on

semi-structured interviews conducted with 45 practitioners from the US intelligence

and policy community, the UK government, the EU, the UN and the OSCE, NGOs in

Washington, London and Brussels and journalists working for leading quality dailies.

In addition, we have conducted a survey among relevant practitioners among the UN,

the EU and the OSCE.

1. Contested Beliefs in the Nature and Potential of Forecasting

One of the key inhibiting factors in the warning response process remains the

contested nature of knowledge about whether forecasts about emerging conflicts are

sufficiently accurate and precise to base policy on. This is not necessarily a comment

on the quality of long-standing academic work in the field, but an observation of

prevalent perceptions and practices in the international policy-community.

Practitioners from think-tanks as well as from within government involved in warning

about conflict expressed various degrees of scepticism about the ability of the best

methods and theories to forecast accurately when conflicts will escalate and to what

extent. This is also borne out by the responses to our survey question, which asked

respondents about their confidence to forecast different aspects relating to the

escalation of intra-state violence. None of the experts were “highly confident” on any

of the issues, but were least confident on questions of “when” conflicts would escalate

(50 percent not confident, and only 11 percent confident) and on the “magnitude of

casualties” arising from the conflict were two th

consider that respondents were practitioners involved in their daily work with

warnings about conflict

finding for perceptions of the state of the art in the area.

It also tallies with a finding by a major review

warning and conflict prevention by the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit

was staffed by a number of seconded officials from the relevant ministries

Minister's Strategy Unit 2005

the systematic academic study of conflict, civil war and instability is

(…) [a]s a result the data and analysis of the incidence, impacts and trends in conflict

and instability is incomplete and unreliable, reducing the accuracy of analysis of

preventive and operational effectiveness, and patterns of crisis recurrence”. It traces


casualties” arising from the conflict were two thirds were “not confident”. If we


within international organisations, this is a problematic

finding for perceptions of the state of the art in the area.

It also tallies with a finding by a major review of the international state of early

warning and conflict prevention by the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit

was staffed by a number of seconded officials from the relevant ministries

Minister's Strategy Unit 2005). It concluded that “[d]espite a relatively long history,

the systematic academic study of conflict, civil war and instability is

[a]s a result the data and analysis of the incidence, impacts and trends in conflict



25


irds were “not confident”. If we


, this is a problematic

of the international state of early

warning and conflict prevention by the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, which

was staffed by a number of seconded officials from the relevant ministries (Prime

espite a relatively long history,

the systematic academic study of conflict, civil war and instability is still immature

[a]s a result the data and analysis of the incidence, impacts and trends in conflict



26

this state of affairs to the fragmentation of research activities, researchers focusing on

individual countries and regions and the commercial sector using operating with

“variable levels of analytical rigour” and methods which remain secret for

commercial reasons” (ibid).

In early warning about conflict there is no single universally accepted competent

source of warning about intra-state conflict as compared to other areas of international

affairs (such as the WHO for pandemics and IPCC for climate change), but many

different competing, complementary and overlapping sources in both the public and

private sector, each producing quite different kinds of products using different methos

and data. This creates a lot of noise in the system, raises problems of overwarning and

makes source credibility more difficult to establish.4 Even in the US, the system with

the most highly developed quantitative systems with high performance scores as well

as dedicated structure for early warning, we found considerable skepticism among

senior practitioners about the actual credibility and usefulness of such warnings. One

former security advisor told us that he had “never learnt anything useful” from the

dedicated warnings products and that he tends to trust more individuals with relevant

expertise and recent experience in a country. This view has been echoed by a number

of our interviews, which shows a deeply ingrained culture of knowledge among senior

diplomats tied to individuals, their track-record and networks, rather than the quality

of methods, theories, models and data sources. We do find a degree of generational

gap here with some of the younger officials trying to convince their older and more

senior colleagues to pay attention to new open-source evidence gathered through new

technological means or the outcomes of highly structured, indicator based risk

4 The only possible exception is the International Crisis Group for the NGO sector. It is the most

frequently mentioned source of warning among practitioners within international organisations. It is,

however, also clear that their analysis is not based on scientific models, but relies on building up

reputation through qualitative analysis and a degree of specialisation on some countries and regions.

27

assessment processes. These younger and less senior officials find that their

credibility is highly circumscribed because of their “lack of experience”, regardless of

the quality of the evidence or methods they use. The dominant belief in the

community, particularly the segment of which that matters for conflict prevention, is

that theory and data-based forecasting of conflict is relatively unreliable and

unspecific and that there is single authoritative source of warning, only a few

individual sources with expertise in particular countries and regions. This has

inevitably negative implications for the prioritisation and mobilization stages of

preventive policy and confirms the vitality of the decision-maker as the “last analyst”

syndrom, who will remake all the judgements underpinning intelligence according to

his or her own beliefs and sources.

2. Asymmetric Relationship between Warning Producers and Consumers

If warning communicators want to avoid their warning being ‘lost in translation’

between the worlds of analysis and policy-making, they need to tailor it in a way that

is intelligible to recipients and convey it at a time when recipients are receptive to it.

Unfortunately, the relationship between warning producers and consumers in the area

of conflict and instability regularly produces cognitive gaps and suffers in some

organisations and settings from misaligned incentives. One of the main causes of

misunderstandings arises from the insufficiently regular interaction between warning

producers and decision-makers, which would enable warning producers to appreciate

users’ worldviews, interests and the competitive nature of the political process. Our

survey finds that almost half of our respondents do have regular and frequent

interactions with relevant decision-makers. Considering that our sample consists to

two thirds of practitioners at the level of desk officers and analysts one could think

this is a relatively positive finding

practitioners in International Organisations so we would expect to find lower levels of

interactions in larger and more stratigied

France.

elatively positive finding. On the other hand, the survey has focused on


and more stratigied bureaucracies such as the US, UK, and

28

. On the other hand, the survey has focused on


bureaucracies such as the US, UK, and

29

Table 1: On the basis of your own professional experience of working with

recipients/consumers, please assess how often the following statements apply?

Always Very often Sometimes Rarely

Don’t

know

1 My organisation prefers

to provide a consensus

view rather than to

highlight analytical

disagreement.

3,3% (6) 50,0% (9) 16,7% (3) 0,0% (0) 0,0% (0)

2 Analysts feel that they

can reach their own best

judgments without

worrying about negative

reactions from the

hierarchy.

11,1% (2) 27,8% (5) 27,8% (5) 27,8% (5)

5,6% (1)

3 There is a frequent

interaction between

producers and consumers

of warning in a collegial

atmosphere.

0% (0) 27,8% (5) 55,6%

(10) 16,7% (3) 0,0% (0)

4 There is a clear division

between the work of

producers and consumers

of warning.

16,7% (3) 50,0% (9) 16,7% (3) 11,1% (2) 5,6% (1)

Table 1 also seems to indicate relatively high level of self-perceived knowledge

among warning producers about different aspects relevant to framing “good” warning

messages as elaborated before, except for the questions relating to recipients’ world

views. The problems with regard to in-house warning seem to be related not so much

to the lack of knowledge among warners about recipients, but to the asymmetries of

the relationship itself. If we look at the responses to question 2, we can see that many

of the potential warning indicators feel that they cannot reach their best judgement

because of “negative reactions from the hierarchy”. A majority of respondents

describes “punishment” as a real problem to communicating objective judgements.

This is also borne out in our qualitative interviews and the second of our case studies

already discussed in this paper. Warning producers usually have a clear sense of what

they can say and how they can say it without being penalised. In other words, they

could communicate more effectively in terms of gaining attention, but they are aware

of the threat this poses to their perception by their superiors and within the

30

organisations. Organisational cultures and the personalities of individual managers

vary of course, but the data do show that warnings about intra-state conflict are

perceived to be potentially dangerous territory by experts within the administration as

it can easily grate with organisational cultures and dominant policy agendas. We

believe that this asymmetric relationship and the limited professional autonomy of

warners leads on balance to less warnings, less explicit and specific warnings and

fewer warnings which benefit from quick and direct access to relevant decision-

makers.

As far as out-of-the field warning is concerned, the qualitative interviews among

the more senior foreign affairs practitioners demonstrated a high degree of scepticism

with regard to warnings originating from the NGO community. They are being

perceived as biased as warnings benefit their public profile, which tends to increase

donations, and because preventive action involves the dispersal of aid that may

benefits them financially. There is also a perception that their exhortations for some

kind of action lack an appreciation of what is important as well as what is politically

feasible and effective on the ground, which underlines the point made earlier that

good warnings needs to be credible not just with regard to forecasting conflicts, but

also with regard to the relative gravity of its different consequences to different

recipients as well as the potential, costs, and risks of different kinds of preventive

action.

The only organisation that according to our interviews and survey responses seems

to have breached the cultural divide between the humanitarian and the national

security/foreign affairs community is the International Crisis Group. Its relative

success lies in the close interaction between country and region experts and former

senior decision-makers sitting on its board who can sensitise analysts to which kind of

31

analysis is relevant when, which hot-buttons to push and which recommendations to

make to whom.

3. Unresolved conflicts over what “what matters most” and “how to act”

We have argued before that prioritising judgements about whether a warning is

credible, urgent and important are unavoidable, but are substantially hampered if there

is: (i) no consensus about policy goals; (ii) no central decision-making locus; or (iii) at

least a working mechanism for resolving conflicts over priorities. This unfortunately

seems to be a wide-spread problem in early warning about violent conflict. In contrast

to policy areas where one institution is charged with monitoring risks connected to a

phenomenon that has direct and uniform negative effects (e.g. pandemics, flooding,

famine), warning Western governments about conflicts in foreign countries raises

inevitably questions about the relative importance of an impending disaster. The

obvious humanitarian answer to rank conflict situations solely by the criterion of the

scale of casualties (or human suffering) they are likely to cause, will not satisfy all the

relevant players in foreign policy-making. Different interviewees framed the question

of interest in terms of whether their country has “equity” in a given foreign country or

region, suggesting a hard-nosed cost-benefit calculation. Our interviews as well as the

survey (see below) indicate that countries and specific situations are judged against

multiple criteria of relevance such as the risk of an impending conflict to lead to a) a

loss of political influence on regime and region, b) increased refugees flows to the

home country c) harm to the national economy/champions, d) threats to national

security, d) negative effects on diasporas or a range of less predictable idiosyncratic

reasons which may still play a role in particular cases. Our survey among IOs

practitioner does indicate that the scale of expected casualties does seem to matter a

lot (55 %), but not quite a

than concerns about immigrations. If we consider that each conflict has its own

unique causes and dynamics and thus t

consequences, the quest for finding and applying a common yardstick for prioritising

warnings becomes even more difficult.

One important reason for the

institutionalisation of such interests in the form of

each with relevant instruments for conflict prevention at their disposal, but each with

different priorities for what phenomenon in particular

where. The existence of such competing priorities is not surprising, but hardly any

organisation dedicated in some way to the preservation of peace

solution to resolving the conflict over

lot (55 %), but not quite as much as the loss of influence and not substantially more


unique causes and dynamics and thus tends to produces its own idiosyncratic set of


warnings becomes even more difficult.

One important reason for the divergence in yardsticks lies of course in

alisation of such interests in the form of different departments or ministries


ferent priorities for what phenomenon in particular they most like to prevent

The existence of such competing priorities is not surprising, but hardly any

dedicated in some way to the preservation of peace seems to fou

solution to resolving the conflict over priorities in a quick and efficient way, and thus

32

s much as the loss of influence and not substantially more


ends to produces its own idiosyncratic set of


in yardsticks lies of course in

different departments or ministries,


they most like to prevent and

The existence of such competing priorities is not surprising, but hardly any

seems to found a

quick and efficient way, and thus

33

contribute a dependable link between analytical and problem-solving processes.

Indeed, the already mentioned review of prevention in the UK noted the imbalance

between the massive efforts devoted to information gathering and analysis vis-à-vis

the relatively inefficient, haphazard and cumbersome process of generating “strategic

options” as a result of ‘the structural difficulties of multi-disciplinary working

between departments. This issue was also identified as the main challenge in all

countries and international institutions consulted” (Prime Minister's Strategy Unit

2005). This weakness at the prioritisation stage tends to produce delays and confusion

in contingency planning and action and induces problems at the mobilisation and

implementation stage. Problems are further compounded by our observation that few

of the governmental warnings are explicitly connected to the available instruments

and hardly any explore systematically contingencies relating to the relative impact

and consequences of acting in different ways. Instead contingency-planning comes

rather late in the process when assessments about relative importance have already

been made and warnings may have already failed at prior stages.

Public warnings are even less suited for taking decisions about how to prioritise.

Most of the news media pieces which could be qualified in some way as warning had

very little to say about what political actors should do to prevent escalation, what the

consequences would be and why one course of action was better than alternatives.

Even more problematically, news media pieces tended to be very vague about what

was likely to happen when and how likely such an outcome was. Public forecasts

were often hedged in various ways in order to avoid being proven wrong, but this very

caution makes them less useful for audiences to decide about the probability and

gravity of a potential problem. Neither could we see any evidence in public discourse

34

that warnings were put in a comparative perspective, avoiding hard arguments about

why one impending crisis in one country is more important than another.

4. Countervailing Incentives to Act Early

At the heart of the dilemma facing decision-makers, particularly those oriented to

and dependent on national constituencies, is the inverse relationship between the

political potency of warning and the feasibility of action. The first generally increases

over time as evidence and media coverage tends to mount with escalating violence,

while the second generally decreases as the costs and risks tend to increase. On the

one hand, decision-makers “do not like to be taken by surprise” as Wallensteen (1988:

88) points out. They run the risk of “mounting public pressure to ‘do something’ just

at a time as the available options have narrowed to the politically least palatable and

practically most risky and costly. Politicians may thus appear ignorant, incompetent,

impotent or heartless vis-à-vis the electorate and their peers (…)” (Meyer, Otto et al.

2011). Yet, electorally accountable decision-makers will still tend to delay decisions

to mobilize beyond what would be prudent until a point when two conditions are

fulfilled: Firstly, the evidence concerning the trajectory of violence has become

virtually indisputable even for those who normally question the knowledge basis of

forecasts. Once that stage is reached, decision-maker will face less opposition to

action within the foreign policy machinery and less risks that they will be blamed for

overreaction when action turns out to be more costly and less effective than

anticipated. The second condition is that the news media need to have elevated

warnings to a level of public visibility as to be politically relevant, either because of

reputational damage for opposing action or for offering opportunities to claim credit

for effective crisis management and international leadership to “save lives”. The

35

problem with attempts of claiming public credit for acting genuinely early are

threefold: first, the public may not have been aware that there was the probability of

major problem in the first place; secondly, they do not feel particularly affected by

conflict as such unless the consequences are sufficiently clear to them, and thirdly,

even if preventive policy was successful political actors will find it difficult to

communicate this success as some of the most effective instruments of preventive

policy such as mediation depend on secrecy to work effectively as Wallensteen as

pointed out (2002), enabling conflict parties to build-up trust and reach compromises.

Florian Otto’s study of media coverage of the Rwanda and Darfur cases (Otto

2010) has confirmed that mediated warning has been late and certainly significantly

later than governmental warnings. On the other hand, he shows how lead international

newspaper coverage can reach a high salience and frame the conflict in a way that

encourages action from decision-makers. Taking these disincentives together,

politicians can be expected to wait with mobilizing action until forecasts have reached

a high level of certainty, warnings have reached a certain frequency and uniformity

and different stake-holders in the policy-process have converged in their assessment

of why this particular problem needed to be prioritized in terms of governmental

deliberations. By that time, however, violence may have escalated unexpectedly

quickly and news media pressure to act reaches a volume and salience that decision-

makers go from being under-reactive to being overreactive, hastily implementing

measures that may be disproportionate or raise news risks.

Given these asymmetric incentives the most noteworthy issue is perhaps not so

much that senior decision-makers will tend to wait longer than is good for either their

own or foreign citizens. It is rather that the warning-response process is still premised

on the notion of convincing top-decision-makers before meaningful action could start.

36

In fact, in many other areas of risk management early warning and preventive action

have been placed outside of the realm of party politics and situated in regulatory

bodies that can both monitor risks and take the appropriate action according to their

mandates. The OSCE’s High Commission on National Minorities is probably the

closest the international community has come to this ideal and both the UN and the

EU offer some protection from counter-productive incentives given that their officials

do not generally face elections. But even these bodies have often limited budgetary or

political autonomy to act in a preventive fashion. A closely related exception are

bodies designed for rapid humanitarian relief, such as USAID or ECHO, but they

engage in mitigation, not prevention and even they struggle to pre-position assets and

act genuinely early at the first sign of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The underlying problem is the absence of a consensus that preventive action is

always and to everyone desirable. This debate is again not necessarily unique to the

risk of intra-state war, but can be seen also in other areas of precautionary politics

where critics point out that preventive action is disproportionate, produces new kinds

of risks or magnifies others and poses moral dilemmas relating to democratic

participation and justice (Sunstein 2005). Yet, there is at least a degree of consensus

that knowledge plays a key role in identifying risks and that preventive action is,

prima facie, desirable. In the area of conflict prevention, however, not only do experts

argue that these trade-off exist as well (Luttwak, 1999; Stedman, 1995), but, more

fundamentally, no normative consensus exists to ban any use of armed force within

states by non-state actors, given the legacy of previous struggles for self-

determination against colonialism, freedom from oppression and racial discrimination

as well as ethnic and religious survival. The UN’s Responsibility to Protect-Doctrine

can be seen as an attempt to formulate and implement a minimum consensus about

37

which forms of violence are uniformly unacceptable, but the prize for this (still

fragile) consensus is the shift from prevention to mitigation. Forecasting violence

amongst humans is difficult enough, but stopping behavior that fits certain legal

definitions before it has actually occurred is an even more vexing challenge.

5. Conclusion

The paper aimed to reinvigorate the debate about the warning-response gap by

suggesting and applying a novel analytical as well as normative model. It approached

the problem from two intertwined perspectives: The micro-level perspective looked at

the cognitive impact of individual warnings and the factors which can help to explain

when warnings about the escalation of violent conflict are noticed, accepted and

prioritised. We test drove the tentative model developed by Meyer et al (2011) with

the help of two case studies which illustrated the complex interplay of key factors and

the difficult judgements involved by individuals on both sides of the warning-

response divide. These case studies did not claim to epitomise the totality of warning-

response processes in various cases and nor could they. Substantially more research

will be needed to investigate in more depth how applicable the model genuinely is

across time, cases and organisational settings and whether it can be made more

parsimonious. But we believe that the paper has shown that the micro-perspective can

help to encourage more nuanced empirical investigations of warning-response

dynamics which inform after-the-fact judgements about what could be legitimately

expected of both decision-makers and warners in the event of violent conflict

escalating.

38

It can also inform practice in the field by shifting the emphasis away from self-

referential optimising of data and methods to better understanding the persuasive

impact of warning messages: What are the audience’s salient interests and concerns

and how can I frame the warnings to resonate with these interests? What are their

predispositions and ways of processing information and is there a way of altering

them, for instance, through guidance and simulation exercises? Which policy

instruments do they have at their disposal, what is the lead-time for their deployment

and what do decision-makers think about their effectiveness and efficiencies in

various situations? When is it best to avoid politicisation and work through personal

contacts and briefings and when is grass-roots mobilisation required? For decision-

makers and organisation interested in increasing their receptivity to warnings, the

model foregrounds another set of questions: what signals are we sending, consciously

and unconsciously, to potential communicators about the desirability of warnings? To

what extent are we aware of how organisational culture, cognitive biases and political

motivations influence what we regard as evidence, who is considered credible and

what is considered risky? How far do we plan ahead and do we have the instruments

in place to react to new contingencies?

The macro-perspective highlights that warning success in terms of impact is not

the same has having a warning-response system which meets key normative

requirements. The paper discussed what these requirements are in four different stages

of the process and elaborated on some of the conducive conditions for them. We then

drew on our empirical work with practitioners to argue that current international and

national warnings-response practices tend to suffer from i) contested knowledge basis

with regard to forecasting conflict; ii) asymmetric relationships between warning

producers and consumers, iii) poorly managed conflicts within organisations over the

39

ends and means of preventive policy, and finally iv) countervailing incentives on

decision-makers to act early.

These findings could be helpful to current attempts to reform early warning and

response procedures and systems and to better interlink them. They point to the

importance of establishing institutions and fora for synthesising, validating and better

communicating the state of the art in conflict forecasting. Our work supports long-

standing proposals to create an IPCC-like process at the UN to establish what

forecasts about conflict can and cannot do and where further coordinated research is

needed. Other avenues for addressing the systemic features of the warning-response

gap relate to more investment in decision-support and contingency planning at an

earlier stage, more professional autonomy and protection for warners, stronger

encouragement for analytical cultures of dissent and questioning as well as better and

earlier news media coverage of impending conflicts. The macro-perspective may,

however, also help to recognise that warnings and preventive policy by Western

governments and International Organisations are inherently difficult and politically

contentious. This does not mean either can afford to give-up on becoming better, but

it does highlight the need for more realism in the debate about warning response.

40

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