The Importance Of Preventative Diplomacy

Both preventative Diplomacy and conflict prevention are the actions geared towards stopping armed conflicts before they escalate to widespread violence. Preventative Diplomacy aims at early detection of any development that may result in the eruption of violence. The main objective is to prevent any outbreak or the further escalation of violence in order to try and save lives. A definition given by Wikipedia states that, preventative Diplomacy are the actions to prevent disputes from arising between parties or to prevent existing disputes from escalating into conflicts and also to limit the spread of conflicts in case they occur. Michael S. Lund in his book ‘Preventing Violent Conflict: A strategy for preventative Diplomacy ‘, defines

Also the deployment of peacekeeping missions, maintaining these missions in the war areas can at times be very expensive. While managing a violent conflict requires a large number of personnel, peacekeeping missions, the army, police and humanitarian assistance personnel, conflict prevention and preventive diplomacy require only a small number of personnel who monitor the trends of conflicts and give early warning to the government or to those concerned who then act upon the intelligence. Preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention therefore ends up using less resources that those which could have been used in managing a violent

Things like resettling internally displaced people, reconstruction of the infrastructure after it has been ravaged by war, reviving the economy and setting up the government afresh are even more expensive than the war itself. This is the reason why countries like Somalia and Sudan have never quite recovered from the effects of war since rebuilding a country is quite expensive. If the conflict in Somalia had been prevented from degenerating into a violent conflict, then maybe it would still be a stable country and would not be reeling in poverty and underdevelopment. That is why Mohammed Sahnoun, the former head of UN in Somalia state that preventing a war has a good chance of success without great expense and without need for a large military