Interventions work

June 11, 2008 | Daniel Korski | More on Africa, Conflict and security | 

Do interventions work? With the vicissitudes of the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions and conflict returning to the Balkans, it is hard to answer in the positive. But the always well-read Nick Grono of ICG alerted me yesterday to this fascinating report – Human Security Brief 2007.

Against current wisdoms, it says that conflict in Africa has dropped dramatically:

Between 1999 and 2006 (the most recent year for which we have complete data), sub-Saharan Africa’s security landscape was transformed. The number of armed conflicts being fought in the region fell by more than half. The number of people being killed dropped even more steeply—by 2006 the annual battle-death toll was just 2 percent of that of 1999.

It goes on to say that while in 2002 there were 26 non-state conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, this number has dropped by more than half across the region, and their death tolls had fallen by some 70 percent.

Why is this happening? Because of international intervention:

Research suggests that the drivers of this remarkable decline in armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are to be found not in long-term structural change, but in the post-Cold War surge of policy initiatives designed to stop wars (“peacemaking”) or prevent them from starting again (“postconflict peacebuilding”).

So despite the poor coordination, underpowered missions, occasionally illegal activities of UN soldiers, the lack of political will to push through large-scale peace-deals etc. etc. intervention actually works.

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