Corporate Peace?

Conflict Prevention: The Untapped Potential of the Business Sector, by Andreas Wegner and Daniel Möckli. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003). 233 pp. $45.

Andreas Wegner and Daniel Möckli set out to accomplish two tasks in Conflict Prevention: The Untapped Potential of the Business Sector: to map the progress of conflict prevention as a field and practice, and to make a compelling argument for the business sector to take on a new set of roles in conflict prevention. As for their success in achieving these goals, this will depend largely on the book's audience.

Mapping the Progress and Practice of Conflict Prevention

Before discussing conflict prevention, Wegner and Möckli begin by looking at conflict itself, noting that the face of violent international conflict has changed. International relations and peace studies scholars once focused on violent conflict as a phenomenon between states, and hence examples of interstate-centric theoretical and predictive models for violent conflict abound. ¹ The approach is understandable considering the Cold War context in which it emerged, but the reality of present day international conflict is very different. As Wegner and Möckli note, "Between 1990 and 2000, there were more than 100 intrastate but only seven interstate conflicts around the world." ² The bulk of violent social conflict, warfare, seems to have fundamentally shifted from being interstate to intrastate in nature.

Several historical trends are cited in relation to this shift. The end of the Cold War and decline and transformation of the former Soviet Union brought an end to a global system characterized by a bipolar balance of power between states. Technological advances in transportation and communication added momentum to a growing trend of globalization, which was further bolstered by growing trade regimes that have pressed for more open and free international markets. Together, these historical forces are seen as having profound effects on societies, states, and the nature of social conflict. Although the authors, regrettably, do not fully trace the causal routes in which these historical changes have affected intrastate social dynamics (which proves a problematic omission in some of their later arguments), they do make reference to the wide body of literature that exists around post-Cold War power relations and globalization.

So where then does the field of conflict prevention fit into this new conflict dynamic? Wegner and Möckli embark on an ambitious effort to map the field and practice of conflict prevention as it responded to these changes. It is ambitious because conflict prevention is itself both an emerging and multi-disciplinary field, still very much in transition and a field in which contours are still quite blurred by the overlap it has with a variety of other disciplines.

In trying to make sense of the many emerging conflict prevention initiatives, the authors lay out a matrix composed of conflict prevention activities and then of actors carrying out those activities. In the authors' descriptive framework, conflict prevention activities include policy formation, early warning systems, operational prevention, structural prevention (governance and socioeconomic), and systemic prevention. Each of these activities is well described, and in casting a wide net to define the sorts of activities done in the name of conflict prevention, the authors support two important principles found in conflict resolution literature. First, the range of activities points to the need to intervene in social conflicts at a variety of levels, an argument often associated with the writings of Lederach and McDonald. ³ Second, the described activities, particularly those relating to structural and systemic intervention, echo Galtung's insights that peace is usefully conceived of as more than just the absence of war, and that structural and systemic sources of violence of social injustice must be addressed in conflict prevention.

Despite the wide survey of conflict prevention activities, the authors studiously avoid some of the unresolved and interesting fundamental questions about the emerging and changing field of conflict prevention and conflict resolution as a whole. For example, what defines the field in terms of its core theories, research methods, and shared values...