ABSTRACT

The processes and aims of conflict management and conflict resolution can overlap with those of conflict prevention.  Conflict management refers to measures aimed at limiting, mitigating and/or containing a conflict without necessarily solving it.  Conflict resolution refers to attempts to resolve the underlying incompatibilities of a conflict non-violently, including efforts to get the parties to mutually accept each other’s existence (Swanström and Weissmann 2005). The methods involved in conflict management and resolution may include negotiation, mediation, arbitration, joint problem-solving and search for integrative solutions, and/or customary or traditional methods.
Similar to conflict prevention, conflict management and resolution activities often seek to identify and address the perceived root causes of conflicts, in order to tailor appropriate solutions. The applicability of democratisation and economic development, for example, which are commonly proposed solutions to conflict, may vary depending on the root causes of conflict.  Where the root cause is political marginalization or the absence of a social contract, democratization may play a positive role in conflict resolution; whereas if the root cause concerns identity politics, democratization may not be the appropriate response and in some contexts may exacerbate the risk of conflict.
Other recent research stresses that effective conflict management and resolution requires instead a shift in attention from root causes only to also the dynamics (actors and motivations) and impact of conflict (changes wrought by the war itself); and to the ‘causes of peace’ (political arrangements necessary to settle power struggles and limit the use of violence). 

 

CHAPTER ONE
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Early warning system and conflict analysis, form a strong synergy. In the first place, the concept of early warning system is gaining a firm ground in the dictionary of strategic studies, particularly on how to prevent conflict or war in the first place. Aja Akpuru-Aja (2007).
Idealist and realists agree similarly that open-club nature of the world system is prone to lawlessness, conflict and war. However, normative theory of strategic studies project the high possibility of conflict prevention, or its avoidance, if parties, or states are wholly sensitive and responsive to early conflict indicators. This approach establishes both the fact and logic on the point of fact, conflict or war is no automatic imposition on parties or states.
There are several definitions of conflict which will serve as threshold for preparing Early Warning Mechanisms as the main thrust of this course. Conflict as a matter of fact, is an inevitable occurrence in human existence that has changed the human habitat to reveal existing problems and resolve unfolding personal or collective grievances.
Conflict ordinarily is assumed by many to be destructive in nature but recent investigations have shown that conflict does not only have bad aspect but also embedded with solution to stem ember of the crisis. Some of these underlying causative factors of conflict are adjudged to either be injustice over some group of people, cheating among individuals, competition, corruption, wickedness, selfishness, oppression among others.
It must be borne in mind that conflict does not have to be dysfunctional at all times. However, this has not been the case in many instances of inter-personal, inter-group and international relations. However, the fact that conflicts are sometimes planned and foreseen by the parties implies that it can be detected and prevented from breaking out. This why this unit this unit defines conflict and describes conflicts in a way that links it to early warning.
This is because the destructive effects of some of the intractable and protracted conflicts in our society have underscored the desirability of early warning mechanisms to prevent fierce conflicts.
This unit also introduces you to the anatomy of conflicts. The essence of this is to deepen your understanding of the concept and analysis of conflict which can greatly aid the design of early warning and its implementation.
The prevention of violent conflict, often referred to as ‘conflict prevention’, refers to approaches, methods and mechanisms used to avoid, minimise, and/or contain potential violent conflicts; and in post-conflict environments, to prevent violent conflict from re-emerging. Prevention is critical for avoiding the devastation and immense human suffering associated with war. It is also prudent as the financial and political costs of managing conflict are much higher once violent conflict has already erupted. In addition, there are a broader range of response options available before conflict has fully escalated.  Conflict prevention has also been found to be effective. A reported decline in armed conflict since the Cold War has been attributed in part because of an extraordinary increase in activism by the international community directed toward conflict prevention, peacemaking and peacebuilding (Human Security Report 2005).
Prevention approaches and mechanisms are generally classified as direct/operational prevention or structural prevention, although there is often overlap. The former refers to short term actions taken to prevent the often imminent escalation of potential conflict (e.g. workshops, dialogue, confidence-building measures, sanctions, coercive diplomacy, special envoys, preventive deployment); whereas structural prevention entails long term interventions that aim to transform key socioeconomic, political and institutional factors that if left unaddressed, could lead to violent conflict in the future.  These long term preventive mechanisms overlap with approaches adopted in the aftermath of conflict in order to prevent a renewal of violence. The UN has introduced a third category of conflict prevention, 'systemic prevention', to describe measures that address trans-national conflict risks.
Most preventive action has been taken in a small number of high-profile cases concentrated in Europe and the Middle East. Asia has received comparatively little attention. The most common tools for early prevention are verbal pronouncements and facilitation; coercive measures are very rarely used.
Conflict prevention is now official policy in the UN, the EU, the G-8 and in many states.  It has been successfully applied in a range of places at the national level, including in South Africa, Macedonia, the Baltic states, Crimea, and the South China Sea.  The many successful violence prevention efforts on the community and sub-national level, often remain invisible. Much conflict literature emphasises that despite these developments, conflict prevention has not been pursued sufficiently. There is still a lack of strategy and capacity for prevention efforts, and inadequate local knowledge and local networks. In order to fill the gap between conflict prevention rhetoric and practice, prevention needs to become a full-time professional and governmental endeavour.  Only then, it is believed, can the devastating impacts of violent conflict be systematically avoided.

1.2 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Currently, the concept of early warning in conflict management is a global alarm. This is no doubt as the Researchers and eve informed knowledge show that no conflict or war springs surprise. Every conflict certainly has early indicators or signals. Observing and responding appropriately to early conflict indicators may be very helpful in the prevention of conflict, in the first place.
Understanding the early indicators signals, signs, red alarm, warnings cautions etc to an issue or conflict, equipts individual or society to be readily available and get prepared in order to avert or manage a conflict. Thus, a stich in time, saves nine.
It is often presumptuousness or apathy, or indifference to conflict warning signals that most often create room for conflict itself, which in turn may lead to escalation level by war perhaps, the value of early warning system is built around peace awareness. Ikejiani O.M (1996).
Hence, this work seeks to investigate the significance of early warning in conflict prevention and conflict analysis (raise pertinent questions)and accordingly explore the ways out of it to respond to early warning signals in order to prevent the occurrence of conflict.  
In the cause of this work, the Nigerian experience formed the case of study. The reason for selecting Nigeria is because Nigeria presented a good example of an average African country with numerous cases of conflict and re-occurrence of conflicts of various dimension in Nigeria, religions, political, ethnic, intra-communal, inter-community conflicts over land and natural resources, positions and representations and more still, full scale intra-country war etc.

1.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
The objective of the work is to make student to be:
• Be familiar with the complexity of conflicts.
• Understand the general notion of the complexity of conflicts.
• Appreciate how the complexity of conflicts can make or mar the designing of early response for early warning signs of conflicts.
• Understand the meaning of conflict anticipation
• Consociational democracy as a tool of conflict anticipation
• Identify the causes of conflict
• Anticipate possible directions in providing strategic advice to decision-makers in the escalation of confliction in order to help mitigate it.

1.4 PROBLEM IDENFICATION
In most recent years, there has been unimaginable rate of conflict in Nigeria and the threat of others people have been easily mobilized into confronting the other group and the workers civil society and the students have been easily called together to confront one set of people, policy and activities or the other Nwanegbo C.J. 2005.
Looking at what happened during the Nigeria civil War and its devasting effect on the federation, one would not fail to recoil and think especially that having seen the effect of civil war, that Nigeria would not have in anyway experience conflicts of any type. This is because that he so called civil war came with so many early warning signs (The political crisis, Kano Riot of 1953, Tiv Riot of 1964, Western Nigeria Election Crisis of 1965, The Pogrom, 1966 Coup and Counter coup, the abolition of Aburi accord etc all were indications and early warning signals which Nigeria did not take into consideration.
          It happened in other African countries. The war in Rwanda came with many early warning signs (sometimes in April movies).
          To show a different set of effect, for instance, in Rwanda about 500,000 people were killed by 1994. In Nigerian experience, during the early stage of the war, Oyediran (1979) recorded over 100,000 lives were lost while parts of their body maimed during the carnage in the North against the Ibos in 1966. The fact remain that most conflicts comes with early warning signs and until these signs are taken into consideration the effects of conflicts will not be prevented.
          Furthermore, with inter-group, inter/intral community conflicts, religious conflict that has become an everyday affair in this country use to come with early warning signals. It is part of the negligence on the part of our leaders that these conflicts has been left to escalate into the level of destruction. In the case of Niger-Delta, Tiv-Juku, Zangon-Kataf, Ife-Modakeke, Omasi-Igah, Aguleri-Umuleri etc, to the present day Kaduna electoral violence, IQS crisis and the on going Boko Haran conflict, weather we believe it or not, they all came with signals that if proper steps/measures were taken, the issue could have been a different one today (Nnekwe L. I  2007). 

1.5 CONCEPTUAL DEFINITION
          In the cause of carrying out this research, the following concepts were used.

EARLY WARNING SYSTEM
          Early warning system is an organized mechanism for tracking, measuring, and monitoring conflict and its progression in a given society.
ESCALATION
          This is an increase in quantity, intensity, or scope of violent exchanges among parties. Escalation typically occurs in cycles of attack or counter attack.

CONFLICT PREVENTION
          This means the anticipation of conflict that seeks to redress. Causal grievances to avoid the escalation of violent forms of conflict engagement or to curtail the re-occurrence of violent exchange or some combination of these elements.

THE CONCEPT OF EARLY WARNING SYSTEM IN CONFLICT
          Conflicts are preventable. They are not a fatality. A conflict is infact announced early by a mutitute of converging signals. These signals may not be visible to all of us. But the research knows very well how to recognize them (as an expert in conflict analysis). The research has developed the tools to help him; he call these tools early warning system (EWS).
          Through the study of the repetition of some specific events, incidents for public, declarations, and their sedimentation in specific patterns, he is indeed able to measure on a conflict Richter scale so to speak with the precision of the geologist; these small political quakes that he believes announced the imminence of a major political seism, a violent conflict or, perhaps, a new war.
          Since the beginning of the millennium, the African continent multiplies the initiatives to set in place modern Early Warning Systems. These Early Warning Systems allow anticipating the occurrence of natural or man-made catastrophes, be it in the health sector, in the access to natural resources, or in the political realm. Regional mechanisms have recently seen the light.. One can name among others the Conflict Early Warning and  Responses (CEWARN). Mechanism for East Africa and the West African network for peace building (WANEP) initiative in West Africa. At the level of Africa, the African Union (AU) is currently working on the establishment of an integrated continental Early Warning System.
          It is with the motto “Conflict are Preventable, peace is sustainable” that a Euro day international public conference on conflict Early Warning Systems was organized by the University of Khartoum (Peace Research Institute) in the Sudanese national capital Khartoum. (Heinz Krummenacher 2001).

THE NEED FOR EFFECTIVE POLITICAL EARLY WARNING SYSTEM
          The then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan stated in his 2001 report on the “Prevention of Armed Conflict” that it was high time to leave the rhetoric of conflict prevention behind us and to create a culture of prevention; five years later we have to acknowledge that Mr Annan’s appeal has not been heard or may have been heard but not been put into practice. There is no culture of prevention in International Politics and when violent conflict appears at the horizon, the behavior patterns of decision makers are most often reactive instead of pre-active. Why? Why were we unable to realize the Secretary General’s vision to address politically motivated violence? On the other hand, why is it so much easier to introduce preventive thinking and acting in cases where emergencies are caused by environmental or man-made natural disaster?
          There are basically two sets of explanations, one of a more technical nature while the other has to do with politics. Let me first address the technical aspects prevention of violent conflict requires early warning!. Without functioning early warning system, there is no such thing as effective conflict prevention. But early warning- if you want to make it work poses some real challenges. By definition, Early Warning consists of three steps:
-      Systematic collection of conflict, relevant data,
-      Analysis of this data, and
-      Transfer of analytical insights into practice.
These three steps require answers to district questions.
First, what data is to be collected? What is relevant, and what is not? To this end, it is paramount to know what we want to warn of! Are we concerned with issues of stability and instability? Are we looking at ethnically or religiously motivated conflict or violent in general? Or, are we focusing on human rights violations, environmentally related conflict, crime etc
Second, which method (s) do we use to analyze the data? Are we using quantitative analysis? Or do we want to rely exclusively on qualitative expert assessment? Third, what is the time frame of our warning (one month, three months, one year, or five years)? Whom do we want to warn? Who would be the appropriate recipient or end-user of our analysis and warning? Finally, and most important, how do we feed the information into decision making processes?
All these questions can be answered, but implementing an early warning mechanism is not a trivial task. Above all it presupposes intellectual rigidity in clearly defining the theoretical foundations and methodological steps involve.

EARLY WARNING SYSTEM AND PEACE EDUCATION
          According to Osisiona B.C Nwolise, in the contemporary world, adequate attention has not been given to peace education, whereas it is very importance. Peace education is the process of pro-active enlightenment on the knowledge and skills of observing and responding to early warning indicators. Beyond the link with early warning system, peace education extends to helping people appreciate how appealing cooperation or peaceful co-existence is, how to analyze conflict situations; the relationship between all the process involved in promoting transnational peace and security. Each concept is basically one of order, or stability to permit system maintenance. This is necessary to get the system or its subsystem more tolerant, accommodating, flexible and mobile and better governable.
          However, due largely to numerous cases of avoidable conflicts and disasters, peace education on early warning system places the challenge on skilled experts, who lay discernment, orientation and interests possess the requisite abilities to:

1. detect evaluate and predict a danger, hazard, or a case of conflict resistance escalation.
2. Constructing a forecast or warning messages(s) for damage avoidance, or damage limitation.
3. Spreading the warning message to create advance preparation to either conflict avoidance, or responsive use of dialogue as a pro-active measure to resolve limes of friction or contention before they get out of hand.

FUNCTION OF AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM
          Summarily, Early Warning System, serves the following function
-      An information system that can provide data and indicators that will be used to forecast the emergence of conflict.
-      A timely alert to potential conflicts
-      A useful management tool
-      A provision for on going learning for those who utilize the system

BASIC ELEMENTS OF AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

1. Information element

-      Identification of the reliable early warning
-      Identification of the target groups

1.     Action element

-      Identification of the audience
-      Exchange of information on specific crisis situations where the tension are in evidence
-      Capability of monitoring the development of the process
-      Initiating the most appropriate preventive measures

1. Gathering information

-      The system needs to estimate the dynamics of the crisis situation before the point of no return is reached
-      Such information is needed which describes the determinants of the conflicual situation within the chosen pluralistic community/society.
-      The system must also build in past experiences and must seek information on how inter-ethnic crisis have been coped with and if they are applicable to the given situation.
However, the first step in gathering information is the identification of the early warning. The selected people of who are committed to fulfill this demanding task must be reliable, well prepared, must have the necessary background knowledge, they should be able to identify the problem, to select relevant information and they unbiased approach to the problem.
The information gathers must have an intrinsic knowledge of the community being examined, also must be familiar with its cultural background, language of its people and must enjoy their confidence and respect.
The other element is the identification of target groups. Since inter-ethnic or religious conflict takes place between at least two opposing interest groups, it is very important from the impending of the conflictual situation to have a clear vision about who are the victims and who are the aggressors. The differentiation is essential as each target group requires specific approach.
It is also very important to estimate the sources and pre-conditions of the conflict along with its level in due time because all these elements will ultimately determines the preventive measures.

 

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