Implementing conflict prevention: explaining the failure of UK government’s structural conflict prevention policy 2010-15

ABSTRACT

Conflict prevention has been a long-standing and high-profile international policy goal, and yet in practice international agencies have found it difficult to operationalise, with the structural dimension of conflict prevention proving especially challenging. Drawing on a review of policy documents, parliamentary debates, and key informant interviews, this article uses a detailed case study of the UK government’s structural conflict prevention policy between 2010 and 2015 to understand why international agencies have found it difficult to implement such policies. Our analysis traces this failure by examining top-level strategy, translation into department-level policy, and country-level implementation in South Sudan. The article finds that the UK government failed to implement structural conflict prevention for three key reasons: because the concepts were not well defined or communicated, because priorities were quickly drawn to more urgent problems, and because the approach was not institutionalised within departments or country offices. We argue that for SCP to succeed, international agencies need to be more realistic about the complex challenges associated with SCP and pay more attention to the process of institutionalisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict prevention
• peace-building
• UK
• structural conflict prevention
• South Sudan

Introduction

Conflict prevention has been a major international policy objective since the late 1990s, when a resurgence of interest in the concept coincided with growing international commitment to the ‘liberal peace-building’ agenda.¹ More recently, there has been a resurgence of interest following the publication of the 2018 World Bank/UN’s flagship Pathways for Peace: inclusive approaches for preventing conflict publication.²

For as long as conflict prevention has been an important concept in the international peace and conflict lexicon, it has been dogged by claims from academics and policy-makers that it is difficult to define, hard to measure, and impossible to implement effectively.³ Although conflict prevention has remained a popular concept for donors especially in times of austerity where it is often touted as a cost-saving measure, agencies have been criticised for failing to prioritise conflict prevention ahead of other goals, being unable to coordinate their work around the goal of conflict prevention, and for ‘lacking the political will’ to commit to intervention before crises turn violent.⁴

Definitions of conflict prevention have varied in three main ways – around substance, timing and agency.⁵ The issue or substance relates to the type of activities that should constitute conflict prevention – ‘operational’ measures designed to respond to short-term triggers of conflict (e.g. early warning systems or crisis diplomatic interventions) or longer-term ‘structural’ measures designed to tackle root causes (e.g. development programmes or security sector reform), or both. The issue of timing relates to when conflict prevention measures should be applied – before (‘upstream’), during or after conflict onset. The question of agency concerns who is responsible for implementing conflict prevention (third parties or domestic actors).

While the conceptual, policy and political criticisms of conflict prevention have been well-aired in the policy and academic literature, these debates have a circular quality and have tended to focus either on refining or clarifying the concept, or addressing ‘bigger picture’ questions about the direction or character of the wider conflict prevention agenda (see e.g. debates around the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) agenda.⁶ While much existing work points out the flaws in the implementation of conflict prevention policy, there are surprisingly few studies that scrutinise empirically and in detail how and why policy commitments to conflict prevention fail to be operationalised by international agencies.⁷

In this article, we examine the failure to turn a rhetorical commitment to ‘structural’ conflict prevention into reality, focusing on attempts to operationalise ‘upstream’ efforts to tackle conflict before it turns violent. Upstream structural forms of conflict prevention, which involve measures designed to address ‘root causes’ of conflict before widespread conflict has begun, have been particularly controversial on the grounds that they may undermine national sovereignty, challenge international norms around non-interference, facilitate international ‘mission creep’ (for example by providing grounds for more intensive military or security-focused interventions in a wider range of contexts), or because the broad scope of structural conflict prevention (SCP) activities means that ‘virtually anything … can be rehatted (sic) as conflict prevention’.⁸

We explore why the operationalisation of SCP fails, through an examination of UK government policy between 2010 and 2015. During this period, the Coalition government made investing in ‘upstream’ conflict prevention a central plank of its foreign, defence, and development strategy, set out most clearly in the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) published in July 2011 and yet in practice this commitment failed to materialise.⁹ We examine why this happened at three levels by tracing the policy from high-level policy commitments, through an examination of departmental policy development in Whitehall and inter-departmental relationships, before finally tracing the policy’s impact on the ground through a country-level assessment of South Sudan.

We argue that three factors underpin this failure. First, concepts of structural and upstream conflict prevention remained poorly defined and communicated. This undermined the process of operationalisation and meant that country-based officials were left to articulate and execute policy, not always in concert with local elites. Although the early commitment of the Coalition government to SCP constituted an opportunity to develop and embed this agenda as a cross-departmental goal, there was a lack of departmental leadership, experience or policies ready to be drawn upon. Instead, junior officials and contractors sought to muddle through as best they could. Second, the UK’s strategic focus was quickly drawn towards emerging crises (notably conflicts arising from the Arab Spring) and ministers were unable to devote the time and effort to institutionalise the long-term political nature of SCP. Third, the efforts by departmental officials to develop and execute a SCP policy were not institutionalised and were therefore crowded out by a closely related set of policy objectives associated with statebuilding policy, which had been more fully institutionalised especially within DFID, the de facto lead agency for applying SCP. As we discuss below, the incentive structure within DFID was strongly geared towards demonstrating measurable and value-for-money outcomes via business cases – a framework within which it was difficult to justify SCP objectives.

Before moving further, it is important to clarify that while we highlight the UK government’s failure to successfully implement SCP in this paper, we are not arguing that this failure was solely responsible for the wider failure of western intervention in South Sudan (or elsewhere). As we aim to highlight in our case study, South Sudan was a particularly challenging context for SCP where the underlying conditions for a sustainable political settlement were lacking, and which lacked the extended period of stability needed for SCP to take effect.¹⁰

This article is based on a doctoral research project which examined UK SCP policy and how it was applied in two contrasting settings – South Sudan (which is examined in this paper) and Nepal (which we do not analyse here). The research was based on a review of 41 policy documents, a review of Hansard parliamentary debates, and 29 interviews with leading politicians, civil servants, academics and representatives of civil society organisations working in the field of peace-building and conflict prevention. While the UK’s experience is not generalisable to all western donor agencies, the challenges examined here are likely to be similar to those facing other western governments concerned with implementing SCP goals. This is partly because of the broader trend towards organisational isomorphism within the aid sector, but also because much of the UK’s work in peace and security at the international and country level is delivered through or in close collaboration with multi-lateral institutions such as the UN, the World Bank or the OECD.

The article is structured as follows. The next section reviews the literature on conflict prevention, identifying a lack of detailed scrutiny of why international agencies fail to operationalise conflict prevention despite repeated commitments to the policy. The next sections assess attempts by the UK government (2010–15) to operationalise its commitments to ‘upstream’ SCP, firstly by examining the agenda-setting work of the BSOS, secondly by exploring how and why the top-level policy failed to translate into departmental strategy, before thirdly providing a detailed examination of how the policy played out in South Sudan. The article concludes by drawing some wider implications of the study.

Conceptualising structural conflict prevention and explaining failure

Although conflict prevention constituted one of the key founding objectives of the United Nations set out in its founding Charter in 1945, it first became a prominent international policy objective following the failure of the international community to respond to the Rwandan genocide, and the 1997 Carnegie Commission report on Preventing Deadly Conflict, which made a strong case for the urgency of improved early detection and response measures to prevent ‘deadly conflict’.¹¹

Academic literature on conflict prevention clustered during the period 2003–2010 at the time when policy commitment to liberal peace-building was reaching its peak. Much of the existing work from this period was broadly conceptual in nature and centred on international debates relating to R2P, the Paris Declaration, OECD-led frameworks for working in fragile states, and the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.¹² There are very few studies that specifically address the translation of donor political intent into concrete policy.

For the purposes of this article we define conflict prevention as a process that is normally driven by national- or local-level actors, to which the international community partners can contribute, through politically-driven strategies and policies at the macro-level, and activities and projects at the micro-level, designed to prevent the outbreak, escalation or relapse of large-scale violent conflict between or within states. Conflict prevention includes long-, medium- and short-term actions, which seek to address the underlying causes of violence or its more immediate triggers.¹³

As noted above, the existing literature identifies different types of conflict prevention on the basis of substance and distinguishes between ‘operational prevention’, which usually entails some form of crisis intervention and early warning systems, and ‘structural prevention’, which aims to transform ‘key social/economic/political factors that, if left unaddressed, could lead to violent conflict in the future’.¹⁴

Types of conflict prevention interventions can also be distinguished based on timing. Figure 1 shows the overlap between conflict prevention and other areas of conflict-related intervention including statebuilding, development and peace-building. It also illustrates that conflict prevention interventions take place both before and after the onset of violent conflict. In 2007, Rubin and Jones noted that most post-conflict peace-building operations are in fact ‘post agreement, and these agreements provide a mandate for the UN and other international actors’.¹⁵

Figure 1. Overlaps between stabilisation and other policy spheres: adapted by the authors from the work of Lund and Collinson et al. [18, p S283, 19, p38]

As noted in the introduction, several practical and political challenges arise from the concept of conflict prevention. First, because conflict prevention covers a vast range of activities, it can become a convenient label to ‘rebadge’ a varied array of existing activities.¹⁶ Conflict prevention may serve as a ‘mobilising metaphor’¹⁷ to promote better coordination, or to mask inconsistencies between diverse policy actors (government departments, non-governmental organisations) with varied objectives in the fields of security, development, or peace-building.¹⁸ Viewed more cynically, the vague parameters of conflict prevention may permit the encroachment of one department into the terrain and resources of another. Beneath the rhetoric therefore, we may expect to find ‘turf wars’ where competing departments vie for influence and funding.¹⁹

Second, as Lund has argued, a lack of conceptual precision may widen the gap between ‘the promise of conflict prevention and its more deliberate pursuit’.²⁰ For Lund, there is at times an ‘excess of political will’ with northern donors already engaged in development activities but ‘pursuing a variety of different policy goals that are not necessarily supportive of conflict prevention’.²¹ A clear agenda can quickly dissolve on the ground since ‘everyone is busily pursuing other mandates’ and due to ‘major overlaps between prevention and other mandates and activities’.²² Bellamy argues that the preventative agenda often falls down around ‘practical concerns about the appropriate institutional locus for responsibility’.²³ Commenting on the EU approach, and noting the issue of pre- and post-conflict prevention, Davis notes that conflict prevention tends to fall ‘betwixt and between’ different objectives relating to a way of acting generally in the world and a distinct set of activities for conflict prevention naming ‘mediation, conflict analysis and early warning’.²⁴

Third, lack of clarity around timing and scope can raise concerns about violation of sovereignty and doubts about the motivations and legitimacy of third-party interventions. These fears have emerged most strongly in relation to the R2P agenda.²⁵ Concerns about the legality and viability of preventive action have been of particular concern for states that ‘themselves may be on the receiving end of preventive measures’ and have acted as a barrier to operationalisation.²⁶

Fourth, while international agencies have been quick to hail the cost-saving potential of conflict prevention, it remains difficult if not impossible to provide clear evidence of the success of conflict prevention measures. Bellamy has argued that the challenge of securing resources for prevention can at least in part be attributed to these difficulties.²⁷

These issues are most acutely felt in relation to SCP. The scope of SCP is broader and less well defined than operational conflict prevention. SCP overlaps considerably with other sets of policy objectives, such as development, governance, state-building, and peace-building. Structural CP therefore is more susceptible both to the issue of ‘rebadging’ and the problem of ‘mission creep’ or issues relating to the violation of sovereignty. While SCP is always at risk of being displaced by more immediate and more urgent crises (requiring operational CP measures), this risk is greater for ‘upstream’ measures, where it is harder to make an urgent and compelling case for intervention. As will be discussed below in relation to the UK government’s experience, these problems are compounded further in a context where a drive for conflict prevention is accompanied by a push for value-for-money and evidence-based policy-making: the ‘business case’ for allocating scarce resources to scenarios where conflict has not yet turned violent is likely to appear weaker than one where violence has already begun and the costs of ongoing violent conflict are already apparent, and most aid has focused on ‘postcrisis’ situations.²⁸

Understanding failure

The preceding section has provided an overview of the well-documented political and conceptual challenges associated with conflict prevention. While existing research has focused extensively on identifying and understanding these inherent challenges, relatively little work directly explores the key question examined in this article: why do actors and institutions that appear committed to CP fail to deliver in practice?

A common argument made in the few studies that do address this question is that CP is undermined by a ‘lack of political will’.²⁹ This contention takes different forms but usually implies a failure by top leadership to prioritise or commit to CP beyond broad statements of policy intent.³⁰ The World Bank/UN’s recent Pathways for Peace frames the issue as one of weak incentives for coordinated preventive action, compared to the stronger incentives associated with responding to crises.³¹ Davis finds that the main challenge facing EU conflict prevention policy is a lack of the necessary political leadership to integrate conflict prevention into strategic decision-making, and to establish priorities, particularly for prevention over response.³² One important neglected dimension in existing analysis of a lack of ‘political will’ in CP addressed in this article, concerns how failure to prioritise CP by politicians is often compounded by limitations in existing institutional capacities and lack of attention to the institutionalisation process. Without such institutionalisation, as will be shown below, governments find it difficult to maintain a focus on SCP, as other more urgent issues draw the full attention of ministers. In the recent Pathways for Peace report, for example, the chapter on the International Architecture for Prevention focuses mainly on operational conflict prevention. Insofar as SCP is addressed, the focus is on broader questions of aid allocation and volatility, with no detailed scrutiny of how processes of institutionalisation or organisational capacities may affect the implementation of this agenda.³³

Before moving on to the case study, where we will examine the UK government’s failure to implement its policy of structural conflict prevention, it is important to highlight three inter-related global trends, which have made the climate for SCP more difficult and which have important implications for our analysis. First, the international environment for peace-building and CP has grown more contested over the last decade. As Höglund and Orjuela point out, the capacity for western donors or multilateral agencies to implement conflict prevention policies has been undermined by growing multi-polarity in the international system.³⁴

Second, western liberal peace-building approaches more broadly have been subjected to widespread criticism: for their top-down, technocratic and templated orientation, for neglecting or misreading local dynamics, and for failing to achieve improvements in the living standards of ordinary people.³⁵ These failures have contributed to negative unintended consequences, which in turn have driven diminishing popular and political support for interventionist peace-building approaches in western countries.³⁶

Third, and growing out of these trends, recent international peace-building policy has tended to advocate a more limited, less transformative agenda. This has implied subtle shifts in the proposed ‘substance’ of conflict prevention. UK policy since 2010 has grown more cognisant of how international policies are adapted or repurposed by local elites when they ‘hit the ground’,³⁷ and as a result has focused away from ‘liberal peace-building’ towards stabilisation, stressing the need to understand the elite bargains that underpin political settlements in conflict-affected countries.³⁸ This view paints a more limited and pragmatic role for international actors and suggests stability should be prioritised over transformation in certain contexts. While this move was underway during the period analysed in our case study, the dial has moved further in the period since 2015.

UK government’s approach to structural conflict prevention (2010-15)

Why did the UK government fail to follow through on a commitment to upstream structural conflict prevention? In the sections that follow, we trace this failure at three levels. The first section examines the policy at the level of ‘intent’, highlighting several key flaws in the headline policy set out in BSOS. Section two describes how the policy became diluted when translated to the departmental level – a process attributed to a lack political direction and a failure to acknowledge the political nature of conflict prevention and the associated institutional challenges. The third section examines what happened when upstream conflict prevention policy hit the ground in South Sudan, demonstrating how without a clear SCP agenda and political commitment to it, implementation fell back on established approaches to programming more focused on statebuilding than SCP.

Before analysing the case in more detail, some brief background on the UK government institutions is required. In the period under analysis (2010–15), there were three main ministerial departments whose responsibilities regularly incorporated conflict prevention goals – the Department of International Development (DFID), the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Ministry of Defence (MOD).³⁹ The importance of coordinated action between these three departments in pursuit of peace-building and conflict prevention objectives has long been recognised. Several cross-departmental institutions were established by the previous Labour governments (1997–2010) to achieve this goal including the Conflict Pool, established in 2001, and the Stabilisation Unit, established in 2007. As will be described below, the Coalition worked through these institutions but also established the National Security Council (NSC) in 2010. After the Coalition government period, the Conflict Pool was replaced in 2015 by the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF), overseen by the National Security Council. Throughout the BSOS, there is emphasis on a whole-of-government approach yet at this time government spending was being cut and neither the FCO nor the MoD had the resources to deliver on BSOS commitments. Although DFID’s funding grew during this period, their priorities were largely shaped by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (due by 2015), which did not include a clear focus on structural conflict prevention.⁴⁰

Setting the agenda: building stability overseas strategy

The Coalition government published its strategic defence and security review in 2010 followed by the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) in July 2011. BSOS emerged during a time when the UK government was committed to an austerity agenda in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and its aid policy was being increasingly framed in terms of ‘value for money’ and the pursuit of the ‘national interest’.⁴¹ At the same time, BSOS signalled a shift away from the more transformative ‘liberal peace-building’ model that had dominated under the previous Labour government towards a ‘post-interventionist’ approach focused on enhancing the agency and resilience of ‘vulnerable subjects’ and proposing a more limited role for external interveners.⁴² The key security and foreign policy challenges facing the UK government at this time were managing the extraction of UK armed forces from Afghanistan and responding to conflicts arising from the Arab Spring.

William Hague, the then Foreign Secretary, wrote that the strategy ‘sets out clear, achievable proposals for how we can improve the way we identify, prevent and end instability and conflict overseas’.⁴³ Hague went on to describe the use of ‘diplomatic, development, defence and security tools’ building on ‘Britain’s experience, relationships, reputation and values’.⁴⁴ The purpose of the BSOS was ‘to address instability and conflict overseas’ on the grounds that ‘it is both morally right and in Britain’s national interest’.⁴⁵ The strategy was divided into three pillars: (1) ‘Early warning’ to improve the ability to anticipate instability and potential triggers for conflict; (2) ‘Rapid crisis prevention and response’ to improve the ability to take fast, appropriate and effective action to prevent a crisis or stop it spreading or escalating; and (3) ‘Investing in upstream prevention’ which aimed to help build strong, legitimate institutions and robust societies that were capable of managing tensions and shocks.⁴⁶ Our analysis focuses on the third pillar.

The BSOS addressed both the operational and structural dimensions of conflict prevention – it sought to tackle both the triggers and drivers of instability, and it identified the importance of legitimate and effective institutions matched by a working economy that meets the expectations of the population. The approach adopted in BSOS was to focus on those states where ‘the risks are high, our interests are most at stake, and where we know we can have an impact’.⁴⁷

BSOS was generally well received by both Parliament and NGOs leading to a degree of early optimism.⁴⁸ On the surface, the conditions were ripe for a step-change in direction. There was political leadership, the problem was identified, there seemed to be a window of opportunity and experts in the field were welcoming the change in approach. So why were policies to implement the strategy not forthcoming either from government or departments?

First and most importantly, priorities were not clearly articulated. BSOS referenced a range of challenges – Afghanistan, MENA (Libya, Syria and the Arab Spring), migration and the Ukraine – but none was clearly prioritised. The document places a strong emphasis on an institutional approach and on governance, security and justice, which revealed tendency to be drawn towards the safe ground of a programming and projects-based approach that underpins the technical expertise of the existing architecture (department officials supported by NGOs, with DFID taking the lead). There was some indication of the approach to be taken but with no priorities, objectives, or any clarity about how resources would be allocated.

Second, BSOS set out the general policy direction but did not constitute a coherent strategy. Rumelt suggests that good strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy and coherent action, arguing that strategy is ‘like a sign-post, marking the direction forward but not defining the details of the trip’.⁴⁹ Bad strategy, Rumelt notes ‘may actively avoid analysing obstacles’ or ‘by mistakenly treating strategy work as an exercise in goal setting rather than problem solving. Or they may avoid hard choices because they do not want to offend anyone’.⁵⁰ If good strategy begins with a clear diagnosis of the issue, then BSOS falls short. BSOS focuses on the nature and problems of failed states, instability and conflict; but, importantly, provides no analysis of what the UK had been doing and where it had been falling short.

There remained large gaps between the problem diagnosis (which focused on failed states), the high-level guiding policy, and coherent actions which make a leap to what organisational changes the UK should make to implement this agenda. While the purpose of the BSOS strategy is articulated as aiming ‘to address instability and conflict overseas … by using all of our diplomatic, development, military and security tools’, and it was claimed that the BSOS focused on ‘how we can improve the effectiveness of our efforts’, there was little reflection on existing capacities (what was being done well) and where lessons could be learnt.⁵¹ BSOS did not reference the previously published government aid review outcome despite this review having targeted fragile states.⁵²

What was needed was clearer strategic direction from ministers about how to prevent conflicts from turning violent, with greater attention to how this agenda could be institutionalised. Vision and subsequent policy direction can come from ministers or from options presented to ministers by officials. However, in the case of the third upstream pillar, a peer and former senior foreign policy special advisor to William Hague suggested that the vision and direction for conflict prevention policy was not developed because: ‘ … it did not have time; your policies have to be embedded but not only on paper, they have to be embedded in practice, and I don’t think it got embedded into practice’.⁵³

Translating top-level policy intent into departmental policy

Because of these limitations, SCP policy, despite being headlined in BSOS, did not feature prominently in subsequent government, inter-departmental or departmental policy. As a result, departments tended to fall back onto generic commitments to SCP and a minor repackaging of pre-existing activities and objectives.

Overall, one can identify the broad levers of SCP policy in the various policy documents that emerged from departments in the period 2011–2015. What is clear is the very general, doctrinal approach to policy did little to help develop clear objectives nor how to operationalise these. While the threads of upstream are apparent in policy and plans, they are not brought together, hence the lack of overall coherence or substance in the government and inter-departmental policy development and execution planning. The problem for the coalition government and departments was that, while on the surface the vision of moving upstream might have seemed straightforward, conflict prevention was still abstract without a clear understanding of how the concepts would translate into practical interventions as there was little practical experience upon which to draw lessons to further develop policy. We identify two key reasons why the political intent expressed in the BSOS was not translated into a coherent departmental and inter-departmental approach, which will structure the rest of this section. First, urgent events took priority, second, there was a failure to embed upstream CP into departmental thinking, and as a result, departments were left to ‘muddle through’ based on their own capacities and experiences.

First, and most importantly, the emergence of more urgent events, especially the Arab Spring meant there was limited scope for the political commitment needed to take forward the government’s upstream vision. As Lord Ricketts, former senior diplomat and crossbench life peer, has argued, pressures on politicians keep their focus on the short term due to the ‘tyranny of the immediate’.⁵⁴

As a strategy, the Coalition government’s BSOS resulted from an inter-departmental approach to documenting lessons and the emerging government intent. Signed off by three secretaries of state, this was a clear indication of the high-level consensus that the UK government had to do better across the three pillars of early warning, rapid response to crisis and upstream conflict prevention.

BSOS did lead to some improvements in internal processes and structures. The key innovation was the creation of the NSC with the Secretary of State for Development a permanent member. Ministers were given cross-cutting responsibilities and there was also an inter-departmental BSOS Board albeit at a too junior level for it to have much impact. Some signs of progress were visible in relation to the Arab Spring, where rapid response (pillar 2) appeared to work well. A senior NSC official at the time recalls that ‘the NSC was determined to learn lessons from Iraq and ensure that, before conflict broke out, there was good planning/preparation for the post-conflict. So DFID was tasked to lead planning’.⁵⁵

But while BSOS brought a new focus on SCP, there was insufficient political capital expended to drive forward this part of the agenda either at home or, importantly, when implementing through country offices. Upstream conflict prevention required politicians to have a longer strategic view and direct policy and execution accordingly. In an interview for this research, the FCO special advisor suggested that what was needed was foreign policy experts who understood conflict prevention, to bring departments together in a whole-of-government approach. The special advisor argued that policy did not have time to develop and the third upstream pillar remained weak conceptually and with no effective direction emerging from the NSC. As a result, the agenda quickly became subsumed by more urgent priorities: ‘[Once we] got caught in [the Arab Spring], there was no preventing any more. You had Tunisia, which everyone got surprised by, then you had Libya, then you had Egypt, one after the other; there was nothing to prevent’.⁵⁶

Second, departments had their own responsibilities, and although there was a series of departmental and inter-departmental policy publications with upstream implications, these failed to materialise into a coherent upstream policy since this pillar was not embedded in departmental thinking. Nor was a whole-of-government approach to upstream likely to work without very clear objectives emerging from the newly-formed NSC with each department’s role clearly defined. What whole-of-government focus existed was directed towards stabilisation in Libya. While one interviewee acknowledged that BSOS was a good start, he commented that after the BSOS launch ‘on the macro level there is a certain amount of over ambition … there was no conflict prevention policy writ large … and there was not sufficient vision in each individual place to say this adds up to something larger’.⁵⁷

During the period 2012–2014, government departments produced a series of related policy documents but only three out of 14 documents had a specific reference to BSOS. Two publications with direct relevance to CP were Promoting Stability throughout the Western Balkans and the UK National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (2012 revision), which responded to Hague’s initiative addressing UNSCR 1325 just before the tenth anniversary of the UN resolution which had mandated the production of a national plan.⁵⁸ The latter document sets out the FCO, MOD and DFID’s strategy for integrating the women, peace and security agenda into conflict policy.

The updated Tri-Departmental 2014 Action Plan on Women Peace and Security and associated Country Implementation Plan represented a step-change in the level of detail presented to Parliament. For the first time a policy document, issued under the banner of the FCO, DFID and MOD, emerged focused on a central CP issues with a level of detail that provides outcome, target country, indicators including timeframe and activity.⁵⁹

The tri-departmental ‘Conflict Pool Strategic Guidance’ was produced in April 2013.⁶⁰ If anywhere was to issue clear guidance, it should have been in this document. There was a vision for the Conflict Pool which was to deliver ‘measurable impact in the government’s highest priority fragile and conflict affected states, in support of the Building Stability Overseas Strategy’.⁶¹ The future shape of the Conflict Pool programme included the requirement for more resources to work ‘further upstream both in countries/regions that have not yet experienced conflict and those where the objective is to avoid a return to conflict’.⁶² But, once again, there was a lack of detail. A further examination of the departmental high-level business plans that followed the publication of BSOS also failed to deliver any sense of how SCP was to be taken forward.⁶³ Where specific, measurable objectives existed, they tended to relate to achieving the 0.7 per cent of GNI and the 30 per cent to be allocated to fragile states by 2014/15; these were the key political promises and benchmarks that were then picked up in Parliament. Spending and resource allocation became the most prominent measure of success with important implications for departmental and staff behaviours.

Analysis of DFID’s UK aid: Changing lives, delivering results and its supporting documents provides an overview of the direction of the DFID programme, but again the detail broadly remains at the high level.⁶⁴ The stated aim of the DFID aid programme was to support peace and security, tackle conflict and help transform the lives of millions of poor people across the world, but the focus remained in line with DFID’s existing priorities: health and education of women and children. There was a requirement for staff to meet the ‘commitment in the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) to spend at least 30 per cent of aid in fragile and conflict-affected states by 2014/15ʹ.⁶⁵

Not only were the objectives in these policy documents not articulated but there was no common understanding of the term ‘upstream’, and hence little clear guidance about how to operationalise objectives. Certainly, there was an understanding of the individual tools (for example, Security Sector Reform (SSR)) and how to use such tools in the implementation of a technical approach to state-building. But this is different from the more subtle use of the same tool as part of a conflict prevention agenda where there is a risk of a society breaking down in violent conflict. In a House of Lords debate, the Archbishop of Canterbury critically noted that:

… the use of intervention through reconciliation and mediation work at the early stages of conflict were more effective than hard power. … Yet the application of this strategy in terms of developing the tools for intervention through reconciliation and mediation is still absent.⁶⁶

Without clear guidance, departments fell back on past tools and thinking to address upstream SCP. The MOD continued on its low-level training missions and the FCO was under significant pressure due to the Arab Spring and staff reductions due to austerity policies.⁶⁷ A senior FCO official recalled how his Whitehall team was stripped out due to the Arab Spring as ‘political attention shifted more or less instantly and every part of the Foreign Office, and the same was true of DFID, was pillaged for staff’.⁶⁸ Most of the effort that did take place was in DFID but very much on a technical project basis As will be demonstrated in the next section, this resulted in a bottom-up technical approach that, at best, was ad hoc and varied in execution with the country team skills available. While the threads of upstream were apparent, they were not brought together, hence the lack of overall coherence or substance in the government and inter-departmental policy development and execution planning.

Without real experience of conflict prevention operations within departments, there was little capacity upon which to develop SCP doctrine; what learning existed tended towards a technical approach with learning from the experience of low-level programmes and projects. MOD had a more strategic ‘lessons learnt’ process that looked at theatres of operation and campaigns, but this was not focused on SCP and certainly not from the perspective of a wider analysis of political context. Within DFID, this focus on projects and programmes was also driven by an incentive structure oriented towards demonstrating quick, measurable results and value for money. During this period, DFID was experiencing both staff cuts and a growth in funding. These combined pressures undermined commitment to less tangible and long-term goals such as SCP. As one interviewee noted: ‘DFID has got tens of millions, we have got to get the money out the door; looking at the politics is just too difficult. Let’s just spend it because we know it will help’.⁶⁹

The UK’s approach in South Sudan

South Sudan provides an opportunity to examine how the UK failed to mobilise a stated commitment to SCP into meaningful plans and actions on the ground, in an emerging nation which only achieved formal independence from Sudan in 2011 but then saw the onset of civil war a few years later in 2013. As noted above, the underlying conditions for promoting SCP were generally unfavourable.

Sudan had been in a state of civil war between North and South since 1953, with the first civil war (1955–72) starting before independence from the British in 1956, and a second civil war (1983–2005) ending with a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). In the period from independence to the CPA, an estimated 1–2 million people were killed or died from starvation or disease caused by the conflict.⁷⁰ The signing of the CPA marked a new stage in the relationship between the north and south. The key tenets of the CPA set out: agreements on broad principles of government and governance; power sharing; wealth sharing; protocols on the resolution of the conflict in several areas (e.g. oil-rich Abyei); and an agreement on security arrangements. The CPA provided for a six-year interim period of an autonomous southern government, followed by a self-determination referendum for the south. From the outset, the CPA showed signs of strain as it ‘lacked broader support’ within Sudan/South Sudan beyond the South Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA/M) and National Congress Party (NCP) – the signatories, and excluded the largest armed force in the South, the Southern Sudan Defence Force (SSDF).⁷¹ Commenting that the international community ‘has remained largely silent’ and ‘heavy on monitoring but weak on follow-through’, the International Crisis Group took the view that ‘ … the international community – particularly the key countries involved in the negotiation of the CPA – [did not embrace] its role as a guarantor of the CPA, and continues to lack a consistent, coordinated approach to dealing with the parties’.⁷²

The UK had been one of those key countries referenced and had been engaged in South Sudan as one of the three Troika countries that assisted in the 2002–5 peace process between North and South, which resulted in a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed in 2005.⁷³ From the outset of the Coalition government, Sudan was drawing Cabinet-level attention, not only for what was happening under the CPA but also for the conflict in Darfur region.⁷⁴ This was not a straightforward case for the Coalition government as relationships and attitudes were already well formed and South Sudan was not a political priority for ministers. Bennett et al. conducted a review of the international community’s response in South Sudan in 2010 and found significant shortfalls.⁷⁵ In an interview conducted for this research, Bennett commented that despite the identification of the fault lines, which he was briefing across US and European capitals, ‘it made not a ha’p’orth of difference because it was a consensus amongst the donors that nothing must disturb this drive towards the [CPA] peace agreement’.⁷⁶ In 2010, Bennett et al. reported that ‘in many respects problems identified in 2005 are still present … youth alienation and specific tensions around water and land have been exacerbated by poor progress over reintegration of demobilised soldiers and the enormous return of populations from Khartoum and abroad since 2005ʹ.⁷⁷

By 2013 South Sudan was the eleventh highest recipient of UK development aid (£136 m) with additional funding focused on Sudan/CPA and Darfur. Although funding to South Sudan was almost equal to funding to Syria (£129 m), the level of political interest began to wane as the UK government became more focused on responding to the Arab Spring.

This lack of political commitment from the UK was compounded by a more general failure for international donors to plan effectively and acknowledge political realities in South Sudan. On joining the FCO Sudan policy team in 2010, a senior FCO official noted that he found it odd when he took up his appointment that ‘there had been no international framework’ for South Sudan but, also commented that ‘the parties didn’t want it’ referring to the elites in south Sudan.⁷⁸ Furthermore, the official noted that ‘[t]here had always been a desire on the part of the international community to see southern independence as the end of the story, the solution to a problem, and job done; move on. It was quite clear that was not the case’.⁷⁹ Alex De Waal sums up the situation in 2010 when he comments that ‘efforts of national technocrats and foreign donors produced bubbles of institutional integrity but the system as a whole was entirely resistant to reform’.⁸⁰ De Waal concluded that SSR and DDR efforts in South Sudan ‘failed utterly’, and argued that since the CPA, South Sudan has functioned as an oil-base rentier political marketplace.⁸¹ The international approach was also criticised by Mahmood Mamdani who argued that the violence that emerged after 2013 can be partly attributed to the Troika and IGAD’s ‘decisive role in framing an agreement that set up politically unchallenged armed power in South Sudan’.⁸²

Analysis of UK’s engagement in South Sudan shows that the UK, while recognising the benefits of early conflict prevention, did not possess the necessary level of political commitment, the degree of inter-departmental coordination or the institutional capacity necessary to conduct effective long-term upstream SCP in South Sudan. There were three key barriers to the adoption of an effective SCP strategy in South Sudan by the Coalition government.

First, as discussed in the previous sections, the SCP agenda was not well articulated within existing government policy frameworks. This led government departments to fall back on more established pre-existing policy objectives and tools (in this case state-building policies such as SSR).

Second, although South Sudan received high levels of aid funding, there was insufficient political commitment to implement a SCP policy in the country. In Whitehall, insofar as there was interest in Sudan, the focus of political attention was on Darfur, the CPA and the threat of terrorism. There was little interest in South Sudan beyond early ministerial interventions associated with the move to independence. Engagement needed to have commenced significantly earlier under previous governments if relationships with South Sudan leaders were to have been sufficiently mature for UK politicians and diplomats to have had any real influence on events

Fundamentally, the UK and its international partners were focused on different issues than the emergence of South Sudan as a federal or independent state and there was a high degree of ill-founded optimism and wishful thinking with respect to South Sudan’s future; this clearly influenced the UK government’s thinking as to how it responded to South Sudan. The Troika was primarily a political effort focused on the North-South conflict and was not concerned with wider peace and state-building activities in the south. Jose Ramos-Horta, who was a former Prime Minister of Timor Leste and a former Chair of the UN High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations cited South Sudan as one of the conflicts where the international community had failed to identify, let alone address, the internal conflicts which led to the 2013 civil war.⁸³ This point shows that even if a single bilateral donor were committed to SCP, the agenda could be undermined in the process of coordinating efforts with other international partners.

Third, just as we saw in Whitehall and despite high levels of aid spending, the UK’s response in South Sudan faced major capacity constraints. With no UK embassy in place in Juba until after independence, and a Khartoum embassy that some argued was too distant and distracted by the North-South CPA and Darfur issues, it is unsurprising that emerging tensions in South Sudan were not identified or addressed. Since it was a new country and the UK’s embassy presence in Juba was only recently established in 2011, South Sudan did not benefit from high-level interest and could not draw on past experience or a repository of officials with long-standing knowledge of the context. Until 2011, the lead in the South had been with DFID and the focus was the coordination of the UN support programme, in which DFID played an important role. The UK government was not well connected with elites in South Sudan and UK departments did not work together effectively in country. A whole-of-government approach was further hampered by the impact of the departmental austerity, particularly in the FCO, which had suffered staff cutbacks in its South Sudan team. Despite assertions in BSOS that more resources would be focused on upstream with implications for the 1,000 strong pool of civilian experts, evidence from this case study indicates that there was no real change in approach and technical projects were being executed on a templated approach.

Lacking capacity and political commitment, the country team in South Sudan began making and executing policy without a coherent approach between the FCO, MOD and DFID. In the absence of clear Whitehall conflict prevention policy and strategy, programmes in South Sudan focused on existing priorities: state-building and addressing the drivers of conflict.

At a country level, UK officials and contractors such as Adam Smith International were tasked with programme management and began developing and delivering their strategies and programmes. The focus was on SSR and while the newly-formed embassy team tried to put together a coherent strategic approach to local SSR programme, it was ‘opposed by programme management in DFID’, who were concerned about the rising scale of violence and therefore the UK’s association with it.⁸⁴ Nonetheless, the SSR programme was designed in Whitehall and subsequently contracted out for implementation. A former DFID contractor and ex-military officer involved in the programme management commented that ‘ … basically, FCO and MOD ganged up on DFID and made them take this [SSR] programme on – a non-ODA programme, a military programme and a military who were at best controversial, who had a whole humanitarian risk element to them and DFID was very unhappy with this. So the programme had to get on and run itself’.⁸⁵ The development of the UK’s policy, strategy and detailed implementation plans was left to relatively junior officials and the conflict prevention approach was broadly technical, delivered through programmes and projects.

The DFID/Stabilisation Unit programme to assist the Government of South Sudan in establishing their own Ministry of Defence, capable of commanding an integrated military made up of the factions, was viewed as a key activity by the UK.⁸⁶ However, this approach was not supported by the South Sudanese government and therefore became an example of a UK-templated approach without the explicit commitment of key stakeholders.⁸⁷ Despite good working relationships between the UK ex-military and the South Sudanese, the programme was not a success.

The problems outlined in this section stemmed from a lack of existing policy relating to SCP, and a lack of political commitment to develop an agenda that had the support of the South Sudanese government and international partners. Since no clear detailed direction was provided, departments were pushed towards using off-the-shelf, templated programmes. In the case of conflict prevention there was no doctrine, nor lessons learned from past upstream SCP efforts in challenging contexts to guide the design of these programmes. In South Sudan, the embassy team were trying to engage Whitehall on a whole-of-government basis to develop a more strategic approach; but there was ‘little coherent direction from Whitehall at any time and no political appetite to engage or support the British Embassy on the ground’.⁸⁸

To take forward upstream CP in a coherent whole-of-government approach was extremely difficult particularly without NSC prioritisation. The process of bringing together upstream coalitions and policies required coordinated action across a wide spectrum of actors which included UK government departments and cross-departmental bodies, contractors, and an array of international and local actors.

The relative simplicity of the outline intent set out in the BSOS for upstream significantly downplayed the challenges that lay ahead. Without a clear political strategy from the UK government and engagement with the government and factions in South Sudan, it was always unlikely that a technical project approach would deliver an effective outcome. If a conflict prevention strategy was to emerge, then much stronger UK government political effort and leadership was needed.

Conclusion

This article has investigated why the UK government failed to implement its SCP strategy and has shown how this approach failed to get beyond normative policy statements and broad intentions. Departmental officials sought to develop and execute the ‘upstream’ policy intent, but without clear frameworks for implementation and with little political commitment, they fell back on existing tools and activities, and in South Sudan ended up implementing SCP through templated state-building programmes and projects.

Three key reasons have been identified for this inability to implement upstream SCP. First, there was a lack of clarity about what upstream SCP was, and how the UK could contribute to effective SCP actions. There was no clear plan for how top-level objectives relating to SCP would translate into activities, and there was no serious attempt to learn lessons from experience of implementing CP work. What lessons were applied tended to be drawn from the related field of post-conflict state-building. Second, leading politicians remained prisoners of the ‘immediate’ and political focus was quickly drawn away from SCP towards more urgent events at the central government level (especially the Arab Spring) and, in the case of South Sudan, towards other conflict and peace-related challenges (especially the violence in Darfur). Third, the normative nature of the resultant departmental policy was not suitable for operationalisation in country settings such as South Sudan. UK country officials tended to ‘muddle through’, often with limited resources at their disposal, and fell back on existing templates and approaches.

At the start of this article we highlighted an apparent paradox: although international agencies have repeatedly fallen short in their efforts to implement CP, it has nevertheless remained a popular policy concept and has seen several waves of interest since the 1990s. One explanation is that while conflict prevention may prove unimplementable, it is nevertheless ‘good policy’ in the sense that it functions to mobilise and legitimise support amongst diverse interest groups and institutions around a shared agenda.⁸⁹ For the Coalition government, SCP did usefully signal the government’s more ‘hands off’ approach to conflict intervention (following the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan) whilst demonstrating commitment to value for money and more joined up action on development and conflict. Although these signalling functions were important, we argue that to understand the SCP policy purely in symbolic terms would be to understate the genuine efforts made to mobilise the agenda. While we found that upstream SCP failed to get off the ground, the analysis did discern efforts to mobilise this agenda beyond top-level strategy.

Previous explanations for the failure of CP efforts have highlighted ‘lack of political will’ and ‘weak incentives’ as key barriers to the implementation of conflict prevention.⁹⁰ This article nuances these accounts by showing that this lack of political will relates in part to a tendency for international agencies to underestimate or neglect the considerable challenges associated with upstream SCP. As our case has demonstrated, these challenges exist on a variety of levels and include the difficulties of articulating what SCP actually is, accepting its fundamentally political characteristics, prioritising which aspects of this broad agenda should be implemented and where, understanding the internal capacity constraints associated with implementing a SCP agenda, and ensuring effective coordination amongst the diverse agencies tasked with operationalising a SCP agenda.

We argue that for future efforts to be more effective there is a need to focus on four key areas. First, SCP policy needs to be more strategic in orientation. Implementing agencies need to acknowledge that without clear prioritisation SCP is likely to be quickly overtaken by events. Second, governments seeking to apply a SCP agenda need to reflect more critically on previous experience and capacities (including why previous efforts to implement SCP have failed) and to consider carefully the implications this agenda will have for existing approaches and institutions. While successive UK governments have taken some steps towards institutionalising an integrated, whole-of-government approach through the establishment of new cross-departmental institutions such as the Stabilisation Unit or the NSC, what has been lacking is a detailed reflection on how top-level goals like upstream SCP can be mobilised within and across existing government departments and how existing tools may need to be adapted or transformed in pursuit of these goals. As this case has shown, without such direction there is a strong tendency to fall back on the most well-established pre-existing policy objectives and tools (which in this case was state-building).

Third, SCP is a multi-faceted agenda involving multiple agencies that requires close attention to coordination both between government departments and between the varied national and international actors that operate in specific country contexts, as well as careful analysis of these actors' political incentives. Fourth and finally, the communication and conceptual challenges associated with SCP should not be underestimated. To get beyond high-level intent, it is important to develop clear and consistent definitions of SCP that acknowledge its political character, recognise the inherent challenges associated with operationalisation, and can be translated into accessible toolkits which can be easily mobilised by departments and country office teams.

Our case study has also highlighted other trends which may undermine or be in tension with a commitment to upstream SCP and which have relevance beyond the UK’s experience. One concerns the growing privatisation of the aid sector, which as we saw in the case of South Sudan, further undermined the process of delivering strategic goals that went beyond technical templated projects and programmes.⁹¹ Another important trend is the shift towards a ‘results’ or ‘value for money’ culture within the UK government that was particularly associated with the Coalition government’s austerity agenda but has remained embedded across Whitehall and is mirrored in the approach of other western governments.⁹² As our analysis has shown, where projects and policies need to be justified in ‘business cases’ that contain reference to value for money calculations, more politicised pre-emptive interventions like upstream SCP where outcomes are hard to measure are often de-prioritised.

These findings chime with other recent studies of aid policy development. Yanguas and Hulme’s study of the integration of political analysis into aid programmes (which includes a case study of DFID), for example, found that political analysis remained peripheral to departmental operational guidelines, despite top-level commitments, a failure they also attribute to a lack of focus on the process of institutionalisation and organisational change.⁹³

If SCP is to be implemented effectively, international agencies should accept that this policy goal contains a particularly complex mix of characteristics (including its pre-emptive nature, its broad remit, and its highly politicised nature), which make this agenda particularly difficult to institutionalise and deliver. It is only by reflecting seriously on the institutional and operational challenges associated with SCP that international actors can start to implement this long-standing goal more effectively.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the NGO officials, junior and senior civil servants, academics, consultants and politicians who were kind enough to give their time to the original thesis research that supports this article; without their input there would be no article. We are also grateful to two anonymous referees for their constructive inputs and to Professor Graham Room (the thesis second supervisor) for his guidance and challenges.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Johnstone

Andrew Johnstone is a retired senior British Army officer who served in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Darfur, Djibouti and Afghanistan. Having completed his military career, he gained a PhD for his research into structural conflict prevention at the University of Bath and is now a freelance researcher on conflict prevention.

Oliver Walton

Oliver Walton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath. His research examines the political economy of war-to-peace transitions, NGO politics, conflict and peacebuilding, with a geographical focus on Sri Lanka and Nepal.

Notes

1. UN, 1992. ‘An Agenda for Peace’. Report by Boutros-Ghali, Boutros; ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect. 2001; OECD DAC, ‘Encouraging Effective Evaluation Of Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding Activities’. Towards DAC Guidance; World Bank, ‘World Development Report 2011’; World Bank, ‘World Development Report 2011’.

2. World Bank and United Nations, Pathways for Peace Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict Executive Summary booklet.

3. Menkhaus, Conflict prevention and human security: issues and challenges.

4. World Bank and United Nations, Pathways for Peace Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict Executive Summary booklet; Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, ‘Preventing Deadly Conflict’.

5. Pérez-Niño and Walton, Working Paper 2: Contemporary conflict prevention.

6. Bellamy, Conflict Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.

7. Notable exceptions include Björkdahl, ‘Constructing a Swedish conflict prevention policy’ and Davis, ‘Betwixt and between’.

8. Rubin and Jones, ‘Prevention of Violent Conflict’, 401.

9. HMG, Building Stability Overseas Strategy; Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, ‘Preventing Deadly Conflict’.

10. Pendle, ‘South Sudan case study’.

11. United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, Article 1.1.

12. Cramer, et al., Conflict Prevention Rapid Evidence Assessment; Johnson, Future Stabilisation Strategy and the Changing Upstream Environment; Brown and Langer, Elgar handbook of Civil War and Fragile States; Brown, Forward, in Politics Without Sovereignty; Bickerton, State-building – Exploring state failure.

13. This definition is adapted from Pérez-Niño and Walton, Working Paper 2: Contemporary conflict prevention, which in turn draws on the OECD-DAC, Guidance on Evaluating Conflict Prevention, 16.

14. OECD DAC, ‘Encouraging effective evaluation of conflict prevention and peacebuilding activities’, 22.

15. Rubin and Jones, ‘Prevention of Violent Conflict’, 393.

16. Ibid.

17. Mosse, ‘Is Good Policy Unimplementable?’.

18. Rubin and Jones, ‘Prevention of Violent Conflict’.

19. For a discussion of the tensions generated by the securitisation of development see Duffield, Development, security and unending war. For an illustration of how these tensions played out within the UK government during the period under examination see BBC, ‘Aid Money could go to defence – David Cameron’.

20. Lund, Conflict Prevention, 288.

21. Ibid, 296.

22. Ibid, 296.

23. Bellamy, Conflict Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, 135.

24. Davis, Betwixt and between, 166.

25. ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect.

26. Bellamy, Conflict Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, 143.

27. Ibid.

28. World Bank and United Nations, Pathways for Peace, 255.

29. Menkhaus, Conflict Prevention and Human Security: Issues and Challenges; Höglund and Orjuela, Winning the peace; Carment and Schnabel, Path to peace or grand illusion.

30. Wallensteen and Moller, Conflict prevention.

31. World Bank and United Nations, Pathways for Peace.

32. Davis, Betwixt and between.

33. World Bank and United Nations, Pathways for Peace.

34. Höglund and Orjuela, Winning the peace.

35. Autesserre, The Trouble With Congo; Cramer, Civil War is not a stupid thing, Richmond & Franks, ‘Liberal Hubris?’.

36. Chandler, Peacebuilding.

37. Goodhand and Walton, The limits of liberal peacebuilding?

38. Cheng et al., Securing and sustaining elite bargains that reduce violent conflict.

39. In 2020, the FCO and DFID were merged into a single department: The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

40. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

41. Mawdsley, National interests and the paradox of foreign aid under austerity.

42. Pugh et al., Beyond the securitisation of development.

43. Hansard, Building Stability Overseas The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr William Hague), Vol 531, Col98WS.

44. Ibid.

45. HMG, Building Stability Overseas Strategy, 4.

46. Ibid, 4–5.

47. Ibid, 18.

48. Pugh et al., Beyond the securitisation of development.

49. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 7.

50. Ibid, 7–8.

51. HMG, Building Stability Overseas Strategy, 4.

52. DFID, UK Aid: Changing lives, delivering results.

53. Interview with FCO Special Advisor, London, 15 November 2019.

54. Ricketts, The Lost Art of Strategic Thinking. A crossbench peer is a member of the UK House of Lords who is not affiliated with any political party. Ricketts elaborates further on this theme in Ricketts, Hard Choices.

55. Interview with National Security Council senior official (2010–2015), email exchange, 10 October 2019.

56. Interview with FCO Special Advisor, London, 15 November 2019.

57. Interview with NGO Policy Director, London, 29 March 2017.

58. FCO et al., Promoting stability throughout the Western Balkans; FCO et al., UK Government National Action Plan on UNSCR 1325, 2012 Revision; FCO et al., UK National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2014–2017.

59. FCO et al., UK National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2014–2017.

60. FCO, DFID, and MOD, Conflict Pool Strategic Guidance.

61. Ibid, 3.

62. Ibid, 19.

63. DFID, ‘DFID business plan 2012’; Stabilisation Unit, Business Plan 2014–15.

64. DFID, UK Aid: Changing lives, delivering results; DFID, ‘Bilateral Aid Review: Technical Report’; DFID, ‘Bilateral Aid Review results’; DFID, ‘Multilateral Aid Review’.

65. DFID, ‘Bilateral Aid Review: Technical Report’, 12, para 41.

66. Hansard, ‘House of Lords Debate’.

67. For example, in February 2013, the MOD International Defence Engagement Strategy listed four activities but these were more aspirations than measurable policy.

68. Interview with FCO senior official (Whitehall), London, 22 November 2017.

69. Interview with DFID Policy Advisor (2010–2015), video call, 5 July 2019.

70. De Waal, ‘Sudan: Patterns of violence and imperfect endings’.

71. ICG, ‘Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement’, i; Pendle, ‘South Sudan Case Study’.

72. ICG, ‘Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement’, ii.

73. The three members of the Troika were US, Norway and UK.

74. UN News, Sudan. The Darfur conflict began in 2003 and violence has continued to the present day with an estimated 300,000 people killed and 2.7 million displaced.

75. Bennett et al., ‘Aiding the Peace’.

76. Interview with Jon Bennett, Oxford, 20 October 2017.

77. Bennett et al., ‘Aiding the Peace’, xiv.

78. Interview with FCO senior official (Whitehall), London, 22 November 2017.

79. Ibid.

80. De Waal, ‘When kleptocracy becomes insolvent’, 347.

81. Ibid; De Waal, ‘A Political Marketplace Analysis of South Sudan’s Peace, 2.

82. Mamdani, Who’s to Blame in South Sudan?, no page number.

83. Ramos-Horta, The State of UN Operations.

84. Interview with Stabilisation Consultant, video call, 4 July 2019.

85. Ibid.

86. The standard UK approach to strategic level SSR was to push for a joint political, civil service military MOD.

87. Interview with Stabilisation Consultant, video call, 4 July 2019.

88. Ibid.

89. Mosse, ‘Is Good Policy Unimplementable?’.

90. World Bank and United Nations, Pathways for Peace; Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, ‘Preventing Deadly Conflict’.

91. Nagaraj, ‘Beltway Bandits’ and ‘Poverty Barons’; Provost, The Privatisation of UK aid.

92. See, for example, Davis, ‘Betwixt and Between’; ACFID, ‘Value for Money Discussion Paper’.

93. Yanguas and Hulme, ‘Barriers to political analysis in aid bureaucracies’, 216.