Stabilisation - Part 2 - an important part of conflict prevention...but only one part of it

Talk about ‘stabilisation’, and Afghanistan is normally the first thing that comes to mind, but it’s also mentioned with regard to several other fragile states, including Pakistan, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo…and (more quietly) in places like Somalia and Yemen.

However, the term seems to mean different things to different people and in different contexts. Maybe that’s inevitable, and we don’t want to get too wrapped up in arcane discussions about definitions. But it does matter. It matters because if we are to ‘do’ stabilisation better – in the UK, in the West as a whole – we need to be clearer about what it is, what it is not, and its place in conflict prevention.

The UK’s cross-departmental Stabilisation Unit has come up with a broad definition of stabilisation, which it quotes on its website:

Stabilisation is the process of establishing peace and security in countries affected by conflict and instability. It is the promotion of peaceful political settlement to produce a legitimate indigenous government, which can better serve its people.

Stabilisation often requires external joint military and civilian support to perform some or all of the following tasks: prevent or reduce violence, protect people and key institutions, promote political processes and prepare for longer-term development.

The problem with this definition, or at least the first half of it, is that it’s almost indistinguishable from any other definition of conflict prevention, peacebuilding, or statebuilding. To some extent, this is understandable, as there’s certainly an overlap. Yet we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that conflict prevention and stabilisation are interchangeable.

Without getting too fixated on definitions, I’d emphasise three factors about what ‘stabilisation’ is:

1) Stabilisation activities occur in highly fragile situations – where there is a high risk of violent conflict, conflict is ongoing or is just coming to an end.

2) As the name suggests, stabilisation activities aim to ensure a basic level of stability that provides a platform for longer-term development and security building.

3) In practice it is assumed that stabilisation activities have a strong military component (though not necessarily direct military operations).

So, stabilisation happens in the most fragile circumstances and usually involves the military in some way. Conflict prevention, by contrast, is a much broader church. It is not only about intervening when the risk of violence is highest, but also about working with different groups across society at a much earlier stage to work out how to manage or eradicate potential causes of conflict before the risk of violence escalates. And where there has already been violence, again it is about understanding the causes of this violence and working with a range of actors on addressing the causes to prevent a return to conflict. This goes far, far beyond stabilising the environment, and includes a wide range of programming tools such as demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration (DDR), security sector reform (SSR), armed violence reduction (AVR), etc.

The distinction between stabilisation and other forms of conflict prevention matters because if certain institutions and budgets have a ‘stabilisation’ mandate, and if stabilisation is used as a lens for the UK’s response to fragile states, how will Whitehall make the distinction between a stabilisation and non-stabilisation context? It needs to be clearer where and how the UK’s stabilisation capacity will be employed and where other conflict prevention tools will have primacy.

A related point is that while in theory stabilisation is seen as the first step on the road to longer-term recovery, in practice it is very hard to identify, let alone manage the transition from stabilisation to whatever comes next. For stabilisation interventions, as other post-conflict activities, it is much easier to launch an intervention than it is to close it down or hand it over to another form of programming.

To conclude, the risk is that with decision-makers focused on Afghanistan and the stabilisation capacity that has developed around it, they will come to expect that wherever there is a need for conflict prevention, a muscular stabilisation intervention is the solution. This would be a mistake. While stabilisation is a conflict prevention activity, not all conflict prevention is about stabilisation.

Duncan Hiscock

Team leader - Conflict and Security