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Jump to Chapter 4 Sections:
>> Conflicts since the Cold War >> Understanding conflict >> Windows of vulnerability and opportunity >> Foreign assistance, conflict management and conflict mitigation >> Guiding principles for encouraging stability >> Notes >> Background paper >> References
If all these causes exist, there will be periods of vulnerability when certain events-elections,
natural disasters, riots, assassinations-can trigger full-scale violent conflict in a region, country, or group of countries. Unlike, say, economic decline or ethnic outbidding, such events are not causes of conflict. Instead, they are moments when underlying causes can come together in a brief window, a window ideally suited for mobilizing broader violence. But such events can also have
extremely positive outcomes if the tensions that tend to emerge are recognized and handled well.
Many of these windows are random or unpredictable, such as economic shocks or natural disasters.
Others, like elections, can be seen in advance. But while the international community may never be able to pinpoint the precise election or political assassination that finally tips a country over the threshold, it is certainly possible to tell that some places are ripe for conflict and that it is probably only a matter of time before it occurs. For example, if President Habyarimana’s plane
had not been shot down in Rwanda, Hutu extremists would probably have found another pretext to launch the genocide.
Many of the more predictable windows of vulnerability involve events, or anticipated events,
that threaten to rapidly and fundamentally shift the balance of political or economic power.
Elections are the most obvious example. By definition, elections are competitive events with
unpredictable outcomes, and conflict is inherent to the process. So, under certain conditions elections may catalyze rather than prevent widespread conflict. This is particularly likely if political power is the only route to economic power or if demographic or other changes threaten to
upset a monopoly on power at the local or national level.
While elections are the most obvious example, any policy change that threatens to alter established
patterns of political or economic control in highrisk environments could lead elites to mobilize violence. Decentralization is an example, as are legislative changes that govern the power of key
players such as the military, or anticorruption programs that that threaten to strip incumbent
elites of their main source of income.
Other events that are less predictable but equally destabilizing are those that point out, in a dramatic fashion, the weakness, inefficiency, or corruption of the ruling regime. For example, political unrest often increases sharply after a large natural or human-made disaster, such as a hurricane, drought, flood, earthquake, or industrial accident that affects the environment.
What turns disasters into events triggering political unrest is the amount of blame that can be
placed on the regime for causing a disaster or for having a particularly weak or corrupt response to
one.34 For example, because Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza regime treated international aid flowing into the country after the 1972 earthquake as personal income rather than as resources for reconstruction, key business elites withdrew their support from the regime-a critical factor in
its demise. Economic shocks can serve much the same role, as the events leading to Suharto’s overthrow in Indonesia make abundantly clear.
Foreign assistance, conflict management and conflict mitigation
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