When are warnings about violent conflict heeded?

Speaker: Prof Christoph O. Meyer, Professor of European & International Politics and Vice-Dean Research of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Policy at King's College

What does it take for warnings about violent conflict and war to be listened to, believed and acted upon? Why are some warnings by some sources noticed and largely accepted, while others are ignored or disbelieved? Our study challenges conventional accounts that tend to blame decision-makers’ lack of receptivity and political will. Instead, we offer a new theoretical framework to explain how a small number of factors shape distinct “paths of persuasion”, including conflict characteristics, political contexts, and source-recipient relations. Warnings in foreign policy is a wicket and complex problem because it involves both inside and outside warners and can vary greatly between cases, political contexts and organisational settings. We wanted to offer the first comprehensive account of how warnings actually work in foreign policy, involving at times also key NGOs and the news media. We were dissatisfied with the often narrow accounts focused on one particular set of warners (intelligence analysts) or one particular set of responders (usually the US government/president).  The study is the first to systematically integrate persuasion attempts by analysts, diplomats and senior officials with those by journalists and NGO staff. Our comparative design involves three states (US, the UK, Germany) and international organisations (UN, EU, OSCE) and looks in depth at four conflict cases of variable warning success: Rwanda 1994, Darfur 2003, Georgia 2008 and Ukraine 2014. While our book is not narrowly about the effectiveness of conflict prevention, a better understanding of the impact of conflict warnings has at least the potential for some warners to become better at warning earlier and more persuasively. The lessons learnt from our research could increase the probability that decision-makers would take some kind of preventive action, or if they don’t, can be held accountable for not accepting some of the warning claims if they were from trustworthy and authoritative sources.

Warning about War: Conflict, Persuasion and Foreign Policy was written by Christoph O. Meyer, Chiara De Franco and Florian Otto and published by Cambridge University Press in August 2019.