'Cutting the Costs of War - Non-military Prevention and Resolution of Conflict'

Dr. Scilla Elworthy
with a preface by Professor Paul Rogers

In this new report (March 2004), Dr. Scilla Elworthy focuses on alternatives to war - ways of dealing with conflict and aggression that do not necessitate the use of further force. She argues that these methods are often more effective and vastly cheaper than the use of military force. Yet awareness of these methods, among opinion formers and the general public, is shockingly low. The report describes thirteen effective conflict prevention and resolution measures, with examples of how each has been used and analyses recent UK government initiatives in conflict prevention, making specific recommendations for how the UK could build on its initial achievements in this area, including:

• Establishing a 'UK Civilian Peace Service' to harmonise the training, recruitment and deployment of civilian peace professionals for international conflict work.
• Taking the necessary measures now to comply with the conflict prevention Public Service Agreement targets by 2006, including "the promotion and funding of indigenous capacity-building".

"MoD is quite right to emphasise the importance of conflict prevention activity, as it now frequently does, most recently in the Defence White Paper ? This emphasis however reveals a fundamental inconsistency in British defence policy: it is not coherent to vaunt effort 'focused on countering the threat from the proliferation of conventional arms' when at the same time spending some £426 million to subsidise British arms sales."

In his preface to the report, Professor Paul Rogers demonstrates that current military postures adopted by the USA and its allies are not bringing peace and security to the regions in which they have intervened. This makes the need for a serious examination of non-military measures all the more pressing.

Local conflict is intimately linked to global issues, such as resource shortages, making it more difficult to justify wars in terms of traditional national or regional security concepts. Global trends now require us to embrace new ways of thinking about our relatedness to each other, where the common interests of humanity are given higher priority than sectional interests and the preservation of privilege. In the light of these trends, non-violent methods of preventing conflict have never been more urgently needed.

Oxford Research Group is delighted to be able to collaborate with Peace Direct in the co-publication of this timely and much needed report, priced at £5.00 + £1.50 p&p and available from peace direct on 0845 456 9714 email: cressida@peacedirect.org