**3. Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding**

Links between religion, conflict and violence are complex and much interrogated, but those between religion and peacebuilding receive less attention. This reflects a tendency of scholars to study peace through its absence rather than its presence and the biases of a largely secular academy (Shannahan and Payne 2016). Within the social sciences, religion is often side-lined, including in disciplines such as international relations (Johnston and Sampson 1994) and development studies (Bompani 2019). Within peace studies, however, a strong and coherent body of scholarship around religious engagemen<sup>t</sup> in peacebuilding has emerged. Many analyses of this coalesce around Appleby (2000) work on the "ambivalence of the sacred", which acknowledges that religious actors are important "purveyors of ideas" (Haynes 2011) capable of driving both conflict and peace. Scholars have examined a spectrum of different forms of faith-based action, including in mediation, dialogue and track-II diplomacy (Bercovitch and Kadayifci-Orellana 2009; Toft et al. 2011; Johnstone and Svensson 2013), humanitarianism, development and displacement (Ager et al. 2015), and post-conflict reconstruction, reconciliation and trauma resolution (Putman et al. 2011). Case studies document initiatives within Christianity (Sampson and Lederach 2000; Appleby 2000; Johnston and Sampson 1994), Islam (Abu-Nimer 2003) and non-Western religions (Galtung and MacQueen 2008; Neumaier 2004). A growing body of work also highlights the role of religious women in peacebuilding (Hayward 2015; Hayward and Marshall 2015).

### **4. The Evolution of Conflict Prevention as a Global Norm and Field of Practice**

In essence, conflict prevention is the effort to prevent tomorrow's violence today. As such, it is relevant at any stage of conflict where violence is anticipated. It requires the proactive identification of conflict triggers and a subsequent response to prevent violence from breaking out or escalating and thus entails both foresight and action. Operational prevention responds to the imminent onset of violence through early warning and response, often using monitoring data provided by field monitors, volunteers or the public. Flagship initiatives have emerged, including CEWARN, an East African model to prevent cross-border pastoralist conflicts through stakeholder collaboration, information sharing and formulating response options. Structural prevention addresses the underlying causes of conflict, aiming to transform these for the long term. The drive for prevention stems from the recognition that prevention is cheaper than cure (Chalmers 2006) and awareness that conflict is a barrier to progress, exacting a heavy toll on human life and on economic, social and political systems. It also reflects a turn to discourses of prevention and precautionary policymaking more generally, in areas as varied as health, early years interventions, poverty, criminality and climate change (Coote 2012; Gough 2013).

Conflict prevention is at the United Nations' (UN) core, with its renowned preamble beginning, "We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind ... ". Its development as a global norm and field of practice came in the Boutros-Ghali era, with the development of "preventative diplomacy" in the 1992 Agenda for Peace. Successive Secretary Generals maintained focus, with Annan shifting to a "culture of prevention", Ban Ki-Moon declaring 2012 the "year of prevention" and current Secretary General Guterres declaring prevention the number one priority. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was adopted by all UN member states in 2005, with the UN developing early warning capacity to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

At the regional level, the European Union (EU) adopted conflict prevention as an explicit objective through the Lisbon Treaty (Vanheusden 2010). The African Union (AU) developed preventative tools within the Africa Peace and Security Architecture. In 2017, it adopted the AU Master Roadmap on Practical Steps for Silencing the Guns by 2020. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has focused on "preventative diplomacy", a state-centric approach to prevent conflict between member states while respecting strong norms of sovereignty that exist within the region (Della-Giacoma 2011). Other regional and sub-regional organisations have their own frameworks. Whilst the development of prevention architectures at regional level is undoubtedly positive, they do not always live up to

expectations. Wulf and Debiel (2009) cite the difficulty of navigating different values and conceptions of sovereignty, lack of coordination and capacity and dominant regional powers as stumbling blocks.

The practice of conflict prevention originally lagged behind its development as a global norm (Aggestam 2003) but has grown significantly. Whilst early generations of operational prevention tended to be internationally driven, recent initiatives are likely to be community focused and technology enabled. Local actors are now perceived to have several advantages over international organisations, including flexibility, efficiency, approachability and familiarity with culture and context. Forms of programming have become more imaginative, with interventions based on crowdsourcing, GPS mapping and big data being piloted and mainstreamed. Alongside civil society programmes, there has also been a "privatisation" of prevention, with the business sector developing its own initiatives in response to public pressure (Haufler 2004). These tend to focus on the extractive industries, with a prominent example being the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme for diamond mining (Haufler 2010).

As conflict prevention has developed, criticisms have emerged that its practice appears weak compared to its promise (Aggestam 2003; Matveeva 2006; Wulf and Debiel 2009). Operational and structural approaches are not always well aligned, reflecting their divergent understandings of conflict and prevention (Aggestam 2003). Indicators that facilitate operational prevention can have a "straight-jacketing" effect and provide a negative basis for analysis, measuring communities' risks and exposure to violence but not their resilience and capacities (Anderson and Wallace 2012). Challenges exist in relation to the credibility and reliability of evidence and a persistent gap often remains between warning and response. Community-based organisations may have been brought into the fold, but international actors often engage in ways that are extractive (Saferworld and Conciliation Resources 2016), for instance by harvesting early warning data from local partners upon which they are unable to act. Such engagemen<sup>t</sup> lacks effectiveness and is ethically questionable, as it depletes local partners of time and energy without the prospect of results.

Finally, the analysis and critique of conflict prevention has been hindered by a lack of conceptual clarity. Firstly, the term is overused within the peace studies literature and peacebuilding sector, where "prevention" is often used interchangeably with "peacebuilding" and "conflict resolution". This imprecision risks embracing initiatives where the term prevention has been adopted but the preventative element is not well developed. Secondly, the term conflict prevention is underused by local actors, including faith-based actors, who may have their own vernaculars or reject the labelling of their work this way. So, the challenge is two-fold: adopt a wide definition and the distinction with other forms of peacebuilding is unclear; adopt a narrow definition and local and faith-based initiatives may be excluded. This article strikes a balance by including all activities that are discernibly preventative, irrespective of whether the terminology of prevention is applied and by excluding activities that are claimed to be preventative but not demonstrated to be so. To assess preventative effect, the article utilises Coote (2012) distinction between upstream, midstream and downstream interventions. Upstream interventions seek to prevent harm before it occurs, targeting structural causes, midstream interventions mitigate the effects of harm and are usually targeted at "at risk" groups and individuals, and downstream interventions cope with the consequences of harm. Upstream and midstream interventions are included within the analysis, whereas downstream interventions are excluded. This allows the study to exclude forms of action that are based on what one respondent referred to as "the fire brigade approach", where action is only taken reactively.

### **5. Conflict Prevention as an Extension of Liberal Peace**

Liberal peace claims to provide a universal ideology for peace, based on an international order of rational, democratic, secular, free-market and human rights-abiding states, together with technical processes and technologies to achieve it. For critics and proponents alike, it represents the internationalisation of a particular form of government—free market liberal democracy (Sabaratnam 2011). In conflict and post-conflict countries, liberal peace generally focuses on the structural reform

of domestic institutions, the failures of which have arguably created the conditions for conflict to emerge. These reforms may seek to establish or alter the country's constitution, institutionalise democracy or raise capacity within key state functions such as the legislature, judiciary and security services. Such processes are political and very technical and so engender forms of peacebuilding that are top-down and highly professionalised. They are often promoted by the international community, which provides substantial engagemen<sup>t</sup> and sometimes muscular intervention in the way of humanitarian and development aid, peacekeepers and even occasionally full-scale military occupation. Whilst such substantial reforms may be contentious and destablising for any country, they are frequently enacted within "fragile states where customary law, traditional authorities and informal "indigenous" institutions often hold greater sway than the state (Boege et al. 2009).

Liberal peace has its strengths, particularly for those whose rights are insecure. Yet, it also has significant ideological baggage, including Eurocentrism, technocentrism and historic connections with empire (Richmond and Ginty 2015). Richmond (2009) argues that in many post-conflict environments, local opinion perceives liberal peace to be "ethically bankrupt, subject to double standards, coercive and conditional, acultural, unconcerned with social welfare, and unfeeling and insensitive towards its subjects". Imposed from above, it risks degrading into violence if its universal aspirations are not reflected on the ground (Richmond 2009). Critiques of liberal peace have come from those who seek improvements in theory and practice but fundamentally accept the paradigm and those radically opposed (Chandler 2010). Many critiques revolve around notions of the "everyday" and the "local turn", which recognise increased assertiveness by local actors and a loss of confidence by some international actors (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013). The concepts of "hybridity" and "post-liberal peace" have also emerged, attempting to draw out more complex understandings of relationships between the local and the international in peacebuilding. However, these have also been critiqued by pro-liberal scholars, who argue that these concepts have not pointed to a clear alternative path for peacebuilding and that liberal peace has still done more good than harm (Paris 2010).

Historically, religion and liberalism have been uneasy bedfellows. Cavanaugh (1995, 2009) charts how early proponents of the modern state system perpetuated a "myth" of religious violence to legitimise its liberal and secular foundations. He argues that much of this so-called religious violence was actually "resistance of local elites to the state building efforts of monarchs and emperors" (Cavanaugh 2009, p. 177). Today, the liberal peace paradigm still struggles to contend with religion, particularly where it challenges secular sovereignty (Mullin 2010). Religious traditions are also forced to reckon with liberalism, generally operating within the paradigm with varying enthusiasm. Religious actors must also consider their own culpability for atrocities perpetrated under ostensibly liberal state-building, such as colonialism (Lynch 2015). Yet, as Gopin (2015) reminds us, it is easy to overstate the differences between liberal peace and religious models, as enlightenment principles such as peace, human rights and democracy are also rooted in religious texts and practices.

Over the past several years, religious peacebuilding scholars have begun to deconstruct liberal peace and its implications for faith-based peacebuilding. Appleby and Lederach offer a corrective in their concept of strategic peacebuilding (Lederach and Appleby 2010), which pursues peace with justice ("justpeace") and embraces elicitive methods that foreground indigenous knowledge and culture over expert input, shifting agency further towards the local (Appleby 2015). In substance and approach, strategic peacebuilding articulates at least a partial rejection of liberal peacebuilding, which Appleby characterises as "Western, bureaucratic, ends-driven, materialist and top-down" (Appleby 2015, p. 190).

Given the overwhelming pervasiveness of the liberal peace paradigm, the development of conflict prevention as norm and practice has necessarily taken place within it (Hauge et al. 2015). Most forms of conflict prevention have shorter term goals than peacebuilding, geared more towards the aversion of violence and the maintenance of stability, but its function is ultimately to provide an enabling environment for liberal peacebuilding. The practice of prevention also shares key characteristics with liberal peace, with its privileging of external knowledge and models and its technocratic approach. The literature examining conflict prevention as a liberal peace project is small but critical. Jacobsen and Jacobsen and Engell (2018) argue that prevention is an extension of liberal interventionism. Their view is that interventionism has retreated but has been replaced by new forms of technology-enabled intervention under the rubric of prevention. Others argue that liberal peace approaches to prevention can undermine communities' capacity to prevent conflict, for instance by omitting to identify what is already working locally (Anderson and Wallace 2012) or by emphasising security and political reform at the expense of socio-economic changes (Hauge et al. 2015).

Many of the key criticisms of conflict prevention emerge from its ideological underpinnings in the liberal peace. Here, this paper briefly analyses three—its technocratic disposition, overreliance on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and short-termism. These are not the only criticisms of liberal peace, and they are not all to which liberal peace should be reduced. However, they are prominent and observable hallmarks of the concept that can be readily operationalised and thus provide a framework for comparing classical liberal peace interventions with those implemented by religious actors. The paper revisits these three areas again later to consider the potential value added by faith-based approaches.
