Written evidence submitted by International Crisis Group (CSS0004)
14 September 2016
Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy
Conflict, Stability & Security Fund Inquiry
Executive Summary
(a) the concept and operation of the CSSF to better reflect the importance of supporting the production of independent analysis and policy engagement not least as a means to strengthen UK programming in this sphere;
(b) explicit reflection on the question as to whether the CSSF has the correct balance between its focus on addressing current crises and the increasing importance of seeking to prevent the conflicts of tomorrow; and,
(c) a collective conversation on what constitutes positive impact in terms of how UK money is spent in this field.
About International Crisis Group
1. International Crisis Group (Crisis Group) is an independent non-governmental organization working to prevent deadly violence and shape policies aimed at ending or mitigating those conflicts which have already erupted. We combine expert field-centered research, analysis, and engagement with policymakers across the world in seeking to effect positive change in the crisis situations on which we work. Crisis Group endeavours to talk to all parties to a conflict, a key component of a methodology aimed at positioning ourselves as a trusted source of field-researched information, fresh perspectives, and dispassionate advice for conflict parties and external actors. Established in 1995, Crisis Group now actively covers some 40 situations of volatility in Africa, Asia, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa.
2. Crisis Group’s reports and analyses of conflict situations are freely available on our website (www.crisisgroup.org). We conduct advocacy both publicly, through these written materials as well as open meetings and extensive media coverage of our analysis; and privately, engaging with all concerned actors at the local level up to, and including, heads of state and government, foreign ministers and other senior officials, the UN Secretary-General and his staff, and regional organisations such as the EU, AU, ECOWAS, and MERCOSUR. Crisis Group’s governance is overseen by a Board of Trustees chaired by Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, and including former heads of state and government, cabinet ministers, senior UN officials, industrialists, philanthropists, and leading figures from civil society.
Introduction
3. Crisis Group finds much to commend about the way the CSSF is structured. In particular, we welcome the centrally coordinated, all-of-government approach, the focus on prioritization, and the emphasis on program design largely driven by post. Further, while Crisis Group is an impartial organization not focused on promoting the interests of any one state or set of concerns beyond the wellbeing of conflict victims, we recognise that the remit of this inquiry is focused on the promotion of UK interests. The comments below are to be understood with this in mind and seek to contribute to discussion of the first question posed by the terms of the inquiry concerning the extent to which the CSSF contributes to UK national security.
4. While we do not write this submission on behalf of any organisations other than our own, we would imagine that many of the points we raise are equally applicable to the many excellent civil society partners who operate in the field of conflict management. Finally, we acknowledge that this submission is to an extent self-serving: we are engaging in this inquiry not just to contribute to a discussion that could enhance the CSSF, but also to seek ways to secure UK funding for our organization, funding which we do not currently receive but which would be vital to our continued operation in straitened times.
The value of independent analysis and advocacy
5. Independence – both in reality and perception – is the core requirement of NGOs. Without it (and the appearance of it), the credibility of analysis/output is called into question. At the extreme, the security of staff operating in complex environments could be jeopardized if they are seen to be biased or operating on behalf of an actor/group of actors with partial equities in the conflict in question.
6. UK national security interests also benefit from accessing independent information. The 2015 SDSR focuses in large part on building stability overseas and developing resilience to crises in order to “project” UK influence. To help achieve this, the CSSF is founded in part on the principles of the UK’s 2011 Building Stability Overseas Strategy, which emphasizes the need to “invest in partnerships beyond government”; as well as on a commitment to rigorous conflict analysis of those situations deemed to be a priority. External organisations that supply independent analysis and early warning are directly relevant to the pursuit of these goals.
7. For Crisis Group, there are four key components to independence: the ability to set priorities based on its own reading of conflict development; the freedom to talk to all concerned parties; the capacity to take a longer-term perspective; and the willingness, where the analysis demands it, to buck orthodoxy.
8. Setting priorities: The freedom to set priorities allows us to maintain a global reach with operations in all five key regions (see paragraph 1). It enables us to reconfigure our operational profile, for example allowing us to develop dedicated capacity to liaise with the African Union, in recognition of the growing number of key actors in the field of conflict management. It allows us to raise issues few others engage on in addition to situations of high-visibility; examples of the former include our work on the emerging conflicts in the broader Sahel; the conflict in southern Thailand; Venezuela’s growing political and humanitarian crisis; rising radicalism in Russia’s near abroad; or the fragility of Tunisia’s ongoing transition. Finally, priority setting allows us to retain flexibility to sound the alarm and react to new developments. Thus we were able to provide immediate analysis of the recent resumption of fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, or the implications for Uzbekistan and the region of the death of President Karimov; we have been able to reallocate resources in our Africa program to work on developments in the Lake Chad Basin; and we have been able to draw on our country-specific expertise to develop a clearer understanding of the dynamics behind the rise of jihadist groups, from West Africa to South Asia, as well as those factors driving the current refugee crisis and what implications this might have for future peace and stability.
9. Talking to all parties: Crisis Group talks to all parties to a conflict who will talk to us. This includes authorities and groups with whom many governments do not engage, whether for reasons of policy or access. Crisis Group may disagree (openly) with the views of those with whom it talks but we accurately reflect their positions in our work. This has important policy benefits. It was our initial work on sanctions against Iran, for example, that articulated the disconnect between the Western motivation for them – as a way to halt a possible nuclear weapons program – and how they were viewed from Tehran –as a tool to engineer regime change. Only by understanding, fully, the positions of all protagonists can effective policy prescriptions be found.
10. Longer-term perspective: Our ability to inform debate rests, in part, on a commitment to staying the course, building up years-deep country-specific expertise and networks of relationships to draw on as situations evolve. We were covering Syria, for example, for five years prior to the 2011 uprising; and have been reporting on Afghanistan since 2001 and the DRC since 1998. Our long coverage of Iraq allowed us to track (and thus reflect a better understanding of) that country’s deepening sectarian fissures. This type of investment requires the ability (in terms of financing, planning and staff development) to remain engaged through the many changing cycles of a conflict.
11. Bucking orthodoxy: Crisis Group’s independence is also dependent on its ability, where our analysis requires it, to take positions at odds with the mainstream if we believe they are ultimately more likely to promote long-term stability. Thus we have recognized the merits of military intervention in some situations, for example in calling for the retention of a sizeable NATO force in Afghanistan. But we have also cautioned against armed action absent a broader political strategy, as we did in the build-up to the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 raising many of the concerns flagged in the report released today by the Foreign Affairs Committee on the UK involvement in that country.
12. Likewise, we have both called for human rights commissions of inquiry where we believe these would contribute to peace (such as in the case of Sri Lanka) but have argued against them where we believe their contribution might be regressive (as was so with Myanmar). Also in the case of Myanmar, we were among the first openly to call for the lifting of Western sanctions in place against the previous, military regime. We consistently call for peace processes to include all parties willing to engage, including those at times effectively proscribed by other involved actors.
13. As public money for civil society comes under ever greater pressure, and as foreign policy agendas narrow, organisations such as Crisis Group find it increasingly difficult to protect their independence: grants become more prescribed, allowing for less operational flexibility, and run to shorter time-lines, impeding the types of investment in both staff and country expertise vital to the quality of our work.
Measuring impact
14. Crisis Group’s basic theory of change is that expert field research and analysis, coupled with tailored recommendations and high-level advocacy helps to contribute to policy changes which will head off conflict, contribute to its resolution, or mitigate its worst effects. But judging the successful implementation of this theory is difficult: the range of actors involved; the complexity of vested interests, including the many competing policy priorities engaged actors will have to contend with; and the sheer challenge of answering with any certainty ‘what if’ questions inherent in conflict prevention pose significant challenges in this regard. The world of conflict is intrinsically opaque and contested: rarely can a situation be declared fully resolved (look, for example, at the propensity for peace process to collapse).
15. With those caveats in mind, Crisis Group gauges impact through not just clear changes of policy to which we contributed, but also such means as access to key actors in conflict situations, the extent to which our analysis and recommendations are included in formal policy documents, as well as our coverage in the media. On all counts, our record is strong: we engage with governments, legislatures, and other actors the world over at all levels of seniority (at their request and ours); and our analysis and recommendations are covered in all major international media outlets, as well as regional and national press.
16. Beyond such metrics recent impact examples include research on developments at and around Jerusalem’s Holy Esplanade (June 2015), which discussed hitherto unpublished details about management of the site since 2000, especially the access restrictions on Muslims normally permitted to enter, drawing front-page coverage in Israeli and Arab media. The report’s preliminary recommendations led to several governments indicating they would increase funding for intra- and inter-religious conflict work and, after violence erupted, our advice on de-escalating the situation contributed to quieting the situation.
17. Other examples of impact include our work on post-conflict Sri Lanka, particularly our calls for some form of accountability mechanism to be developed to look into liabilities for the crimes committed in that war’s denouement. We can also point to our work, since 2006, in helping to frame the options available to Iran and the P5+1 in their nuclear talks. Our published, detailed, highly-technical 40-step plan (May 2014) became an intrinsic part of those talks, and the interim and final accord.
Conclusion
18. To sustain Crisis Group’s work, methodology and impact, it is critically important that we, and groups like us, possess the freedom to act independently, sufficiently resourced in pursuit of our mandate. This mandate – the prevention and better management of deadly conflict – is, likewise, a core UK national security interest. Indeed, the UK government, through both DFID and the FCO, in London and elsewhere, engage frequently with Crisis Group staff and regularly acknowledge the value of our public reporting in helping to inform internal policy deliberations.
19. However, efforts to secure funding through the CSSF have thus far proved time-consuming and ultimately unsuccessful. As currently constituted, the CSSF is not structurally amenable to supporting field-based research and analysis, with a focus instead seemingly more on operational service delivery and with prohibitively short timeframes at the application, service provision and impact assessment stages. This framework weakens our ability to complement the CSSF’s goals.
20. We also argue that the increasingly complex nature of conflict, its propensity to cross national borders, and the increasing array of actors involved, highlight the imperative need for more collaborative approaches to its resolution, which the CSSF has made steps to encourage. This need – which requires not just the ability to partner but the development of global networks and an array of impartial analysis – has arguably become more compelling for the UK after the referendum decision to leave the EU.
21. Further, we argue that early warning is pivotal to preventing conflict erupting and subsequently metastasizing. The significant challenges inherent in halting much of today’s conflict argue heavily in favour of strengthening our collective capacities to prevent tomorrow’s from breaking out. It is in the UK’s interest to support early warning and early action mechanisms that can identify, contain and resolve emerging problems before they spiral out of control. The 2011 Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) stipulates early warning as the first of its “three pillars”, alongside rapid crisis prevention and upstream conflict prevention. How to improve early warning – and the ability to act effectively on those warnings – is of increasing interest to a significant number of governments with whom Crisis Group engages, a development which we welcome.
22. Whether the structure of the CSSF and current UK national security priorities – both explicit and implicit – currently have the right balance between managing today’s crises and preparing for tomorrow’s is a question we would urge to have expressly debated. While recognizing the limits of resources both human and financial, there is a danger that current conflicts and crises occupy too much policy bandwidth at the expense of seeking effective ways to ward off potential future turmoil. Crisis Group is concerned that the CSSF and, to an extent, the UK’s national security strategy is reflective of that bias, however understandable (indeed, in last year’s SDSR the word ‘crisis’ is mentioned 38 times, the word ‘prevention’ four).
23. In short, Crisis Group would welcome continued conversation with UK officials on how best we and groups like us can support UK national security interests as they overlap with ours and, likewise, how moving forward we might collaborate more closely with the UK government, while preserving our independence. In particular, we would welcome discussion on:
a) The extent to which the UK government values independent, expert analysis as a means, inter alia, to assist in CSSF program design;
b) The extent to which the CSSF in its current form has the balance right between working to alleviate current crises, and seeking to head off future conflict;
c) Whether a better articulated, collective understanding as to what constitutes impact in this field can be formulated, one that recognises the need for value for money, alongside, the inherent complexity of the field in question.