Peace building and Conflict prevention

Conflicts often cause injuries, disablement, displacement and death. It also intensifies the poverty of those who survive. Often they are deprived of their livelihood and any chance of securing an income.

Development successes, painstakingly achieved over many years, can literally be “shot down” overnight due to conflict. For that reason, conflict prevention and peace building are one World Vision’s important cross-cutting topics.

Conflictsper se are unavoidable. Conflicts arise wherever people live together and have conflicting interests about accessing food, land, resources and power. What matters is to resolve these conflicts in a peaceful way and to avoid violence, armed conflict or solutions of the gun. For that reason conflict prevention must be integrated into long-term development co-operation.

Conflicts must be identified and resolved before they erupt into violence and/or armed struggle. One must assist people to learn how to resolve their conflicting interests constructively and creatively, to find peaceful solutions and to consider the interest of all stakeholders.

For a number of years, World Vision staff has been trained in conflict-sensitive programme planning. The objective of such training is to learn how to minimize those factors which lead to conflict and to maximize those factors which foster peaceful solutions. Peace building means to create a network of social relationships that turn conflicts into fair and just living conditions.

Conflict Prevention and Peace Building include such areas as:

• Promotion of the Rule of Law
• Peace Education
• Capacity Building
• Interaction and Dialogue
• Promotion of Reconciliation
• Psycho-social Support

In addition to that, development NGOs have also developed methods to extend their humanitarian and development assistance in such a way as to avoid conflict, realizing that any kind of assistance always bears a certain degree of conflict potential, as there are not only the recipients receiving assistance but also poor and disadvantaged groups who are not receiving assistance.

Assistance geared to prevent rather than aggravate conflict requires that humanitarian workers make judgments about the risks of giving aid, speak with all stakeholders involved, and take prudent decisions regarding who is to receive aid and who should not, where and when aid is distributed and how long assistance will be needed and when it will have to be stopped.

To prevent conflict and violence, attention must also be given to small arms and light weapons which very often are too easily accessible. When weapons are easily available, they will eventually be used. For that reason, there is a need for disarmament and destruction of weapons. National and international advocacy is needed to control violence, and contain arms production, arms trade and arms proliferation.

Another area of conflict prevention is to stop the use of children as soldiers. Against all international conventions, children are often drafted and trained to kill and are thereby forgoing their chance of building up a civil future for themselves. One avenue to prevent children from being abused as soldiers is to educate governments and to influence non-state actors to demobilize children, to re-integrate them back into their society and to give them psycho-social support to treat their traumatic experiences