Regional Responses to
Internal War Program

Military interventions in internal conflicts raise legal, moral, and practical questions that the international community is still struggling to address. Some interventions have conformed to, and reinforced, existing international law and procedures while others have been more ad hoc in nature. Some interventions have been successful while others have been deeply flawed. Still others that, in hindsight, might have been successful in saving thousands of lives never materialized at all.

During its first two years, the RRIW program enriched the global debate on humanitarian responses by building regional consensus on the criteria for military intervention during four conferences that explored regional values on preventing and responding to humanitarian crises. These meetings assembled over 100 participants representing diverse academic, governmental, civil society, and military expertise from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Participants shared their findings with the American public and media through a series of open forums, and they engaged senior American policy officials in the search for a common vision for confronting humanitarian emergencies. The results yielded a recognition that a new normative standard to protect civilians from mass killing and gross violations of human rights has emerged. Moreover, participants from each of the four regions stressed that regional or subregional approaches to security issues need to be pursued and strengthened.

In its next phase, the program will examine specific regional capacities to fulfill the criteria regional participants identified. The program will combine original field research, outreach to local civil society organizations in each region, and engagement with regional organization leaders and US policymakers. Creating a clear assessment of organizational capacity is crucial to developing a greater role for these organizations in resolving internal disputes and developing policies for a new international architecture to respond to humanitarian emergencies. The Fund for Peace will work with global partners towards this goal through a series of activities:

• Research Missions: A Fund for Peace investigative team will travel to Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas to interview knowledgeable officials, opinion leaders, and civil society experts on regional organizations. The research will examine organizational resources, military capacities, institutional structures, and political mechanisms for responding to internal conflicts and humanitarian crises.
• Strengthening Civil Society: The Fund for Peace will partner with civil society actors in the regions to probe their role in shaping more effective regional cooperation on security issues. Obstacles to civil society's development as a forceful voice for regional engagement will be explored, as well as strategies to encourage cooperation with government officials and the media. RRIW will join with local NGOs to host six workshops. In these workshops, the findings from the first phase of the project will be presented, debated, and discussed, with a view toward obtaining specific recommendations to strengthen the capacity and interest of local civil society and regional organizations in dealing with security threats.
• Engaging World Leaders: The program will convene three conferences to engage policy makers in these issues. A conference of American experts on regional organizations will assess the current state of knowledge on the strengths and weaknesses of these organizations and identify the areas that need to be strengthened for regional organizations to play a larger role in addressing security challenges. The second meeting will bring together high-level officials from the regional organizations to prepare concrete policy recommendations based on their shared experience, the workshops with civil society organizations, and the program's field research. These recommendations will then be presented at a "Regions of the World Summit" for the leaders of the respective regional and subregional organizations.

The program will disseminate its findings widely through published reports, web-site publications, its Reality Check interview series, and a final, book-length monograph. The program is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and is being carried out in partnership with the The Peace Fund of the Netherlands.