Analyzing the Conflict Early Warning-Response Gap as Divides Between Communities of Practice

This is an in-person event.

Tuesday, 18 March 2025 from 09.30 until 11.00.

Conflict early warning has seen a revival in the past decade alongside the resurgence of the conflict prevention agenda. In line with this, the African Union Conflict Early Warning System (AU CEWS) and several Conflict Early Warning and Response Mechanisms (CEWRMs) of its Regional Economic Communities (RECs) have expanded their mandates, established more formal institutional linkages among concerned actors, and assisted one another in building capacity. Despite such intensive formal institution-building, practitioners and scholars continue to observe the warning-response gap or the inability to translate early warning information into timely preventative action by decision-makers.

Veering away from the dominant focus on formal insitutions, this seminar presents another set of disconnections fueling the gap, particularly disparities in knowledge, norms, and practices between two Communities of Practice (CoPs), namely, the community of early warning analysts on the one hand and the community of responders on the other. Similar differences are arguably observed in other conflict resolution mechanisms, such as between mediation support units and mediators.

The seminar synthesizes the preliminary findings of the Swiss National Science Foundation-supported project, “Minding the Warning-Response Gap: Examining the Fragmentation of African Conflict Early Warning and Response Mechanisms (CEWRMs),” hosted by UNU-CRIS. The seminar also explores possible policy applications of the CoP concept in assisting the AU and RECs in augmenting the warning-response gap.

Speaker:

Jamie Pring is an Associate Research Fellow at UNU-CRIS and a lecturer at the University of Basel. Her research and teaching focus on peace and security policies of regional intergovernmental organisations in the Global South. Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Jamie analyses the fragmentation among conflict early warning mechanisms in Africa as a research fellow at UNU-CRIS. Before her current roles, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin. Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, she conducted a comparative study of the conflict prevention policies of major regional organisations in Africa, Asia-Pacific, and South America. Her PhD in Political Science at the University of Basel examines the promotion of inclusivity in the mediation process of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in South Sudan.

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