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Armed conflict and violence seldom erupt overnight, even when their visible effects seem to take many off-guard. More likely, they stem from deep-rooted, entrenched fault lines that may not always be obvious or visible because they go back decades—if not longer. Effectively mitigating the eruption or recurrence of conflict requires identifying, analyzing, and tackling the root causes of fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV)—not just what happens but why it happens.

Structural factors of FCV are systemic characteristics that underpin a country's economic, political, institutional, security, and societal evolution. They range from historical legacies and narratives to norms and values and include geography, subnational disparities, demographic trends, and many more. They may be simmering beneath the surface, deemed latent, as if no longer relevant or even self-evident, to the extent that one may not assess their full ramifications in the current context.

In the Lake Chad region, where armed conflict has been fueled by deep-rooted fragility and grievances, some groups, such as the "montagnards" from the Mandara Mountains and the Buduma, have been historically disenfranchised and still face regular barriers to representation in decision-making processes and development dividends. Geography is another important structural factor. As shown in the Lake Chad regional RRA with the exception of the capital N'Djamena, the Lake Chad region is remotely located which has fostered a sentiment of political isolation coupled with economic marginalization.

Past instances of armed conflict generate historical legacies, even when a generation or more has elapsed since violent events. Trauma, often inter-generational and collective, heals through acknowledging wrongdoings and reparative justice. In addition to direct survivors and families of victims, their descendants and the community at large can connect with the memory of violent events and how remnants of discrimination and stigmatization may still be perceived, long after these historical occurrences. Historical legacies shape a memory and group identity. It further contributes to a narrative where an individual's access to opportunities may be interpreted through the lens of whether they belong to the group of former perpetrators or survivors.

While underlying, persistent patterns of exclusion and a sense of injustice feed into strong local feelings, collective narratives, and psyche about significant elements of a society, structural factors of FCV do not necessarily determine the trajectory of a region, country, or locality. They are instead constitutive to the history and fabric of a context and, as such, shape a core part of its specificity. Think of rhizome more than direct causality.

There are many examples of this. For instance, territorial imbalances greatly contribute to inequalities and grievances. Analysts point out a crisis of pastoralism at the heart of nomadic herders' grievances in the Sahel, as well as zero-sum tendencies that prevent wider inclusion. Regional inequalities, between coastal and landlocked Saharan and Sahelian provinces, have various ramifications, such as on economic diversification, identity formation, and center-periphery relations.

Another example is the way in which governance systems inherited from colonial times have contributed to perpetuating contested and/or exclusionary patterns in settings affected by FCV. Guiding questions that may be helpful to unpack these connections include: To what extent did a colonial administration influence central or federal trajectories and power-sharing? Did independence occur as a result of a peaceful negotiation or from violent guerrilla warfare which institutionalized top-down, one-party "winner take all" mindsets? Did major milestones include and benefit all or only a few?

The recently completed Guinea Risk and Resilience Assessment (RRA) outlined the country's experimentation with different forms of governance, such as socialism. The country's exposure to various models has deeply influenced Guineans' yearning for equality and their low acceptance of economic stratification, which can still be perceived today.

How can we adjust our lens not just to the last unconstitutional change of government but to review core features that have defined a country's entire post-independence period? We cannot address the root causes of FCV unless we understand why events happen. This not only helps to mitigate their impact more effectively but also to prevent their recurrence in the future. Capturing structural factors of FCV entails augmenting a standard stakeholder mapping or conflict analysis with a recognition of these complex, intertwined connections, and the role of people's perceptions in fueling deep-rooted grievances. In line with the World Bank Group Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence, it requires attention to the following:

Mobilizing various disciplines to understand a society, its constitutive forces, and pressure points. Armed conflict and violence rarely arise simply because of economic failures and asymmetries. Rather, they stem out of power dynamics as well as actual and perceived exclusion factors. To measure them, one should understand that the structure of the economy, the country's history, geography, culture, and social divisions, set entrenched patterns and require thinking outside the realm of traditional disciplines.
Valuing people's perceptions as much as objective measures of wellbeing and development. As the 2018 Pathways for Peace report demonstrated, inequalities and perceptions of exclusions between groups matter just as much, and often more, than inequalities between rich and poor. Perception and subjectivity play a critical role in shaping people's sentiments and appraisal of inequalities and exclusion. As such, it is often not only about what happened, but how it was perceived, interpreted, digested, and narrated by the people who experienced it. Therefore, one key challenge for practitioners is often one of data. Simply put, do we have the right data to dig deeper and wider
Accepting the compounding and dynamic aspects of conflict and risks. Structural factors of FCV are mostly static but they are not relegated to the past. The extent to which these simmering attributes interact with the present makes them "living" and ever-present in the backdrop of fragile and conflict-affected situations.
This web of connections between past and present, structural, and more acute experiences of state formation and contestations, illustrates that societies are not frozen in time—they live, breathe, and evolve. They also remember. In addition to spatial, social, cultural, and economic features, structural factors of FCV influence path dependency—a historically-influenced course from which sets a rigid route—and behavioral patterns that unfold and repeat through time. They resist change and sometimes build up over time, like the sediment of a riverbed. If we don't integrate them into a risk-informed approach and engagement, we, as development practitioners, miss critical depth and breadth, two essential parameters to effectively diagnose and tackle the root causes of FCV.









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Farah Abdessamad
Consultant, Fragility, Conflict, and Violence Group
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Catherine Defontaine
Senior Operations Officer - Fragility, Conflict, and Violence Group
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Dave


October 04, 2023

Very insightful article.






Catherine


October 27, 2023

Thank you!

Vietnam is seared in American history and memory like almost no other distant nation since World War II. Seen as the first domino in the supposedly relentless march of communism across Southeast Asia, it later caused the downfall of a president and left a trail of tears and recriminations in its wake that echoed all the way until the Gulf War in 1991. And it opened a window — even if for a brief few years — for serious questioning at home of both the means and the ends of U.S. foreign policy.
How times have changed! The lavish welcome accorded to President Biden in Vietnam is just the latest sign of the dramatic shift. Clearly, Washington is eager to deepen ties with Vietnam with China on its mind. But if Washington thinks Hanoi will, at some point in the foreseeable future, align with Washington on countering China on the security plane, it would be sadly mistaken. Vietnam indeed has a China strategy, but it is not America's China strategy. Being clear-eyed about this can open doors to thinking about the true payoffs of the relationship.
Vietnam upgrading its relations with the United States to the level of "comprehensive strategic partnership" merely means ties have drawn level with a similar status bestowed earlier to China, India, Russia, and South Korea. China is also Vietnam's biggest trade partner by far. Though Hanoi has welcomed the U.S. Navy, it has also hosted similar visits from Japan and India, among others. And unlike some other U.S. partners in Asia, American defense sales to Vietnam remain limited and confined to lower-value products. Vietnam conducts military exercises with foreign powers, but they are dominated by a focus on disaster relief and peacekeeping, or come in very expansive almost-multilateral formats such as RIMPAC. Hanoi, which has a sharp maritime dispute with Beijing, is nevertheless not pursuing a geopolitical alignment with Washington so much as a hedging strategy involving all of Asia's major powers.
The real story of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship is geoeconomics. Vietnam — which Washington shamefully bombed and strafed practically back to the stone age in the 1960s and 70s — is now, incredibly, Asia's new economic tiger. Even more remarkably, it has become the United States' 8th largest trade partner in goods and looks set to overtake the U.K., (currently seventh-largest partner) very soon. U.S. bilateral trade in goods with Vietnam reached $139 billion in 2022, a 20-fold increase in 20 years.
Washington's emphasis on moving supply chains away from China aligns with Vietnam's desire to attract as much trade, investment, and manufacturing as possible. Vietnam also possesses the world's second-largest rare earth reserves, a key asset in a time when the global energy transition is taking off. Vietnam saw a surge in solar installations recently and signed up to a U.S.-led initiative to reduce its dependence on coal. Vietnam has also joined the Biden administration's Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and is a part of both the CPTPP and RCEP trade agreements. Clearly, there is a serious convergence of geoeconomic interests, and both sides are acting on this recognition.
But while Vietnam looks toward a rapid rise, its feet appear firmly planted. The anchor is provided by its famous "Four No's" policy: no siding with one country against another, no military alliances, no foreign military bases, and no using force or threatening to use force in international relations. This does not preclude having military relations with other powers, but even in those, balance is pursued.
Vietnam keeps its powder dry — for instance it has developed its own potent maritime militia to counter Chinese maritime assertions. But if there is one state in Asia that demonstrates both resolute strategic autonomy and committed non-alignment, it is Vietnam. It would take a huge strategic error by China to change that.
President Biden denied that countering China was the motivation for his visit. The United States was not trying to start a "new cold war," he said, and was focused on "stability" in Asia. But Washington's actions speak louder than words. The Philippines is a case in point. In recent months, the United States has expanded its military footprint in the Philippines and doubled down on deep military coordination, also involving its other allies, with Manila. This has enhanced chances of a great power war and is also turning out to have divisive impacts on Filipino domestic politics.
Of course, Chinese intrusive actions — most recently trying to stop Philippine resupplies to its troops perched precariously on the Second Thomas Shoal and asserting a new, illegal 10-dash line map — are contributory factors. And, of course, the Philippines is also exercising its own agency in all this. But the asymmetric realities of power in the Washington-Manila alliance give reasons to suspect U.S. "agency" is much more consequential in the dramatic U-turn in the trajectory of the alliance. Biden's skipping the ASEAN and East Asia summits in Jakarta and going to Hanoi instead also sent the unfortunate signal that Washington is focused more on building up potential China-balancers than prioritizing ASEAN centrality.
Despite the vociferous denials, the logic of a new cold war with China is very much alive in many quarters in Washington. The United States should resist this logic, which includes seeing Vietnam's own serious maritime rifts with China as an opportunity to bring Hanoi over to "our side." Aiding Vietnam's economic rise, and encouraging supply chain diversification where sensible, is important to pursue. It will create opportunities for American businesses and workers, deepen bilateral ties and automatically help create a more multipolar Asia, reducing chances of absolute Chinese dominance. But we will likely not see enhanced military interoperability and heavy-duty exercises between Washington and Hanoi. In their bilateral relations, Hanoi's terms will set the bar, also because Vietnam has its own concerns about U.S. policies that mirror China's. Hanoi remains very wary of Washington's "democracy v. autocracy" rhetoric and so-called values-based interventions. "Color revolutions" and the "politicization of human rights" even made it to the joint statement by Chinese and Vietnamese leaders during General Secretary Trong's visit to Beijing in November 2022.
Vietnam's rise is also a sign of how a middle power in Asia and the Global South can find the will to not remain hostage to the suffering of two genocidal wars (against France and the United States) and another damaging invasion (by China), even though Hanoi effectively won all these wars. Vietnam is a case study in channeling past trauma into a laser-like focus on rise — "don't get mad, get rich." This is being achieved by the one-party state through a deliberate emphasis on external multi-alignment, investing in the capacities of its people, and a focused embrace of trade and investment.
The United States, in contrast, let its own victory in the Cold War go to its head with disastrous invasions and coercive projects to remake entire regions. And today, the impulse is to wall off major trading powers and adversaries and pursue forward presence to deter rivals. Much of the American political class is also deeply fearful of trade agreements. These are two very different countries, but Vietnam provides America an antidotal geopolitical model worth reflecting on.

Foreign policy mandarins have spent years fighting over what to make of former President Donald Trump. At heart, is he a hawk or a dove? Does he hope to be a new Nixon, capable of seeking detente with enemies despite (or even because of) his mean streak? Or perhaps a new Reagan, focused on achieving "peace through strength"?I might ask it a different way: Who cares? New political science research suggests that Trump's personal views are not the most important part of the puzzle. In short, it's the advisers, stupid. This may sound like received wisdom, but its implications are profound. Researchers created an unprecedented dataset of minutes from presidential meetings related to foreign policy during the Cold War. Using complex statistical methods, they found that the relative hawkishness of a president's advisers is a remarkably good predictor of whether a leader will make "conflictual decisions" regarding an adversary.The differences can be stark. If you assemble the most hawkish group of presidential advisers from the Cold War, the model predicts they would make six times as many aggressive choices as the least hawkish group. Over the course of a presidency, that could mean hundreds of extra moves liable to spark new conflicts or escalate simmering disputes."Who dominates the room [...] does seem to have a systematic effect" on whether presidents choose hawkish or dovish paths, said Tyler Jost, a professor at Brown University who co-led the project.Now, Trump has a unique opportunity. The new research finds that hawkishness is surprisingly consistent from administration to administration; in fact, it varies more within administrations than between them — a statistical testament to the power of the so-called foreign policy "blob." Perhaps more than any president in recent memory, Trump has the chance to ditch advocates of global primacy and hire proponents of a more restrained U.S. foreign policy.Indeed, the former president is spoiled for choice. Most candidates for posts in a new Trump administration now agree that Washington should shift its focus to Asia by pursuing real retrenchment in Europe and the Middle East. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) — a close Trump ally and top vice presidential candidate — has slammed U.S. military adventurism, called for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, and even voted in favor of removing U.S. troops from Syria in December.New think tanks have popped up to support this viewpoint, and some old conservative stalwarts have refashioned themselves as America Firsters who want to help shape a different, more populist vision of U.S. foreign policy. These groups are creating staffing pipelines for a new brand of conservative foreign policy, and the consequences of their investment could go far beyond 2024.The transition battleThe Heritage Foundation wants you to know that it's changed. Once a premier home for neocons and uber hawks, the eminence grise of conservative politics now loudly calls for the U.S. to pull back from the Middle East and Europe, all while railing against inefficient military spending.Heritage's shift reflects broader changes in the conservative movement dating back to Trump's first election in 2016. "The real America First foreign policy position recognizes that the last few decades were characterized by a series of blunders," argued Micah Meadowcroft, the research director at the conservative Center for Renewing America (CRA) and a former staffer in the Trump White House. "Our leadership class messed up badly" during the so-called unipolar moment by launching a global crusade against terrorism and ignoring China's rise, Meadowcroft told RS.Conservative realists hope that recognizing this shift will allow the U.S. to focus all of its attention on preparing for — and hopefully deterring — a war with China over Taiwan. "China remains the single greatest threat to American interests in the world today, and we just haven't been acting like it," said Alex Velez-Green, a former adviser to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) now based at Heritage. "My view is that a new administration will really need to prioritize it."The key question is how to strike a balance between deterrence and provocation. Velez-Green draws on a "peace through strength" tradition exemplified by Elbridge Colby, a prominent China hawk who appears poised to get a major role in a new Trump administration. While all hope to avoid war, other realists have argued for a more conservative approach to Beijing's rise.Regardless of the reasons behind this broader shift, conservatives have made big investments in order to shape its path. The most influential effort is Heritage's Project 2025, an initiative that has raised millions of dollars to identify potential staffers for a second Trump administration and plan policies to help vault it back into the White House.For supporters of a more restrained foreign policy, Project 2025 has a lot to offer. While any Heritage program is bound to make up a big tent of conservative views, "the leadership of Project 2025 is a lot more aligned to a more Trumpian strain of America First, which is a more narrow, national-interest oriented idea," said Sumantra Maitra of the CRA, who has advised on the effort. Will Ruger, who Trump nominated as his ambassador to Afghanistan, welcomed Heritage's shift toward a "much more prudential approach to American foreign policy."But there are still some reasons to doubt Heritage's restraint bona fides. Project 2025's transition manifesto makes clear that the conservative tone setter is not quite ready to drop its commitment to fighting global terrorism and keeping down America's parochial enemies, however weak they may now be.Of course, Heritage is far from the only game in town. Its foreign policy team has often found common cause with the CRA, a right-wing think tank with restraint-oriented views on international affairs that Maitra said will be a "key player" in the planning for a second Trump term. Trump himself reportedly read and at least partially endorsed Maitra's CRA paper calling for a major down-sizing of the U.S. role in NATO.On the other side, traditional hawks at organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute continue to hold sway in both mainstream and conservative media, as Meadowcroft pointed out. But many prominent hard-line hawks — like one-time Trump adviser John Bolton — have had a sufficiently large break with the MAGA movement to make them persona non grata in any future Trump White House.The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) appears determined to split the difference. Like Heritage, AFPI has questioned the wisdom of continued U.S. aid to Ukraine and pushed hard for Europe to shoulder more of the burden of its own defense. But the startup policy outfit — created as something of a White House in waiting — has a bit of a neocon streak when it comes to the Middle East, with a particular focus on countering Iranian influence and supporting Israel.There is no love lost between Heritage and AFPI, as journalist Sam Adler-Bell recently noted in the New York Times. "A.F.P.I. partisans see Heritage as a latecomer to the Trump train, establishment wolves in 'America First' clothing," Adler-Bell wrote. "Some at Heritage see A.F.P.I. as a redoubt of precisely those unreliable Trump appointees — grifters and RINOs — who trade on their relationships with the president to ensure they can continue to run the show." This antipathy helps to explain why AFPI has a separate Trump staffing effort, known as the America First Transition Project.One should note, however, that the two don't always disagree. They share some staff and have both kept strong ties to more traditional foreign policy shops. Part of this stems from the fact that even the more dovish members of the GOP national security world are more hawkish on, say, the Middle East and Venezuela than hard-line realists. But, on balance, restrainers are more skeptical of AFPI than their old foes at Heritage.It remains unclear which side has Trump's ear. AFPI associates — including Fred Fleitz, Keith Kellogg, and John Ratcliffe — often show up on lists of current and potential future Trump advisers. He also reportedly consults with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who rank among the most hawkish figures in American politics. (Pompeo's habit of calling himself a "realist" is a particular point of frustration for many America Firsters.)But, as efforts like Project 2025 demonstrate, Trump will no longer be stuck with old-school options on every front. There are no hardcore restrainers known to be in the running for major roles, but the former president is reportedly considering Richard Grenell and Kash Patel — both of whom have a somewhat less interventionist streak — for top jobs in his administration. And, as just about everyone I spoke with noted, there's still plenty of time for other potential nominees to gain ground before the election."The bench is deeper, and therefore there are more folks to turn to if a president wants to go in a restraint direction," said Ruger.Trump 2.0Much of the planning for a second Trump administration revolves around staffing. This laser focus is a response to his first term, in which advisers and officials often took steps to block the implementation of the president's preferred policies.Take Syria. When Trump ordered that U.S. troops be withdrawn from the country in 2019, the move sparked an uproar among policy experts who argued that it would leave our Kurdish allies in the lurch. Jim Jeffrey — then the special envoy to Syria — persuaded Trump to leave a token force in the country but later revealed that "we were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there."Trump world is looking to make sure that never happens again. Heritage wants a new administration to make sweeping personnel changes that would allow Trump to replace thousands of federal bureaucrats with more sympathetic cadres.This is both an opportunity and a challenge for restrainers. On the "challenge" side, Trump has increasingly signaled that he wants to use military force against Mexican cartels, a proposal that most realists reject as dangerous and counterproductive. And, as Jost of Brown University notes, presidents don't just select their advisers based on hawkishness. They have to make decisions about which advisers will appease which constituencies in their base, among other considerations. In Trump's case, loyalty to the president appears to be another key criterion.But loyalty to Trump doesn't get your nomination through Congress. For many top jobs, nominees will have to persuade the old-school hawks in the Senate that they won't change too much about the status quo. Restraint-oriented nominees will, however, get help from the growing group of young America Firsters on Capitol Hill, not to mention the changing of the guard symbolized by Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) decision to step down from leadership.It will be up to Trump to decide whether he picks less controversial candidates for these positions or simply relies on "acting" appointees, as he did at the end of his first term. The former president will have much more room to maneuver when it comes to the National Security Council, whose leaders don't require confirmation.These challenges aside, the decisions that Trump makes in a potential second term could have a massive, lasting impact on the direction of conservative foreign policy. To better understand how, a quick history lesson is in order.In 2007, Democratic foreign policy big wigs founded the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a hawkish center-left think tank first conceived as a government in waiting for Hillary Clinton. When Barack Obama beat Clinton in the primaries, he made the fateful decision to soften his stance on the Iraq War and staff up his team with CNAS acolytes.The CNAS crew — in addition to Clinton herself — earned powerful roles in Obama's administration that allowed them to steer the president away from his anti-war rhetoric on the campaign trail. The result was a vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on where you stand. The more hawkish CNAS staffers got coveted government experience (and connections) that put weight behind their arguments. Once they left government, they took their place as the sages of liberal foreign policy, with many returning in 2020 to staff the Biden administration.Obama's decision may have been practical. The progressive foreign policy landscape was, and in many ways still is, short on funding and candidates for high-level jobs. But Trump has the virtue of a genuine choice. The former president probably won't reject staffers based on their hawkishness — but perhaps he should. Research suggests it just might prevent the next war before it happens.