Early Warning about Violent Conflict: Better Intelligence for Early Action 1
The EU has been at the forefront of international efforts to prevent conflicts before they escalate
when it adopted the Gothenburg programme in 2001. The commitment to these goals has been
reaffirmed in several Council conclusions, most recently by the Foreign Affairs Council (12/5/2015)
stressing the ‘the key importance of early warning and conflict prevention to reduce the risk of
outbreak or recurrence of violent conflict and human suffering’ in the context of endorsing the EU’s
comprehensive approach. Considerable progress has been made, particularly on the information
gathering side and the piloting of an Early Warning System capturing conflict and mass atrocity risks
in the context of the “Responsibility to Protect”.
However, the EU can and must do better improve early warning for early action, particularly as the
consequences of conflict spread geographically more widely and become diverse as the fall-out from
the Arab uprising and conflict engulfing Syria and Iraq have shown. While there have been some
successes, too often the EU and its member have been concentrating to much of its material and
political resources on countries already in crises, finding themselves overtaken by developments on
the ground and thus losing opportunities to positively influence outcomes with less cost and risk.
Sometimes EU and member state action has increased conflicts risks in ways that were not
anticipated. The consultation process over a European Global Strategy is an opportunity to tackle
some of the underlying problems hindering the EU from becoming better at producing more
accurate, more timely and more relevant knowledge (“warning intelligence”) and adjusting decisionmaking in a way that facilitates preventive action. Where are the key areas for improvement?
1. warnings are often not timely, but generally late or too late, particularly in countries that
are “off-the-radar” or in situations of high “noise” and “deceit”. A key factor here is scarcity
of experts with deep qualitative country and regional knowledge, which is exacerbated by
poor quality handovers, job rotation and other career disincentives to grow such expertise,
as well as insufficient sharing of information from member states, especially in cases of
high political sensitivity.
o Potential solutions: Mapping of country/regional expertise with member states to
identify key areas of scarcity, which could be addressed through recruitment or
closer cooperation with outside experts. The EU should also create with member
states country/regional expert career tracks and consider how to better use
accumulated expertise of diplomats and staff on field missions. Training in how to
calibrate the “betting-average” in warning would also help to address the risks of
over- and under-warning and how to handle uncertainty.
2. Insufficient awareness among analysts and decision-makers of political and cognitive
biases affecting their judgements as the historically most frequent cause of warning failures.
Cognitive biases could be “mirror imaging” where people fill information gaps with
assumptions about how they would react (e.g. Saakashvilli’s surprising actions in Georgia
2008). In the case of the EU, there are also diverse motivational biases at play when
diplomats and politicians can fall prey to wishful thinking and denial depending on how
1
This paper was presented at a public workshop on Intelligent Foreign Policy on 14 December 2015 in
Stockholm, organised jointly by the EU Institute for Security Studies (EU-ISS) and the Swedish Institute of
International Affairs (UI). The paper draws on findings undertaken by Professor Meyer and the FORESIGHT
team consisting of John Brante, Chiara de France and Florian Otto with funding from the European Research
Council (further information here). For further information please contact t the author at
Christoph.meyer@kcl.ac.uk
politically desirable or uncomfortable the consequences of a forecast are or whether a
foreign actor is seen as hostile or friendly, weak or strong.
o Potential solutions: The EU should appoint an official responsible for estimative
intelligence who could, inter alia, organise training for all analysts and decisionmakers (!) on such biases distort their judgements and how to safeguard against
them. Internal forecasting tournaments and follow-up training for the best
forecasters can further boost accuracy (see DARPA, Tetlock)
3. warnings are often insufficiently intelligible and relevant to decision-makers, lacking
specificity and actionability. This is partly because warning producers do not know the
warning recipients well enough to tailor their warnings to recipients’ ways of thinking, “hot
buttons”, evidential preferences, instrument lead-times, and receptivity. In large
bureaucracies with a strong hierarchical culture, especially the Commission, but also EEAS,
there are too few opportunities for producers and consumers of warnings to interact closely
enough and for mutual learning to take place.
o Potential solutions: Build a early-warning system “back to front”, i.e. focuses on the
decision-makers and build stronger relationships between warning sources and
responders through more opportunities for personal interaction, including the
creation of briefers for senior decision-makers, and “reaching-down” to where the
knowledge is located. It would also help to use anticipatory analysis not just for
warnings, but also for highlighting opportunities for peace-building, thus changing
the incentive structure for politicians and creating a potential for “success stories”.
4. Problem 3 is all the more problematic as our findings show that source credibility is more
important to warning impact, than warning content: knowledgeable warning producers are
not believed or warnings are discounted because of lack of seniority or perceived political or
national bias. Warning can also be a career risk in such settings. This is a key issue for the EU
as a multi-national organisation where warnings come with a national flag – warnings
about Russia from Estonian, Polish or Swedish sources are seen in a certain light. Senior
Decision-makers disbelieve good evidence for problematic (political) reasons, trust sources
that are not necessarily knowledgeable (who have just been to the country).
o Potential solutions: Diverse national perspective can generate “alternative
hypotheses” for free, which is helpful when avoiding conventional/group thinking
errors, but this implies that member states need to understand that their “sources”
and “understanding” is not necessarily superior and perspective of others are not
“inferior”. Better cooperation between analysts and post-mortem studies could
promote such an understanding of how national intelligence can lead to a better
overall understanding. Agreeing an EU warning doctrine would help as in the US.
5. EU institutions, but especially the Council structures, are insufficiently flexible in their
decision-making processes to react to warnings at a time when a conflict has not reached
the media headlines yet. Policy-planning and decision-making processes are not knowledge
sensitive enough and not enough time and resources are ringfenced for anticipatory analysis
and preventive action vis-à-vis the immediate demands of managing current crises.
a. Potential solutions: There need to be regular decision-making points in the diary of
senior decision-makers for the consideration of warnings. Moreover, the EU should
create more opportunities for considering less-likely/most surprising events and
create opportunities for warning sources, who have been ignored by their direct
superiors, to fast-track warnings upwards, potentially to the EU warning officer. One
could also use dissent/whistleblowing channels for such a purpose. Finally, the EU
should consider devolving more authority for preventive action downwards to
delegations or special representatives to enable early action.
6. Finally, early warning and response in the EU has been hampered by a lack of clarity over
the EU’s priorities and interests, as well as how it wants to handle the trade-offs that
inevitable occur in preventive action as part of foreign policy-making, including how to
handle issues of authoritarian rule, human rights violations, criminal justice, extremist
ideologies when they come in conflict with preventing violence or mass atrocities in the
short-term. The EU needs to avoid conflict warning becoming a silo run by experts where
data comes first and foreign policy is conceived in a technocratic or legalistic way.
o Potential solutions: The Global Strategy should be as clear as it can be about its
priorities and interests, without being overly rigid. It would be helpful if it was able
to say what it does NOT regard as a priority and how it sees particular trade-offs,
rather than pretending that all the desirable goals can be achieved at the same time.
Creating clear lines of accountability for who/which body is responsible for acting or
not acting on a warning would be helpful, ideally such a function should be situated
at the level of a new body akin to the US National Security Council.