The Potential of Early Warning Mechanisms Preventing Violence based on Inequality and no Recognition Feelings Related to Identity. The Experience of ECOWAS

The evolution on security threats in the last two decades has forced international community to develop different measures and policies able to manage them. There has been a constant transformation in the international agenda for improving tools focused on facing international security and peace goals, where conflict prevention have gained an important place. The reason is that triggers of insecurity and violence situations can be avoid through the deployment of preventives measures. These policies can be used in different fields and contexts, existing a wide range of opportunities. Prevention can be implemented by immediate actions, in a short period of time, and when there is an imminent crisis with risk factors; it is the operative prevention. There is another set of measures, working in the long term, and centred on the economic, social and political stability; it is the structural prevention –a classification established by the Carnegie Commission for the Prevention of Deadly Conflicts, (1997)–. The advantage of conflict prevention is that it can prevent the escalation towards violence and even transform contexts of security threats into stable and pacific processes. There are different tools for accomplishing this goal, of which we highlight the early warning mechanisms. They work on the identification and timely alert of potential threats in circumstances of instability, geting into operation during the violence escalation. The base of their success rests on a timely collection, analysis and communication of data, since their final objective is to transform warnings into preventive measures. This proposal emphasises the role early warning mechanisms can play on the early indentification of an important risk factor present in some conflictual contexts: the link between inequality and no recognition feelings and the escalation towards violence. The main thesis is that the recognition of identities is a necessary condition for the sucess of conflict prevention. Thus, the objectives of this research are: (1) to explain how early warning works and to present the potentiality of early warning mechanisms; (2) to use the case of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as an illustration, since the organization is at the forefront of early warning and response in the African continent; (3) to expose the case of Côte d’Ivoire’s elections in 2010 and the current context of the country –an example of identity-related violence–, with the objective of drawing lessons; and (4) to develop the application of early warning mechanisms in possible future scenarios of (re)escalation of violent political contestation bases on identity and no recognition feelings.