The Project on Prevention of Armed Conflict

The PTF project on conflict prevention reflects the high level of importance given to this issue by the Swedish government and Swedish organizations.  Conflict prevention has in fact been recognized as one of the cornerstones in Swedish foreign policy. At a governmental, donor and NGO level, Sweden has taken on a role to integrate conflict sensitive perspectives and work actively on prevention. While many Swedish organisations are already working in the area of conflict prevention, few actually define their activities and measures as preventative. It is important to draw together the existing knowledge and experience on this issue and examine how organisations can strengthen their various approaches to work on the prevention of armed conflicts.

 I n this project three working groups have been established; one on impact analysis (Do No Harm and Reflecting on Peace Practices), one on context analysis with integrated conflict perspectives, and one on developing a scenario based training on prevention of armed conflict. The scenario-based training is going to be a three-day exercise, highlighting long-term structural preventive measures as well as operational measures.  The scenario will be based on a fictional country developed by the Swedish Defence in their biannual Viking exercise on coordination in peacekeeping. Whereas the military exercise will take place when the peace process in this fictional country has failed, the PTF project will attempt to make use of preventive measures at a much earlier stage in an attempt to avoid such conflict. The scenario-based training will be held in April 2005 in cooperation with the Folke Bernadotte Academy, a governmental agency.

Alongside the working groups for this conflict prevention project, the PTF also arranges seminars, training sessions, and workshops on topics related to the over-arching project focus.  Some topics include Early Warning Systems and the work of EU and UN on conflict prevention. Most of these are open events and are not restricted to project participants only.

The current project was initiated August 2004 and runs till December 2005.