Conflict prevention, more than other fields of international politics and foreign policy, is characterized by a multiplicity of state and non-state actors, giving rise to particularly complex coordination challenges. This article evaluates the extent to which the German response to these challenges, the action plan for civilian conflict prevention, has succeeded in its aim of improving coordination with the ultimate aim to increase policy coherence between different governmental agencies as well as with civil society actors. It finds that although the general approach is indeed promising, the government's lack of commitment prevents it from tapping into the action plan's full potential.
Introduction 1Successful conflict prevention above all depends on effective coordination. In any peace operation, a plethora of actors, national ministries, international organizations and NGOs is involved. In the mid-1990s, researchers and practitioners became increasingly aware that these actors' efforts can, if incoherent, lead to unintended negative consequences (contravening the 'do no harm' rule), 2 and that in order to avoid these in conflict-prevention, coordination as the main 1 A previous version of this paper was presented at the research colloquium of the Institute for Development and Peace (INEF), University of Duisburg-Essen. We would like to thank the participants, in particular Tobias Debiel and Angelika Spelten, for helpful comments. We are furthermore grateful to Christian Reisinger as well as the editor and reviewers of International Peacekeeping for providing valuable suggestions.
The obvious demand for more selfreflection in security policy raises the issue of reflexivity of and in peace research itself. This article recalls the reflexive potential of critical peace research, but aims to expand it to a reflexive peace research based on its claim to reconcile its scientific approach and its practice orientation. Because peace research in this view is thus constantly involved in and dealing with political conflicts, it needs a reflexive perspective to be able to scientifically analyze these conflicts. This argument is further illustrated by the methodological challenges of empirical conflict analysis. The article ends with the outlook that in addition to the critical approaches also postcolonial perspectives offer promising links to pursue peace research as a practiceoriented, reflexive science.
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