NARRATOR: Civil wars. Ethnic strife. Refugee flows. Genocide. The world is plagued with conflicts. What can be done to stop them?

MICHAEL LUND: Getting engaged in a situation before it becomes a matter of armed mobilization is a lot more effective than trying to mediate a civil war that's already raging.

J. BRIAN ATWOOD: You've got to get out, way out ahead of these kinds of situations.

KUMAR RUPESINGHE: We are beginning to see again another movement, a humanitarian movement, which is going to say, at least in the 21st Century, that we are going to find the instruments to the prevention of war.

LOUISE DIAMOND: This is a very big shift in human consciousness.

NARRATOR: The traditional concept of war has been nation against nation, the military forces of one country fighting those of another across national borders. Since the end of the Cold War, that concept has shifted. For the most part, conflicts now take place within national borders or between ethnic or communal groups: Somalia...Bosnia...Rwanda...Armenia/Azerbaijan... Liberia, to name just a few.

In some cases, the central government has completely collapsed. The combatants are often poorly trained and loosely organized. Overwhelmingly, the victims are civilians, women and children.

The diplomatic system -- shaped by the old concept of war -- was designed to guarantee security among nation-states. This system reacted to conflicts after they exploded -- conflicts which for half a century were viewed through a framework of East versus West. But the simple political geometry of the Cold War -- "us" versus "them" -- has given way to a complex, multilateral world in which old formulas for determining strategic interests don't work.

Today there is a growing movement to redesign the international system to catch up with the changes in the character of warfare.

Ms. DIAMOND: Somebody has estimated that there are 5000, maybe 10,000 different distinct peoples on this planet and there are only -- what is the latest -- 187 nation-states in the U.N.

NARRATOR: Louise Diamond is executive director of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy, a private group with peace-building initiatives in Cyprus, East Asia and the Horn of Africa.

Ms. DIAMOND: So, that tells you that there's going to be tension at a different level and the kind of diplomacy you need to prevent that kind of tension is very different.

NARRATOR: Called "preventive diplomacy," or more broadly, "preventive action," it consists of actions taken to address disputes before they escalate into bloodshed.

JOHN MARKS: We bring people together, we try to discover what they have in common, and then we act on it.

NARRATOR: John Marks runs Search for Common Ground, a private group that uses television and radio programming to encourage dialogue in potential trouble spots.

Mr. MARKS: I would define preventive action as actions that can be taken by government, non-government and international organizations before conflict gets out of hand to prevent it from getting out of hand.

NARRATOR: One of the hallmarks of preventive action is the increasing role played by non-governmental groups, or NGOs. While governments and the United Nations are still the primary actors in resolving conflicts, increasingly it is private groups that pave the way. With ongoing, in-the-field experience, these groups often have the clearest understanding of the situation on the ground. They also enjoy a degree of trust based on their neutrality which is generally unavailable to governments.

Mr. MARKS: The basic principle of preventive action is that all sectors have a role to play. Governments do their thing. They negotiate borders, they negotiate peace treaties. That's absolutely at the heart of what goes on, but there are other things that NGOs do better.

Ms. DIAMOND: Non-government organizations, unofficial parties, can convene dialogues that give people the chance to explore things without being on record, without having to report to the press, without having to lock-in a commitment.

NARRATOR: Citizens of the region in question, with a personal stake in preserving the peace, play a crucial role.

Ms. DIAMOND: In order for a peace process to be sustainable over time, to be enduring, you have to involve the people from many walks of life -- the civil society, official society, the private sector, the business community, the media all together work toward a viable peace.

NARRATOR: Preventive action can take many forms:

...the presence of peacekeeping forces

...mediation by neutral, private organizations

...election monitoring

...citizen diplomacy, often by former high ranking officials

...balanced media programming designed to counter hate rhetoric

...training in conflict resolution

...human rights monitoring and promoting adherence to humanitarian law

...support for institutions of civil society

...development assistance that is sensitive to local conditions.

Even relief groups such as CARE and the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, normally associated with responding to crises, are increasingly focusing on preventing them. They cite "donor fatigue," meaning the donating public on which they depend has grown weary of humanitarian emergencies, most of which are man-made. Many relief groups see prevention as a more cost-effective use of resources.

For twelve years, El Salvador was wracked by a vicious civil war. Much of the conflict centered around inequitable land distribution. After the U.N.-mediated settlement in 1992, tensions remained high because of disputes over vague property boundaries.

CARE, with financial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development, now runs a program that helps provide former combatants with titles to farmland. With the help of Global Positioning Satellites and computers, boundaries are quickly and accurately determined. CARE also provides the new landowners with technical assistance to succeed as farmers.

By addressing the root causes of the original conflict, programs such as this can help build a stable society and prevent war from erupting again.

WILLIAM PERRY, Secretary of Defense: [5 March 1996, before House National Security Committee.] We have provided three lines of defense. The first line of defense, not well-understood but very important, is preventive defense. That is, we want to prevent these dangers from becoming military threats to the United States.

NARRATOR: The Clinton administration has often spoken out about the benefits of a preventive approach.

WARREN CHRISTOPHER, Secretary of State:[13 January 1993, Confirmation Hearing.] We can't afford careening from crisis to crisis. We must have a new diplomacy that can anticipate and prevent crises like those in Iraq, and Bosnia, and Somalia rather than simply manage them.

STEPHEN STEDMAN: I think that policymakers are looking for a magic wand to make very intractable conflicts go away.

NARRATOR: Professor Stephen Stedman of Johns Hopkins University challenged many of the assumptions about preventive diplomacy in "Alchemy for a New World Order" in the journal Foreign Affairs.

Prof. STEDMAN: The original proponents of this idea made it sound like it was simple to do, that it was riskless, it was costless, and that all it took was essentially saying the magic words "preventive diplomacy" and these conflicts would go away. Now I think you see a lot more sophistication in thinking about what it will take to systematically try to create effective policies of preventive action.

Mr. ATWOOD: There's an entirely different orientation that one has.

NARRATOR: Brian Atwood directs the U.S. Agency for International Development, the chief government agency responsible for administering economic assistance abroad.

Mr. ATWOOD: Preventive diplomacy requires one to have early warning systems in place. It requires one to see the beginnings of a crisis. It requires one to understand the kinds of pressures that bring about crisis. And it requires action before some of these stories get on the front page of the newspaper.

NARRATOR: One of the key components of preventive action is the need for early warning of impending conflict. Certain indicators can signal trouble in a society, especially when grouped together:

...Environmental degradation -- deforestation, drought or scarcity of clean water -- increases competition for resources while destroying the land's ability to support the people.

...Rapid population growth magnifies these conditions.

There are many other early warning signs:

...inequitable land distribution

...excessive expenditures on arms at the expense of health and education

...autocratic rule

...and the use of mass media to spread hate rhetoric by one ethnic group against another.

Michael Lund is the author of "Preventing Violent Conflicts: A Strategy for Preventive Diplomacy."

Mr. LUND: When leaders of an ethnic group begin to talk about the need for their group to have its own state, to have its own republic or political sovereignty, and begin to talk about how other groups are its enemies, this is at least one of the danger signs.

Prof. STEDMAN: We are very limited in our ability to predict the outbreak of violent conflict. For conflicts to really become violent, there generally involves a degree of choice in leadership and strategy by individuals, and that we're never going to be able to predict.

NARRATOR: Another problem with current early warning models is that too many regions can show potential for conflict, overwhelming policymakers with choices.

Mr. LUND: Just because the red light goes on in a place doesn't guarantee that the corresponding problem is going to occur the next week or whatever. But you get alerted to the situation and you look closer as a result and you start to talk about what might done if certain things happen.

Mr. RUPESINGHE: The concept is very fashionable now, early warning, but I think it's still very much a concept.

NARRATOR: Kumar Rupesinghe is secretary-general of International Alert, a London-based NGO actively involved in conflict prevention.

Mr. RUPESINGHE: Early warning must be defined as early action and it is only if one can design an early warning system which has an early action component, then I think you can talk about an early warning system. Otherwise, I think it is just an information system which nobody responds to.

NARRATOR: As with much of the evolving field of preventive action, early warning systems are very much in the formative stages. But modern communications systems such as the Internet permit timely, citizen-based information sharing that can help alert the international community to impending trouble. What has yet to come is a coherent, coordinated system for routinely collecting, distributing and acting on this information.

Mr. RUPESINGHE: What we are arguing is for a kind of a clearinghouse for early warning where a number of organizations, if you like, a consortium of organizations -- humanitarian organizations, development organizations, human rights organizations, peace and conflict-resolution organizations -- could in a way work together both to monitor conflicts and to develop response systems.

NARRATOR: Perhaps the greatest challenge to preventive action today is generating the political will to respond to a potential conflict before the shocking images of human suffering make it on to the evening news.

Mr. ATWOOD: You have a very hard time getting people's attention if something isn't on the front pages of the newspaper or on television. I think it's extremely important that we have a much more intelligent approach to the world because we can't wait and react when these situations blow up. They become very intractable at that point.

NARRATOR: Peace, however tenuous, rarely makes "good television." Which of these scenes is more likely to grab your attention? This? [Fighting in Chechnya.] Or, this? [Pastoral scene.]

Thus, the paradox for preventive action is that when it works, you don't hear about it. Only its failures get headlines.

Mr. MARKS: Gruesome pictures of babies dying or people starving can spur action. Preventive action is not that because we've failed in doing our job when those pictures appear.

NARRATOR: Chances are you haven't heard much about preventive action in Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic. To prevent a conflict with neighboring Serbia or Albania, the Macedonian government requested a United Nations peacekeeping force in 1993. Over 400 American troops make up part of the force.

LT EDWARD SYDZINA, American Peacekeeper in Macedonia: It seems like the people are very friendly. All the towns we walk through and have driven through, everybody was waving, and it looks like it's going to be a real pleasure to work out in this area.

Mr. LUND: It's a multinational force. Its main aim is to monitor the border between Macedonia and Serbia. But its presence there has signaled an interest by the United States and the U.N., generally, in maintaining stability. So, it's had a broader, a calming effect on the tensions, the mainly ethnic tensions in that country, as well as in its relationships to its neighbors.

NARRATOR: Search for Common Ground produced a television series to help build understanding between Macedonia's ethnic communities. Many other preventive initiatives are ongoing. While serious problems remain, thus far Macedonia has managed to avoid the conflict that has shadowed other parts of the Balkan region.

South Africa's successful transition from apartheid to democracy is another triumph of preventive action, although rarely recognized as such.

Mr. MARKS: It wasn't diplomats in Washington or in Europe doing it, it was South Africans. They got some learning from here, they got some training from people in the conflict-resolution field, but it was mostly home-grown.

NARRATOR: In contrast, the world watched in horror in 1994 as the central African country of Rwanda was gripped by systematic genocide that left over half-a-million dead and created a massive refugee crisis. Despite well-documented warnings of the potential for conflict, the international community stood on the sidelines, unable to agree on the proper response. Afterward, the U.S. military coordinated a costly relief effort to bring food and supplies to the survivors.

Mr. RUPESINGHE: How do we change political will? How do we get governments to care and to be concerned about issues that they would like to forget about? And for this what we need is what I would call "strategic coalitions" which can impact on the political constituencies and which can work effectively in lobbying for situations and to bring them up in the agenda. And I think this is happening.

NARRATOR: Today, Burundi, next to Rwanda and with a similar ethnic makeup, is torn by spasms of ethnic slaughter in a growing civil war that has so far killed 150,000 people. In July 1996, the fragile coalition government fell to a military coup. Despite the lack of strategic interests in Burundi, an array of international efforts have been underway to stem the bloodshed.

Mr. RUPESINGHE: What you have in Burundi is the management of a conflict at a very complicated level. And at the moment, what we see is a lot of actors getting involved, including the United States, the regional actors, non-governmental organizations, all beginning to work, if you like, in harmony with each other, so as to prevent the genocide and to manage the conflict and to create frameworks in which parties would begin to have a framework for dialogue.

NARRATOR: The advanced state of the violence in Burundi makes preventive action all the more difficult.

Mr. MARKS: Unfortunately, the methodology of prevention is much weaker than the methodology of killing.

NARRATOR: Although the future of that troubled country remains in the balance, concerted efforts by a broad range of international groups have helped push Burundi on to the foreign policy radar screen.

Yet the resources the U.S. Government commits to programs aimed at preventing conflict are shrinking every year. The United States now spends less than one percent of its federal budget on foreign aid and development.

Prof. STEDMAN: Contrary to our self-image, we are not a generous nation. In terms of foreign aid, we give the lowest percentage of GNP than any other developed nation.

NARRATOR: As a result, the United States is being forced to close embassies and eliminate assistance programs abroad that contribute to stability in developing countries, stability vital to preventing conflict. Now the U.S. military is called on to participate in an increasing number of humanitarian disaster relief efforts.

Mr. ATWOOD: We should not be using the military as a first resort, we should be using them as a last resort. But increasingly, because internationally that's the only resources we have, we're finding the military in places where they don't want to be. They didn't want to be in Rwanda helping refugees after. They did a very good job of it, but we could have prevented that from happening if we had more resources. So, I think it's very shortsighted to cut our foreign aid budget.

NARRATOR: As with many new ideas, the preventive action movement is struggling for both credibility and coherence. Certain steps could improve both.

To start with, the United States should pay off its debt of over a billion dollars to the United Nations. Strapped for cash, the UN's ability to mount peacekeeping operations is severely hampered by the U.S. refusal to meet its obligations.

In the field, a common complaint is that the various actors in preventive efforts -- governmental, United Nations, NGO and local -- work independently, making a refugee camp a hodge-podge of agencies without a clear division of labor. A centralized mechanism to coordinate their efforts and avoid turf battles needs to be developed.

Mr. ATWOOD: We must use the new diplomacy and we must use international organizations to try to bring some structure, some form to this world so that everyone is practicing preventive diplomacy in the same essential manner.

NARRATOR: On the governmental level, ad hoc responses on a crisis-by-crisis basis need to give way to a routine, systematized approach.

Mr. LUND: Preventive action needs to be incorporated as a regular function, including early warning and analyzing the potential for trouble in various places and picking appropriate responses. This needs to be a regular function that our foreign policy apparatus, our State Department, AID, and so on do as a regular part of their job.

NARRATOR: Highly centralized, top-down bureaucracies such as the State Department need to devolve authority outward empowering officers abroad to pursue preventive responses as situations develop. As a society, American support for preventive action would be enhanced by a greater understanding of foreign cultures and languages.

Ms. DIAMOND: There is a unity here that there really is only one human family on this planet. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that within that one family, there are profound differences, differences of cultures, differences of language, of religion, of values, and to accept the ideal that those differences enrich us, that they don't need to be competitive.

NARRATOR: One of the main catalysts of today's conflicts is the global proliferation of small arms and light weaponry. Many of these regional feuds have festered for years, but the unregulated influx of guns has turned many low-level disputes into widespread civil wars. U.S. leadership to restrain the international arms trade would go a long way toward controlling these conflicts.

Mr. LUND: You need to figure out ways of making best use of America's strengths, for example, its leadership role, its ability to call attention to problems and commit other countries to pay attention and its ability to galvanize resources of other countries to focus on particular areas.

NARRATOR: Why should Americans care about preventing distant conflicts? With the growth of U.S. exports and four out of five people living in the developing world, stability abroad translates into prosperity at home.

Mr. ATWOOD: We have no choice but to try to find mechanisms to deal with the impending chaos in any given country or globally. If we don't do it, it's going to disrupt the global economy. It's going to mean that we won't see the growth that we want for our own economy. It's going to mean that diseases that we thought had been beaten or new diseases that we never really understood, like AIDS and Ebola virus and the like, are going to be affecting our people. We can no longer close our doors to the developing world.

NARRATOR: Beyond these pragmatic interests, Americans are increasingly calling on politicians to be accountable to moral principles.

Mr. RUPESINGHE: My own feeling is that states do not only act on interests anymore, I think they also need to act on values. And I think you have in the United States a huge, large constituency of networks and people and cities where foreign policy may not only have to be decided in Washington. People want to know what they as human beings can do about these conflict situations.

And I have great faith that if people are only mobilized and they know what they can do to build those political constituencies, to ask politicians questions, to make it a part of the political agenda, then things will happen. Isn't that all what democracy is about?

ADM JOHN SHANAHAN (USN, Ret.): One criticism I constantly hear is that preventive diplomacy costs too much, as if peace was somehow unaffordable. Well, it's true that the resources for prevention are extremely limited and congressional cuts in international affairs funding further reduce them. Yet the United States military gets $265 billion a year, 22 times the combined budget for all international affairs. If preventive diplomacy is truly our first line of defense, then we could shift just a fraction of the money spent preparing for war to programs designed to prevent war and the U.S. military might find that it could avoid the Bosnias and Somalias of tomorrow.

For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I am Jack Shanahan.