Program Overview

As crises and conflicts become increasingly transnational in their implications and effects, U.S. policymakers, international organizations, philanthropies, and issue networks are searching for more effective policy approaches to address them. Disaster response and conflict management, particularly in weak states and fragile countries, present multidimensional challenges to policymakers. Rarely are the effects limited to one country, and the spillover can include wider conflict, health crises, economic dislocation, transnational crime, and terrorism. The effort to address these issues is made more complicated by the diffusion of global power that is transforming the international order. The Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation (C3), formerly the Post-Conflict Reconstruction (PCR) Project, assesses the dynamics in conflict- and crisis-affected areas and develops innovative strategies to speed, enhance, and strengthen international crisis response and conflict management.

The Program works in three priority areas:

Crisis: Strategic approaches to disaster risk management and humanitarian assistance

In an era in which natural hazards are increasing in frequency and intensity, disaster risk management is emerging as a priority issue of governance, conflating traditional distinctions between humanitarian and development practice. Affected states and donor governments are shifting attention from international assistance paradigms to national self-management capabilities, but they struggle with how to structure support for disaster preparedness and response and align it with longer-term development and poverty reduction goals. The objective of the crisis pillar is to develop a deeper understanding of the intersections between disaster risk management and governance as a means to promote U.S. policy solutions for building disaster-resilient societies.

Conflict: Governance, legitimacy, and stability in complex environments

Most armed conflicts originate in struggles over governance, whether to establish legitimate structures, protect existing privileges, or facilitate illicit activities by undermining stable structures. Rarely do such conflicts involve just two or three coherent groups with clear motivations, as some models and doctrines assume. More often, they involve a complex mix of nonstate, subnational, and state actors with uncertain and often shifting motivations and allegiances. Clear successes in conflict management, peacebuilding, stabilization, and counterinsurgency are so often elusive that policymakers have been looking for new approaches that account for the complexity of today’s conflict environments.

The conflict pillar offers new ways of understanding these complex dynamics and motivations, by questioning the assumptions of existing approaches, accounting for the politics of governance, and evaluating policies that affect the capacity, legitimacy, and stability of state, nonstate, and local actors and institutions.

Cooperation: Smart Multilateralism

It is widely accepted that solutions to transnational problems require international cooperation. However, governments regularly express frustration with the slow and inadequate results of multilateral processes, which often represent the lowest common denominator. In addition, core international bodies—such as the IMF, UN Security Council, and World Bank—are plagued by perceptions of ineffectiveness and illegitimacy, in part because their decisionmaking bodies do not reflect the changing global power landscape. Despite these frustrations, governments will continue to resort to multilateral groupings to address difficult transnational problems in the absence of practical alternatives.

The goal of Smart Multilateralism is to understand better international organizations and multilateral processes, and to offer recommendations on how, through them, U.S. policymakers can more effectively address global problems and achieve U.S. interests in an increasingly multipolar environment.