Conflict and Violence Prevention Works. How Do We Sell It Politically

In an era of rising violence and shrinking budgets, the case for prevention has never been stronger—or harder to make

The hardest thing to communicate in public policy is a non-event. Few news headlines describe when a city’s homicide rate falls quietly over a decade, when a community at risk never quite tips into gang recruitment, when a potential terrorist is redirected by a counsellor rather than arrested by a counter-terrorism unit, or when a conflict is narrowly averted. Successful prevention is often invisible. And that is why it often keeps losing to the politics of urgency.

The Architecture is Crumbling

The system designed to prevent conflict and organized violence is breaking down, and the timing could not be worse. For the past 80 years, preventing conflict and promoting peace has been at the heart of an international system anchored by the United Nations (UN). Measures were put in place to prevent major forms of organized violence from breaking out. Mechanisms were deployed to coordinate responses to crises as they emerged. Programs were financed to anticipate violence and address its root causes. It did not always work, but it held.

It is holding no longer. Armed conflicts are expanding in frequency and intensity. In 2024, there were over 60 state–based conflicts, the highest since 1946. Last year, terrorist incidents spread to 66 countries, up from 58. Organised criminal violence remains concentrated and volatile across large swaths of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East. Newer international conflicts are breaking out as a result of a breakdown of leadership and preventive diplomacy. Geopolitics is increasingly challenging the prospects for mediation, as great power rivalry weakens the cooperative frameworks that once supported peace processes. As a result, mediation efforts appear to be pursued less as a genuine path to conflict prevention and more as a means of buying time for attacks to resume.

Yet just as organized violence expands, the resources available to respond are being cut. Development assistance is projected to fall by as much as 17 percent in 2025, following a 9 percent drop the year before. Humanitarian financing collapsed to USD 15 billion in 2025, the lowest in a decade. UN peacekeeping budgets are declining. The multilateral architecture that sustained prevention programs for a generation is crumbling. In its place, military spending reached USD 2.7 trillion in 2024 and could exceed USD 3 trillion in 2025, a stark measure of how the world is choosing to respond to insecurity.

In an environment of rising militarism and declining aid, the case for conflict and violence prevention has become significantly harder to make. This is not because the evidence has weakened. It has not. Rather, there is a structural mismatch between how prevention works and how political systems reward action. Indeed, the problem is not evidence. It is incentives.

The Incentives Problem

When fear is high, leaders are rewarded for responses that look immediate and forceful, such as raids, arrests, and emergency measures. These are visible, attributable, and legible to voters. Prevention operates on a different logic by reducing risk, strengthening protective factors, and interrupting the pathways through which individuals or communities slide towards violence. It requires sustained investment over years, not news cycles. The agency that funds a gang-intervention program in a volatile neighborhood will not receive credit when, three years later, the neighborhood stays quiet. The finance minister who paid for it will almost certainly have moved on. The political leader who authorized it may no longer be in office.

The financial costs of prevention are immediate, but the returns in saved lives and social and economic benefits are not. Savings materialize slowly across health systems, courts, prisons, and the broader economy, and rarely flow back to the budget line that justified the original investment. In today’s tighter aid environment, where more must be done with less, this timing problem only intensifies. Finance ministries and donors favor interventions with immediate, visible outputs and clear attribution.

Deep institutional weaknesses compound the politics of prevention. Today, violence prevention is typically housed in small coordination units with limited authority, responsibilities scattered across multiple ministries, and budgets that are thin and unstable. Even when national prevention strategies exist on paper, they are frequently orphaned from the spending decisions that would make them real and quietly abandoned when administrations change.

The communication problem then compounds the institutional one. In high-crime environments, prevention is easily attacked as too soft, coddling the wrong people, and rewarding bad behavior. In fragile and conflict-affected settings, prevention programs are routinely crowded out by stabilization operations designed for short-term risk containment rather than long-run risk reduction. In post-conflict environments, demobilization and reintegration efforts get framed as concessions to perpetrators; in high-crime ones, gang-intervention programs are cast as working with the enemy. Decision-makers are having to prevent conflict in a world tilted towards an ever more violent equilibrium.

The deeper political problem is that prevention necessarily concentrates resources on those most at risk—the young men most vulnerable to gangs, guerrillas, or extremist recruitment, the neighborhoods most exposed to violence, and the communities most susceptible to radicalization. To critics, this looks like a subsidy for the dangerous and a slight to the law-abiding. It is neither, but the charge lands easily in polarized environments. And the communities that benefit most from prevention are rarely organized or powerful enough to fight back.

When Prevention Works

There is, however, a counter-record worth examining—and it is more substantial than the current political mood suggests. Prevention does work, and when it does, certain conditions tend to be present.

Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit embedded a public health approach within government. It sustained it through successive administrations, using data-driven targeting to focus resources on the highest-harm individuals and places—producing a large and sustained reduction in violence over more than a decade. Denmark’s Aarhus model built structured collaboration among early intervention workers, mentors, social services, and police under strong local governance—yielding measurable reductions in radicalization. Medellín, Colombia, combined institutional reform, targeted social investment, and urban upgrading to achieve a decline in homicides from some of the highest rates ever recorded in a major city. The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland coupled a negotiated political settlement with new institutions and sustained external support, dramatically reducing violence from its peak levels despite persistent underlying tensions.

What these cases share is not a program model but a political and institutional alignment. In each, violence prevention became defensible because influential actors—business communities, local political leaders, civil society coalitions, and pragmatic security officials—could explain results in plain language and hold the line against critics. Data systems made violence targetable and performance manageable. Mayors and governors were empowered and held accountable for outcomes. Prevention became, in short, a whole-of-government commitment rather than an isolated project.

What It Actually Takes

Effective prevention requires four elements that are routinely absent. A genuine institutional home with real budget authority—not a coordination function bolted onto a weaker ministry. Data systems that reliably measure risk and harm, linking outcomes to specific people and places, and making accountability possible. Coalitions broad enough to absorb political attacks: victims’ groups, faith leaders, business associations, and credible voices within security institutions. And honesty about sequencing: in the most fragile settings, some stabilization must precede prevention, but stabilization without prevention is expensive and fleeting. None of this is beyond reach. What is required, above all, is political determination and a clearer understanding of what the alternative costs.

Spiraling global insecurity is being read, in many capitals, as a vindication of harder approaches. The evidence does not support that reading. The costs of reactive, militarized responses to violence—in terms of lives, the erosion of state legitimacy, and international legal frameworks strained to the breaking point—are mounting. Prevention’s problem has never been that it does not work. It is that the political systems responsible for funding and sustaining it were not designed to reward its silent successes. Changing that is a governance challenge as much as a technical one, and certainly the more difficult of the two.