Introduction

Conflict prevention is an emerging norm. It's proliferation through out the rhetoric and discourse of governments, international organizations, the United Nations, and non-governmental organizations is immense. Googled, conflict prevention turns up 25.5 million websites. This observation is hardly novel, but it does warrant our attention because the whole notion of conflict prevention raises some pretty interesting questions, which I'll turn to below, along with what this column is all about. First, let me give a brief overview the term and its related practices.