I confess I'm very old school on this. One of the best conflict analysts of this past quarter century wrote a piece in the early 1990s describing conflict prevention as alchemy for the new world order.
Politics is politics. We intervene badly in it. We don't understand the societies where we've intervening. I'm deeply skeptical of conflict prevention as an agenda, frankly, other than if you're thinking about long-term developmental transformation over the course of decades, which we're engaged in and should be engaged in.
I'm much more focused on stabilizing conflict situations. This requires defeating those who are trying to undermine peace agreements or undermine the state. It's easy sometimes to drop back to notions of prevention and political processes, etc., but ultimately, there are groups that are going to try to undermine peace, undermine the stability of these countries, and they have to be defeated. That's how you protect civilians. That's how you improve the situation in a country.
I know I sound very recalcitrant, but sometimes these softer notions, I think, obfuscate the real challenge in front of us.