ABSTRACT
The prominence of conflict prevention as an important practice particularly of the AU and the RECs in Africa reflects the rise of an international norm – in this case, a constitutive norm that creates new actors, interests, identities, or categories of action as opposed to a regulative norm that orders and constrains behaviour. This chapter identifies parallel sites of knowledge production with regard to the emerging norm ‘conflict prevention’. Second, the knowledge transfer from ‘conflict prevention’ to the practice of ‘early warning’ is reconstructed by providing a brief overview of competing epistemological approaches on how to conduct ‘early warning’. And, finally, the application of this particular knowledge is analysed with reference to Africa as the world region with the most intensive debate about, and rich empirical examples for, these issues. Early warning systems are meant to close the gap between ‘early warning’ and ‘early action’.
