A/HRC/16/45 access to political decision-making, and inequality in cultural status adds a further risk factor.7 39. The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict concluded that time and again in the twentieth century, attempts at suppression of ethnic, cultural or religious differences had led to bloodshed, and in case after case, the accommodation of diversity within appropriate constitutional forms had helped to prevent bloodshed.8 The Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has conducted research showing that the likelihood of conflict increases with rising group inequality.9 The Minorities at Risk Project at the University of Maryland monitors indicators for political discrimination, cultural and economic exclusion and persecution on 283 minority groups around the world, and has found a significant link between conflict and those forms of denial of rights. B. Early warning indicators 40. Minority rights violations are often among the root causes of conflicts that have long gestation periods, root causes grounded in grievances that may bubble under the surface for years, or even decades, before violent conflict breaks out. Incorporating minority rights indicators into early warning systems would enable an earlier identification of potential conflicts.10 Other more technical early warning indicators, such as small arms flows and movements of displaced peoples, tend to reflect a situation that is already rapidly spiraling into violence. By the time those indicators trigger attention, grievances may have festered for decades, perhaps generations – generations of lost opportunities to heal rifts, avert conflict and build a cohesive society. 41. Some analysts worry about the risk of raising false alarms by flagging concerns at too early a stage. But if the response to an early warning of patterns of discrimination is to work with the Government to set up programmes that correct those patterns, then that has its own value, regardless of the impact on conflict prevention. 42. Clearly it is necessary to combine monitoring of patterns of economic and political exclusion, for example, with an analysis of the political and social context, allowing for an identification of the risk of escalation that is as accurate as possible. Better insight is needed into why certain situations of systematic exclusion escalate from chronic grievances to violent conflict. It may be due to numerous factors, such as the building up of pressure over time to intolerable levels; regime change (many studies have found a link between political transitions and increased incidence of conflict); or a specific, highly symbolic trigger, perhaps linked to an affront to a community’s identity such as the denial of status to a minority language.11 7 8 9 10 11 F. Stewart, G. K. Brown and A. Langer, “Major findings and conclusions on the relationship between horizontal inequalities and conflict”, in Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding Group Violence in Multi-ethnic Societies, Frances Stewart, ed. (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). David A. Hamburg and Cyrus R. Vance, Preventing Deadly Conflict (New York, Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1997), p. 29. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2004: Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World, pp. 41-42. S. Srinavasan, Minority Rights, Early Warning and Conflict Prevention: Lessons from Darfur (London, Minority Rights Group International, 2006). Denial of status to minority language has been linked to the onset of conflict in both the Atlantic Coast region of Nicaragua in the 1980s and in Sri Lanka in the 1950s. See S. Brunnegger, From 11