The global landscape of peace and security has undergone significant transformation in recent decades. Today’s conflicts are increasingly complex, protracted, and multidimensional, demanding more holistic, adaptive, and innovative responses. There is a need for more integrated and forward-looking strategies that span across the entire peace continuum. This necessitates rethinking how the international community conceptualizes and operationalizes peace efforts and interventions from the deployment of peace operations to longer-term peacebuilding processes.
To contribute to ongoing efforts to strengthen approaches to peacekeeping and peacebuilding, this workshop examined how the international community can improve coherence and integration across the peace continuum. Participants included member-state experts, UN officials, and civil society representatives. In addition, the workshop gathered voices from outside the New York policy space by convening stakeholders based in the field.
Key takeaways from the discussion are summarized below:
- Financing conflict prevention must be treated as essential. The Peacebuilding Fund in particular plays a key role to finance peacebuilding and prevention in transition settings. Discussions also raised the need to empower the UN Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO).
- National ownership has to be inclusive and locally rooted. Special attention to the social contract, the role of national resources for financing, and building national capacity should be given to strengthen national ownership. In addition, the mandates for Peace Operations should allow for changes to be made in response to local needs, which change over time.
- Peace, climate, and development agendas should work together, not apart. The challenge is to increase climate related financing in conflict-affected countries.
