An integrated approach to crisis and conflict prevention requires clarity on what is meant by prevention, and how the concept of prevention fits with the 2030 Agenda, sustaining peace, and other relevant frameworks. This new briefing paper by Sarah Cliffe and David Steven proposes a new paradigm for prevention that has three levels: (i) universal prevention strategies that aim to build healthy societies that manage conflict productively, provide safety and security, increase resilience, and enhance social, political, and economic inclusion; (ii) “at risk” prevention strategies that target groups, communities, and countries that face elevated risk of conflict, or where violence is highest and resilience lowest; and (iii) prevention strategies that are tailored to situations of ongoing conflict or crisis.
At the most recent Arria-formula meeting on Afghanistan on November 27, 2017, Barnett Rubin spoke on the importance of regional approaches in fostering development and peace. In his talk, Partners for Afghanistan: Linking Security, Development and Peace in the Central Asian Region.
The President of the Human Rights Council, Ambassador Joaquín Alexander Maza Martelli of El Salvador, has announced the appointment of CIC Senior Fellow Hanny Megally of Egypt to serve as a member of the Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.
The African Union is mandated to help South Sudan to ensure accountability for past human rights abuses through the establishment of a hybrid court. This mandate is derived from the Agreement for the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan, signed in 2015. The agreement also makes provision for a Commission for Truth, Reconciliation and Healing and a Compensation and Reparation Authority. In the face of continued violence in South Sudan, how can the African Union assist in enabling an effective transitional justice strategy for the country?
The Pathfinders group is convened by the governments of Brazil, Sierra Leone, and Switzerland, with support from the Center on International Cooperation.
On Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ first day in office, he signaled his intention to reform the peace and security pillar by immediately co-locating staff from the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and establishing an internal review team to work on the bigger proposals for change made by the High Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO), the Advisory Group of Experts (AGE) on the Review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture, and the Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. CIC supported some of the independent review team’s work through our report Restructuring the UN Secretariat to Strengthen Preventative Diplomacy and Peace Operations. The Secretary-General has now made proposals based on the team’s recommendation.
More than 20 years have passed since the United Nations (UN) first committed to achieving gender parity in its managerial and decision-making positions, but the organization still has a long way to go. Karin Landgren, a former senior UN official, provided the data two years ago to show that gender parity at the UN had become a “lost agenda” under the previous Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon. And in spite of a push to have a woman at the top of the UN hierarchy for the first time, the front runners in the Security Council straw polls for a new Secretary-General were largely men. (Perhaps Wonder Woman would have stood a better chance.) Yet the new Secretary-General, António Guterres, seems determined not only to talk about change but to effect it. After ensuring a 50/50 split in his own appointments at the senior level, Guterres has released this week the report of the Gender Parity Task Force: a far-reaching “System-Wide Strategy on Gender Parity,” which does not pull any punches in describing the current situation for women trying to make a career inside the UN bureaucracy.
The UN General Assembly meetings in September will no doubt be dominated by the crises of the day: an underlying theme of discussions, however, will be the less sensational topic of UN reform. The most impenetrable of all areas of the UN’s bureaucracy, its processes for financial and human resource management are generally of little interest to those outside New York’s Fifth Committee. The subject is also somewhat “tired”—Ban Ki-Moon too had management reform as a key point of his agenda—and politicized, in particular in the context of US announcements on cuts to UN contributions.
This publication examines the main cooperation fields between China and the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the post-NATO period. In doing so, this study looks at the initiation of various bilateral joint projects as a distinctive turning point in China-US relations. It argues that existence of such bilateral projects and cooperation in this region does not only produce added value for the countries in question but also have the potential to enhance the mutual relations between China and US. This study also reveals the main common priorities and practices between China and the US and concludes that they have a partial convergence in their attitude towards the infrastructure projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For the past 20 months, the Congo Research Group has documented the vast and eclectic business portfolio of Joseph Kabila, the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and his family. This report presents our conclusions, based almost entirely on legal documents.
You can find the whole report and examine the underlying documents here
The Pathfinders group is convened by the governments of Brazil, Sierra Leone, and Switzerland, with support from the Center on International Cooperation.
The Global Peace Operations Review is a website providing analysis and data on the spectrum of issues surrounding global peace and security, including civilian-led peacemaking and peacebuilding as well as uniformed peacekeeping by the United Nations, regional organizations and ad-hoc coalitions. The site’s objective is to contribute to the effectiveness of all peace operations.
We seek to provide the most comprehensive overview of multilateral contributions to conflict prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post-conflict peacebuilding. In doing so, we seek to integrate thematic and cross-cutting issues including, but not limited to, the women, peace and security agenda and countering violent extremism.
The India-U.S. relationship is presently stronger than at anytime in their history. The twin summits – less than six months apart – in September 2014 and January 2015 between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have repaired, revived and revitalized the strategic partnership. Yet there remain several hurdles to deepening the relationship, notably, geopolitical differences over Iran, Russia, Syria and India’s membership of various nuclear and missile export control regimes. Perhaps the most formidable of these in terms of immediacy and proximity is the resolution of the Iranian nuclear challenge.
