Person wearing a European Union Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid vest talking to someone wearing an Azerbaijani woman.

Prevention, Peacebuilding, and Protracted Crises

This program supports efforts to prevent the outbreak of violence; to advance reforms to enhance the effectiveness of United Nations peace and security efforts; and to strengthen the nexus between humanitarian response, development assistance, and peacebuilding in countries grappling with protracted crises.

The objectives of the program are to provide an evidence base for improving responses on the ground and to contribute to policymaking in support of collective action at the global, regional, and national levels.

Preventing Crises and Building Peace

The Prevention, Peacebuilding, and Protracted Crises program works to strengthen the effectiveness of the work of the UN peace and security pillar and the coherence of UN responses in fragile and conflict affected contexts through people-centered triple nexus approaches.  

Our critical areas of work are as follows:

  • Prevention and Peacebuilding
  • Peace and Security Reform at the United Nations
  • Humanitarian Crises

Prevention and Peacebuilding

Despite the United Nations having been established to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, the multilateral system continues to focus on response rather than on prevention. The resurgence of great power competition and interstate war, the climate change crisis, and shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic only serve to increase the urgency of translating prevention and peacebuilding from rhetoric to reality. 

Our work on prevention and peacebuilding includes the following lines of effort:

Peace and security reform at the United Nations

The past decade has been marked by a precipitous decline in the perceived effectiveness and relevance of UN peace operations in responding to peace and security challenges. Through this workstream, we focus on articulating a new vision for peace operations to address the shortcomings that have become evident in existing approaches and on identifying the shifts in policy and practice necessary for the UN to plan and deploy tailored, adaptive, and people-centered missions. 

The program continues the tradition of work on peace operations at CIC, including its long-standing Global Peace Operations Review series.

Humanitarian Crises

Our work on humanitarian crises builds on two decades of work to advance peace, justice, and inclusion in crisis-affected areas. Its current efforts are guided by the conclusions of a multi-year review of efforts by the UN and its partners to operationalize the humanitarian-development-peace triple nexus, and focus  on three main areas:

This program currently focuses on three main areas:

  • Government and localization
  • Aid modalities in politically-contested circumstances
  • UN reform and capacity on the humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus
Header Photo: “Azerbaijan: helping conflict-affected families through the winter,” February 2022, © European Union/Tofiq Babayev) via CC BY-ND 2.0

Explore Our Work

Subscribe to the CIC Newsletter

Stay in touch with our latest events, publications, and other resources.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.