Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace
Expected Council Action
In August, the Security Council will hold an open debate on Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace, one of the signature events of Sierra Leone’s Council presidency, focusing on national and regional conflict prevention strategies. Sierra Leone’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Timothy Musa Kabba, is expected to chair the meeting. The anticipated briefers are Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support Elizabeth Spehar; AU Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security Bankole Adeoye; Executive Secretary of the Independent Commission for Peace and National Cohesion in Sierra Leone Hawa Samai, and a civil society representative.
Key Recent Developments
On 20 July 2023, Secretary-General António Guterres presented his policy brief, A New Agenda for Peace (NAfP), which underscored the urgency of focusing on conflict prevention consistent with Sustainable Development Goal 16.1, through which all states are committed to reducing all forms of violence. The NAfP emphasised that preventive tools in Article 33 of the UN Charter have been underutilised. (Article 33 directs parties to any dispute to seek a solution by peaceful means, including negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, and judicial settlement. It further asserts that the Security Council “shall, when it deems necessary, call upon the parties to settle their dispute by such means”.)
The NAfP recommended that member states and regional organisations develop prevention strategies “to address the different drivers and enablers of violence and conflict in societies”. It stressed that these strategies should have “cross-regional dimensions to address transboundary threats, collectively harvesting and building on the wealth of knowledge and expertise existing at the national level on effective conflict prevention measures”. The NAfP further recommended that the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) create a mechanism to mobilise political and financial support for national and regional strategies of states that are interested in receiving international assistance for developing and implementing their strategies.
On 26 January 2023, Japan convened an open debate on “Investment in people to enhance resilience against complex challenges” as a signature event of its Security Council presidency during the month. The discussion explored the need to invest in conflict prevention and peacebuilding as one of its core subjects, a theme of A New Agenda for Peace, which had not yet been released.
On 13 March, Japan also convened an open debate on “Promoting Conflict Prevention—Empowering All Actors Including Women and Youth”. Following the meeting, sixty-seven member states issued a joint statement at the press stakeout in which they committed to work together “to effectively incorporate proposals and recommendations made by various countries and regions into the Council’s activities to further promote conflict prevention”.
On 22 March, the PBC held an ambassadorial-level meeting on national efforts for prevention and peacebuilding, with the objective of providing a platform for member states to share good practices and lessons learned on these issues. Kenya, Norway, and Timor-Leste shared experiences based on their national prevention and peacebuilding efforts. The meeting encouraged member states to continue using the PBC as a forum for sharing experiences, best practices, and lessons learned on developing national prevention and peacebuilding strategies. It also underscored the need to promote inclusivity in these endeavours and called for stronger partnerships among international, regional, national, and local actors.
Key Issues and Options
The key issue is how to support the implementation of the recommendations contained in the NAfP regarding conflict prevention, particularly how to implement prevention strategies at the national and regional levels. The open debate could provide an opportunity for member states to share their experiences in developing national prevention strategies.
Another key issue is the need to generate the political will, resources, and capacities to support the effective implementation of national and regional strategies. Many countries have strategies for the prevention of violent extremism, crime, or domestic violence, along with national development strategies, which contain elements or precedents of a national prevention strategy. Regional strategies that have been developed to target structural drivers or root causes of conflict and may be discussed at the August open debate include the Regional Strategy for Stabilization, Recovery, and Resilience (RS-SRR) of the Lake Chad Basin Commission and the UN Strategy for Peace Consolidation, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution in the Great Lakes region.
A related issue is whether and how the open debate can feed into the ongoing negotiation on the Pact for the Future—the outcome document expected to be adopted at the Summit of the Future in September—particularly the language on conflict prevention. The co-facilitators of the negotiation, Germany and Namibia, circulated a second revised text on 17 July. The draft text, among other things, underscores the need to:
- prioritise conflict prevention and resolution by revitalising and implementing existing mechanisms for peaceful dispute settlement;
- develop and implement new mechanisms for peaceful dispute resolution, confidence-building, early warning, and crisis management at sub-regional, regional, and international levels to address new and emerging threats to peace and security;
- intensify diplomacy and mediation efforts to ease tensions, including early diplomatic interventions;
- urge the Secretary-General to actively use his good offices and encourage him to bring any matter that may threaten international peace and security to the attention of the Security Council; and
- support the role of regional and sub-regional organisations in diplomacy, mediation, and peaceful dispute resolution, and strengthen coordination and cooperation between these organisations and the United Nations.
An additional important issue is how to leverage the role of the PBC in supporting national and regional efforts to develop prevention strategies and mobilise financial and political support for their implementation. Regarding the PBC, the draft Pact for the Future stresses the following:
- enhancing the PBC’s role as a platform for building and sustaining peace by sharing best practices among member states and mobilising political and financial support for national prevention and peacebuilding efforts, particularly to avoid conflict relapse;
- making greater use of the PBC to support nationally owned peacebuilding and prevention efforts; enhancing its advisory, bridging, and convening roles; and facilitating the inclusion of stakeholders’ perspectives on peacebuilding through dialogue with civil society actors; and
- establishing more systematic and strategic partnerships with international, regional, and sub-regional organisations, including international financial institutions, to bolster peacebuilding efforts, mobilise resources, and align national development, peacebuilding, and prevention approaches.
At some point, Council members could potentially consider a new resolution on conflict prevention. This could update resolution 2171 of 21 August 2014, the Council’s most recent resolution dealing directly with conflict prevention, and focus on areas improving the UN’s efforts in this regard.
Council Dynamics
The Security Council has struggled to engage effectively in prevention, often because of concerns about interference in states’ internal affairs, a particular impediment to addressing intra-state conflict. Past initiatives like “Horizon Scanning” and “Situational Awareness” briefings for the Council to identify potential conflict situations have failed to gain traction, partially because of these concerns. Even after conflict erupts, states frequently try to block the Council from discussing such situations because of sensitivities over external interference and the stigma often associated with being on the Council’s agenda. Current geopolitical dynamics have made the Council’s preventive engagement particularly complicated.
Useful prevention tools that Council members all appear to value are the UN’s regional offices for West Africa, Central Africa, and Central Asia (UNOWAS, UNOCA, and UNRCCA), known for their early warning and good offices activities. These offices also support states and sub-regional organisations in developing responses to structural conflict drivers and helping to promote common analysis and coherence among UN agencies, funds, and programmes for more conflict-sensitive development assistance.
Several Council members are interested in seeing the Council strengthen its engagement on prevention. Sierra Leone’s organisation of this open debate is a further expression of its interest in prevention and peacebuilding. Japan capitalised on its two presidencies in January 2023 and March to facilitate discussion on these interrelated topics. The UK has traditionally been a proponent of improving the Council’s engagement on prevention.
Meanwhile, there appears to be rising interest among UN member states in having the PBC become more explicitly involved in prevention, given its mandate to address issues that lie between peace and development and the PBC’s practice of discussing situations only with the consent of the country concerned. Some states remain hesitant, however, to endorse the PBC’s role as a conflict prevention platform. (For more, see the “In Hindsight” on the Security Council and conflict prevention in our March Monthly Forecast.)
| Security Council Resolutions | |
| 27 April 2016S/RES/2282 | This was a concurrent resolution with the General Assembly on the review of the UN peacebuilding architecture. |
| 21 August 2014S/RES/2171 | This resolution requested the Secretary-General to submit a report to the Council on actions taken to “promote and strengthen conflict prevention tools within the United Nations system” by 31 August 2015. |
| Security Council Presidential Statement | |
| 18 January 2018S/PRST/2018/1 | This was a presidential statement on conflict prevention stating that a comprehensive conflict prevention strategy should include early warning, preventive deployment, mediation, peacekeeping, non-proliferation, accountability measures, and post-conflict peacebuilding, recognising that these components are interdependent, complementary and non-sequential. |
| Security Council Letter | |
| 31 May 2024A/78/902-S/2024/430 | This was a letter from Japan containing a summary of the open debate held on 13 and 19 March on “Promoting conflict prevention – empowering all actors including women and youth” under the agenda item “Peacebuilding and sustaining peace”. |
| Security Council Meeting Records | |
| 13 March 2024S/PV.9574 | This was a Security Council open debate on conflict prevention held under the Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace agenda item with briefings by Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo; Chair of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) Ambassador Sérgio França Danese (Brazil); Professor of the Practice of International Politics at Tufts University Abiodun Williams; and Programme Manager at the Pacific Women Mediators Network Sharon Bhagwan Rolls. |
| 26 January 2023S/PV.9250 | This was a Council open debate on “Investment in people to enhance resilience against complex challenges” under the peacebuilding and sustaining peace agenda. |
