Boosting the UN’s Role in Conflict Prevention — What Next?

This article is published as part of Fridays With MUNPlanet and its series dedicated to world politics and the United Nations. Adriana Erthal Abdenur (Instituto Igarapé) and Gustavo de Carvalho (Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria) discuss the role of the United Nations in conflict prevention in the context of the rise in the number of intra-state conflicts worldwide in the past several years. The authors analyze the 2015 reviews of the UN peacekeeping architecture pointing to the deficiencies of the “silo” approach and the sidelined notion of conflict prevention. They argue that “the UN needs to focus on understanding not only the key drivers of conflicts, but also the conditions needed for durable peace”, for, “only then will the UN be able to design and implement innovations for effective conflict prevention, anticipating and addressing the root causes of conflict.”

The 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations (UN) has prompted new questions about the organization’s ability to effectively address peace and security problems around the globe. The UN peace and security architecture has expanded dramatically in the post-Cold War period, partly in response to the changing nature of conflict, but also as a reflection of the organization’s own ability to provide effective responses.It is important to see this expansion in the context of the changing dynamics of conflicts. After an increased number of complex intra-state conflicts in the 1990s, the world saw a sharp decrease in numbers in the early 2000s. However, in the past five years, these numbers have been on the rise.
This is particularly important for peace operations, perhaps the most visible of the international responses to conflicts. The results of peace operations have been mixed at best, particularly for the robust missions, which are continuously drawn-out over prolonged periods and face increased challenges in their ability to deal with transnational threats, including terrorism, and the protection of civilians.

Attempts of reforming the UN’s peace and security mechanisms have been undertaken since the 1990s. In 1999, the so-called the Brahimi Report was a response to the challenges faced by UN peacekeeping in the 1990s, especially the failure in protecting civilians in Bosnia and preventing the genocide in Rwanda. While the report resulted in some positive changes, including the creation of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture in 2005, problems of effectiveness, funding, coordination, and coherence remain. Among them: peace operations have not fulfilled the goals of protecting civilians, and the UN has not been effective in preventing conflicts and sustaining peace.
It is perhaps not surprising that a new series of reviews of the UN’s peace and security architecture were conducted in 2015 — namely on Peace Operations, the Peacebuilding Architecture, and Women, Peace and Security. These reviews focused on ensuring a better role played by the UN and recommended (among other points) that member states and the UN place conflict prevention at the core of its responses, as a means of becoming more effective in avoiding conflicts and sustaining peace.

This idea is not new. The need to prevent conflict in the first place — rather than waiting to address it once violence has broken out — is found in the UN Charter itself, and it was in fact the main driving force behind the creation of the organization. During the Cold War, calls for greater investment in conflict prevention were made by both sides of the ideological divide, and it was a central theme in the Non-Aligned Movement’s (NAM) positions on the UN’s role in the promotion of peace.

In the post-Cold War era, and especially since the turn of the millennium, the so-called rising powers have also invoked the language of conflict prevention at the UN, sometimes in reference to their defense of national sovereignty and their critique of military interventions as it has spread in the past two decades. Yet conflict prevention, and the idea that the UN should play a central and far-sighted role in promoting it, is not exclusive to these states. Smaller developing countries, including so-called fragile states, have also been vocal in calling for a greater emphasis on prevention as a means for longer-term sustainability of peace processes. Some of the major donor states have also begun stressing the need for innovative thinking on conflict prevention.

The 2015 Reviews, as well as subsequent UN General Assembly and Security Council Resolutions, argue that the fragmentation and “silos” that mark UN responses to conflict are not just costly but also reduce the overall impact of UN efforts. At the same time, many — both within the UN and outside it — believe that an increased focus on conflict prevention would be far cheaper than continuing with the narrow focus on ongoing or recurring conflicts. However, if the key idea of turning conflict prevention into a core responsibility of the UN is broadly accepted among stakeholders, why has the UN been so slow to implement it?

You can read the full article on MUNPlanet.

Cover Image: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (front, third from left) and his wife, Yoo Soon-taek (right of Mr. Ban), are led by officers from the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) through Nicosia’s buffer zone, separating the Greek and Turkish sides of the Cypriot capital [UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe via Flickr]