GPPlatform

This Paper commemorates the 20th anniversary of ‘An Agenda for Peace’, and provides perspectives for a forward-looking discussion about the new visions needed to prevent conflict and consolidate peace. It collects the contributions of the speakers of an event convened by the United Nations Office at Geneva and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform in Geneva, on 15 June 2012.

This Paper is the synthetic report of the Platform's Annual Meeting 2011. The Annual Meeting had the objective to better understand the tools and assistance required to accompany political transitions from a peacebuilding perspective. Despite the fluidity of the transitions in North Africa and the Middle East, a peacebuilding contribution would be the launch of processes to rebuild and recreate trust within and between governments and civil society. The basis for this peacebuilding engagement should be "constructive accompaniment" which focuses on lending expertise and advice to locally-shaped and guided plans and processes.

This paper distils the discussions of a multi-stakeholder meeting of experts on strengthening international support for conflict prevention. The paper locates conflict prevention within the emerging practise of strengthening resilient national systems, and explores operational issues about how to better assist such conflict prevention. The paper also reviews various conflict prevention approaches that have emerged from the fields of armed violence reduction, mediation, or the private sector. It highlights that there needs to be better communication across sectors and institutions about the changing nature of prevention practice, and about what works in what context. It also argues that the greatest opportunity for conflict prevention lies in fostering the strength and resilience of social and political networks and institutions on the ground.

Drawing on over 50 interviews with company representatives and their advisors, this Paper attempts to make sense of the experience of managers struggling to put into action an enormous body of normative advice for companies developed over the last decade. The paper concludes that increased attention to the individual skills, organisational capabilities and inter-organisational mechanisms that enable companies to act more constructively in conflict environments provides a complementary lever for conflict prevention. It invites a broader discussion of how to move from a largely anecdotal to a more rigorous and systematic understanding of capacity for conflict prevention in ways that can aid both companies and those hoping to influence their actions reach their goals.

The World Bank’s Geneva Office, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform partnered to promote a debate on the conclusions of the World Development Report 2011 in Geneva. The event addressed a series of key questions such as: What are the elements that allow a country to prevent violence and establish a sustainable peace? What are the vulnerabilities during a period of transition? The event highlighted the fact that a transition from conflict to sustainable peace takes at least a generation - and not a few months - as many, including donors, expect. It also stressed the need for a paradigm shift in the way in which the international community responds to the issue of organized violence around the world.