Wednesday, 21 June – Thursday, 22 June 2023 Location: United States Institute of Peace, Washington, D.C.
Opening Keynote Address, 21 June: Dr. Rosemary A. DiCarlo, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs.
Holmes Lecture, 22 June: Ms. Bintou Keita, Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Head of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO)
Global Policy Dialogue: Reconstructing the Global Peace & Security Architecture
Background
The UN Charter confers upon the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Yet time and again, geo-political tensions and the veto power of the Council’s permanent members—which last year alone hampered collective action toward Russia’s war against Ukraine, North Korean missile tests, and the Syrian civil war—have kept the world body from realizing its primary purpose. Not since the end of the Cold War has the specter of nuclear weapons use seemed so real, while the growing number of intractable conflicts worldwide has taken a toll on the UN’s conflict management system. More conflicts (34) are currently active than at any time since the end of the Second World War. Average conflict duration has grown, and “settled” conflicts are relapsing more often.
Against this backdrop, and pursuant to a recommendation by Secretary-General António Guterres in his seminal 2021 report, Our Common Agenda, the UN’s 193 Member States committed, last September (in UNGA Resolution 76/307), to convene a Summit of the Future on 22 and 23 September 2024 in New York. It will have “… an important role to play in reaffirming the Charter of the United Nations, reinvigorating multilateralism, boosting implementation of existing commitments, agreeing on concrete solutions to challenges and restoring trust among Member States.” Integral to the summit is the preparation of a New Agenda for Peace, which the Secretary-General is expected to unveil in June 2023. In his recent 2023 priorities briefing to the General Assembly, he argues that this new agenda should “… represent a holistic view of the peace continuum that … invests in prevention to avoid conflicts in the first place, focuses on mediation, advances peacebuilding and includes much broader participation from women and young people.”
In April, the Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism also put forward several recommendations to improve the peace and security architecture. Moreover, related reform efforts continue through the Intergovernmental Negotiations on Security Council Reform, the Ad-Hoc Working Group on the Revitalization of the General Assembly, and the formal Review of the Peacebuilding Architecture.
Objectives
As an integral part of the Annual Meeting of the Academic Council on the UN System on “Making, Keeping, and Sustaining Peace”, from 21-22 June 2023 at the U.S. Institute of Peace, three Global Policy Dialogue (GPD) sessions and a Closing Plenary Session were held on the theme of “Reconstructing the Global Peace & Security Architecture” with the following three objectives:
To convene leading policy researchers, practitioners, and advocates to debate and recommend specific global institutional, policy, legal, normative, and operational innovations that could inform the agenda—and help to raise the ambition—of the September 2023 Ministerial Forum and September 2024 Summit of the Future.
To make targeted recommendations for operationalizing the UN Secretary-General’s (June 2023) New Agenda for Peace and for ensuring that the Summit of the Future’s Pact for the Future reinforces this new peace agenda with high-level political support, financing, and corresponding structural change in major UN bodies.
To contribute to efforts to take forward the UN75 Declaration’s commitment #9 (“We will promote peace and prevent conflicts.”) and the Our Common Agenda report’s peace and security strengthening ideas, including by supporting follow-through to the civil society driven—including members of the ACUNS community—Global Governance Innovation Network and Coalition for the UN We Need-led Global Futures Forum (March 2023 and 2024) and related, ongoing Regional Futures Forums.
Schedule and Speakers
Convening some 80-100 leading, diverse scholars/policy researchers, practitioners, and advocates from around the world within the wider ACUNS Annual Meeting, the GPD was organized around three thematic “breakthrough” groups and sought to address, at a minimum:
What are the major challenges and gaps in the international system requiring attention?
What are 1-2 current proposals under discussion by UN Member States that could be refined/strengthened, and what are 1-2 new proposals our group can work to advance? (ideally, practical and achievable!)
THU-A2 ROOM B241 Global Policy Dialogue 8:00 am – 9:15 am | New Agenda for Peace: Global Policy Dialogue on Reconstructing the Peace & Security Architecture
Elizabeth Hume (Co-Chair), Alliance for Peacebuilding
Maria Joao Rodrigues (Co-Chair), Foundation for European Progressive Studies
Amb. Tijjani Muhammad-Bande, Permanent Representative of Nigeria to the United Nations
Franz Baumann, ACUNS Vice-President and former UN Under Secretary-General and Special Adviser on Environment and Peace Operations
Roger Coate, Georgia College & State University and former ACUNS Chairperson
Musa Ibrahim, Policy Specialist, Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding, UNDP Crisis Bureau
Alice Oluoko-Odingo, University of Nairobi and ACUNS Vice-President (Spokesperson)
THU-B2 ROOM B241 Global Policy Dialogue 9:30 am - 10:45 am | Peacebuilding Architecture Innovation: Global Policy Dialogue on Reconstructing the Peace & Security Architecture
Erin McCandless (Co-Chair), University of Witwatersrand
Cedric De Coning, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) (Spokesperson)
Lilianne Nkunzimana, Global Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security
Sultan Barakat, Global Institute for Strategic Research - Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Georgios Kostakos, Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability
THU-C1 ROOM B241 Global Policy Dialogue 1:15 pm - 2:30 pm | UN Security Council Reform: Global Policy Dialogue on Reconstructing the Peace & Security Architecture
Hardin Lang, (Co-Chair) Refugees International (invited)
Karim Makdisi, (Co-Chair) American University of Beirut
Amb. Neville Gertze, Permanent Representative of Namibia to the United Nations
Rebecca Shoot, Global Citizens for Global Solutions
Vesselin Popovski, Jindal Law School
Anjali Dayal, US Institute of Peace and Fordham University (Spokesperson)
GPD Breakthrough Groups Report-Back, Ambassadors Segment and Discussion (14:45-16:45) Carlucci Auditorium.
A Breakthrough for People and Planet(especially shift 5: Peace and Prevention) by the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Board for Effective Multilateralism. -
We use cookies to measure website traffic (Google Analytics) and make the website work (User logins). We do not sell your information.
Necessary
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
