New UN chief faces uphill battle on conflict prevention

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is determined to make conflict prevention a priority during his tenure, but he’s likely to find it tough convincing member-states to fund peace-building initiatives, even if it could save billions in humanitarian and peacekeeping spending down the road.Guterres took office at the beginning of this year with a rallying call to both his staff and member-states to make 2017 “a year for peace”.“We spend far too much time and resources responding to crises rather than preventing them,” he told the Security Council just days after assuming his post. “We need a whole new approach.”Few would disagree with his analysis at a time when conflict-induced crises are proliferating way beyond the capacity, or willingness, of the international community to deal with them. Even as governments have steadily increased their aid budgets, the gap between needs and available funding continues to grow. And that gap is likely to widen further in the wake of significant cuts to US foreign aid being pursued by President Donald Trump’s administration.But given the funding crisis, Trump’s “America First” doctrine, and pervasive political and economic uncertainty in Europe, how does Guterres intend to turn his vision into reality?So far, the former Portuguese prime minister has been heavy on rhetoric but light on detail, although he has commissioned an internal review of the UN’s entire peace and security architecture, which is due to report back in June with recommendations for how these various departments and agencies could be restructured.As he awaits the findings, his “whole new approach” appears to boil down to providing leadership within the UN system in making early conflict prevention the priority, using his renowned diplomatic skills to work tirelessly for early mediation, and restructuring the UN’s peace and security architecture following the review.Clearly, preventing conflicts before they develop could save billions of dollars and countless lives. It’s also central to the UN’s mandate. The maintenance of peace and security is described as the organisation’s primary purpose in Article 1 of the UN Charter.And yet, three reviews of the UN’s peace operations completed in 2015 all concluded that the organisation was under-performing on conflict prevention and peacekeeping.The High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO), appointed by former secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, acknowledged that preventing conflict was often beyond the UN’s control, but found that a lack of strategic decision-making at the top levels of the organisation was leading to a failure to engage early enough to address emerging crises. It also found that responses were often ad hoc and disconnected from national and regional efforts.“One of the established principles of effective prevention is that there has to be a holistic strategy and you can’t deal with conflict from separate entry points,” commented Youssef Mahmoud, a senior adviser at the International Peace Institute who served as a member of the high-level panel.Guterres has been frank about the UN’s failings in this area. In his remarks to the Security Council, he stated that “while the causes of crises are deeply interlinked, the UN’s response remains fragmented”.Partly this is a lingering by-product of the way the UN was structured 70 years ago into three separate pillars: human rights, peace and security, and development. It means that work done by the UN’s development system still often fails to link up with that done by its political missions and peacekeeping operations.“We still do have a UN system that’s struggling to come together,” acknowledged Stephen Jackson, head of policy planning at the Department of Political Affairs, which plays a key role in the UN’s preventive diplomacy and mediation efforts.“We essentially have had peacekeeping operations, special political missions, and engagement by UN country teams on the ground. There are still obstacles we have to overcome to blending those three effectively,” he told IRIN, adding that the system also made it difficult to rapidly scale up or scale down responses.“For instance, in a transitional context, say Cote d’Ivoire, we’ve just recently gone from quite a large peacekeeping operation straight to engagement by the UN country team, so there’s no longer any political or security presence.”The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are part of an effort to achieve a more integrated approach, and Guterres and others have cited them as providing an existing framework for conflict prevention. “Peace, security, development and good governance are all in one document,” said Mahmoud. “One of the better ways of engaging in prevention, particularly early prevention, before the outbreak of violence, is to faithfully and fully implement all the SDGs.”In a memorandum to Secretariat staff circulated during his first week in office, Guterres stated his intention to pursue “cultural, process and structural” reforms to improve the UN’s performance on peace and security. The memo set in motion several immediate actions aimed at reducing “structural disincentives” and “bureaucratic barriers”, including an order that the Departments of Political Affairs and Peacekeeping Operations move into shared offices “to facilitate more effective and integrated decision-making”.Several reviews have identified the DPA and DPKO’s overlapping mandates and competition between the two departments as contributing to the “fragmented” response that Guterres alluded to. But various other UN departments and agencies are also involved in conflict prevention, from the UN Development Programme to the UN Peacebuilding Fund and the Peacebuilding Commission.