Peace Diplomacy and Conflict Prevention

Abstract

Abstract United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s ‘Agenda for Peace’ was the first comprehensive UN engagement with conflict prevention and peace following the end of the Cold War. The Secretary-General divided his agenda into preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and peacekeeping. But given the interconnectedness of global challenges, and the changing face of threats to international peace and security and armed conflict, a comprehensive approach calls for a blurring of the lines between these temporally defined elements of the architecture of peace. In particular disputes, the toolkit deployed in respect of one aspect of maintaining or securing peace may well be relevant or even critical in respect of another. Flexibility and responsiveness to the particular context is essential. While it remains true that international efforts towards peace and security operate on the sequential conflict cycle paradigm suggested by the Secretary-General, stakeholders increasingly seek to ‘bridge the divides that beset this discussion, between security and development, between crisis response and capacity building’ in order to ‘encompass our new conception of violence in a variety of environments’.