When diplomats gather in New York later this month for the UN’s inaugural Summit of the Future – billed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remake failing global governance – the wars that are fuelling much of the world’s humanitarian needs will be top of mind.
Violent conflicts are the cause of massive death, displacement, and destruction, from Gaza to Sudan, from Ukraine to Myanmar, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Colombia, and new ideas and momentum to lessen their impact are sorely needed.
2022 was the deadliest year on record for civilians since the Rwandan genocide in 1994, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme. Given events in Gaza and Sudan, the figures for this year could be even worse.
At the heart of discussions in New York to adopt the summit-headlining Pact for the Future will be proposals from the New Agenda for Peace (NAFP), the UN’s recommendations for reforming multilateral peace and security efforts to meet the scope of modern challenges.
Published in July 2023, the NAFP is a wide-ranging set of proposals, from well-worn ambitions like eliminating nuclear weapons to newer measures like reforming the UN peacebuilding architecture. It forms part of the Common Agenda, the broader set of policy briefs in a summit programme tasked with making multilateralism fit for the 21st century.
But the document has been met with scepticism by peacebuilders and security policy experts interviewed by The New Humanitarian. They say the ‘New’ agenda repeats old ideas, lacks plans for implementation, and inappropriately emphasises state-led solutions.
Mixed reviews, at best
The focus on the NAFP has troubled some UN watchers, who criticise its lack of originality and say it emerged because of a lack of better ideas without taking into account the needs of local communities, or even governments.
“It was more an attempt from the UN to try to make themselves relevant,” said Marina Kumskova, a senior adviser at the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), a network of civil society organisations focused on conflict prevention and peacebuilding that fed into the NAFP’s consultation process.
Kaltumi Abdulazeez, executive director of the Ladies Empowerment Goals and Support Initiative (LEGASI) in Nigeria’s northwestern Kaduna state, said she first read ideas about many of the ideas in the ‘new’ Agenda for Peace in the original 1992 report published under then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
“Implementation has remained a problem,” she told The New Humanitarian. “We are so used to a system just interested in making up reports and not impacting the lives of people themselves.”
Like Kumskova and Abdulazeez, Eugene Chen, a senior fellow at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, had misgivings about the way the NAFP was drawn up. Speaking during a panel in July, he said the document lacks coherence because it was “farmed out” to different UN agencies instead of being written up by UN Secretary-General António Guterres' office. “Each department took aspects relevant to themselves,” said Chen.
Civil society’s input came from the “closest friends” of those agencies and was “not at all an inclusive, participatory process”, said Kumskova, who added that she only dedicated her limited resources to engaging with the NAFP because she was pushed to by donors.
She told The New Humanitarian she would critique the agenda for “being a process that doesn't go anywhere” but was told by donors “it's a way to get innovative ideas” into the discussions. “That's the positive side people saw in it… [but] I have very little positive to say,” she added.
However, the NAFP is not universally disliked.
Fred Carver, managing director at consultancy Strategy for Humanity, called it “one of the strongest parts of the secretary-general’s consultation processes [on UN reform] so far” and “a clever framing” of what the UN is for and what it can do.
“It insists the core work of the UN is interrelationships between states and the mechanisms the UN provides for diffusing tensions between states before they become conflicts,” he added, speaking at the same panel as Chen in July.
However, even Carver acknowledged that the direct impact of the NAFP on alleviating conflicts would likely be limited, though he said it could accelerate some pre-existing proposals, like delegating UN peacekeeping in Africa to the African Union.
The challenge of managing the worst effects of wars – let alone resolving them – has been demonstrated by the crisis of legitimacy suffered by traditional style peacekeeping, reflected by controversial drawdowns in Mali and DR Congo. But the appetite for peacekeeping is picking up elsewhere as other conflicts escalate, notably in Sudan and in Haiti, where the deployment of Kenyan police officers has reportedly had a limited impact on gang violence.
The NAFP takes a reflective tone on UN peacekeepers, referring to them as “an essential part of the diplomatic toolbox” that will “remain a central component” of international responses to insecurity, while noting the “gap” between operational mandates and what they can deliver. It calls for “a serious and broad-based reflection” on mandates and exit strategies, among other measures.
The sovereignty question
Some aspects of the NAFP have, at least, got people talking.
In particular, the agenda’s emphasis on national violence prevention strategies is reportedly gaining traction among diplomats. And the summit’s timing is certainly helpful: The UN peacebuilding architecture is due for review next year.
Member states “seem to be leaning toward focusing the organisation more on development-led security strategies and showing respect for states’ sovereign prerogatives”, noted Richard Gowan, UN director at the International Crisis Group.
Favoured by government officials, the focus on sovereignty and giving states greater power in future peacebuilding processes is also a controversial aspect of the agenda.
“When it comes to civil wars and to some of the main conflicts that make the headlines, [the NAFP] seems pretty much inept,” said Kim Jolliffe, an expert on the conflict and politics of Myanmar. “Anything discussing peace and conflict issues needs to recognise the international system of states is part of the problem for the majority of individual armed conflicts going on at the moment.”
For Jolliffe, “emphasis on national ownership, which basically just means state control of the process, makes it completely inept for a country like Myanmar” where “politics is contested”. The country is suffering a bitter conflict between a military junta that seized power illegally but calls itself the State Administration Council (SAC) and a patchwork alliance of ethnic armed groups and organisations, which provide state-like services in the territory they control and believe the SAC lacks all legitimacy. The sensitive political situation has hampered aid delivery to the country, including innovative proposals to navigate tensions between groups.
Even when the state is functional, prioritising just one conflict actor is problematic if it is warring with people in its own territory, or conducting illegal occupations, apartheid, or genocide, said Jolliffe. He did not specify Israel but the country has faced those accusations over its violent campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 people.
He also mentioned Sudan, where the Sudanese Armed Forces are fighting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Despite international support, “neither have any legitimacy… but are causing huge harm, without any serious discussion of what they are doing, what their plan is to bring the country back together or anything like that”, he added.
“How can this agenda preface national ownership and talk so directly about state leadership of these things,” asked Jolliffe. “I just think that's ridiculous.”
The UN would be better off admitting – as some UN staff on the ground already do privately – that it can’t do much in intrastate conflicts or “cases where there’s ambiguous recognition of states”, he added.
The NAFP is out of tune with a peacebuilding sector that now recognises that “you can't just build the state if you want to build peace”, concluded Jolliffe. “The Agenda for Peace seems a bit behind the curve on that.”
Talk to the locals
If the peacebuilding specialists The New Humanitarian interviewed had any advice, it was that the process to reform the UN’s peace and security efforts needed to be more collaborative with local groups in conflict settings if it was to have any concrete impact.
In Syria, “a very complicated country, like many civil wars”, the agenda was not expected to make any difference, according to Zaidoun Zobi, a governance and peacebuilding expert from the country. “I don't think Syria is able to pay attention to anything that comes from the liberal or Western view of peacebuilding. People tend to think: ‘let's solve our own problems, no one understands us very well. At the end of the day, superpowers just look after their own interests, and we are just neglected’.”
Questions were also raised around how the NAFP would be applied to Africa, which “dominates the agenda [of the UN Security Council] but doesn’t have any decision-making space… is [the new agenda] just there as a political tool for language and seemingly doing something?” asked Nqobile Moyo, chair of GPPAC’s Youth, Peace and Security Working Group. “From an impact perspective, in terms of affected communities or the continent itself, it’s not taking root,” he added.
Moyo said the NAFP lacked a financial support agenda, which made it unclear how support actually makes its way from high-level UN circles to local communities. The communication of the agenda, including its translation, has been a “very great challenge”, he said. “As long as there is no knowledge of the agenda itself, then its implementation or impact becomes almost irrelevant.”
In Nigeria, Abdulazeez replied an emphatic “no” when asked if the NAFP could make any difference to her work, which includes direct involvement in community peacebuilding efforts. “We are so used to the system making up reports and not [being] interested in the lives of people themselves,” she said. “Who cares about local organisations?”
Abdulazeez cited a lack of genuine participation of women and local peacebuilders in conflict resolution work, and said flexible grants would make the most difference to her work at LEGASI – a call repeatedly echoed by civil society organisations globally. Many groups feel hamstrung by donor restrictions on funding, but donors say they need to keep tight financial controls for accountability reasons.
“Somebody in the Global North is telling you everything you should do in the Global South even though it does not fit to your reality or context. We need people to begin to unlearn some of these bureaucracies if we want to see the change we are talking about and need for the agenda for peace.”
Several others echoed the importance of taking a more bottom-up and women-led approach to peacebuilding work.
But Sarah-Derval Ephosi Lifanda, CEO at Hope of Africa in Buea, southwest Cameroon, also took a more optimistic tone about the potential of the NAFP — with the caveat that it needs to be properly implemented and coordinated.
Lifanda thought the agenda’s recommendations on preventative actions based on the early warning signs of conflict could have forestalled the outbreak of conflict in Cameroon, where English-speaking separatists are trying to break from the francophone state.
There was a long time in Cameroon where “people were complaining”, she said. “The crisis erupted from the time of strife, protests – that was the moment the UN should have stepped in,” Lifanda added, placing the ideal time for international mediation to identify grievances and suggest compromise solutions as late 2018. “If [the UN] had come in early, there wouldn’t have been this level of violence.”
But despite her sympathy for international diplomatic interventions to prevent conflict, Lifanda warned that these efforts must be contextualised: “The custodians of traditional culture must not feel they are losing their power… [and have] to accept and own whatever policies or recommendations we are putting forth to them.”
This was a sentiment that chimed with Abdulazeez on how programmes are run: “Somebody in the Global North is telling you everything you should do in the Global South even though it does not fit to your reality or context.”
“We need people to begin to unlearn some of these bureaucracies if we want to see the change we are talking about and need for the agenda for peace,” she added.
Abdulazeez said efforts to resolve conflicts were more about transactional diplomacy, and that shared interests among nations with unequal power was “not a reality”.
“Why hasn’t the first one worked?” she asked, referring back to the 1992 effort under Boutros-Ghali. “What makes us think this second one is going to work if we still use the same strategy, bureaucracy, approach and first world stakeholders?”
Edited by Irwin Loy and Andrew Gully.
