By many accounts, the most prominent international peacebuilding model is increasingly becoming unviable. Developed in the 1990s and 2000s, the “liberal peacebuilding” model (as it is commonly called) is being questioned, updated, and challenged, though its staying power has persisted, due to the continued contributions of international aid agencies and joint funding initiatives that come through multilateral institutions like the United Nations (UN). However, in recent years there has been a scaling down of funding from donors who have traditionally supported liberal peacebuilding, as changing geopolitics has shifted their priorities to defence and security sectors. At the same time, large-scale challenges such as migration and forced displacement, demographic changes, urbanisation, and digital technologies are raising questions among peacebuilders as to how these can be addressed through social cohesion and community-centred actions.
Against this backdrop, in 2025, the UN will conduct the fourth comprehensive peacebuilding architecture review (PBAR) as mandated by the 2020 General Assembly (A/RES/75/201) and Security Council (S/RES/2558) resolutions. The review allows the UN to evaluate its global standing within the evolving peacebuilding field and consider how much of a leadership role it wants to play in setting the direction of peacebuilding. However, this requires the organisation to make an honest examination of its role in perpetuating the liberal peacebuilding model, and a frank assessment of what useful engagement looks like.
It has been widely recognised for decades that the strength of the peacebuilding community comes from its multitude of actors. How, then, can the UN ensure the meaningful participation of new voices; create spaces that elicit creative conversations and ideas; and be open to recommendations for new approaches? One way would be to change its approach to conducting the review and create a new working modality based on new forms of UN partnerships that allow space for genuine engagement and reflection. This would allow meaningful participation from a broad range of voices to participate, including community organisations, social movements, networks, national non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and international NGOs. If the UN embraces this opportunity, it could play a significant role in facilitating a shift towards a new vision of peacebuilding.
Multilateral institutions consistently struggle to meaningfully engage civil society in the global policy space, despite their overt recognition of civil society’s importance over the past decade.
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Why is Meaningful Engagement Elusive at the UN?
Multilateral institutions consistently struggle to meaningfully engage civil society in the global policy space, despite their overt recognition of civil society’s importance over the past decade. This recognition has come in the form of multilateral initiatives, frameworks, and resolutions that have focused on local peacebuilding and civil society’s vital role in addressing the drivers of conflict to build long-term sustainable peace.
Too often, however, the global space for civil society is defined by tokenistic, shallow, ad-hoc and one-off engagements between global policymakers and local peacebuilders. When invited, peacebuilders and community leaders are often brought into spaces where they face bureaucratic hurdles, formal methods of working, and specific language and terminology that can be exclusionary and make it difficult to engage. Both the location (often the United States and European capitals) and the structure (formalised panel discussions) are decided by those who live outside conflict environments. Other practices such as last-minute invitations, lack of funding for travel, and visa and immigration concerns are all additional barriers to meaningful engagement.
Additionally, there are serious questions among local actors (especially those who work in peacebuilding) about the relevance of the multilateral system. Their general impression of the global peacebuilding architecture is that its institutions are slow to respond, that it lacks flexibility, and that it is largely inaccessible to local actors.
All this adds up to global conversations without the participation and inputs from those most affected and those responsible for implementing policy decisions.
Going Beyond the Usual: The Role of the Intermediary
To overcome some of these barriers, the UN could look for ways to innovate its own consultation and engagement processes. One option is to partner with “intermediary” institutions to create new networks and thoughtfully expand engagement. These intermediaries are increasingly aware of the power imbalances in the global policy space, and are making adjustments in response so that different peacebuilding and policy actors can engage, creating stronger relationships and deeper conversations.
Intermediaries have flexibility in designing conversations that can neutralize power dynamics and enable more meaningful engagements. For example, in 2023, the Life & Peace Institute (LPI) supported the Kenya Peacebuilding Architecture Review by inviting youth leaders from Nairobi’s informal settlement areas for a participatory mapping exercise. Youth leaders are highly influential in their communities, but are regularly left out of these processes. The meeting used a participatory mapping methodology that allowed the youth leaders’ expertise of their communities to shine. This active and participatory process also created opportunities for the Independent Panel of Advisors and the youth leaders to interact directly and have deeper conversations. Subsequent convenings brought together a diverse group of long-term peacebuilding practitioners from across Kenya and the greater East and Horn of Africa region. In partnership with the Independent Panel of Advisors, hypothetical scenarios were developed to address common challenges like land rights disputes and climate migration that regularly came up in cross-country consultations. The exercises allowed these staid peacebuilders to focus on the discussion at hand and apply their technical knowledge to build concrete recommendations and solutions in support of the panel.
[..] consistent engagement is critical to ensure that those engaged have been heard and are correctly represented in ongoing discussions, which builds trust and willingness for ongoing collaboration. It also increases the likelihood of public interest and acceptance of policy outcomes.
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Testament to the impact of new partnerships and convening methodologies on relationships and collaboration, there are indications that more global policy actors are recognising the importance of civil society engagement. Increasingly, they are recognising that, to get honest views, they need to bring in actors with trusted connections to a diverse network. This, in turn, requires financial support, as the UN did for the LPI engagement in the Kenya Peacebuilding Architecture Review. This support bolsters the importance of the role of the intermediary; creates the possibility for more significant time and focus to be dedicated to high-quality interventions; and acknowledges that many civil society actors are facing a “starvation cycle”. Finally, consistent engagement is critical to ensure that those engaged have been heard and are correctly represented in ongoing discussions, which builds trust and willingness for ongoing collaboration. It also increases the likelihood of public interest and acceptance of policy outcomes.
Conclusion
Ultimately, these examples highlight how intermediaries are working to change the means of engagement between peacebuilding policymakers and civil society organizations and advocate for diverse voices around the table. By building online forums, creating new spaces, and addressing power dynamics, global actors are starting to push boundaries on how to include civil society, upholding the call for inclusivity and closer engagement with diverse national and local actors in the UN’s Sustaining Peace approach (A/RES/70/262 and S/RES/2282).
Looking forward, the upcoming UN Peacebuilding Architecture Review provides a unique opportunity for the UN to shape the future of peacebuilding at a moment when sentiment toward multilateral institutions and the liberal framework guiding peacebuilding as a whole is changing. The way in which the review is developed and implemented, as well as the outcomes, offers a platform to tackle these contemporary challenges and guide the field of peacebuilding into the future. Central to this is the meaningful inclusion of diverse voices through innovative processes. To this end, the UN can work in partnership with intermediaries with a track record of organizing such inclusive and participatory processes.
Lesley Connolly is Team Leader, Global Policy at the Life & Peace Institute. Aaron Stanley is a Senior Global Policy Advisor at the Life & Peace Institute.
The article was first published in the IPI Global Observatory, on 19 March 2024.
