 I'm Alan Gingel from the Crawford School and the H.C. Coombs Policy Forum and it's a great pleasure for us to have here in the studio at the University today Jean-Marie Guillainot, who is the CEO and President of the International Crisis Group. Great pleasure to welcome you to Canberra, Jean-Marie. For those who don't know the International Crisis Group, I think it's one of the most innovative and interesting non-governmental organisations around and I want to ask you about that very shortly. But it certainly needs someone in charge of it who has a very distinguished background in some very difficult issues including international diplomacy, conflict resolution and peacekeeping and they couldn't have chosen better than Jean-Marie who comes to the job most recently from a position as professor at Columbia University and director of the Center for Conflict Resolution there and before that from a distinguished and I think record-breaking stint as Undersecretary General of the United Nations for peacekeeping operations between 2000 and 2008 and even earlier than that you're in the French Foreign Service including a stint as head of policy planning there. So all of that shapes up to prepare you very well for the very difficult task you've now got and I wanted to begin by asking if you could say something about the ICJ and what it does and how it does it. Well Price's group was created as a reaction to the policy failures of the Yugoslav Wars a sense that many conflicts develop and get terrible for the population because of ignorance and indifference and if you could fight ignorance and fight indifference you could make progress and so the concept of Price's group is pretty straightforward is to have analysts in the conflict areas or close to conflict areas developing an analysis that is objective that is impartial and then not stopping there making sure that we have policy recommendations and that we push for those policy recommendations with any country any actor any stakeholder who can influence the conflict. I'd like to say that Price's group in a way is the foreign ministry of all those with no foreign ministry. We are not our job is not to defend a particular national interest our job is to speak for all the people or the victims of conflict and propose and push for practical pragmatic solutions that end the conflict or prevent it. It seemed to me in a lot of the jobs I've had that the work of the crisis group was in some ways reminiscent of quite old-fashioned skills which you no longer see from diplomatic reporting and even from newspaper reporting you've got people on the ground in the areas doing that job and then as you say turning it into recommendations. Who is your main audience for all of this? Well the main audience is of course when all the foreign ministries of concerned countries are very interested in what we say. The parties to conflict are very interested in what we say because they know that they will hear from us the unvarnished truth and they often search themselves for solutions and we engage with them and try to convince them to find a solution and then of course the general public who wants to make sense of this world when it comes to crisis group reports because they offer objective analysis. You're going to be talking tonight about reconfiguring the international response to conflict. Why is such a reconfiguration required and what does it involve? Well we have been used to a world where conflict was essentially state to state conflict and where the number of powers that really structured the international scene was fairly limited. It was essentially a top-down world with the states as the pillars and now we are seeing a much more bottom-up world where events, circumstances often dictate the reactions of states, where states are often overwhelmed by what is happening and where the number of states involved is much greater than it used to be. So a world in which 30, 40 states operate follows quite different rules and different processes than a world in which a handful of states are really the dominant powers. You wrote recently throughout the world it seems crisis is gripping national politics and for any Australian over past weeks would I think recognise all of that. How do you define this crisis and what does it matter to conflict resolution? Well I think that politics were always defined in the confines of the nation state and the notion of a public space in which you compete for political programs was really strongly embedded. Now you see a number of actors who transcend states and you see a great skepticism on the notion of a comprehensive political program. That is in part the result of the end of the Cold War which was in a way the end of ideologies where you had strong ideologies structuring political life. Now that's come to pass and so but that doesn't mean that people don't want to act collectively but they are less looking for political answers. Hence crisis in many countries of politics. You see in Europe a great fragmentation of politics, a sense of impotence of politics and the darker side of that is how extremist movements, extreme fundamentalism especially islamist fundamentalism then provide a cheap and most dangerous outlet to a sense of lack of purpose, lack of collective purpose of disenfranchised people. You've already mentioned that one of the distinctive features about the current international system is the emergence of non-state actors and you've talked about fragile states and ungoverned spaces which obviously preoccupy a lot of crisis groups work. In this part of the world we're highly conscious too of another feature of the current international system which is the emergence of a strong state in China with growing international influence not just in our part of the world. I wondered if I could ask you how you see China currently and in the future contributing to global order and conflict resolution and the issues that crisis group is interested in? Well I have seen China gradually taking a more assertive role I saw it in peacekeeping where I saw the growth of Chinese participation in peacekeeping wanting to show that it could be a good citizen of the world. At the same time it is not yet clear how China will integrate in the multilateral system which requires to have a fundamentally symmetrical view of international relations not a hierarchical view and China there is anyway there is a tension between its sense that it has to become a global power its desire not to have enemies which means also not to have allies as they say which means that China is hesitant to take on strong positions at the same time it needs a stable world and it's now too big to just abstain and so I think in the we see conflicting signals in a way coming from China because it is pursuing different objectives on the one hand it wants to remain a quiet power that doesn't rock the boat at the same time it sees a world in which precisely they are fragile state there are situations where abstention is not an answer it's certainly concerned about the rise of jihadism it sees that if you don't deal with those weak states where jihadism can take hold then jihadism could strike home and so that challenges in a way fundamental concept of sovereignty for China and the balance between engagement and abstention and I don't think China at this stage has found the full answer yet it's it's looking for it one of the things that you jobs that you had before you you took this was as a special envoy for both the Arab League and the United Nations in dealing with Syria that jihadism and those whole issues which are as you were saying directly relevant to China and to the end to the rest of the world come together very much there what hope do you see now for the situation there well I was working on directly on Syria in 2012 and it would have been less difficult in 2012 to reach a settlement than now because the more a conflict endures whether it is in Syria or in Somalia or in south Sudan the more we see a tendency to fragmentation and today Syria is infinitely fragmented which means that today we cannot be looking for the kind of comprehensive ceasefire that we tried in 2012 it failed in 2012 but it barely failed there was a moment of hope certainly today to try for a comprehensive ceasefire in Syria would be is completely unrealistic and so that is why the the present special envoy of the United Nations Stefan de Mistura is trying for what he calls local freezes and he has focused on a freeze in Aleppo and we at crisis group had drawn attention to to Aleppo at the moment these efforts are not yet succeeding because both camps still believe that they can win I believe and I think our analysts at crisis group believe that there is more and more a stalemate but there is not among the parties a perception of a stalemate sadly and so long as there is not the perception of a stalemate then the fight goes on as each side believes it can crush the other certainly that is the belief of the Syrian government in Aleppo and the opposition the mainstream opposition I'm not talking about Amnus or the Islamic state but the mainstream opposition in the south may think that it has momentum and that can have further gains and so that that prevents progress on on local freezes I think eventually there will be such freezes and the question will be then in which national framework I believe that the talk about breaking up Syria is very dangerous I think the Syrians want Syria to stay a unified country but certainly it will require much devolution of power local security arrangements and very solid security guarantees which probably mean that the various group will need to be sure that they have some kind of control over part of the security establishment because they won't believe in just words and I'm afraid this solution is still far off okay I'm that rather pessimistic notion let me thank you very much Jean-Marie Guillena for joining us here at the ANU thank you thank you