 myfwng i'r ddechrau i'r eisteddfwyllt y bwrdd y cyddemach agai cyfrifolau a gyfrifolau a'r dyfanc. Dyma'r ysgrifennad ei wedi hynny i llwyf Trustaeth, neu'n dod yn cael bod i gael'u cyfrifolau yn gwybod at y cyfrifolau, sydd ddwy'r argylcheddawr y Gwelch Cymru. Mae llwyddi cerddurdodd yng Nghymru yn dweud y Cyfrifolau Pwylltig oxideisgwydau a'r Pwylltig panell ar gyfrifolau mae'r cyfrifolau ar gyfer cael eu cyfrifolau, The new Secretary-General's commission, she is going to be a member of that on the peacekeeping commission, which she has set up relatively recently. Of course, he has taken office in the first of January. She's worked on peace and security policy and operations at UN headquarters including UN peace operations in Mali and Afghanistan, civilian capacities and peace operations, security sector reform, economic governments initiatives and partnerships with regional organisations, and on the ground she has served in UN peace operations in Syria, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo and in Haiti. Before joining the UN in 2005, Renata was head of SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute programme on Armed Conflict and Conflict Management, and prior to that she was special advisor to the EU, to the EU Council Secretariat for the Planning of the First EU Crisis Management Operation, and was deputy director of the East West Institute European Security programme from 97 to 1999. Dr Duann has received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford and was a full bright scholar in Princeton, and she has also published widely on peacekeeping international crisis management. That's a lengthy and very distinguished career and leads us to welcome the thoughts and the address that she will give. Obviously, the peacekeeping operations are very much a front line for the UN. They are a highly visible operation of the UN functions, and over the seven decades, I think there have been over 120 states have contributed it, so it's a very widely seen and acknowledged arm of UN functions. Of course, it's particularly so in Ireland, where since 1958 we have continuously been sending troops abroad, and we see it here as very much a feature of our foreign policy, our contribution to peace and conflict resolution, but of course there are huge challenges at the moment. The world has changed, the conflicts have changed, the actors have changed, so it will be of considerable interest to hear from you, Renata, of your view on peacekeeping in a divided world, what is the role of the UN? Thank you very much, everyone, and it's a pleasure to be here today, and it's also a chance for me to come home, so that's even more of a nice experience. Coming from atlone, as I do with the memorial to UN fallen peacekeepers, literally steps from my house, it is a very sort of personal meets professional always for me to be thinking about the role of Ireland in peacekeeping. I think where we are today in peacekeeping, in light of the current global environment, the surge in conflicts after a significant period of decline, the refugee crisis that has reached unparalleled needs, and of course in size, and the perspective of the incoming administrations or elections in multiple countries, both in Europe and of course the new Trump administration, it's fair to say are we at a time where it's the end of a commitment to global organizations and to peace and security efforts by global organizations. So I think these sorts of conversations are urgent and they're going to become more urgent in the course of the years as we go ahead, as we move ahead into what is a very uncertain time. What I want to discuss today a little bit is currently in global environments, the UN, but also the EU, the World Bank and other institutions, there's a lot of focus on peace building and how to sustain peace and fragile context and you have institutions like the World Bank spending a lot of money in these areas and you've seen last year the Security Council and the General Assembly agree a groundbreaking resolution on sustaining peace which is sort of a commitment to look more much more at the bookends of conflict, the prevention side before the conflict and after the conflict breaks out and a feeling that we've spent too much time thinking about the conflict phase and that we need to spend much more time thinking about the prevention and the sustaining peace of the conflicts. So this is also a priority for the new secretary general who has come in on an agenda of prevention and on trying to do much more to sustain peace on the other side and a call to people to stop having just a crisis response and just a sort of when the crisis is at its hottest then to say now we have to do something. So that has been sort of the current mood in some of the debates both in the academic world and certainly in the policy world at multilateral institutions. Now in some cases this is almost seen as an alternative to peacekeeping. Let's move in this peace building direction and let's sort of this peacekeeping thing let's leave it aside. Now what I want to argue today is that it's a mistake to approach peacekeeping and peacebuilding as two separate entities but that they're essentially intertwined. Peacekeeping is an essential component of any peacebuilding and successful peacekeeping relies on incorporating a peacebuilding approach and I want to argue that as we go forward in what is going to be a very rocky year ahead we are going to have to rethink what we mean by peacebuilding and how what we mean by peacekeeping in that. So where is the the mood on peacekeeping? Well if you look at the numbers alone as Mary suggested it looks pretty good 125 countries participating in it, 16 missions around the world, 118,000 people participating in UN peacekeeping of which 100,000 are military and police that is a significant global operation. Seven decades long perception of international legitimacy and longevity. So does that story look pretty good and of course you had under the Obama administration a commitment of the US to come behind peacekeeping and you've had three years of successive fairly high global summits on peacekeeping to increase the base of peacekeeping you've had Obama even chair one of them and you have of course last year in London the third peacekeeping summit. Budget high some eight billion dollars and now you've seen increasingly in the last couple of years the return of Europeans to peacekeeping. I don't mean Ireland or Sweden and countries that have traditionally maintained but I'm talking about Germany in the Netherlands and so coming back to to peacekeeping after a significant period of non-participation. So that looks pretty good perhaps the signs are that it's a tool that has acceptability and people are participating in it. Now if you look at the research side of things which of course being good international civil servants we rarely do any empirical basis or rebranding on research but if you do look at the research the research also points to correlating data that peacekeeping in countries emerging from conflict tends to reduce the chances of that country falling back into conflict and of course for those of you who are students you'll know that work Doyle and Sanbanes from 2000 page four from 2006. So essentially it's it's also saying on the whole peacekeepers tend to go to more violent conflicts where that had been going on for longer and on the whole the data demonstrates that where peacekeepers are deployed the chances of falling back into conflict are reduced. So that's perhaps a good story and is that a good new story. Well if you're in New York today or perhaps in the media of any one of our countries that's not how it looks. There's a perception fairly widespread perception that peacekeeping is in trouble and or even failing and there's very multiple factors that have led to that. One of course is the significant problem around sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers in mission areas that may be undertaken by a small number of peacekeepers but it has cast a negative light on the conduct of peacekeepers on the accountability and on the ability of the UN to manage and it's significant because at the moment in the US Congress there are bills about cutting funding for the UN for various factors but one of which is because of the problem of sexual exploitation and abuse. So that has cast a dark cloud in public perceptions and and the idea whether the UN can control its peacekeepers. A second issue of course is the cost. We're still emerging from a global financial recession context is difficult and eight billion dollars seems like a lot of money. It is a lot of money even if it's less than half of one percent of world military expenditure. It is paid through compulsory assessed budget contributions of member states and that has been a constraint. Another area that I think is a perception of it's not working is the idea that somehow it's maybe what you might call the dog that doesn't bark. People now and I've just come back from Unifil last week to look at a mission in response to a security council perception that you know it's casting a lot of money and the place seems pretty peaceful and like why should we be keeping a lot of troops and money and material out there? Well maybe the troops and the material that are out there are contributing to that piece but it's a little bit difficult to demonstrate that argument so it's a bit like the dog that didn't bark. Is it because of the peacekeepers there that it's quite so demonstrating success isn't always easy. There is a perception of protracted conflict recovery. How long it takes for a country to get back on track. Look at Haiti and Liberia where the past two years we've been successfully trying to close those missions and downsize them and there's a perception of are they ready yet is it always too fragile to move in beyond the departure of the peacekeeping. Certainly the president of Liberia continues to argue that the presence of UN police is absolutely essential for the stability of the country and similar you get a similar tension in Haiti and then of course you've got the very difficult context of South Sudan in particular but also Sudan and DRC where presence of peacekeepers takes place amongst that all out violence as in the case of South Sudan or significant political crisis like the Congo. So when you combine that with a sense of the cost and the record it's there's a perception of we deploy these troops we deploy all these operations and why is there not a sustainable peace and recovery in the country concern. The reality is also too that the UN has been deployed into more and more intense and violent conflicts. If you think about Mali and the mission there which was deployed in the light of perceived Islamic threat by Islamic extremist organisations if you look at the countries like Somalia where AU peacekeepers are authorized by the UN to deploy against the threat of al-Shabaab the perception that UN peacekeeping is more and more being deployed to intense ongoing conflicts where there is no peace to keep and where the threat is coming from armed groups that have no desire to participate in a political process and indeed are targeting the UN. So I think these sets of issues have left a lot of doubt and a fundamental crisis of confidence amongst many in what's the purpose of peacekeeping and where and how it should continue to play a role in the future. I think a consequence of that crisis of confidence has been you've seen increased political tensions between member states about what they think peacekeeping should do. So if you look at the Security Council and the debates over renewals of mandate debates over what peacekeepers should do in DRC whether protection of civilians should be a task for peacekeeping whether the UN peacekeepers should engage in reform of state institutions that's become a tension between security council members who are themselves divided as never before it's become a tension between the security council and the troop contributing countries who say we're the ones sending our troops to undertake the mandates that you yourselves have have defined but are not willing to send troops to it's created tension between the peacekeeping operations and the whole state where there is a perception that the that sovereignty is being interfered if you look countries like South Sudan or like the like DRC which has for three years running PNG in other words sent out persona non grataid the human rights the head of the human rights component of the mission. So that tension in terms of what the mission is mandated to do and what the whole state is willing to accept or do has left a sense that there's a political loss of unity there's also I think in particularly in light of the dangerous environments of peacekeeping today an increasing focus on the military operations and the activities that's partly a consequence of the environments and the very dangerous environments that peacekeepers are going into it's partly a consequence of the lack of political unity which faced with a lack of political unity the focus then becomes military activities stability efforts protection of civilians I do want to flag that ironically the return of the Europeans to peacekeeping in my view has increased a little bit that tendency to take a very much military focus on operations and I think that's partly that many of those countries are coming from a NATO experience a NATO experience in Iraq and Afghanistan perhaps not as institutionalized in the culture as perhaps Irish troops or even Swedish or Finnish troops in the culture of having a civilian command and of working side by side with civilians so that has led to I think an increased focus on operations military capabilities performance of the military side and that you see in the council today with this focus on on debates around use of force and the drive to get more enablers and capabilities so where do we see that spanning out I mentioned Lebanon last week you see the council wanting to cut all community outreach activities or some on the council I should say you see them saying and the driver for that being why are the troops doing these sorts of community outreach civilian activities let's let's revise that you see China in in the budgetary processes not approving any political affairs officers or or looking at human rights activities and saying why do we need that in a peacekeeping operation you see Russia fairly seriously opposed to any references to human rights mandates and to capacities and normative engagement on human rights issues in peacekeeping operations and you see real tensions over extensions of mandates whether Liberia should continue to benefit from a peacekeeping operation or not so that's where I think some of these tensions are back what I want to argue here is that the implications of this division and this implication of understanding peacekeeping increasingly as a kinetic and operational military driven activity is not good neither for peacekeeping and for the political cohesion behind it but not good either for practical peacebuilding and the effect and the capability of the UN intervention to contribute to peace let's go back again to statistics for a minute if you look at the data analysis the data has looked at the types of operations and what are more likely to contribute to peace so page four now has looked at this over time and said found that multi-dimensional operations in other words operations that include police civilian military components that include political human rights civil affairs community activities disarmament on all those activities that go alongside a significant effort have had more chance to maintain peace than more traditional limited military ceasefire monitoring missions and interestingly the data is also pointing that to the success of peacekeeping is mainly due to its non-military mechanisms so the decision of armed groups not to go back to war and to keep the peace is about changing the incentives of violence alleviating fear building more trust avoiding accidental escalation into war and the while these are important things that the military contributes to they're also critically led by political processes and efforts to change perspectives views and incentives so we understand therefore peacekeeping as primarily a political tool that draws on and uses important military and police assets security assets but that is not in and of itself a military tool for the purposes of military objectives so security is critical for any peacekeeping for any peacebuilding activity and peacekeepers do contribute to that effort by creating an enabling environment but the idea that somehow that a military and security perspective and a political and peacebuilding perspective can be separate is blatantly demonstrated by all our experiences so far to be not the case some have said then well why do we pay for expensive peacekeeping we could perhaps put that money into aid development aid humanitarian aid and drive tackle poverty in the root causes of conflict that might lead to conflict well again the literature is mixed on that one there is not any indication at the moment that aid has a significant effect in stabilizing post-conflict situations it has a moderate effect but but not a significant effect so the idea somehow that putting money just development aid alone and in and of itself will not necessarily achieve stability so what we're coming back to is how do then do we have this integrated approach of a political security development in human rights component therefore I would argue then that peacebuilding and a peacekeeping approach to peacebuilding is critical for the success of the peacebuilding effort and for the success of the peacekeeping operation but we will need to approach it differently in the new world in which we now work on maybe first a couple of elements as to what would be a new or understanding an approach to peacebuilding in a peacekeeping in a new peacekeeping context the first I think would be the need to rethink some of the drivers of conflict up until perhaps the Arab spring we may try to make it or there was a direct correlation often made between poverty and conflict poor poverty leads to conflict and so we found ourselves then a bit non plusd when Syria happened and when the Arab spring happened where you saw countries that according to poverty development indexes were middle income countries or approaching middle income status erupting in conflict and likewise you have conflict you've countries like Malawi countries fairly low down on the conflict in the development index that have not had conflict so we've had to rethink what does the link between poverty and conflict we know that poverty creates conditions that can result in people using violence armed violence and we know that sudden shocks in a country the collapse of of the gold industry or if it's a mining country the collapse of money can have create shocks that a country can't manage to overcome but more and more we've become become aware of from the Arab spring on that when we think about conflict we're looking at the relative inequality between communities and societies in a conflict and that exclusion and inclusion of communities and societies in the state's governance and in the state's resources tends to have a much more significant correlation for chances of violence and violence so for those of you of course who follow some of the development debates you'll have seen in the sustainable development goals this emphasis now on inclusion and that inclusive society stand a greater chance of peace and of avoiding and managing crises than non inclusive societies so if we were to approach that understanding from peacekeeping what does that mean and how might that affect where where we might not look well one thing it would change is the emphasis of the state building experiment that we see in Iraq and Afghanistan so if we think about Iraq and Afghanistan and the ISAF the international security assistance force the American led effort in both countries we saw their massive exercises to rebuild entire states we saw emphasis on recreating an army from scratch in the case of Iraq significant creation of new police forces in in Afghanistan we saw the overhauling of the constitution in Afghanistan we saw the complete reform of justice redesign of everything from taxation to to functioning of health and environmental institutions that process and that outcome has not necessarily yielded success and it's a super long process that will inevitably take decades so the extent to which the nation building approach is the right way to building peace is under question that is not to say that strong functioning states aren't essential to maintaining states peace and stability and human rights absolutely the focus is more on should the job of the peacekeeping or an international intervention be on building state institutions or on looking at other aspects of the community and in particular the extent to which trust exists between state and societies and communities i give you an example from my time in Afghanistan the world bank was running a massive financial ministry of finance support overhaul to build a financial ministries that was a huge undertaking that began at the central level to get a ministry of finance functioning and start a budgetary process working but in the course of that process when you would say to the bank officials what does that mean for a local community to have any budgetary budgets coming for any local civil service functions any time in the next three to five years they would say no we're not ready yet it'll come but it'll take some time but if you're in a peacekeeping context and in a context of fragile stability is that sufficient to to engage and to create the basis for a recovery and for a sustainable peace it's one of the questions we're looking at in central african republic right now so if we were to look at a new and a slightly different peace building approach one i think of the key issues would be that we have a little bit more focus on the local level and on the sub-national of building community engagement building confidence of communities and building trust between communities and central state representatives and that's i think a critical role for UN peacekeepers not just because they're often out in the field offices where nobody else is and where few development actors are present and certainly no embassies and certainly no international financial institutions but it's also a critical component of part of the efforts that we have to engage with the community as much for our own safety and security as elsewhere so whether and how we might look at more local community incentives and community rebuilding is i think going to be a big question and it's going to be a sensitive question because it's at the heart of states and state sovereignty and state institutions and for example when we engage now in central african republic with community building initiatives and community engagements initiatives that has some sensitivity for the states which would like to sort of see an immediate establishment of of its institutions and focus so that's one key issue the second i think focus that we're going to have to look at is a whole new way of working with development and humanitarian partners now the UN for the last two decades has been talking about integration between development human rights and humanitarian nato has a comprehensive approach the EU has its comprehensive approaches to to crisis management too but i wonder and i would just put it out there whether we have really advanced significantly on those efforts every national country still has its siloed pools for financing we still have our siloed programmatic activities the development budget doesn't mix with the security budget the political budget so we're very much still funding and programming and engaging these as entirely separate functions and while much of the focus of the efforts of UN peacekeeping to work better with development and human humanitarian human rights actors for the last 10 years has progressed it's been internally UN focused whereas if you look at the amount of money that comes into a country in a post conflict 80 percent of it 85 percent of it goes outside the UN so in other words even if we have perfect coordination with all our UN partners the real money is coming from outside actors the EU the world bank development banks and bilateral donors so that really gets at the issue of how can then the UN really and UN peacekeeping really work in a much more strategic and operational way with other actors and i'm highlighting in particular the world bank the european union and key donors at the level of programming and at the level of activities and finally i would flag that a newer area of peacekeeping that we're going to have to look at is having a leaner and more effective peacekeeping mandate should not mean that it's therefore a lean military component but that we look at the leanness as an ability to think about critical peacebuilding tasks and equip ourselves to to deliver on them i raise all this because i think Ireland's particularly well placed to drive some of these issues of the new peacebuilding tasks in a divided world first you've been amongst the most supportive of this comprehensive effort and at the nexus between development and security but second you've also been a driving force between the EU and the UN and driving some of that cooperation in crisis management so looking forward to a moment that is potentially a moment of crisis for the EU with brexit with a lot of discussions about the future of european security and defence and looking to questions about the future of UN peacekeeping i wonder if it's not a moment for countries like Ireland to really come in behind helping to define a new approach to peacebuilding that recognizes the challenges and the very real challenges of building peace in conflict and after conflict but avoids the tendency to make that simply understood as a military task