Peace Advocacy
2024 in numbers
Overview
Global decision-making often takes place in international forums where key governments, policymakers, and other international actors shape policies affecting peacebuilders. However, these spaces can be profoundly disconnected from the realities of individuals, communities, and states affected by conflict. To make policies more relevant, meaningful, and effective for those living in conflict or seeking to build peace, decision-making processes—and who participates in them—must change.
Interpeace’s global policy engagement is both proactive and reactive, seeking to innovate new approaches and concepts alongside responding to formal policy processes or convenings of national, regional, and international policymakers. Interpeace’s thematic policy work, whether on YPS, peace responsiveness and the HDP nexus, peace finance, or rethinking stability, aims to amplify the impact of bottom-up peacebuilding efforts reflected in the organisation’s working values and understanding of good peacebuilding practices. It revolves around: 1) mainstreaming grassroots experiences to ensure that international funding, strategies, and interventions address the root causes of conflict effectively; 2) ensuring that peacebuilding approaches are embedded into, intersect with, complement, or are sequenced with development, climate, humanitarianism, and wider security and diplomatic objectives; and 3) embedding peacebuilding principles into global policies that recognise local capacities and aim at prevention.
Case study: : Institutionalising civil society engagement through the CSO-UN Dialogue
The CSO-UN Dialogue Initiative on Peacebuilding, co-chaired by Interpeace and the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA)/PBSO in 2024, supports efforts to build a more complementary and integrated ecosystem of peacebuilding actors and approaches by fostering the participation of UN entities and agencies and civil society actors. The platform amplifies voices and leadership beyond the traditional structures of multilateral institutions. Interpeace mobilised and utilised this forum to consolidate a community of practice among civil society and other peacebuilding actors while institutionalising UN engagement with civil society.
In 2024, the two main dialogues took place in Nairobi in June and New York in December, influencing the UN Pact for the Future and the Peacebuilding Architecture Review (PBAR), respectively. A survey conducted by PBSO after the New York dialogue revealed:
- 98% of participants thought the dialogue will advance their organisation’s engagement with the UN
- 68% of participants found the UN processes and entry points for civil society to engage with the UN covered in the event useful and relevant; 32% found them partially relevant
- 77% of participants were able to meet and speak with the UN system and Member State representatives informally
- 69% of participants found the peacebuilding lessons in regions outside their own covered in the event useful and relevant; 27% found them partially useful and relevant
- 98% of participants thought the dialogue was helpful for their organisation’s future work
- 100% of participants would come again next year
This positive reception is underscored by one of the participants of the CSO-UN dialogues, Khaled, who highlighted that the initiative.
The initiative seeks to build an active network and sustain a lasting momentum for continuous engagement throughout the year. It aims to become an institutionalised forum for civil society-UN Member State exchange and collaboration on peacebuilding. The CSO-UN Dialogue is a growing platform, currently planning its third iteration.