A New Agenda for Trust: Forging Peace in a Divided World
Session description:
Since 1992, when the Agenda for Peace on preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping was adopted by the UN Security Council, armed conflicts have changed in type and nature. Over the past decade, both the number of armed conflicts and fatalities have been increasing, while the level of trust towards national and international institutions has correlatively been shrinking[1]. Time and time again, distrust has been observed as a consistent driver of conflict. Trust is usually the first element lost when conflict erupts, and the last to be regained. Today, ominous geopolitical mistrust and breakdown in relations between and within States erode the capacities of our international political system to promote sustainable and resilient peace at the local, national, regional, and international levels.
The eve of defining a New Agenda for Peace in 2024 offers decisive momentum to address this obstacle by placing trust at the center of a renewed peacebuilding architecture. Effective dialogue and collaboration between international actors, states, citizens, and communities can nurture trust, fostering social cohesion and reinforcing social contracts. Even in the most difficult conflict contexts, building blocks for trust and reconciliation between parties exist.
2024 also marks the celebration of Interpeace’s thirty years of existence. Based on three decades of collective peacebuilding experience and ahead of the Summit of the Future in September, this discussion will explore the avenues to rebuilding a trust-based international system shaping peacebuilding policies, processes, and practices, crossing learnings from different country contexts. It will also discuss the role peacebuilding organisations can play in fostering drivers of trust at the local level and helping to reshape multilateral relations, notably between the Global North and the Global South.
Objectives:
This session's objective will be to discuss drivers of trust as a foundation of peace in the new peace architecture. The discussion will be based on successful stories of peacebuilding efforts, using trust as a bedrock and leverage for the growth and reinforcement of social cohesion and reconciliation in societies affected by conflict. The objective is to draw from trust-building practices from different contexts to shape positive transformative learning for the definition of the New Agenda for Peace, the Summit of the Future, and the review of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture. All levels of trust will be examined, from grassroot communities to the multilateral system. The panel will discuss the role different actors can play in anchoring trust-based peace at all levels.
Guiding Questions:
1) What lessons learned can civil society organisations draw from their work in countries to help build trust in international fora and institutions, in the current context of geopolitical tensions and political deadlock?
2) How can the variety of actors working on peace and security work in a peace responsive manner across divides and mandates, and promote a trust-based international system?
3) How can peacebuilding organisations reconcile the political agenda at the international level with the peacebuilding needs at the grassroots level? And how is this work enabling trust-building activities?
4) How can the new Agenda for Peace and UN peacebuilding architecture address the trust deficit between the Global North and Global South? What role can be particularly played by CSOs in this regard?
5) How can the international community, states and regional institutions support organizations across the Humanitarian-Development and Peace (HDP) nexus to carry out activities that are drivers of trust and social cohesion?
The session will be 75 minutes long. The moderator will introduce the session and the panel of speakers for five minutes and will then give ten minutes to each panelist to provide their answers to his questions (45 minutes of discussion). The next 25 minutes will then be dedicated to the audience engaging with the panelists. The moderator will dedicate the last five minutes to summarize and provide the main takeaways of the session.
[1] https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/publication/PB_108.pdf ; https://ourworldindata.org/trust ; https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts ; https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-new-armed-conflicts