6th Senior Level Peacebuilding Course “Enhancing Leadership for Peacebuilding”

Thank you for the opportunity to reflect with you on the future of peacebuilding, looking at what our world will look like in 2050 and how we can foster sustainable peace in this changing context. It is a pleasure to host you here in Geneva during our first-ever Geneva Peace Week.

It will come as no surprise that I do not have a crystal ball but let me nonetheless set out a few trends that I believe will determine how we need to adapt our responses to conflict and instability.

We live at a time of increasing complexity and growing connections across the challenges we face. It is a trend that will be reinforced over time. This sounds almost like a truism. But while we seem to have understood this on an analytical level, we still have a long way to go in adapting our responses at an operational level so we can actually address these linkages in an effective manner.
Looking ahead, I am convinced that we need to address challenges in what I sometimes call a “matrix format” that brings together peace and security with social and economic issues – both in how we analyze problems but most importantly in our operational responses. Linked to this, there is a clear need to do away with the “short-termism” that we all-too-often experience in policy-making. The challenges we face are simply too serious and too complex to be dealt with in timespan that suits the electoral cycle and the 24-hour news cycle. But it takes real courage and leadership to go beyond the short-term solutions.

Climate change is the most obvious example of where we need a completely different way of thinking and delivering. Climate change is truly an existential threat that cuts across all categories and all institutions as we know them, and must be dealt with in a longer perspective. For the first time in our history, we are in the process of altering the very conditions our planet. But we are still dealing with the different climate change through outdated frameworks. It is not only our consumption patterns that are unsustainable; the way we address the impact of our consumption patterns is also unsustainable in the long run.

At the same time, technological advances are fundamentally changing the interaction among people. Technology has gone from being an aid in delivering services, to defining and determining the services that can be delivered. Technology also alters relations among people, and brings potential for the empowerment of individuals in a way that is fundamentally different from what was the case previously.

This trend brings tremendous possibilities for progress, but also carries with it the risk of entrenching and exacerbating inequalities. By the end of this year, there will be some three billion Internet users and seven billion mobile phones in the world. Very impressive figures – and the growth in the developing world is particularly important. But still, more than half of the world’s population is not connected to the Internet and is missing out on the possibilities that it offers.

Most importantly, technology changes the expectations of individuals: it raises expectations of a more direct and active role in shaping their own futures.

Demographics are also changing rapidly. People are on the move. Not just across borders, but very much within countries, moving into cities. The total number of international migrants has increased over the last 10 years, from an estimated 150 million in 2000 to 214 million persons today. Already now, over 50% of the world’s population lives in cites. It is estimated that this figure will increase to 70% by 2050. And most of this urbanization will take place in the developing world, and much of it will be in slum dwellings.

This not only means that much more of our critical decision-making will need to be made at city and municipal level. It also means that most of our peacebuilding will take place in urbanized settings. We are already seeing the beginnings of these changes, with an increased role and political visibility for the mayors of some of our major cities and with many of the most creative solutions being thought out and implemented at this level also.

Above and beyond these trends, we are also experiencing a deficit in trust at many levels. It is caused by a combination of unfulfilled expectations, a sense that the rules of the game can be discarded with impunity and growing feelings of injustice when faced with unequal opportunities. We see this at the geopolitical level, with growing distrust among some countries. And we see this on a daily basis, with individuals losing trust and confidence in their elected leaders, in their Governments and also in the institutions that are supposed to deliver greater stability and progress, including the United Nations. There is a pervasive feeling among the general public that the “authorities” that they used to believe in no longer deliver and do not have integrity. This trust deficit is a distinguishing feature of our societies today and is also a reflection of a broader leadership deficit.

All this adds up to a world of asymmetries: asymmetries in political influence and economic weight and asymmetries in opportunities and influence – all of which can have very powerful destabilizing effects. Overall, I believe that these trends will have very far-reaching implications for global governance. They alter identities, alliances and allegiances – and as a result, also our political priorities. This means that we will need to re-think fundamentally how we do business - also in peacebuilding.

At the global level, I think that we will experience a re-calibration of the role of the State, with a great number of decisions taken at other levels. Identities will be more fluid and overlapping, which in turn will have implications for how we do business at local level.

Combined, these developments result in new patterns of governance. Key characteristics will be more direct engagement by citizens and a trend towards a multi-stakeholder approach, with more inclusive decision-making and a much-changed role for the State and with a much greater demand for active participation, justice and equality in the relations between individuals and institutions. This is a shift that challenges established centres of power - and which will also have a deep impact on how we build peace.

So, bringing it all back to the topic of your course, what do we need to do to foster sustainable peace - not just in 2050, but even now? It is important to remember that our peacebuilding efforts take place in this larger context and cannot be dealt with in isolation from broader trends. The tools we choose, the leadership skills we need, the approaches we take - these are all embedded in this wider context, and we will not be effective if we do not take this into account.
First, we need to be serious about building multi-stakeholder partnerships. And we need to do so in a way where we move on from what is sometimes a rather superficial interpretation of what multi-stakeholder means and how it is to be implemented.

I think that for many diplomats and politicians, multi-stakeholder still refers to a situation where processes and solutions are effectively determined by Governments, with some, relatively limited consultation with other actors, most notably advocacy NGOs, so they can “tick the box” when it comes to engaging other stakeholders. This is not only insufficient, but it will also - in the longer term - compound the trust deficit that I mentioned earlier.

Multi-stakeholder partnerships will require us to change qualitatively the way that partners other than Governments are involved in our processes. It is not just a question of a “place at the table”, but having a real voice at the decision-making table and the ability to help determine outcomes.

Above and beyond this change in the level and type of involvement, we also need to think more about who the stakeholders are. We need to integrate parliamentarians, the private sector, the academic and research communities and the scientific community, for a more inclusive and rounded process of policy-setting and decision-making.

Building multi-stakeholder partnerships is very much a question of leadership. Reaching out to and integrating other stakeholders in a meaningful manner is much harder than it sounds. Often there is a need to deal with underlying mistrust, lack of understanding of what others can bring, and institutional structures that are not well-suited to this way of doing business - all of which may work against true partnerships. Leadership that is convinced of the value of the multi-stakeholder approach is needed. And there I have much hope: I see on a daily basis how new generations of leaders have taken onboard the multi-stakeholder approach and are practicing it.

Second, we need to anchor all that we do in human rights. We have already made important progress in this area. Some 15 years ago, the words human rights were hardly ever used in the Security Council. For example, today we cannot envisage a new peacekeeping mandate without a human rights component. This goes beyond mainstreaming in a technical way. This represents a quantum leap, in a relatively short period of time. It is close to revolutionary in an Organization that otherwise usually adapts in small, gradual processes. We see this also in the rapidly growing importance of the Human Rights Council, which is based here in Geneva - which is close to rivalling the importance of the Security Council.

Protection and promotion of human rights is also necessary to overcome the trust deficit, and it has significant implications for how we do peacebuilding in the field. When human rights are placed at the centre of what we do, those we work for understand that we are actually working for them. And this builds trust - not just in the processes but in the institutions - and in their future.

Third - and this is linked with the previous point - we need to promote women’s empowerment to a much greater extent. If there is such a thing as a “silver bullet” to achieve peace, rights and well-being, then women’s empowerment is it. I don’t think it is possible to underestimate the importance of women’s empowerment for all our processes - at global and at local level. Yet, we have a tendency to relegate this to a sub-category of other priorities. We need to place women’s empowerment squarely at the centre of what we do and build other priorities around this, and not the other way around.

Finally, we need to get better at building trust. This is a common thread that runs through all of the three first points. And we must recognize that what constitutes trust at local level may not always be what commands the trust of the international community. Processes that have local legitimacy and therefore local trust may need to involve actors that are not acceptable to the international community. Or local actors may be ready to make compromises, for example on transitional justice, that are not acceptable to the international community. Local processes may also have other timeframes than the international community. In short, we - as international actors - need to learn to trust the local processes much better. As the international community, we talk about the need for a “locally-owned process” but often we are, in fact, unwilling to allow the local actors to set the parameters for the process.

It goes without saying that it is in the effort to build trust - both among local communities but also between the local process and the international expectations - that we find the greatest challenge for the individual peacebuilder. And this is where personal leadership is needed the most.

So, in conclusion, in my view, 2050 is likely to be a world of even greater contradictions that we need to reconcile to ensure cohesion and stability:

A world of greater fragmentation where decisions are increasingly taken by smaller entities and at different levels. A world where the role of the State has been fundamentally altered in how it delivers services and what it delivers. At the same time, a world where people as individuals are more connected than ever through technology, and where technology will determine our expectations. A world where there are greater possibilities for empowerment than ever before, but also a world where a large number of people will feel shut out from those possibilities. A world where the private sector and many other stakeholders will be more directly implicated in decision-making because it will simply not be possible to move ahead without them. And yet possibly a world whose future may be in even more doubt than it is now due to our inability to confront climate change in any meaningful way.

The conclusion can only be that we cannot wait until 2050 before we adapt. I am convinced that we need to move towards a different way of doing business, not just in peacebuilding but in global governance more broadly much before then. The institutional structures that we have and the modus operandi of politics and diplomacy are no longer suited to the challenges we face.

Reality is imposing itself - and we need to adapt if we are to have any hope of being effective. A few thoughts for our dessert - and hopefully also for some discussion!