Launch of the International Peacebuilding Advisory Team (IPAT)

Director-General Weber
Distinguished Ambassadors
Dear Colleagues:

A very warm welcome to our launch of the International Peacebuilding Advisory Team, which we are hosting with our partners at Interpeace. And let me, first of all, thank Mr. Weber and his team for the excellent collaboration – on this event and on other joint projects to support the promotion of peace. I have a long association with Interpeace and with its predecessor – the War-Torn Societies Project – and the United Nations very much appreciates continuing this partnership. Let me here also acknowledge the presence of my good friend Matthias Stiefel who founded Interpeace and laid the foundation for the organization as it is today.

The United Nations has been supporting peace processes for the past 70 years. It is at the very heart of our mission. But as any quick glance at today’s headlines will tell us, we are still learning how to make peace sustainable. There is a clear need to improve our tools and to strengthen our processes.

A key challenge is how to operationalize the international community’s commitment to peacebuilding so that it has a concrete impact on the ground through meaningful processes, with local ownership. Interpeace and other partners have over the years made much progress in building peace in fragile contexts and turning the international support into genuinely more resilient communities.

The International Peacebuilding Advisory Team initiative – IPAT for short – adds further capacity to respond to the requests for support, and I welcome the focus on practical activities and advice that can help sustain local peacebuilding efforts. IPAT is already providing support to the United Nations system. The UNDP/DPA Joint Programme on Building National Capacities for Conflict Prevention has asked IPAT to facilitate its bi-annual internal reflection process with select Resident Coordinators on leadership in complex political contexts. Hopefully, one day we can expand this to other colleagues in the field, and we hope to make more use of this new capacity.

Experience and research have over the years provided much knowledge in how to build institutions and infrastructure, strengthen respect for human rights and the rule of law, generate employment and nurture business, and reform the security sector, all of which are key building blocks in peacebuilding. However, at the core of this process is – in my view – the need to build trust. Trust among communities and groups. Trust in institutions and authorities. Trust in the support and commitment of the international community. And trust in the future. This is what will sustain peace in the long term – and it is also the most difficult part of the process because it cannot be imposed and it cannot be rushed.

The focus today is on the practical peacebuilding work on the ground. But our event also opens for a broader discussion of the international community’s peacebuilding efforts as two important processes of relevance to the peacebuilding agenda are gathering pace. The first is the debate on the post-2015 development agenda, and the second is the review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture. There is no doubt that the international community in Geneva has an important contribution to make to both processes and UNOG is very pleased to facilitate today’s discussions to feed into those two streams of debate.

These two processes require us to look not only at our institutions and tool boxes, but also at a more profound level at what kind of societies we should help build, at the very concept of peacebuilding and where it should be applied. They require us to look in a more creative way at the link between security and development, at armed violence in our growing urban centres, and at the role of regional organizations, the private sector and other partners.

Common to both sets of discussions is that we need to figure out how to place the needs of communities first – how to establish the frameworks that empower individuals to shape their own futures, without forgetting the role that the State plays in creating and sustaining these frameworks. Yet, there is still a way to go from our conceptual understanding of the importance of locally-led processes to making that a reality on the ground. Likewise, both processes will highlight the importance of partnerships. But also here, we face a challenge in making partnerships a reality across sectors and institutional boundaries.

I hope that the International Peacebuilding Advisory Team approach can help to bridge these gaps. Just as I strongly believe that Geneva, with the unique combination of research and operations presences has a comparative advantage in taking this work forward.

Thank you very much.