Threats and Challenges

chapter 3 Threats and Challenges

The United Nations has used a broad range of approaches and methods to provide alerts of threats and challenges to the security and welfare of hu- manity including the use of un organs for discussion of potential threats, the presentation of analyses and alerts by the un Secretary-General, the adop- tion of policies and norms, the preventive diplomacy of the un Secretary- General, and the organization of the un Secretariat for early warning and prevention. i Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar’s Comprehensive Prevention Strategies and His Case for a Comprehensive Global Watch over Environmental, Economic, Social, Political and Other Factors Affecting International Security

Historically, un Secretaries-General have sought to play a role in helping the Organization detect and head off threats and challenges. The first Secretary- General, Trygve Lie, submitted a Ten-point plan to energise the Organization. It was politely received and then ignored. Dag Hammarskjold saw the United Nations as a body that could help advance the development of the developing countries and he helped shape the concepts of conflict prevention and peace- keeping. U Thant sought to develop the role of the United Nations in dealing with humanitarian crises. Kurt Waldheim was a diplomatic helmsman as was Javier Perez de Cuellar. Perez de Cuellar did, however, press hard to develop the capacity of the United Nations for conflict prevention. This was continued by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose Agenda for Peace, submitted at the request of the Security Council, sought to mobilise the forces of the Organization for conflict prevention. Even he, however, two years later, issued a Supplement to Agenda for Peace in which he called into question whether the very ideas he had advanced could be implemented practically. His subsequent Agenda for Development and Agenda for Democratisation hardly received attention as he exited office shortly after they were published. Secretary-General Kofi Annan empanelled, as we shall see later in this chapter, a high-level panel on threats and challenges and his successor, Ban Ki-moon has empanelled groups to look into how the un could better detect crises and help to head them off.

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Of all of these efforts, the most seminal was Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar’s report, Perspectives for the 1990s, which he presented to the General Assembly in 1987. It is one of the most important ever presented in the quest for comprehensive prevention and protection strategies. The vision presented was one in which international security, including disarmament and international law, development and international economic cooperation, social ad- vancement, basic rights and fundamental freedoms, and human well being would be the broad areas in which the future programmes of the United Na- tions should be concentrated.1 The document presented, with feeling, the problems facing the world:

Conflict and resort to force, the inordinate utilization of resources for arms, continuing social and economic inequities, hunger, terrorism, the abuse of human rights – these and other negative elements in the world condition cast their shadow forward on the future.2

Making the case for the enhancement of early-warning and prevention activi- ties, the report stressed that nowhere was the saying that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure more true than in the field of international security, especially since the cure for conflict had proven so elusive. The United Nations must, therefore, give very high priority to monitoring potential causes of conflict and to communicating warning signs to those in a position to allevi- ate the situation. First responsibility should lie with the Security Council and the Secretary-General who would need to have means to mount a global watch. Given the strong economic and social factors in regional violence, economic and social developments would have to be followed and assessed in terms of their relevance to international security.3 There was, the report continued, much that could be foreseen in the economic and social fields for which advance planning was increasingly essential. A crowd- ed world of strained resources could not be managed on an ad hoc basis. The Unit- ed Nations must also be able to meet emergencies that called for collective effort, whether to contain violent political conflicts or to meet natural or man-made disasters. Both in looking ahead and in meeting new crises, information was an indispensable tool. In the past decades, many of the greatest shocks to the international community had been unanticipated, partly because warning signals had not been communicated. A communication gap had kept environmental,

1 A/42/512, Perspectives for the 1990s, p. 2. 2 Ibid, 2. 3 A/42/512, 3.