Preventive Diplomacy: Regions in Focus
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Preventive Diplomacy: Regions in Focus DECEMBER 2011 INTERNATIONAL PEACE INSTITUTE Cover Photo: UN Secretary-General ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Ban Ki-moon (left) is received by Guillaume Soro, Prime Minister of IPI owes a debt of thanks to its many donors, whose Côte d'Ivoire, at Yamoussoukro support makes publications like this one possible. In partic - airport. May 21, 2011. © UN ular, IPI would like to thank the governments of Finland, Photo/Basile Zoma. Norway, and Sweden for their generous contributions to The views expressed in this paper IPI's Coping with Crisis Program. Also, IPI would like to represent those of the authors and thank the Mediation Support Unit of the UN Department of not necessarily those of IPI. IPI Political Affairs for giving it the opportunity to contribute welcomes consideration of a wide range of perspectives in the pursuit to the process that led up to the Secretary-General's report of a well-informed debate on critical on preventive diplomacy. policies and issues in international affairs. IPI Publications Adam Lupel, Editor and Senior Fellow Marie O’Reilly, Publications Officer Suggested Citation: Francesco Mancini, ed., “Preventive Diplomacy: Regions in Focus,” New York: International Peace Institute, December 2011. © by International Peace Institute, 2011 All Rights Reserved www.ipinst.org CONTENTS Introduction . 1 Francesco Mancini Preventive Diplomacy in Africa: Adapting to New Realities . 4 Fabienne Hara Optimizing Preventive-Diplomacy Tools: A Latin American Perspective . 15 Sandra Borda Preventive Diplomacy in Southeast Asia: Redefining the ASEAN Way . 28 Jim Della-Giacoma Preventive Diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula: What Role for the United Nations? . 35 Leon V. Sigal Annex . 42 PREVENTIVE DIPLOMACY: DELIVERING RESULTS— REPORT OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL 1 Introduction Francesco Mancini Senior Director of Research, International Peace Institute Preventive diplomacy—conceived by Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in the mid-1950s and revitalized in the early 1990s by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali—is a vital instrument in the United Nations’ conflict-prevention toolkit. While the responsibility for preventing conflict and its escalation ultimately lies with countries themselves, the UN has played an indispensable supporting role since its establishment and will continue to do so. Over the past few years, there has been a resurgence of interest in employing preventive tools to thwart the outbreak and escalation of violent conflict. At the United Nations, member states have shown increasing interest in the kinds of results preventive engagement can achieve, both as a pre-emptive and cost-saving measure. The UN’s Department of Political Affairs has significantly enhanced its mediation capacity, most notably through its Mediation Support Unit, regional offices in Central Africa, West Africa, and Central Asia, and political missions. The Security Council has dedicated a number of its recent discussions to this subject, both in open debates and in closed sessions. During its July 2010 open debate on preventive diplomacy, the Security Council requested that the Secretary-General submit a report with recommendations on “optimizing preventive diplomacy tools within the UN system…in cooperation with regional organizations and other actors.” 1 It is within this context that the regional papers included in this publication were commissioned, as a contribution to the analysis and discussion that informed the Secretary-General’s report of August 26, 2011, Preventive Diplomacy: Delivering Results .2 From the Sudan to the Middle East, from Madagascar to Kyrgyzstan, the relevance of preventive-diplomacy initiatives cannot be understated. In fact, this renewed attention has occurred with good reason. There is an increasing realization within the international community that the more traditional measures for forestalling the emergence of conflicts have often fallen short, at times with catastrophic consequences. Today, “new” types of conflicts have arisen, most of them internal tensions over political transitions and regime change, coup d’états and coup attempts, election disputes, constitutional processes, access to natural resources, property, and land issues, among others. In addition, it is more cost-effective and less intrusive to invest in specific preventive initiatives as compared to postconflict reconstruction, peacebuilding, and peacekeeping activities—in terms of helping to save lives and scarce financial resources. Intractable conflicts place a heavy strain on war-torn societies and the international community. The World Bank, for example, estimated the cost of one civil war to be the equivalent of more than thirty years of economic development. 3 Resource constraints have become vitally important at this time of prolonged economic crisis and fiscal austerity in many donor countries. This renewed interest in conflict prevention follows an earlier period of conceptual, normative, and institu - tional advances between 1997 and 2002. Preventive action today is, however, quite different from the mid-1990s in at least two significant ways. First, the field of preventive diplomacy has become increasingly crowded, now comprised of a vast array of international, national, and local actors: NGOs, governments, and regional, subregional, and other international organizations. As the papers in this collection show, the United Nations is hardly the sole actor in preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution, with coherence and coordination among 1 UN Security Council, “Statement by the President of the Security Council,” UN Doc. S/PRST/2010/14, July 16, 2010. 2 United Nations Secretary-General, Preventive Diplomacy: Delivering Results , UN Doc. S/2011/552, August 26, 2011. 3 See World Bank, World Development Report 2011 (Washington, DC, 2011), p. 6. 2 INTRODUCTION multiple initiatives and actors quickly becoming a major challenge. Second, this new wave of prevention is no longer primarily externally driven. Local actors, from central governments to local communities and civil society, have become more proactive in expanding their roles in support of preventive initiatives within their own countries. International actors are increasingly focused on strengthening and supporting national and regional capacities and the processes for prevention. If we look more broadly at the field of conflict prevention, there is yet a third reason why these efforts are different today. The differences between operational and structural prevention are far less pronounced than when the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict coined these concepts in 1997. 4 Increasingly, both types of preventive intervention aim at achieving results in the medium term. This follows the realization that success at confronting acute crises (operational prevention) typically requires sustained engagement with the conflict parties, and that efforts to address the root causes of conflict (structural prevention) should have an observable positive impact in the medium term. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution with which to respond to emerging conflicts, UN Secretaries- General employ a number of diplomatic tools when hotspots flare and tensions rise. These include good offices, Groups of Friends of the Secretary-General, fact-finding missions, independent mediators, regional offices, country teams, resident political missions, and the dispatching of special representatives and envoys. An increase in the pace of preventive diplomatic efforts is evident in the growth in the number of UN special representatives engaged in peace operations, which grew threefold from twelve to thirty-six from 1980 to 2005; the number of special envoys deployed has also increased. The August 2011 report of the Secretary-General on preventive diplomacy (see annex) is the first-ever report on this topic. Secretary-General Ban detailed the growing importance of this practice and its recent accomplish - ments. At the same time, he outlined five priority areas for strengthening the use of preventive diplomacy: (1) early and decisive action to address emerging threats; (2) investing in and better equipping “preventive diplomats” and their staff; (3) predictable and timely financial support to maximize efforts on the ground and to deliver results; (4) stronger strategic partnerships with regional and subregional organizations; and (5) greater support for national institutions and mechanisms for mediation, including civil society and, in particular, women’s and youth organizations. Far from being a perfect tool, preventive diplomacy will require sustained attention and dedicated resources to be more effective in diminishing conflicts and their devastating costs. In his remarks to the high-level meeting of the Security Council on preventing conflict in September 2011, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon indicated that preventive diplomacy would remain a key priority for his second term and that “it is, without a doubt, one of the smartest investments [the UN] can make.” 5 The instruments of preventive diplomacy are more cost-effective than the deployment of a peacekeeping operation and can avert the loss of innocent lives and prevent the devastating consequences produced by internal displacement and economic upheaval. The Secretary-General called on the Security Council, the primary UN organ responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security, to continue “generating political momentum and engaging