UN peacebuilding efforts play a vital, unheralded role, says outgoing chief

The emerging peacebuilding architecture at the United Nations is playing a vital if under-appreciated role in assisting countries around the world stabilize and rebuild their economies and societies after armed conflicts, the outgoing chief of UN peacebuilding said today.

In her farewell press conference before retiring tomorrow, Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support Carolyn McAskie told reporters that the Peacebuilding Commission, Peacebuilding Fund and Peacebuilding Support Office had helped to overcome a void in the international community’s efforts to help struggling States.

“I haven’t got a headline for you, but it is a slow, quiet success story that’s growing and in the long run will have an enormous impact,” she said, pointing to early signs of success in countries such as Burundi and Sierra Leone – the first two nations on the agenda of the Peacebuilding Commission.

Ms. McAskie stressed that peacebuilding is much harder than it looks, and involves bringing together institutions and other actors in development, security, human rights, humanitarian, politics and other fields so that they can work together towards common goals.

The UN peacebuilding architecture, established in the wake of the 2005 World Summit, is designed to help post-conflict countries determine the priority areas for rebuilding out of the vast array of challenges they face.

The Assistant Secretary-General said it was important to remember that peacebuilding cannot be externally imposed, and must instead be internally driven and externally supported.

“The problem in the past has driven from the fact that we’re so concentrated on getting the politics right, the peace agreement – [and] rightly so, you’ve got to end the fighting, you’ve got to get the political structures in place – that we’ve waited too long to kick-start the economy. These things should not be sequential. They have to happen at the same time.”

Ms. McAskie said her experiences showed that the delivery of aid does work, but that many countries and crises had fallen off the international agenda and were relatively neglected by donors and policymakers.

She also noted the high correlation between the location of conflicts and the number of people living in poverty.