Rethinking Peacebuilding for a New Geopolitical Era

The three opening statements converged faster than a panel usually does. Roger Mac Ginty argued that the peace infrastructure built over the past thirty years is creaking and underfunded but still standing, and that what has actually changed is who is willing to use it. Western actors who once led the liberal peace have vacated the space, pouring resources into defence and talking about security where they used to talk about peace. Into that gap have come middle powers with access, appetite and, in his word, optimism.

Richard Gowan reached a similar diagnosis by a different route. Qatar, Turkey and the Gulf states are displacing the institutions built up after the Cold War, and the Security Council is too deadlocked to compete. His tentative conclusion was that those institutions keep certain narrow comparative advantages, humanitarian coordination and peacekeeping among them, and that the honest question is what they are for in a world that no longer routes everything through them.

Erika Gregory took the conversation somewhere less institutional. Her argument was that the post-1945 order could not have anticipated the way today’s security risks entangle. She offered Camp Century, the nuclear-powered base the US Army abandoned beneath Greenland’s ice in 1967 on the assumption that snowfall would bury the diesel and radioactive coolant forever, and the 2016 anthrax outbreak on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula, where thawing permafrost released spores from a decades-old reindeer carcass. Each began as one kind of problem and became four at once.

The disagreements were sharper than the diagnoses. Gowan pressed Mac Ginty on whether the 1990s deserve their nostalgia, given Srebrenica and Rwanda, and got back a mixed report card that kept the decade’s legal innovation while conceding that some interventions amounted to democracy at gunpoint. On whether a world of short-term ceasefires can add up to peace, Mac Ginty declined to force the question, asking instead what it is about us that insists on imposing coherence on a peace space that may no longer have any. Gowan’s answer on entanglement was that ad hoc coalitions can do real work, the Black Sea Grain Initiative being his example, but that genuinely global problems still need institutional responses nobody is currently willing to fund.

The most pointed intervention came from the floor. Julia Pickhardt, who led the Yemen file at CMI, observed that the long search for a technical formula in mediation has functioned as a way of avoiding the political question of whose norms get applied. The mediators we call new, she noted, are only newly recognised by us: Sulh in the Islamic tradition predates the UN Charter by centuries. Wail Abdullah Hashem, drawing on sixteen years of humanitarian access negotiation in Yemen, made the practical case, describing six months spent opening a route to 75,000 people in Al-Durayhimi and Al-Tuhayta, and arguing that fragmentation sometimes creates openings rather than only obstacles.

Responding to both, Gowan offered the line most people will take away. We tell these stories from the mediator’s point of view, he said, which is rather like going to a wedding and finding the priest interesting. People marry because their interests align. The priest is there in a functional role.