Blog by Donatella Benjamin, SI United Nations Representative, Geneva.
Geneva Peace Week (GPW) is a leading annual forum in the international peacebuilding calendar, held in Geneva, where bridges are built and where the various actors working on peace from all sectors, including Civil Society, can interact.
This year, GPW21 was held from 1st to 5 November. It aimed to galvanise leadership, build trust, and contribute to transforming international cooperation. Four areas of inquiry were explored in some 30 interactive online workshops and sessions, and through the development and dissemination of some 30 digital productions. The four focus areas were the following:
- Creating a climate for collaboration: Ways forward for environment, climate change, and peace;
- Moving beyond securitisation: What risks (and new horizons) for peacebuilding;
- Harnessing the digital sphere for peace;
- Confronting inequalities and advancing inclusion, peace, and SDG16.
Opening Session
On 1st November, the opening session saw high-level speakers, diplomats, students of the Geneva Graduate Institute and peacebuilders converge from around the world. The focus for the opening ceremony was: “From seeds to systems of peace: Weathering today’s challenges”, in presence of Ignazio Cassis, head of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and Tatiana Valovaya, Director-General of UN Geneva’s Office.
Tatiana Valovaya greeted and welcomed all the participants to this hybrid international forum, speakers, diplomats, students and peacebuilders, highlighting that this annual event was a great opportunity to explore possible solutions to some of our major challenges.
Photo of Tatiana Valovaya’s introductory remarks.
Ignazio Cassis, highlighted the continued relevance of Geneva for dialogue and building trust: principles that Switzerland wants to bring to the Security Council. He added that digital innovation plays an important role in conflict prevention and resolution and stressed that Geneva, “Ville de Paix”, offers the international setting to develop new technologies for peace and diplomacy.
After the official addresses, an online panel of peacebuilders exchanged their views and answered questions from the public.
Florence Foster, representative for Peace and Disarmament for QUNO (Quacker United Nations Office), was a voice from the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference (COP26) in Glasgow to peacebuilding actors in Geneva. She reminded the participants that a human rights based approach is critical to addressing climate change to ensure peace and justice as we move forward together, inclusively. In her opinion, external interventions – peaceful of military – that ignore, disregard, undermine, are all too often the obstacles to peace. She asked a crucial question: can we have an economic system that is sustainable and just, and not driving us to extinction?
According to Lindsay Fielder Cook, representative for climate change, political will is a major obstacle to climate change and other global issues; we need to have an honest discussion about who holds power. She also wondered how our so-called defence industry is protecting us in the face of contemporary challenges.
Other speakers were Marie-Laure Salles, Director of the Geneva Graduate Institute, Thomas Guerber, the Director of the Security Sector Governance centre. The last speakers were Oya Dursun-Özkanca, professor at Elizabethtown College, and Marc Batac, regional liaison officer for GPPAC-SEA (Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict – South east Asia). Marc Batac made a poetic reference to the Lumad people in Mindanao – indigenous cultural communities in the Philippines – and reminded the assembly that “the seeds of peace are centuries old forests that have been there all along – representing robust communities of practices in preventing and transforming conflicts, passed on from generation to generation, sharpened and strengthened each day”.
Kofi Annan Peace Address
On 4th November, former President of Liberia and Nobel laureate, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, delivered the inaugural Kofi Annan Geneva Peace Address, a high-level lecture on peace organised by the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform, the Kofi Annan Foundation, and the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She urged for greater women’s representation in peacekeeping processes and the strengthening of democracy: “Now is the time to change. A single person can make the difference”.
The lecture, organised as part of Geneva Peace Week, marked the 20th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Kofi Annan, who served as Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1997-2006. Madame Sirleaf was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her commitment to women’s rights and safety, and her advocacy for their full involvement in peacekeeping processes.
Screenshot of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf delivering the Peace Address.
Madame Sirleaf was inspirational and always direct. In her view, peace must start from the individuals and it must be built in communities. It is not enough to build better, she said, we must build forward, we must move on and follow the course that Kofi Annan set for so many of us. She admired him and worked with him until her election as Liberia’s President – and first elected female president in Africa. Kofi Annan advocated for the full inclusion and participation of women, young and marginalised, into decision-making processes to achieve progress. He thought democracies were fundamental to keep peace. He was a quiet changemaker, who put in motion the Millenium Development Goals, which have become the world measure of human condition. He often asked her, “Have we made enough?”
Madame Sirleaf highlighted a “renewed sense of urgency” and the crucial importance of equal representation at decision-making levels: the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will not be fully realised until women, the disadvantaged, and the marginalised have hurdles and restrictions removed from their paths to achieve full participation in political processes and national decision making. This is why initiatives that bring women leaders together are so important, she said. As we look at the creeping global divisions, we must all try more, and as women we will take our appeal to the European Union, to the UN, the G7, G20, COP… because only through full participation will we obtain lasting peace.
In Madame Sirleaf’s opinion, UN mediation efforts are no longer seeing much success. The international community can better support locally-led peace efforts by concentrating more on building sustainable democracies than on peacekeeping, when there is no peace to keep. She founded the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Centre to become a catalyst for change across Africa by helping unleash its most abundant untapped power – its women. The Centre creates new leaders for tomorrow, uplifting African women, and in doing so uplifting the human condition: “In this sorority we become greater than the sum of our parts”.
Kofi Annan said leaders have a duty to do more, to inspire. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf challenged us to carry on the message that Kofi Annan left behind “Look in your hearts, can you make a difference? If you can, go on and do it”.
Watch video highlights of Geneva Peace Week 2021 HERE.