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“Elections play a significant role in peace processes since they are widely considered to be the main method of achieving a peaceful resolution to political controversies. An election process is a means of pursuing or retaining political power in which social differences are highlighted by candidates and parties campaigning for popular support. This process can contribute to peace, but it can also provide entry points for violence and conflicts”.
Training
The UN system, its Member States, as well as other key partners, all face an array of complex and interrelated challenges to global peace. Overall, the increasingly pervasive impact of many contemporary conflicts and their intractability make focusing on prevention a priority for the international community as a whole.
The course focuses on examining and promoting community-based M&E mechanisms and gender-balanced citizen participation to “Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels” (SDG 16.7). Experts from the UN and Academia will discuss the theoretical framework and innovative examples from different countries on how participatory practices help build more resilient institutions and how they contribute to a more effective service delivery at the local level.
Human rights, conflict, peace and development are closely linked, but the linkages are not always evident in practice. Misconceptions exist; such as that conflict prevention involves making unacceptable compromises or that human rights engagement means delaying lasting peace. Even though they engage with similar national partners and both aim to build just and peaceful societies, conflict prevention practitioners and human rights practitioners do not always work together and at worst the divide can lead to them working against each other.
Local governments are often the first to collapse when factions fight for territorial control. In post-conflict settings, the state is often unable to effectively reach parts of its territory for years. Given these challenges, it is no surprise that decentralization and local governance provisions are increasingly prominent in peace agreements and national post-conflict peacebuilding agendas.
In the last decade, maintaining peace and security has become further complicated by an increase in the violence perpetrated no longer exclusively by national armies and armed oppositions but also by an increasingly assertive and brutal range of hybrid actors, such as illegal armed groups, criminal organizations, and transnational networks of illicit trafficking. The impact is so significant that the violence resulting from these situations exceeds many on-going civil wars.
