Frontiers for Peacemaking.

 

The Principles for Peace Initiative has identified three additional forwardlooking frontiers that have great potential to upset or facilitate efforts move towards sustainable peacemaking. They touch upon issues of economic well-being, the digital world and environmental crises. Across all of these is a common concern with sustaining engagements. Each section below highlights these challenges and how the Covenant's principles can change the narrative. They also sketch some of the initial programmatic and policy implications that will shape engagements with stakeholders in these communities to realise the broader potential of the Peacemaking Covenant.

 The 21stcentury digital space is integral to modern political, economic and social life worldwide. Digital technologies transcend geographical borders and open new venues for global connection and cooperation, with enormous potential to develop new ideas and create new spaces of encounters and empowerment. They also, however, bring new challenges, including amplifying political polarisation and instability within and across borders, spreading misinformation and cybersexism, compromising data privacy, and facilitating mass surveillance.

Many governments and business actors are increasingly cooperating and taking significant steps to provide digital security in cyberspace. Responses to date have mostly taken the form of state-led regulations and legal procedures, but the borderless nature of the digital space makes accountability and responsibility difficult to uphold. Much more work is needed at all levels and in all jurisdictions, and in particular with business actors, to ensure that peace, humanitarian and development interventions can meet the challenges of the digital era.

The Peacemaking Covenant aims to ensure that digital technologies are harnessed as instruments to positively influence the evolution of contemporary peacemaking, while also protecting against abuse and misuse by: 

• Encouraging actors involved in peace processes to engage directly with businesses and technology companies to ensure that the tools they champion support consolidation of a pluralistic society and the public interest and prevent manipulation, extremism, hate speech and sexism in the digital space.
•  Supporting and exploring innovative use of practical PeaceTech tools to: 1) transform conflict dynamics by incentivising groups to seek common ground; 2) encourage wider inclusion in processes of negotiation and intergroup dialogue to complement power sharing with a focus on responsibility sharing to promote the common good; and 3) gauge sentiments of different groups in society relating to key concerns and factors in the peace process and to seek pluralistic outcomes in society. 
• Involving influential technology companies and leaders, as well as local businesses and influencers, to support legitimate peace processes and counter misinformation and bridge digital divides, by acknowledging the role and work of local institutions and respecting and protecting local priorities, specificities and concerns. 
• Supporting states and institutions that have robust regulatory frameworks protecting privacy and supporting the public interest in cyberspace to engage with local actors, including business actors, to establish appropriate protection safeguards and frameworks based on good global standards and practices such as the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. 
• Sharing expertise and technologies, especially related to artificial intelligence (AI) and managing "big data" for example, to create new instruments and innovative tools to provide early warning of conflicts and contribute to sustainable peacemaking, including in the political, social, environmental and economic domains. Ensuring that data sharing for humanitarian and development purposes follows international standards that protect the interests of the people to whom the data belong and supporting capacity building in national statistical offices of affected states. 
• Providing peacemakers, including mediators, with appropriate and context sensitive PeaceTech tools to engage with and analyse the interests and actions of different communities represented in the digital space.

Rationale 

Digital spaces and technologies, such as social media platforms, artificial intelligence and accessible communication networks, provide opportunities to build bonds and bridges between and across different social groups to enhance trust, reduce friction and resolve conflicts peacefully. They can also accelerate economic development and social transformation. The expansion or effacement of borders in a digital world provides opportunities to influence social and political orders in novel - and sometimes unsettling - ways. The role of large technology companies, or even private individuals with significant political and economic capital, cannot be underestimated. 

The digital revolution, however, also poses grave challenges to societal and political stability by reinforcing polarising beliefs and biases and by sowing chaos and insecurity. Democratic institutions and election processes can be undermined by the abuse of social media, misinformation and disinformation, and intergroup tensions inflamed by fake news. Cyberviolence against women and girls directly affects their sense of safety in the physical world and hampers their ability to participate fully in public life. Countering this requires investments in "digital literacy" and safeguarding, and support to multiple, local, independent and publicinterest media sources, as well as monitoring of disinformation and hate speech. The mishandling or abuse of access to personal data, especially of vulnerable people and groups, represents a potential threat to sustainable peacemaking, whether by governments or by private or nongovernmental actors.

Curtailing access to digital spaces has become a powerful means by which governments silence their critics and punish citizens. At least 50 Internet shutdowns in 21 countries were documented in the first half of 2021 alone. 

Digital innovation has great potential to catalyse economic growth, contribute towards sustainable solutions to developmental and environmental challenges and open new avenues for foreign investments in conflict- affected or fragile settings. Large parts of the world do not enjoy fair access to digital technologies, however, and this "digital divide" can entrench alreadyexisting privileged access and exacerbate existing tensions and social and economic inequalities, unless specific efforts are undertaken to make the benefits availabe.

Peace is unsustainable without a sustainable biosphere. The Peacemaking Covenant recognises that peace, development and environmental sustainability are inseparably intertwined. Human societies have found many cooperative solutions to managing shared environmental resources, and human civilisation must reconcile economic growth and human advancement with the physical limits of our biosphere and ecosystems. Violent conflict erodes the adaptive capacity and resilience of states and societies to manage the effects of the climate crisis and environmental degradation. Conversely, the effects of the climate crisis and environmental degradation erode societal resilience and increase vulnerability to conflict and violence. These effects can be exacerbated by poorly designed adaptation and mitigation strategies. In many conflictaffected or fragile settings these challenges are everyday realities, not abstractions, and the climate crisis and overexploitation of natural resources has a direct and severe (and gendered) impact on vulnerable communities. Recognising that existing environmental challenges exacerbate inequalities and the risk of conflicts over land, water, food, energy and other resources, peacemakers need to reinforce the capacity of social institutions to adapt to maintain peace, security, and socio-economic functionality under stress. 

Actions to maximise the impact of these efforts should include:

•  integrating an understanding of how the climate crisis and environmental degradation exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and stresses on communities into conflict analysis and conflict prevention, mediation, and peacemaking planning and assessments 
• examining how solutions to environmental challenges can contribute to preventing or resolving conflicts, through such things as cooperation on the management of shared resources
•  ensuring that peace operations and peacemaking programmes include specific support for building resilience and adaptability to the climate crisis and the adoption of sustainable environmental strategies 
• supporting national actors and political leaders to adopt locally appropriate, gender-responsive and sustainable policies and investments in renewable and non-renewable resources and ensure equitable distribution of the benefits of natural resource exploitation.

- Rationale - 

The accelerating impact of the climate crisis and global warming must be central to peacemakers' programmes and policies. While unfolding on a longer time scale and with worldwide implications, the climate crisis has profound implications for all aspects of peacemaking and requires a shift towards understanding the spaces humans inhabit (local to global) as integrated and interdependent systems of people and nature. Extreme weather, environmental degradation, resource scarcities and climate-induced displacement will only be the most visible manifestations of the conflict-inducing crises that states and communities face. Sustainable peacemaking must increase the resilience of communities to these shocks and ensure that policies and programmes are coherent with an environmentally sustainable future for all. The Peacemaking Covenant acknowledges that peace, development, and environmental sustainability are inseparably intertwined, and that peacemaking, sustainable environmental policies and a sustainable biosphere are mutually interdependent. Local efforts to mitigate and adapt to the effects of the climate crisis will achieve little and may reinforce existing global inequalities if not coupled with strong global efforts to achieve netzero emissions. In this case, subsidiarity requires acting at the global level and in advanced industrial states as well as locally in conflict-affected and fragile states. Existing international agreements, including the Sustainable Development Goals and Sustaining Peace resolutions, as well as the Paris Agreement, provide a legitimate global framework for cooperation and collaboration at the climate-peace nexus but are only a starting point. The urgency of a transition to a netzero future underlines the need to acknowledge that a significant and rapid transformation away from fossil fuels comes with a short-term risk of political and social insecurity and can incite or ignite conflict. Mitigation measures will encounter strong resistance from some quarters and must be conflict sensitive. A vast array of international and bilateral efforts - some with considerable financial backing - has already been launched in the environmental arena. The role of peacemakers is to ensure that their own efforts are coherent with environmentally sound peacebuilding and add value to these initiatives. Likewise, as international environmental efforts are scaled up, policy makers must ensure that their programmes do not undermine often-fragile peace and political settlements and that the burdens of adjustment and change are shared fairly.

Economic issues - global and local - are at the root of many contemporary conflicts and are crucial to their long-term resolution. Economic issues are also inextricably entwined with national, regional and global political, social and gender dynamics, especially when state institutions and revenues have been a means to enrich or benefit particular social groups. But the economic dimensions of peacemaking and political economy analyses are often deferred to later phases of conflict management or treated as distinct from the political and social dimensions of peacemaking, despite being an important source of ongoing conflict and competition.

Conflicts also create war economies with new winners and losers, meshing local and global economic interests with elite networks, many of which have strong interest in the distributional effects of any peace agreement. A post-conflict environment provides rich opportunities for criminal groups and illicit economic actors, often with links to armed groups or state elites. These powerful interests cannot be left aside as they affect everything from macroeconomic policies, infrastructure development, the provision of services, gendered access to land or employment and the distribution of state revenues from natural resources. Conflict-affected and fragile states often have limited fiscal and revenuegenerating capacities, magnifying the role of the business sector (local and transnational) in creating value and opportunities and providing basic services. Harnessing these limitations through greater advocacy and engagement with business actors can help sensitise them and their political constituencies to the importance of their role in building peace and stability and to the need for conflict and gendersensitive investment and commercial decisions. Shared norms, such as the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, can provide a framework for deeper engagement. Today, a broader array of international development, financial and investment institutions are involved in peacemaking efforts, but more is needed to overcome the frequent misalignment of their efforts with the work of peacemakers. Sustainable development and sustainable peace considerations must advance in tandem and be mainstreamed throughout the process. Steps towards this could include: 

• moving from "conflict-sensitive" to "peace-responsive" international and foreign direct investment and development assistance, in cooperation with international development banks and financial institutions.
• understanding the conditions shaping effective involvement of economic actors in peacemaking and delivering the economic foundations of peace to identify the sectors and companies more likely and able to support peace-positive investments and activities.
• encouraging investment in local human and social capital, and institutions and enterprises that can flourish independently over the longer term, especially in regions where youth are prone to recruitment into criminal organisations, violent extremism or illicit activities linked to war economies.
• ensuring that the local economy can respond to economic shocks in a manner that protects local communities and institutions, by establishing legal and administrative frameworks that protect investments and livelihoods and minimise corruption and fraud at all levels.
• establishing a rules-based market that respects human rights, facilitates the economic inclusion of marginalised groups and contributes to decent labour opportunities to provide sustainable alternatives to informal, illegal and criminal market activities.
• encouraging systematic efforts to address structural inequalities and access to economic opportunities for disadvantaged groups.
• supporting the establishment of a basic social safety net for the population that is able to provide services such as health care and equal opportunities to access education and training supporting the development of a robust transportation and technological infrastructure to better integrate distant regions into national and international trade networks.
•  engaging with constructively oriented diaspora communities to facilitate their economic support and investment in reconstruction and sustainable development.

- Rationale -

International and private sector investment is often promoted as a panacea for peacemaking, based on the idea that development and growth will lead to peace and stability. This hands-off vision minimises the more direct positive - and negative - role that business actors can play in the entire process of peacemaking. Although their actions can directly advance sustainable peace, businesses' practices that are not conflict- nor gender-sensitive, and that do not follow due diligence and appropriate investment rules and practices, can exacerbate intercommunal and state-society tensions and fuel unrest, instead of contributing to dialogue and confidence building. The transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy is challenging, given the opportunities created by the existence of large-scale illicit or criminal activities and networks. "Crowding out" such large-scale activities through promotion of legal markets and opportunities to provide people with licit opportunities for income, as well as enforcement against illicit activities, are central to stifling criminal and armed group activity. The domestic business community has particularly important role to play in this regard and must also follow guiding principles on best practices for business and human rights. a The role of natural and renewable resource exploitation, including who accesses, controls, or profits from it, is a critical dimension of sustainable peacemaking. In conflict-affected counties, where human capital and other forms of investment may be scarce, the exploitation of natural or prominent renewable resources becomes an important revenue source for the state, which can be captured soon after violence ceases - or even as violence continues. Given the relatively great importance for state revenues, opportunities for corruption and unsustainable exploitation exist, and tensions often arise between the interests of local communities (who often face the negative externalities from resource exploitation) and revenue-seeking national authorities or multinational corporations. Natural and renewable resource exploitation is a sensitive economic sector that needs to be monitored carefully. While advances in corporate social responsibility and due diligence have been made, major actors (including international financial institutions and multinational corporations) often do not fully incorporate local interests or concerns around equitable distribution and shared benefits for the common good in their decisions.

The principle of subsidiarity can help address this issue by encouraging and supporting legitimate partnerships with diverse actors, including local, national, regional, international and business sectors. This differs from topdown approaches where development partners or business actors align with state institutions that have authority over local and civil society actors, often inhibiting genuinely inclusive ownership. Subsidiarity in economic terms can promote more efficient outcomes, while also mediating between individual and local community needs and interests and the broader common good. It can help align sustainable economic development policies with sustainablepeacemaking programmes.