Peacebuilding: Policy Challenges, Global Engagement, and Women – Peace and Security Agenda
Date: October 12, 2017
Time: 12 to 1:15 p.m.
Speaker: Larisa Galadza, Director General, Peace and Stabilization Operations Program (PSOPs) at Global Affairs Canada (GAC)
The Operations Program
- Provides policy leadership and advocacy.
- Ensures coordination and coherence in the government’s response. Recently, it makes sure the government’s response to disasters is coherent and coordinated.
- Supports transitional justice in fragile states like Mali, Ukraine, Colombia, Haiti, South Sudan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. It picks countries where the issues are related to peace.
- Globally, the UN Secretary-General has woven the prevention agenda throughout the UN system. The UN works at preventing violence from re-emerging.
- Violent conflict is on the rise. We won’t avoid violence if we don’t deal with exclusion. She recommends the booklet Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches for Preventing Violent Conflict (World Bank Group and United Nations, 2017). https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/28337
- Regarding gender, we have to ask how issues affect women and girls. Women have to be there.
What Has Gone Well in Canada
- Inclusive approaches to solving problems.
- The push for integration and innovation. We have to make a difference. In the International Assistance policy, feminism is right up front.
- The feminist approach is actually happening—in gender analysis and looking at problems through the lens of gender. It is no longer a question of whether women are involved, but how.
Challenges
- The need to respond to conflict sooner. We wait to see how other countries are dealing with the conflict before Canada acts.
- The primacy of politics at the local level. We need to be smarter at the local level—how to deal with national politics.
- GAC needs to enhance its capabilities, particularly in mediation.
- PSOPs is interested in engaging civil society in new ways that ensure continuity and that build on lessons learned from the past.