Social Reconciliation, Just Peace, and Development Research Group
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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.