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initiatives, both through its own projects and by
contributing to international collaborative efforts. One such
effort was the International Commission on Intervention
and State Sovereignty (ICISS), established as a response to
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s call for the building
of a new international consensus on how to respond to
massive violations of human rights and humanitarian law.
UNU Vice-Rector Ramesh Thakur served on this
independent commission, whose final report, The
Responsibility to Protect, 2 was debated over the course of
2002 by groups of scholars as well as UN Member State
representatives and staff, and was the focus of a UN
Security Council retreat in May.
The basic principles of the report, which represents a
major step forward in the debate on “humanitarian
intervention” in both policy and academic circles, are that
state sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary
responsibility for protection of its people lies with the state
itself; but if a population is suffering serious harm –
whether as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression
or state failure – and the state in question is unwilling or
unable to halt or avert that harm, then the principle of nonintervention
yields to an international responsibility to
protect. The report cautions, however, that military
intervention is warranted only if there is specific serious
and irreparable harm occurring, or imminently likely to
occur, to human beings, and, furthermore, that the use of
force must conform to the “precautionary principles” of
right intention, last resort, proportional means and
reasonable prospect of success, and also be subject to
lawful UN Security Council authorization.
Conflict Prevention
Building on the ICISS Report, two of its Commissioners –
Prof. Michael Ignatieff, Director of the Carr Centre of
Human Rights at Harvard University, and Vice Rector
Thakur – teamed up with the International Peace Academy
in New York to launch a major new project on “Making
States Work.” The premise of this project is that the
biggest contribution towards a world of peace, stability and
human security is a world of effective, functioning and
legitimate sovereign states. This project interrogates the
causes and conditions of failed and failing states, but also
successful states, particularly those that can be said to have
2 The Responsibility to Protect – Report of the International Commission on
Intervention and State Sovereignty, Ottawa, International Development Research
Centre, December 2001. The report is available online at http://iciss-ciise.gc.ca/.
succeeded against the odds. The first project workshop was
held in Pocantico, New York, in November.
An 18 March expert forum on the theme of “Conflict
Prevention: The Secretary-General’s Report and the Way
Forward” reflected on the Secretary-General’s Prevention
of Armed Conflict report and laid the groundwork for a
thematic essay on prevention that the Secretary-General
was asked to submit to the General Assembly as part of the
Millennium Report 2002. The forum, co-chaired by UN
Assistant Secretary-General Michael Doyle, Senior
Advisor to the Secretary-General, and UNU Vice-Rector
Thakur, was attended by representatives of various UN
agencies, departments and programmes comprising key
UN Secretariat staff involved in conflict prevention. The
forum called for greater conceptual clarity in the conflict
prevention debate and policy development, stronger efforts
to build local and institutional capacity in preventive
action, improvements in information gathering and
distribution, improved coordination among actors and their
efforts, and increased reporting and dissemination of
success stories of preventive action. An improvement in
the relationships among diverse actors and a reduction in
structural inequalities is required, forum participants
agreed, if the UN system is to work effectively with its
partners in addressing the sources of conflict and thus
reducing the potential for violence. 3
Evaluation of Conflict Interventions
While the field of conflict resolution (i.e., the development
of non-military alternatives to solving conflicts) has over a
half-century of experience, surprisingly little attention has
been paid to evaluating the impact of such interventions.
INCORE’s project on “Evaluation of Conflict
Interventions” collected current evaluation models in the
field of conflict resolution, management and
transformation, summarized the academic literature
specific to conflict resolution and peace-building
evaluation, and convened a working group to explore and
refine the key questions and challenges. The process
included calls for information on evaluation guidelines and
resources from over 700 people, followed by interviews
with key practitioners, funders, academics and
governmental units around the world. The project’s final
report, The Evaluation of Conflict Resolution
3 Conflict Prevention – The Secretary-General's Report: The Way Forward. Report
of a UNU/EOSG Expert Forum, Edited by Ramesh Thakur and Albrecht Schnabel
(Tokyo: United Nations University, 2003).
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