Aswan Forum IV: Re-envisioning global governance for peace

Doaa El-Bey , Wednesday 3 Jul 2024

Doaa El-Bey reports from the Aswan Forum for Sustainable Peace and Development

Aswan Forum IV:  Re-envisioning global governance for peace

 

“The forum opens a dialogue that has peace and development at its heart” said a video shown at the opening ceremony of the fourth edition of the Aswan Forum for Sustainable Peace and Development in Cairo this week.

The event provided a venue for officials, leaders from regional and international organisations, business, and civil society, and experts from various sectors to tackle and advance African perspectives on re-envisioning global governance for peace and development.

In his keynote opening speech, Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri pointed to the double standards that the international community is adopting in dealing with present global challenges. The Aswan Forum and the Future Summit due in September are important venues for restructuring these standards in a way that better protects global peace and security, he said.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed to the difficult moment in which the forum was being held. In a televised address to the forum, he said that sustainable peace and development are being obstructed by poverty, hunger, conflicts, and terrorism.

“The path forward is clear: all we need is peace. We must collaborate to counter terrorism and extremism,” he said.

Mona Al-Khalili, minister of women’s affairs in the State of Palestine, drew a bleak picture of the situation in Gaza and the West Bank and how Israel, as the occupying power, has been subjecting the Palestinians to genocide not only since 7 October last year but also for the last 76 years.

“The occupation should end. There will never be justice or sustainable development under the occupation. The international community should put pressure on the occupying state to end its aggression against the Palestinians,” she said.  

The two-day edition of the Aswan Forum, titled “Africa in a Changing World: Re-Envisioning Global Governance for Peace and Development,” was scheduled to conclude in Cairo on Wednesday. The forum is named after the Upper Egyptian city of Aswan where its first meeting was held.

The forum is being held at a time of unprecedented challenges to peace and security in Africa and globally, including the war in Gaza, the crises in Libya, new conflicts in Sudan, and the Horn of Africa and the Sahel and Great Lakes regions, as well as climate change and population displacement.

“This year marks the 60th anniversary of the first African Summit held in Cairo [in July 1964], the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the AU Peace and Security Council [PSC], the first African body to settle inter-African conflicts, and 30 years on after the establishment of the CCCPA,” said Ahmed Abdel-Latif, executive director of the forum and director-general of the Cairo International Centre for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping, and Peace building (CCCPA).

All these facts cast light on the importance of joint work in Africa, he added. The CCCPA is the executive secretariat of the Aswan Forum.

The challenges that the African continent is facing underline the urgent need to rethink the multilateral system, with special consideration being given to African problems and perspectives, particularly within the framework of the UN Summit of the Future to be held in September, he said.

This’s week Aswan Forum had three main objectives: to contribute towards advancing African perspectives on strengthening multilateralism and international cooperation to address complex and interconnected challenges to peace, security, and development; to outline priorities and actions for fostering effective, integrated, and durable solutions including through accelerating operationalisation; and to foster dialogue and collaboration through partnerships that are based on principles of equality, mutual respect, and national ownership.

Each forum, Abdel-Latif said, “is part of an ongoing process that begins before it convenes and continues after it ends.”

Given that the forum works to point to more effective and integrated solutions to increase the role of women and youth, a session titled “Through her Eyes: Women’s Experiences Across the Conflict Cycle” was dedicated to women. It shed light on best practices and lessons learnt from women’s engagement as drivers of sustainable peace and development.

Another session titled “Youth Dialogue” pointed to the need to shift the narrative from perceiving youth as victims and agents of conflict to one that puts a spotlight on their role as active champions of peace and resilience.

Another important issue that the forum addressed was deploying African-led peace support operations that are run by African organisations like the African Union (AU) and other subregional bodies. A session dedicated to this issue discussed the future of peace operations in the continent and how to position them in a way that deals efficiently with future threats to peace and security.

By the end of this week’s edition of the forum, the participants were expected to produce a list of action-oriented recommendations, and during the sessions they followed up on the implementation of the recommendations produced by the previous edition.

In preparing for the forum, the CCCPA conducted a series of webinars including on “Multilateral Partnership on Climate, Peace, and Security” in Cairo in November last year, “From Rhetoric to Reality: Placing Women’s Participation at the Heart of Global Peace and Security Governance Reform” in Addis Ababa in December, and “Dawn of a New Era. Resetting the African Peace and Security Architecture in a Changing World” in Munich in February this year.

The establishment of the AU Centre for Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development (AU-PCRD Centre) is one of the achievements of the Aswan Forum. The agreement to establish the centre was signed on the sidelines of the first edition of the Aswan Forum in 2019, and it officially opened in temporary headquarters in Cairo at the end of 2022.

Egypt took the initiative to launch the Aswan Forum during its presidency of the AU in 2019.


* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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