On 9 April, the Inclusive Peace and Transition Initiative (IPTI) at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform organised an event to discuss the findings of Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict, a new report from the World Bank and the UN.

“With the publication of Pathways for Peace, there is an opportunity to deepen the conversation about how countries and societies can move towards sustainable peace”, said Achim Wenmann, Senior Researcher at the Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding and Executive Coordinator of the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform. “Better exchange of information on conflict risk between the UN, the World Bank, academic institutions and the private sector will be key. There is a lot international Geneva can contribute to the process of matching knowledge and know-how with the identified needs to practically prevent violent conflict in its many forms.”

Eckhard Volkmann, IPTI’s Deputy Director, added “the Pathways for Peace - or P4P - report is a significant contribution to furthering the Sustaining Peace Agenda. The novel approach of this agenda lies in a vision of the prevention of violent conflict as a holistic concept that identifies exclusion, inequality, and power imbalances as principal causes of conflict and violence. This approach realigns the prevention spectrum, bringing the concept of inclusion to the forefront of the agenda as the ultimate precondition for more inclusive societies in the spirit of the SDGs. While there is no one size fits all approach to building inclusive societies, collating common lessons of successful previous experience can help to guide political transition processes.”

The Graduate Institute contributed to P4P through background studies from IPTI (Preventing Violence through Inclusion: From Building Political Momentum to Sustaining Peace) and the CCDP (The Business Community as a Peacebuilding Actor).