Common Security, The New Agenda for Peace, and the Pact for the Future: Redefining Security for the 21st Century

Co sponsored by: International Peace Bureau (IPB), Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) New York, Peace Action New York State (PANYS), Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security (CPDCS), Centre Delas

Details:

Duration: 90 minutes
Date and Time: Saturday, 21 September 1:15 pm | 7:15pm CEST
Type of Event: Panel + Q&A
Location: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation-New York Office, 275 Madison Ave #2114, New York, NY 10016, United States

A light snack will be provided during the event

In person registration: https://bit.ly/CS-inperson by September 18
Zoom Registration: https://bit.ly/CS-zoom

“We are now at an inflection point. The post-cold war period is over. A transition is under way to a new global order. While its contours remain to be defined, leaders around the world have referred to multipolarity as one of its defining traits. In this moment of transition, power dynamics have become increasingly fragmented as new poles of influence emerge, new economic blocs form and axes of contestation are redefined. There is greater competition among major powers and a loss of trust between the global North and South. A number of States increasingly seek to enhance their strategic independence, while trying to manoeuvre across existing dividing lines.”

This is the context that UN Secretary General lays out at the start of his Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 9: A New Agenda for Peace published in July 2023. The brief continues on to mention military doctrines that seek to intensify geostrategic competition for decades, increasing conventional and nuclear rearmament, geoeconomic fragmentation, and lack of will to cooperate to solve the polycrisis that the entire planet faces, before turning to proposals for improving global relations based in what the document calls Collective Security. Secretary General Guterres’ Collective Security, based in the principles of trust, solidarity, and universality, serve as the basis for a renewed United Nations system that can overcome the challenges of a shifting world order.

The principles and recommendations shared in the New Agenda for Peace echo the work of the civil society-based report Common Security 2022: For Our Shared Future, which revitalized the concept of Common Security – the understanding that no state or peoples can make itself more secure at the expense of another state’s security – that rose out of the Cold War tensions of the 1980s. Common Security, which focuses heavily on interstate relations while also prioritizing human security, emphasizes the importance of trust-building, cooperation, disarmament, and diplomacy to resolve conflicts and other cross-border threats like climate change and inequality.

While Common Security and Collective Security overlap significantly in their definitions and understandings, there are also key differences, including in the focus, intended audience, and recommendations. Nonetheless, the concepts are not seen as competing with one another, but two parts of the same push to redefine what makes us safe – away from over simplistic militarized definitions and toward a nuanced understanding of the various overlapping factors that impact the security of people within a state or society.

Recognizing that the Summit of the Future and resulting Pact for the Future are meant to revitalize global governance with all UN members present, we hereby invite you to join us for a deeper discussion on redefining security, elaborating on the proposals of Common and Collective Security, and looking toward the future of security in a changing world.

• The History of Common Security through to the present and the relevance now, including recommendations [15 min]

• The New Agenda for Peace important takeaways and focus [15 min]

• Focal point: disarmament [5 minutes]

• Focal point: trust and cooperation [5 minutes]

• The Summit of the Future and Security [5 minutes]

Open Q&A/discussion