Introduction to Creating Lasting Peace; Protecting Civilians – Preventing Conflicts

Responsibility to Protect – Engaging Civil Society

Conflict Prevention

United Nations Emergency Peace Service

Human Security and Terrorism

United Nations Emergency Peace Service

Responding to humanitarian crises and violent conflicts requires more than the political will to intervene. It also requires capacity to deploy quickly and effectively. WFM supports the creation and strengthening of the international community’s capacity to respond to outbreaking crises as well as natural disasters, as seen in Haiti and from the tsunami in the Pacific.

WFM supports strengthened peace operations and services at all levels: national, sub-regional, regional, SHIRBRIG or ad hoc, and international. Consistent with this position, WFM supports the creation of a UN-based rapid response force which would be capable of deploying in a matter of days. Such a service would act as a fire department with the goal of filling the gap between the weeks and sometimes months that it currently takes to deploy military and police personnel to an outbreaking crisis. If such a service were in place, it could have saved tens of thousands of lives and untold costs in crises such as East Timor, Rwanda, Haiti, and the Sudan.

In the past two years, WFM has been working with its colleagues to gain consensus about the basic elements of an UN-based rapid response service and advocate for its creation. WFM helped establish a working group of NGOs that is currently calling for the creation of a “UN Emergency Peace Service” (UNEPS). It would include the establishment of an UN-based service that would be permanent, based at UN-designated sites and include mobile field headquarters, with the capacity to respond to an emergency within 48 hours of United Nations authorization. This service of 10,000-15,000 personnel would be individually recruited, therefore not be dependent on the country contributions and would include civilian, police, judicial, and military personnel prepared to conduct multiple functions in diverse UN operations.

WFM has agreed to act as interim co-secretariat for the working group for UNEPS along with Global Action to Prevent War and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. WFM is now approaching other NGOs for consultation on this proposal with a view towards a larger public debate on the issue.