Report

Ensuring the UK’s new conflict framework successfully promotes peace

This briefing from UK think tank the Foreign Policy Centre looks at the Government’s new strategic agenda for tackling conflict.

Amid the (warranted) controversy over UK aid cuts and the withdrawal from Afghanistan, little attention has been paid to the Government’s quiet development of a new strategic agenda for tackling conflict. This is a big deal: how conflict is handled – whether in Sierra Leone or Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq, Libya or Syria – has proven a defining foreign policy issue for all recent UK governments. Nonetheless, until now, the UK has lacked a comprehensive cross-government approach. As international peacebuilding organisations, we believe a new strategic framework will only herald progress if it addresses the issues driving conflict, takes a people-centred approach, successfully manages competing UK priorities, and is backed by consistent, effective political and financial investments in peace.