Taking Stock of the CSO-UN Dialogue on Peacebuilding

Okay, speak. Odile, they con— oh. Thank you very much. I'm a lawyer but an aspiring judge, so I took advantage of this. It's probably my only opportunity to sit as a judge on something. Under-Secretary-General, thank you very much for being present in this UNCSO dialogue. I'm Vasu Gounden, the Executive Director of ACORD, but it's my pleasure to represent the CSO core group in this session. Let me recognize Ambassador— 7 weeks in the US, in New York, So I can't say welcome, I'm not a New Yorker, but I'm sure the Under-Secretary-General can welcome you, she's a citizen of the country. And my sister Yebeka from our sister organization CMI. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this session on the UN CSO Dialogue. We gather, as we said, at a remarkable time. In history. For more than 3 decades, many of us have lived and worked through an era defined by hope. The end of the Cold War unleashed powerful aspirations for a rules-based international order, democratic governance, human rights, inclusive development, and peaceful cooperation among nations. Peacebuilding emerged as one of the defining projects of that era, and we've had the privilege of working with the peacebuilding architecture for the last 20 years as a court. Around the world, civil society organizations, community-based organizations, faith-based leaders, women, youth movement, and the local peacebuilders became indispensable actors in shaping our societies. Technology amplified their voices, information flowed more freely, citizens organized, mobilized, and influenced public policy on a scale previously unimaginable. For a time, it appeared that history was moving in one direction, that humanity, despite setbacks and contradictions, was steadily advancing towards a more peaceful, more inclusive, and more democratic world. But history, as we know, rarely moves in a straight line. Today, Excellencies and colleagues, the foundations of that era are under strain. We are witnessing the return of great power competition. Multilateralism is increasingly challenged. National interest often trumps collective interest. Military expenditure is rising while development and peacebuilding resources are shrinking. Political polarization is deepening. Social cohesion is fraying. Trust in institutions is declining. At the same time, another profound transformation is underway. The concentration of economic, technological and information power in the hands of a relatively small number of actors is reshaping the nature of influence itself. The race for artificial general intelligence, quantum computing, advanced biotechnology and data dominance is creating centres of power whose reach increasingly transcends national borders. We are witnessing the emergence of actors whose influence rivals and in some cases exceeds that of many states. And so we must ask ourselves a difficult question: Who will shape the future of peace? Will it be governments alone? Will it be markets? Will it be technological elites? Or will it remain a shared human project shaped by governments, citizens, communities, institutions, all working together? These are not abstract questions, ladies and gentlemen. They go to the heart of peacebuilding, because peacebuilding has never simply been about ending violence. Peacebuilding is about determining who belongs, who participates, who benefits and who has a voice in shaping the future. Many of us in this room have devoted our entire lives to this work. I see my friend Gus here. Gus and I are like dinosaurs in this field. Jurassic dinosaurs. We have sat across negotiating tables in moments when war seemed inevitable and watched adversaries choose dialogue instead. We have worked in refugee camps, villages, cities and capitals. We have seen societies shattered by violence, and we have seen them rebuilt through courage, compromise and hope. We know from experience that peace is possible. But we also know that progress is not permanent. Every generation inherits the responsibility to defend and renew the institutions, values and relationships that make peace possible. No generation receives that inheritance guaranteed. The danger before us is not only conflict. The danger is our resignation, the belief that the forces shaping our future are now so large, so powerful and so technologically advanced —that ordinary people no longer matter, the belief that communities no longer matter, the belief that civil society no longer matters, the belief that peacebuilders no longer matter. History tells us otherwise. History reminds us that every great advance in human dignity began with people who were told they were too small to make a difference. The abolition of slavery, the expansion of democracy, the advancement of women's rights— look at all of our colleagues who would not have been here 100 years ago in the same room— the defeat of apartheid in my own country, South Africa— we didn't think that was possible— the protection of human rights. None of these achievements were inevitable. All of them were won because ordinary people refused to accept that the future belonged only to the powerful. And yet, colleagues, Excellencies, we must also be honest about the challenge before us. There is a real risk that what once appeared to be a democratic transition begins to resemble an autocratic permanence. A world in which power becomes increasingly concentrated, a world where stability is pursued without freedom, a world where efficiency replaces participation, a world where order replaces inclusion, a world where decisions affecting billions are made by a shrinking number of actors, a world that may become secure but not free. And perhaps beyond that lies another possibility: a technocratic future in which humanity gradually surrenders urgency and agency to the very systems it creates. A future in which machines become increasingly capable of making decisions once reserved for human beings. This future, Excellencies and colleagues, is one that may not be decades away. It may only be years away. This is why thinking about peacebuilding today requires us to think about tomorrow. We are no longer in 1990. We are no longer living in a moment defined by the collapse of a superpower and the expansion of a rules-based, values-driven order. We are living through a moment— in which power, technology, capital and geopolitics are converging in ways that could fundamentally reshape human society. This is the challenge of our time. And this is why peacebuilding must also evolve. We cannot simply recreate the models of the past. The world has changed. The actors have changed. The technologies have changed. The conflicts have changed. Therefore, peacebuilding must become more innovative, more inclusive, more anticipatory, more courageous. It must engage not only governments and civil society, but also technology companies, private capital, cities, faith communities, youth movements, and the next generation of global leaders. It must learn to operate in a world shaped by climate change, demographic pressures, urbanization, organized crime, cybersecurity, disinformation, and technological disruption. In short, peacebuilding must move beyond managing the crisis of yesterday and begin preparing humanity for the challenges of tomorrow. Tomorrow. And for that, the peacebuilding architecture of the United Nations, which as I've said we have had the privilege of working with from day one, needs now to move beyond just a UN peacebuilding response. But today's complex challenges require a whole of UN response, and it's why I'm happy that the USG is here, because you cover a wider spectrum. This is why this peacebuilding week matters, because the question before us is not whether the world is changing—it is changing. The question is whether peacebuilding will change with it. For generations, reformers, revolutionaries, and visionaries have asked a simple question: What is to be done? That remains the defining question of our time. What is to be done to ensure that peacebuilding remains relevant? What is to be done to ensure that it remains innovative? What is to be done to ensure that it remains relevant and inclusive? What is to be done to ensure that ordinary people continue to have a stake in shaping their own futures? What is to be done to ensure that technology serves humanity rather than humanity serving technology? And what is to be done to ensure that peace remains a global public good rather than a privilege enjoyed by the few. Excellencies, colleagues, I sometimes wonder what future generations will say about our moment. Will they say that this was the period when humanity surrendered its urgency to power, technology and fear? Or will they say that this was the moment when humanity paused—like we are doing today—reflected, and chose a different path? Will they say that freedom slowly gave way to control? Or will they say that we found the wisdom to harness innovation while protecting dignity, rights, and human freedom? Will they say that peacebuilders became irrelevant? Or will they say that peacebuilders reinvented themselves and helped guide the world through one of the greatest transitions in human history? The proverbial fork in the road is not somewhere beyond the horizon. It is here. We can already see it. One road is illuminated by the bright lights of power, profit, competition, and technological supremacy. The other is illuminated by something less visible but far more enduring: our shared humanity. The first road promises dominance. The second road promises dignity. The first road may appear exciting. The second requires courage. But every generation is eventually asked a question that defines its place in history. Our generation is being asked that question now. Will we build a world that is merely secure, or will we build a world that is secure and free? Will we build a world that is efficient, or will we build a world that is just? Will we build a future for technology, or will we ensure that technology serves the future of humanity? That is why we are here this week—to gather evidence, to challenge assumptions, to imagine new possibilities, to mobilize new partnerships, to tell policymakers, innovators and investors alike that value—the value of peace for humanity is greater. Let me repeat that: the value of peace peace for humanity is greater than the paper valuation of any balance sheet, even if it is a trillion dollars; to affirm that a more secure, more inclusive, more caring and more peaceful world remains possible; and to choose consciously, courageously, the road less travelled. Let those of us who still believe in a better world,— I hope we all do— a more humane world, a more peaceful world, a rules-based and values-driven world, become the voices that inspire others to walk that road with us. Not because it is easy, because it is necessary. Not because success is guaranteed, but because the alternative is unacceptable. Because peace is not naïve. Peace is not weakness. Peace is not an afterthought. Peace is the foundation upon which freedom, justice, prosperity and human dignity are built. And peace, Excellency and colleagues, is not simply the absence of war. Peace is humanity's most ambitious act of hope. And hope, my friends, when organized, mobilized and acted upon, remains the most powerful force in the world. I thank you. It's now my pleasure to hand the floor to the Under-Secretary-General to give her input. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Then thank you for your comments. Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, it's a pleasure to address you today during this inaugural Peacebuilding Week. This occasion provides a valuable opportunity to reflect on two decades of United Nations peacebuilding efforts while generating renewed momentum for the work that lies ahead. At the outset, I'd like to express my sincere appreciation to our colleagues from civil society organizations. Throughout this week, your contributions have been central, shaping discussions on prevention, women's inclusion, financing, and the role of artificial intelligence. The networks you represent are among the United Nations' most critical partners in peacebuilding, driving the innovation, inclusion, and impact our work needs. Today, we take stock of the CSO-UN Dialogue Initiative, now entering its fourth year. The presence of all 17 members of the Dialogue's Organizing Core Group reflects both your dedication and the value of this platform. I also thank the Government of Switzerland for its continued support to the Dialogue and to civil society engagement. Nao, Excellencies and colleagues. Since our last meeting in Geneva 6 months ago, the global context has become more challenging. We continue to witness rising geopolitical tensions, protracted conflicts, growing polarization, and shrinking civic space. At the same time, multilateral cooperation is under strain. And resources for peacebuilding and prevention are under pressure. In this context, partnership between civil society and the United Nations is critical. As demands increase and resources diminish, we must work together more effectively. In Geneva, discussions converged on four priorities. First, strengthening civil society as strategic partners and protecting civic space. Second, enhancing system-wide coherence, including through engagement with women and youth-led actors. Third, advancing inclusive and locally-led approaches, including Women, Peace and Security and Youth, Peace and Security. And fourth, improving financing for peacebuilding. A clear message also emerged: the need to move beyond dialogue towards stronger partnerships, joint advocacy, and collective action for impact. Today's meeting reflects our shared commitment to sustained follow-up on these priorities. I hope Peacebuilding Week can serve annually as a moment for reflection, while also feeding the dialogue's outcomes into key processes at UN headquarters, including the Peacebuilding Fund's NEXT Strategy. As we are here primarily to hear from civil society, I will be brief and highlight one good practice and offer two suggestions. First, it is encouraging to see the momentum behind regional CSO-UN dialogues, which translate global priorities into actionable outcomes. Over the past year, 9 regional dialogues have taken place across diverse contexts. Recent meetings in Dakar and in Bangkok brought together civil society, UN colleagues, and partners to deepen regional analysis and generate practical recommendations. This model strengthens the link between field realities and policy, and we welcome these insights and encourage you to share them with colleagues across the United Nations system during your time in New York. Second, I encourage future dialogues to further engage with nationally owned prevention strategies, as discussed this week. These are gaining importance as risks intensify. From Mauritania to Papua New Guinea, promising practices show how civil society networks can support both prioritization and implementation of preventive action. These strategies also provide an entry point to advance key priorities, including women's and youth engagement and financing. Now, in my department, we are supporting prevention approaches that are nationally owned, locally grounded, and internationally supported. Civil society networks play a critical role in sharing good practice and informing global debates. Finally, I wish to reiterate the importance of engagement with the Peacebuilding Commission. The 2025 Peacebuilding Architecture Review calls for stronger interaction with civil society, including local, women-led, and youth-led organizations. The Commission's monitoring framework offers a useful avenue for the dialogue to inform the intergovernmental deliberations, and I encourage your continued engagement. In today's context, none of us can act alone. Civil society, member states, The United Nations Secretariat must move forward together to strengthen peacebuilding for the challenges ahead, and my department remains fully committed to this partnership. I wish you continued good discussions while you are here in New York and beyond. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Under-Secretary-General, and thank you for your partnership with civil society and for your encouragement and continuing intention to work with civil society. I don't think people understand how important civil society— you know, I said to my colleague, life starts in civil society and ends in civil society. Most people are activists. They start their careers at university in civil society. Then they move on. They become presidents, undersecretaries general, ambassadors. And then when they finish that task, they go back to civil society and, you know, they join a peacebuilding organization, the mediation. I see so many friends, you know, who've been in government, and then if you remember President Obama with his torn shoes on the table, started in civil society and then he went on to become a senator, president, he's back in civil society now. So we thank you for the partnership with civil society. Ambassador, we thank you for your support. And I give you the floor.

Thank you very much, Under-Secretary-General, Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, representatives of civil society organizations, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to address the opening of today's event from Geneva to New York, taking stock of the CSO-UN Dialogue on Peacebuilding. I'm very pleased to see members of the core group as well as other civil society representatives who have joined us from different regions of the world. Your presence is a reminder that peacebuilding begins long before it reaches conference rooms in Geneva or New York. It starts in communities through the daily efforts of those working to prevent conflict, build trust, and strengthen social cohesion. It is critical that these experiences and realities inform discussions at the policy level, and conversely, that policy deliberations remain anchored in realities on the ground. The CSO-UN dialogue plays an important role in this regard by helping connect international discussions with local experiences. Our collective objective should be to ensure that such engagement becomes a regular and institutionalized feature of our work rather than a periodic exercise. Likewise, there is value in strengthening engagement across the diverse communities of stakeholders operating in key international and regional peacebuilding hubs including New York, Geneva, or Nairobi and others. Drawing on their experience and areas of focus from policy to development to humanitarian, human rights, and operational perspectives can help make peacebuilding more coherent and more effective. As a country with a longstanding commitment to dialogue, mediation, and inclusive peacebuilding. Switzerland attaches great importance to strengthening these connections. We are convinced that better outcomes— that outcomes are better when policy discussions draw on operational experience and are informed by perspectives from the ground. The previous rounds of the dialogue, including the one held in Geneva in December last year, have demonstrated the value of this approach, generating concrete recommendations to strengthen cooperation between the United Nations and civil society. Switzerland supports this initiative with the conviction that dialogue, partnership, and local ownership are essential to sustaining peace, and that its impact is greatest when policy and implementation are mutually reinforcing. I thank you all for your engagement and continued commitment to this shared endeavor. I wish you a productive exchange and a successful workshop to follow. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Ambassador, and thank you again for your support It's a very difficult time. Under Secretary-General, all of this grew the last 35 years in what paradigm we all called peace through dialogue. We're entering a new paradigm called peace through strength, and it's being presented sometimes as being mutually exclusive, and I think we need to reassess that and say that this is two sides of the same coin. You actually may need some peace through to stand sometimes, but you still need peace through dialogue. And so this— we thank the government of Switzerland for its continued support. The support is dwindling in this area, so we thank you for that support. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, this closes the opening session. It didn't sound right, closing the opening session, but I suppose that's what it is.— and then I— oh, my instructions say then hand to Rebecca to moderate the session. Ah, okay, right. Now let me reopen the opening session. Rebecca, you now have the floor.

Mr. Chair, Vasu, thank you very much. Under-Secretary-General, Ambassador Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished colleagues and friends. It's my absolute pleasure and privilege to be here alongside these distinguished opening speakers and my colleagues and friends in the core group of the CSO-UN Dialogue on Peacebuilding. It has been thrilling to be part of the first ever, well overdue UN Peacebuilding Week, and to see how much attention and people conflict prevention and peacebuilding are attracting at this otherwise grim and challenging time that we are living. Håning. Having been a young professional at the United Nations here in New York when the UN Peacebuilding Commission and the UN Peacebuilding Fund were set up 20 years ago, it's particularly special for me to be here with you today. Young me could not in my wildest dreams have imagined that I would be back 20 years later alongside you guys talking about this. I think it's important that we stop and consider the significance of the UN leadership and membership coming together at this fragmented and conflict-ridden time and around peacebuilding based on a consensual— consensual adoption of the twin resolution on the peacebuilding architecture review in December last year. Many of us were not sure we would get there. This sends a very important signal about a unique opportunity considering the fundamental shifts and changes that the current geopolitical divided and multipolar world is experiencing towards short-term transactional cooperation and deals, and away from comprehensive sustainable peace and security spanning across the three pillars of the United Nations. And I would argue that this inclusion event is likely to be, if not the, then at least one of the most important and interesting events during this week. Despite the shrinking civic space around the world, and return to great power politics, the 2025 UN Peace Bar does place inclusion and the meaningful participation and localization at the center of peacebuilding and therefore also at the center of international peace and security. It's a recognition of how achieving sustainable peace requires nationally and locally led and owned processes with civil society at the center. And that peacebuilding has greater impact when the UN successfully connects with national and local peacebuilding efforts. Yet civil society has not necessarily been up front and center of this Peacebuilding Week until now. Discussions have largely been centered around UN member states and traditional formats. While I understand why it is particularly important at this time to ensure the UN member states' ownership and therefore commitment to peacebuilding, I do think that it comes at the expense of a certain lost opportunity to really get into the fabric of what peacebuilding is and what is required for peacebuilding to sustain in the current political and financial pressures that we are all under. We need to hear from people on the ground who are the ones who on a daily basis are building peace around the world in both protracted and active conflicts., and in contexts that are at risk of conflicts breaking out. In the large majority of cases, civil society are the last ones to pick up arms and the first ones to build peace. We are on the front line. This is why this inclusion event is so important and why the CSO-UN Dialogue on Peacebuilding is so important. The CSO-UN Dialogue is a prime example of that and a UN leadership who is looking to civil society for a more equal and strategic partnership at a difficult time for multilateralism, for civil society, and for peacebuilding. CMI/Matteo Zara Peace Foundation is a proud founding member of the Core Group and a former co-chair of the CSO-UN Dialogue with the UN last year. We have learned so much, and together we have come so far. It's been an incredible experience marked by co-creation and real partnerships over the last 4 years, and I would like to sincerely thank the UN PBPF PSO and the core group for all the hard work. Together we have and are building a new imperfect mechanism for participation, where civil society is not just consulted, but engaging in a real dialogue with UN policymakers. This allows for mutual learning and also trust building, and thus more strategic, forward-looking discussions on how to better and more effectively build peace. The annual dialogues have resulted in 3 substantial outcome reports, with targeted operational recommendations based on experiences from around the world. As part of the effort to bridge levels and structures, regional CSO-UN dialogues on peacebuilding are increasingly also taking place throughout the year, as we heard. The experience in Geneva showed us the added value of tapping into different multilateral hubs, including a different and wider range of UN expertise. The Peacebuilding Week adds to that cycle as a useful midpoint in the dialogue and thus answers to to requests from CSOs for continuity. It helps us ensure that this unique initiative is an ongoing platform for engagement, reflection, and collaboration. Going forward, it's essential to protect this space for co-creation and effectively bridging local and global. We are so lucky to have so many peacebuilders with us to share their experience and vision. Without you and your dedication and investment in your spare time, this would not be possible. And one more time, thank you to UN DPPA and Switzerland, but also to Finland and Denmark for funding us throughout these years and for hosting us here today. I cannot wait for our interactive discussions. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Jyväkä. I would like to record this as a moment in history. It's the first time that an opening session has been closed and reopened, but I'm sure that has happened before, so I can't say this is an historic moment. But the gathering in this Peacebuilding Week on the 20th year is an historic moment, and the opening session is now officially closed. Thank you. Thank you for all you do for business.

And I'm back. Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues and friends, I'm delighted to go into the interactive format of this event. After those very grounding but also inspiring words of our opening speakers, I would like to introduce this core segment of our discussions here today, where we will aim to jointly reflect on previous dialogues and what has changed over the iterations. We will take stock of progress, challenges, and opportunities as the dialogue process continues to evolve, and look into the future of what might come. The Core Group has been privileged enough to have two full days, a first-time-ever in-person retreat here at UN headquarters, talking about where we would like to take this dialogue. Some of those reflections will be shared with you by my colleagues here today. But before we start, Graham will come in with a few— Graham Simpson, sorry, Principal Representative of Interpeace here in New York and Senior Advisor, of course, on YPS with Interpeace. I'm sure you all know him, and my assumption was that first name would be enough for a profile like you here. But he is going to remind us of the main takeaways from Geneva and previous dialogues. Let me also take the opportunity to thank Interpeace once again, because they took on the co-chairing as the first one from CSOs for the first 2 years, which was a massive undertaking. It was somewhat of a risk. We didn't know where it was going, and they have been a key actor in getting us to where we are today. So over to you, Graeme.

Thank you. Thank you, Joubeka. And yes, Graeme's sufficient. Excellencies, colleagues, I'm going to try and take only a little time I think we've heard a— I feel a little bit like the cheese in the sandwich. All the deep analytical reflection on the current context has happened, and then after this there will be the reflective exercise of looking at what we've been doing and how and asking all the tough questions about what's worked, what happened, what were the challenges, what were the achievements. And in between, I'm just going to do this little sliver of history, which mostly reflects, I think, some of the innovative practice that we sometimes take for granted in how this UN CSO dialogue has evolved. And some of what I think you described at the beginning, Ibek, is true, that I think there was quite a lot of risk, that we didn't know what this was going to be like, and that this is is a process that has been shaped by the protagonists in it. It has been driven by an exercise that has involved leaps of faith, quite a lot of disciplined, contested, honest discussion, and at the base of all of it, eventually, the construction of a really safe space in which there's a high degree of trust both between the civil society organizations in the core group and beyond in this exercise, which is not to suggest it's perfect, and between the CSOs and the CSO core group and the UN. So the first UN dialogue took place in 2023. The next one will take place at the end of 2026. Over 20 years after the establishment of the peacebuilding architecture. I think in some ways— well, over the last two days, over the last week in the course of this historic first inaugural peacebuilding week in New York, largely thanks to the generous support of Switzerland in bringing the core group members to New York to participate in this, for which we're very grateful, and an incredible hard work of Rebecca and her very small, very overworked team. We've had the luxury of a day and a half's worth of reflection, a much-needed process on the dialogues going back to '23, '24, and last year in Geneva in '25. I think that the— it's easy considering this is the— this will be the fourth year in which the dialogue takes place to see it as almost institutionalized, but actually the drive and the demand of civil society organizations throughout this process has been for exactly that and a recognition that that is not yet a complete process. That it is about recognizing the importance of institutionalizing in some ways the role of civil society actors in the deliberations of the multilateral system. This is still a work in progress. It's not predetermined. It wasn't predetermined that this would take root, and we have to keep pushing on these buttons in order to make this happen. At origin, I think the first dialogue driven by a UN recognizing that as we approached the 2025 Peacebuilding Architecture Review, there needed to be a more organized, more predictable, less ad hoc engagement with the peacebuilding field and access to the innovation, perspectives, and practice of CSOs, of organized peacebuilders on the ground, both the practice, the policy perspectives, and the analytical research and understanding of this field rooted in the practice of peacebuilding on the ground. So the first dialogue in December 2023 was a precursor to the Peacebuilding Architecture Review of '25., and it was a process that was quite fraught with risk. It involved 50, roughly 50 civil society organizations. There had been the selection of core group members of the dialogue, civil society core group members, who were largely, not exclusively, regionally based networks, and it was essentially up to those networks in the first iteration of this to handpick and select the civil society organizations that would come to New York for that first dialogue. I think there was a strong sense that this would be an opportunity from the UN side to brief civil societies, to make sure that civil society organizations were well informed. I think there was a sense that this would become a vehicle for consultative process leading into the PBAR, with some risk that this could be about quite an extractive exchange. The terms of reference worked out together of the dialogue was about enabling the policy contribution of CSOs and enabling the UN to more systematically engage with them.. And that, in a sense, was quite a bland and uncomplicated mandate, but it came in that first dialogue with some real risks. The risk was that this would be one-way traffic, that civil society organizations would step into the space and be briefed, that they would share their views, and that this would be absorbed. But in some ways, and I have to say, as the first co-chair of the process, I think we came into this quite wary of that, quite wary that this could be a way of oversimplifying or rubber stamping consultations with civil society. And I think it was largely through the reciprocal commitments But really civil society organizations' determination in that first process that the space was shaped, that actually this was described not as a consultation process but as a dialogue, that this wasn't about one party briefing the other but that it was about reciprocal learning, it was about honest, reflective, engagement with innovative practice. I don't think that could be taken for granted. In the wake of that, I think there was also— and this is where the trust was really built— a real recognition that we had to together challenge the way we traditionally did things, the different cultural spaces that the UN and civil society organizations often operate— operated under. It required the negotiation and co-creation of agendas, which was not the same as inviting people into a space in which the agenda had already been set. It required being quite brave about challenging existing formats, traditional formats for the way in which these conversations happened. The protocols of diplomacy which often provided real opportunities for exclusion rather than inclusion, the privileging of voices through the order of who spoke when, the need to broaden both the participants on the UN side and the CSO side of who was in that process. And there was a real exercise— I remember this— in the development of the second CSO-UN Dialogue Agenda, a real conversation about how we needed to take every single panel and reorder and juggle with the way in which speakers were organized so that we made sure that no one was second in line all the time, that there was a real balancing act in those processes, and that took quite a lot of courage. It took quite a lot of innovation. It really was a vital process in building trust and the trustworthiness of this forum, its openness to being reshaped through this collaborative endeavor and a recognition that we had to try and do things differently. So if we were slightly on guard in 2023, worried that this would be a once-a-year talkshop, or that it could become an annual jamboree in which an extractive exercise took place once a year. Actually, there was a real collaboration, a real collaboration ensuring that that was not the case and that in 2024 the agenda was a co-designed one, it was co-created, it had a different set of criteria for participation, and that included our ability together and I emphasize together, to rethink how we invited civil society organizations into that space. 2024 was really important because instead of the CSOs who were part of the core group selecting who would be in the room, we actually established a set of criteria, a quite laborious and time-demanding process of applications, and we invited organizations based on a set of criteria, thematic focuses, a set of priorities to apply to come, and that completely changed the composition of who was in the room and how that was determined. And that also took quite a lot of innovation and courage. There was a commitment to the rotation of the chairs of the core group. There was a commitment, at least in principle, to rotation of the members of the core group— sorry, the co-chair of the dialogue and the members of the core group. And that was very important because it wasn't just about changing the way the UN did things, it was also about recognizing the importance of eliminating the potential for small politics, competitive discourse within the civil society organizations. And there was a real commitment to thinking about this as an evolving process in which we had to establish continuity between the agendas, the outcome documents, some kind of accountability from one year to the next. This was a real change and a real shift in how this process evolved. It scaled up civil society involvement, but it also was a big push for scaling up and diversifying the number of— the UN agencies engaging with the dialogue, and a real push in '24 to sort of expand this to a conversation which also invited in and included member states. So at the same time, I think it was very determined to preserve the opportunity to listen to initiative from the field and to ensure that this conversation was one which really accessed civil society voice, not just as policy advice, as I say, but as innovative peacebuilding practice to access the research and analysis of civil society and new voices through that process. 2025 took the dialogue from New York to Geneva, and I think this is really important. This wasn't just about moving from one hub to another.. It wasn't just about moving the geography of this. It was, at least in part, about a recognition of the fact that we needed to also talk to different UN agencies and entities, that peace was not going to be forged just in New York and just within the structures of the peacebuilding architecture in New York, but that there was the opportunity to actually engage humanitarian, human rights, development, and other UN agencies and entities in a spirit of recognizing that peacebuilding was a cross-cutting goal across the UN system. This was associated also with the push for a lot of civil society organizations who were saying, "Actually, the place we meet the UN is not in New York, and it's not always through the architecture of the peacebuilding structures that are based in New York." This remains a centre of gravity. It remains a key dimension of the system's peacebuilding architecture. But for many civil society organisations, they were saying, we actually meet the UN through its operational entities, through the UN country presences, and that that's a place in which we needed to re-engage and diversify the ways in which— and decentralize the ways in which this dialogue was taking place and the interface with the UN. So Geneva was a really critical moment in shifting that, and what we saw— and it's been described already— was a series of, over the last year, 9 regional consultations which really forced this conversation into a much more decentralized set of discourses with diverse UN entry players. That brings us to today, and I think the real value of the two days that we've been in New York has been about stocktaking of that, and that's an exercise in which you're invited to all participate in the next short while. The way forward seems to be about deepening these engagements, committing to this diversified engagement with the UN, enriching and expanding the role of civil society actors, and still forcing the agenda of institutionalizing the role of civil society organizations within— through the UN CSO dialogue as a reciprocal learning exercise that offers to helps engage in what I think Vasu talked about as the critical need for rethinking not just funding and financing, not just the participation of women and youth in these processes, but in reimagining what multilateralism needs to look like. Thank you.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Graham, for those inspiring words. And it is clear it's a very timely moment for you to share with us how important courageous leadership is to bring things forward, to taking risks, and to work in a mode that's trial by error. I think it's a very good time for us to remember the importance of that. I will now quickly— I just thought I'd introduce the two women next to me, even if you're not speaking, because it's a But so here, of course, we have Karishma Raju, who is the General Manager of Programs with the Court and who is co-chairing this year together with Rebecca Feely, who is Inclusion Lead at PBPSO and who has recently taken over and hit the ground running with her incredible team. Now we will go into the segment where we will take stock together with core group members. We have 3 questions, one which is taking stock of the progress on the recommendations that we've made. Secondly, we will be looking at challenges and opportunities, and finally looking forward. And there will be some time for the floor also to come in, so please, you can already think about if there are any comments or questions that you'd like to also ask. But first, when we're looking at the progress that we think have been made in advancing the priorities, the discussed during the previous dialogues. Where have commitments translated into changes in policy, practice, partnerships, financing, or participation? And what has made those changes possible? What are the enablers? Let me start by handing over the floor to Sonia Reynas-Givanidis, who is Executive Director of the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office. Sonia, you have 3 minutes, please.

Thank you, Rebecca, and thank you for the opportunity also to take stock. I think it's really important in how we look at how to do better moving forward. Very quickly, EPLO is the independent civil society platform of European NGOs, networks, and think tanks working in conflict prevention, peacebuilding, and mediation, with 58 members and headquarters in 22 European countries, but working all over the globe. A lot of our members, CMI, Interpeace, GPAC, and others have been members of this initiative. We've been with the core group since the lead-up to the first dialogue meeting that took place in this room, and with the goal of bringing our expertise in creating dialogue spaces between policymakers and civil society practitioners. We've also been part of the regional dialogues as well. A lot of progress has already been mentioned, but I want to step back to focus on the fact that this is a functioning dialogue mechanism with very strong support from the UN and strong investment from CSOs, and that the dialogue is living. And so, I don't know if we can really answer just yet, or will we know just yet, all of the places where this has had the most impact. And there is a lot of pressure to show results right away. Dialogue is important in and of itself, and increasingly so with the closeout of civil society space, but what we do with it is even more important. So, we see it this week, and we've seen it in our reflections, that we're drawing on the experience of civil society actors and communities who, as have been mentioned, are working on the front lines, and that is the purpose, to inform better policy, but better work. And another sort of advancement in this has also been the member state involvement. And I think that's an area where we can capitalize a little bit more moving forward. I want to say that the areas of progress might seem mundane, especially when you're on the loudspeaker, like terms of reference and the various things that Graham mentioned, but this also comes from having dialogue organizations be part of the core group. And it's an experience and an expertise, and it's been one that we've been able to create a space that's been very good. I believe there's a positive trajectory moving forward. I see strategic thinking. There's also a need to be more effective, to avoid duplication, and reflections also about what can we do in this space collectively, but what should we not do in this space, and what can we do on our own as individual organizations. And so there is that pressure, and we'll need to be careful to preserve it moving forward. And to, you know, also find new allies. So, this is the importance of moving this around, and also, I think, the upside of the new member state involvement. We need to be smart and creative to use this dialogue approach to build on the regional, very much the regional outreach to feed into the annual dialogues with very much, and this is in the outcome document, the need to rebalance priorities towards prevention, a long-term impact, including greater investment in peacebuilding. So everybody's focused on the immediate, and we need to be focused on the long term and the medium term. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Sonia. In the interest of time, I'm not gonna bridge between speakers, even if I'm very tempted. But it's better that you get the time rather than me. So I will hand straight over to Beatriz Elena Meija Restrepo. My Spanish is not brilliant. Grupo Internacional de Paz, please go.

Good morning, distinguished delegation, colleagues. I would like to speak in my own language, so I invite you to use the Spanish translation. Thank you. Permítanme comenzar— Please allow me to begin by recognizing the value of this dialogue that over recent years has created a unique space to strengthen trust and collaboration between the United Nations and civil society. Reflecting on the achievements made since the beginning of these dialogues, since the first one, one of the great achievements has been precisely strengthening trust between the UN and civil society. This trust cannot be taken for granted. For many years, civil society organizations have felt some distance between decision-making spaces and the realities that we experience on the ground. These 3 years of annual dialogues have contributed to reducing this distance, creating a more genuine relationship based not only on formal participation but also on listening to each other and recognition and building a shared agenda. This trust has in turn enabled a transition in more— to more individual forms of participation and more direct forms of participation from civil society. In Latin America, we're starting to organize ourselves as a regional community that's able to engage in collective analysis, to look at shared priorities, representative participation, and sustained contact between the cycles of dialogue. From Latin America's perspective, the dialogue also give us the ability to engage in discussions beyond global fora. And have fostered regional spaces to build trust between organizations and identify shared challenges and develop collective responses that are based on our realities on the ground. This was strengthened further last year with regional dialogues and regional consultations on the peacebuilding architecture. These expanded. Opportunities for participation enabled us to consolidate a common agenda between organizations from different countries in the region and enabled us to strengthen common working relationships that continue to be in place today, contributing to global dialogues. A constructive step has been the creation of the Latin American Coalition for Systemic Peace that today brings together organizations from 13 different countries and is a common expression of the progress made thanks to these global and regional dialogues and is a platform that can serve as a bridge between the local, national, and regional levels and, of course, the global level. Civil society organizations work on the ground supporting communities and long-term processes and that's why we like to serve as a bridge and we like to participate in this effort because we want to be recognized as allies in peacebuilding because peace is only possible if we build it together. Thank you.

Thank you, Beatriz, and the timekeeping is admirable. We go over to Augusto Miklat from the Initiatives for International Dialogue. Gus, please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you, Jiebecca. Thank you for this hopefully not going to be rare opportunity anymore. I am Gus Miklat from the Initiatives for International Dialogue, which is a Filipino and regional solidarity advocacy and peacebuilding NGO. Based in the Philippines, covering peacebuilding issues, among others, in Southeast Asia, such as in the Bangsamoro in Mindanao, Myanmar, Pattani in the south of Thailand, West Papua, Timor-Leste, Aceh, and the region at large, engaging the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, for example, on these issues. 6 months from Geneva last December may be too short in measuring impact at once, but we did hit the ground running, as you mentioned, Jiwika. And I am pleased to say that we were able to actualize one main recommendation from Geneva when, together with the United Nations Peacebuilding and Peace Support Office, we organized the regional CSO-UN Dialogue for Southeast Asia just two weeks or so ago in Bangkok. So now I am returning the jet lag that Rebecca, Joy, and Osei experienced when they came over. That regional dialogue was participated in by our regional civil society partners from the region, along with 5 United Nations Resident Coordinators and Officers, the Regional Resident Coordinator himself, ESCAP, and other UN agencies like UNDP, including allies, partners, and some donors like the Open Society Foundation and the Asia Foundation. Even the Asian Development Bank joined us online. This to us was also an opportunity to engage the rest of the United Nations system on peacebuilding and hopefully not only popularize but embed the peacebuilding discourse into the respective specific remits. But even before Geneva, together with Interpeace, whose representative is in front of me and is serendipitously sitting beside me today, we organized the Southeast Asia Peacebuilding Architecture Review in Manila earlier last year. This continued the process initiated by this innovative CSO-UN dialogue in 2023. Organizing the regional dialogue with the UN PBPSO epitomizes what partnership is all about. We were not just implementing a UN-sponsored or UN-supported activity, as NGOs usually do, but we co-designed, co-created, co-invested, if you may, and implemented the dialogue together as equal partners. For me and my colleagues in civil society in the region, this is somehow something new, fresh, definitely welcome, inspiring, and hopeful that the world will become better and more peaceful place, especially amidst these very troubling and terrible times. As my dear friend and co-peacebuilder Dinosaur Vasu— and the UNSG spoke earlier, I mean the Deputy UNSG spoke earlier. We look forward that the outputs in the Bangkok Dialogue, including this one that we are conducting now during this inaugural Peacebuilding Week, including with all your excellencies here in New York, will cascade and burrow deeper into the national and local milieus where it really matters. The commitment of the Resident Coordinator's participants in Bangkok to partner with us in our respective locales augurs well for this process. For indeed, not one actor can resolve or prevent conflicts—not the United Nations alone, not the governments alone, and not civil society alone. This kind of partnership is imperative to make this world a more peaceful, just, and healthy planet. Thus, we look forward to regularizing, if not institutionalizing further, this process. And it was very heartwarming to hear what the good Ambassador from Switzerland said about this matter earlier, with hopefully also the active engagement and partnership of the governments of member states, especially those who are present here now, and that would be really, really, really awesome. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Maraming salamat po. Mabuhay.

Gus, thank you so much. Always a pleasure. Sharon Bagwan-Rose from Pacific Women Mediators Network. Please, the floor is yours.

Thank you so much, Excellencies, colleagues, and friends. Across movement ecosystems of Pacific Island independent and non-independent states, we're weaving together a vision where peace and security isn't defined by external forces but by local values, indigenous knowledge, and deep solidarity. This is the heart of our Pasifika Peace Talanoa. To Talanoa is to provide a process of inclusive, participatory, and transparent dialogue. It's a safe space for open conversation, storytelling, and relationship building without strict hierarchies or rigid agendas. Coordinated by the Pacific Women Mediators Network, a program of GPAC Pacific, we come together weaving intergenerational experiences and Expectations, Bridging the Nexus Between Peacebuilding, Sustainable Development, and Climate Resilience. Our goal is clear: to ensure that civilian-led expertise, the voices of diverse women and youth, faith and traditional leaders, are recognized as a foundational element of our regional architecture. Our approach is inclusive by design. Women in all our diversities hold the majority of our leadership positions, and youth leaders from our networks are actively shaping regional discussions. In February this year, we brought together 22 civil society leaders for a cross-movement learning exchange. The subsequent dialogue with the Pacific Islands Forum on the Regional Action Plan on Peace and Security was evidence of this collective leadership. Today, we're proving that inclusive, people-centered approaches, as affirmed by the 2025 Blue Ocean of Peace Declaration, are the only ways to truly sustain peace and resolve conflict. Our advocacy is evidence-based and deeply rooted. We have subsequently seen our recommendations directly reflected in the drafts of the Pacific Islands Forum Regional Action Plan on Peace and Security. We're no longer just beneficiaries of policy, we're partners of its formation. And when I sit at the table as a civil society representative in the Pacific Islands Forum Advisory Group on Peace and Security, it is understood that I bring recommendations from a movement of peacebuilders. Our impact is tangible. Our advocacy is representative, evidence-based, and deeply rooted in our community needs. We're therefore successfully translating global policy into local influence. Acting as a strategic conduit that ensures civil society is a partner in policy formation rather than just a beneficiary. The recommendations developed through the Pacifica Peace Talanoa have been reflected in subsequent drafts of the Pacific Island Forum Regional Action Plan, and the engagement continues. We look forward to our CSO-UN Dialogue on Peacebuilding continuing to affirm civil society as strategic peacebuilding partners, enabling flexible, innovative dialogue approaches supported by financing models to engage with member states. Together, we can co-create and advance inclusive, intersectional, and locally led approaches that prevent violence, sustain communities, and protect the living planet. Binaka, shukriya. I thank you.

Thank you very much, Sharon. We have our last intervention under this question, and then we will open the floor for those of you who'd like to come in as well. But Karishma, please, over to you.

Thank you, Yebika. Given the inputs that have been made from the colleagues to question 1, and focusing on impact, I think for us, from the Accord perspective, having to see the dialogue actually bring about influence for policy,. And this comes in the face of the work that we had done in terms of the 2025 PBAR process, which presented an opportunity for alignment with continent-specific needs and where peacebuilding efforts were closely linked to the African Union's post-conflict reconstruction and development policy. Having focused on governance, security, human rights, and socioeconomic development as well as gender inclusion, the dialogue This space definitely highlights and offers additional opportunity for how global and regional peacebuilding frameworks can be synchronized to be able to foster longer-term stability as well as resilience. But at the same time, for us, in terms of that process, having to reflect Africa's own context and its peacebuilding needs. Accord, in terms of this process, has also been able to see a commitment to convene regional dialogues, which was another concrete step and examples that have been shared here as well. What this did was to create opportunities which allowed us to bring into the perspective of the dialogue those recommendations, those discussions from the Sahel, the Great Lakes, the Horn of Africa, as well as other conflict-affected regions, which we had done in partnership with another core group member, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilders. So rather than just having to be consulted, we were able to share these priorities and look at ways in which we could bridge the different levels for peacebuilding. In particular for Geneva, what we saw was the recognition of the African Development Bank's tripartite partnership model, which highlighted innovative approaches to peacebuilding and seeing them emerging beyond just member state level, but also at a regional level. It's important because it demonstrates that African institutions as well as civil society are not only implementing ideas but having to look at generating solutions in which we can inform global practice as well. So looking ahead, the challenge is no longer having to identify the right priorities. Through the CSO-UN dialogue process, we have collectively done that. We've seen that from New York, we've seen it in Geneva. Geneva definitely produced important ideas and commitments, and what we should seek from the 2026 Dialogue is now the evidence which we are starting to see here today during Peacebuilding Week. And this is our task as we head forward. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Karishma. So you've had a rich understanding of some of the achievements that members of the core group see to today. If we very, very quickly summarize them, I would say the first point is around process and sustainability and continuity of that process. The second is around format, direct and expanded forms of participation. And the third is around agency, agency of the CSOs, where we see a movement that relates to bridging connectivity of levels, structures, actors, of the global to the local, local to the global via the regional. And I would like to highlight also the strategic and real partnership that has been mentioned several times, as well as the importance of trust and how this related to connectivity, of course, really has enhanced trust between all of the, the actors, levels, and structures mentioned. And with that, I'd like to open the floor. Your nameplate does not state who you are today, today, apart from the ones on the first row, so I would kindly ask you to present yourself, and if possible, keep remarks to around 3 minutes maximum. Let me then see if somebody would like to raise a hand. Please, sir, go ahead and introduce yourself first, as mentioned.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Issa Toashamsu. I work for United Network of Young Peacebuilders as a regional coordinator for Western Central Africa. This has really, really been an enriching conversation. Missed opportunity to join you in Geneva last year, but I was here in 2024 for the UNCSO dialogue. And so it is very interesting for me to hear about what happened in Geneva and connect that to what happened in New York here. But I still remember some of the few things that came up right here in New York when we met in 2024, and one of the One of the key themes that especially came up within the youth session was how do we ensure that the lessons that we learn here, we connect that with the UN offices in the respective countries. I still think that is something that is work in progress. Let's still keep that on our to-do list. We need to find a way to be able to connect what is happening here in New York, in Geneva, and in other regional platforms at the national level, because usually they are the offices that do the work, and then they are the people that largely would work with state institutions than work with CSOs, which of course is understandable in certain contexts, but it's still important for, as a young person, I would say, for the UN agencies at the country level to find a way to basically work with young people. I see that that is changing, where now youth have a voice in the advisory councils and the youth boards, to contribute to the cooperation frameworks, but we still have a lot to do on pushing that forward. Then the second point is also about the whole idea of localization. We still have to ask again, how do we ensure that whatever discussions that we are having here translates into the lives of the people on the ground? Because I said, where I come from in Ghana, if you don't have patience, you might come to Ghana and you not get to my community because it's so far away in the north. How do the people there, and even people living in much difficult circumstances like our friends in Niger, in Mali, and in many parts of the Sahel, young people there risking their lives to call for peace and to call for dialogue and to engage with stakeholders, how do that translate into their lives? How do that impact the work they do? And that is what a lot of young people want to see happen from these different spaces. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Thank you very much for stressing why connectivity matters. This is about real people. Thank you. Anybody else? Oh, please. Merci beaucoup, Madame la Présidente. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. If I may, I would like to take the floor in French, please. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I'm Mamadi Dogolan. I'm the National Coordinator of WANEP, the West African Network for Peacebuilding. I'm also a member of the core group for the UN Civil Society Dialogue. I listened very closely with a lot of interest to the different speeches, and for my part, I think that today the different presentations clearly show that the question is no longer to question the role of different actors, but rather to think about how we can make sure that we transform, let's say, results and initiatives that we're engaging in them into concrete results on the ground. I think what's at stake right now is that there's a lot of dialogue internationally, and so what is at stake is how we make sure that on a local level that we reap the dividends of these initiatives and that the results can really be perceptible for actors on a local level on the ground. In terms of inclusion, there's a fundamental element, and this is just a personal observation from my part, is what we call, um, taking account of inclusion. Because often when it comes to the participation of women and youth, this is symbolic. So how do we make sure that— by the way, I've I'd like to thank my brother Issa for his statement, but the reality on the ground is that women's and youth groups aren't necessarily homogenous. So when we look at youth participation, we need to make sure that we ensure that they participate, and I'm talking about young people that live in areas experiencing crises, people that live whether situations of conflicts, youth have specific needs, they're vulnerable, especially youth in displaced persons camps. So we need to look at how we make sure that they are taken into account, women and youth. So I think as we move forward, we need to bear this in mind and make sure that we're more inclusive so that the actions can benefit local actors, that they can have agency and that people aren't left by the wayside. Now, my last point, just to conclude, is looking at risks, because in some contexts in Africa, particularly in the Sahel region, we face— —states of emergency. So what do we need to do to take account of some of the risks that civil society organizations and NGOs face as challenges, like reductions of the civic space? Um, there's often limitations on the room for maneuver for civil society to act. So in my humble opinion, I think it's very important as we move forward to take account of these risks that are really significant risks that can jeopardize the results and the impacts of the initiative that we're currently working on here together. Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much for stressing a few other key elements, and not only youth, as we only heard, but also contextualization and the need to really learn from the local level, but also to acknowledge all the results on the local level at the global level and learn from them. This is exactly the type of informal exchange that we're after, to really hear from you. So please feel free to come in, not necessarily with prepared remarks, but with thoughts or experiences that you'd like to share related to what we are discussing. We have time for another couple of— yes, please, Madam.

Good morning to you all. My name is Kautumi Abdulaziz, Executive Director of Legacy from Nigeria. First, I want to thank you very much, the core group. I see the commitment to the work that you're doing is not an easy task. Having said that, I also want to bring our attention to the role of women in, you know, these local communities. You know, women are usually the first responders when it comes to like emergencies and even in conflict. However, they are also the last to receive opportunities or support to do the work that they do in those communities. So I'm wondering, how can we strengthen our system to support them to be part of the decision-making table, not just as implementers or not just as beneficiaries rather, but then how can we include these local women to be part of where some of these decisions are being made on their behalf. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Indeed, we have a number of women mediators network also on the core group, so they will be grateful that you pointed that out, I'm sure. Actually, the next speaker for the second question is one of those. So with your permission, we'll move into the second question and look more at challenges and opportunities that we have seen along this process, but also, of course, that we see moving forward. Our first speaker on this question is Ruth Arengang Abunav Erbesong, who is is with the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders. Ruth, please, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Madam Moderator. Standing on all existing protocols, I'm deeply honored and grateful to the Peacebuilding Commission, the UNDPBSO, and the core group for creating space for civil society organizations to contribute to this important discussion. I am called Ruth Abunobi Song, and I am a program officer for Africa at the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders. The Global Network of Women Peacebuilders is an international nonprofit coalition of women's rights and civil society organizations in over 40 countries affected by conflict and humanitarian crisis. GNWP has been a member of the core group since the inception of the dialogue, and we are so grateful for that. GNWP implements programs within South America, Eastern Europe and South Caucasus, Africa, the Middle East and North— North America, and also Southeast Asia. From GNWP's experience working with women peacebuilders and local communities across conflict-affected contexts, three persistent challenges continue to undermine peacebuilding and prevention efforts. Firstly, there remains a significant gap between national and international peacebuilding frameworks and the realities experienced by communities on the ground. Too often, peacebuilding architectures are not designed around emerging and evolving threats, nor are they sufficiently informed by local knowledge. As a result, responses can be disconnected from the actual drivers of conflict. Secondly, Local and traditional peacebuilding mechanisms remain underutilized despite their proven legitimacy and effectiveness. Across many African countries and other conflict-affected contexts where GNWP works, traditional leaders, local mediation committees, women groups, and community institutions continue to play a central role in preventing violence and resolving disputes. Yet these actors are frequently excluded from formal peacebuilding processes and receive limited institutional support. Thirdly, the sustainability of peacebuilding efforts remains a challenge. Too often, progress depends on short-term projects and external support. When funding circles end or international actors leave the scene, local structures are left without resources, and capacities needed to sustain gains are all challenged. GNWP's localization strategy demonstrates that addressing these challenges requires shifting power and resources closer to communities. Through localization workshops and write-shops, local stakeholders including women, youth, traditional leaders, and local authorities identify the security challenges affecting their communities, analyze gaps in local policies, and develop local action plans to address them. This process strengthens local ownership, builds accountability, and ensures that peacebuilding solutions are grounded in community realities. The lesson is clear: Sustainable peace cannot be built for communities. It must be built with communities. Peacebuilding and prevention efforts must be nationally owned, locally led, adequately resourced, and anchored in partnerships that recognize the value of traditional and community-based systems. Only then can we move from short-term interventions to lasting peace. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Ruth. Zaid Movlazada from Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, GPAC, please.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks very much, dear Yubeka. Friends, colleagues, there is a wartime survival principle known as the rule of two walls. When sirens warn of incoming rockets or drones, the safest place at home is a space protected from the outside by at least two walls. Today, far too many people living through conflict know this rule. The coming years are unlikely to make this knowledge less necessary. Armed conflict is on the rise. Emergency governance is continuing to normalize, favoring crisis response and short-term risk containment. By contrast, and by definition, peacebuilding is a long-horizon endeavor. It requires commitment, institutional continuity, and the cultivation of trust. The Civil Society-UN Dialogue on Peacebuilding offers a vehicle to do precisely that. Over the past 3 years, we have helped bring local experiences and civil society analysis into global policy discussions and supported more systemic engagement between the UN and local civil society organizations. This has helped to start institutionalizing this important conversation.. But there is both space and need to go further. As GPAC, which includes several organizations that are present here in this important conversation, we believe one possible next step is for the civil society-UN dialogue to evolve into a Secretary-General Civil Society Advisory Group on Peacebuilding. Such a group could provide regular strategic advice on conflict risk and prevention; bring local expertise into UN policy discussions; and strengthen collaborations between the UN, Member States and civil society to make a difference for people affected by conflict. Is it ambitious? Yes. Is it attainable? We will only find out if we try. Because the challenge—and the opportunity—is to move civil society engagement from consultation to partnership, and from partnership to reciprocal influence. As a network of more than 250 local civil society organizations that are present before, during, and after conflict, GPAC stands ready to work with the UN, Member States, civil society, communities, and other partners to advance this goal. Together, we can help ensure that people affected by conflict have more than two worlds to rely on. I thank you.

Thank you very much, Zaid. And I'd like to also acknowledge the substantive investment that GPPAC has has done in the CSO-UN dialogue from the outset through a number of different support initiatives throughout these years. So thank you very much for that. Osama Abdullah Ahmed Al-Rawani from the Sana'a Center for Strategic Studies, please, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Rebecca. Excellencies and colleagues, despite the commitments made across successive dialogues, including those identified in Geneva, as my colleagues have Ori mentioned, several persistent obstacles continue to limit progress on peacebuilding and prevention. Let me mention a couple of those. The first one is the unresolved governance and transition crisis across parts of the Arab world. Much of today's instability is the continuation of a historic transformation triggered by the failure of governance model to deliver inclusion, accountability, and responsive institutions over the past few decades. At the same time, opportunities to support inclusive and legitimate political transitions were often disrupted by regional and international competitions. What could have become pathways toward more sustainable political settlements instead evolved into prolonged instability and conflict. Many of the underlying drivers of fragility, therefore, remain unresolved. The second challenge is the rise of the transactional geopolitics at the expense of principled multilateralism. Commitments to prevent— to our commitments to prevention, including and sustaining peace, often struggle to compete with immediate security or geopolitical priorities. This actually has weakened the collective action and reduced the support for long-term peacebuilding efforts. The third challenge is the growing securitization of peacebuilding. And as we can see, the ongoing conflicts across the region and instability in and around the Red Sea, the broader geopolitical tensions have understandably elevated security concerns. However, this has also shifted attention and resources away from prevention, dialogue, institution building and social cohesion. While military responses may address immediate threats, they rarely address the underlying causes of conflict. Peacebuilding yet and prevention continue to be underfunded while investments in security responses expand. The fourth challenge is the widening implementation gap. We continue to affirm the importance of localization, inclusion, and local ownership, However, many local actors still lack meaningful influence over decision-making and resources. The gap between what is agreed in dialogue spaces and what is experienced by communities on the ground remains significant. This is contributing to a, a broader erosion of trust, not only in institutions and international actors, but also in the credibility and relevance of peacebuilding itself. Taken together, these challenges point to a common problem. The issue is not a lack of commitments, frameworks, or understanding. The issue is whether we can generate the political will, restore principled leadership, and mobilize the necessary resources to translate those commitments into action, action, and action. Until we address that gap, peacebuilding risks becoming increasingly marginalized at a time when it is needed more than ever. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Osama. We move on to Mahamadi Togola from the West African Network for Peacebuilding, WANEP. Please, back to you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Madam Chair. I wish first and foremost to thank the Peacebuilding Support Office of the United Nations Accord, as well as all partners for this initiative, which provides a valuable space for dialogue. Between the United Nations and civil society organizations. I'm taking the floor today on behalf of WANEP, the West African Office for Peacebuilding. This is an organization of the core peace group on civil society and peacebuilding with more than 25 years of experience in conflict prevention and management and positive transformation in West Africa. When we discuss the persistent challenges related to peacebuilding, specifically in the Sahel or in West Africa, we frequently mention rising insecurity, the political, political crises, as well as climate change. However, on the ground, the challenges are completely different. The challenges are more fundamental in nature, and the real challenge is to ensure that local communities are not considered as the last beneficiaries of peace policies, but rather for local communities to be viewed as their first leading architects. Our experience within OneUp shows us that the most effective and efficient prevention mechanisms are those which are locally crafted and locally implemented, including early warning mechanisms, women mediator networks, young peacebuilders, community-based dialogues, as well as local consultation platforms, as is frequently seen with consultative advisory security committees at the local level. These are communities that are tasked with conflict management, management of conflicts related to natural resources. So these mechanisms already exist, but they are also generating results. But the challenges, the persistent challenges are frequently related to underfinancing. These challenges are insufficiently connected to national and regional mechanisms and they are infrequently implemented at the start of the process. Once again, I emphasize they are infrequently leveraged at the outbreak, at the start, because frequently peacebuilding initiatives are designed elsewhere either at the international level or at the regional level. And as a— and this then arrives at the local level as a completed product for implementation. So local actors are only engaged in implementation, not in consultation, and that is an issue today. There are a number of relevant projects, but when it comes to implementation, the impacts remain limited. To my mind, if we really wish to improve prevention, what we need to do is to invest more in the capabilities of local actors before the outbreak of crises rather than solely intervening when these crises morph into international emergencies. UN Civil Society Dialogue is precisely an important opportunity to transform this approach, and this dialogue can become a genuine space for building together peace policies where the knowledge from communities help to craft international decisions and where partnerships are rooted more in partnership rather than merely implementation— mere implementation of projects. I would conclude with the following: communities are not the last link in peacebuilding. Communities Communities are the first line of defense and prevention. Investments in leadership at the community level, listening to their proposals and providing them with the means to act, remains without a doubt one of the most sustainable investments that we can make when it comes to peace. Thank you, Madam Chair, distinguished guests.

Thank you very much, Mohamadi. We go on to Hanna Eriksson from Interpeace, please.

Thank you so much, Jibeke. Thank you, Excellencies, colleagues, and friends. I'm sorry I'm speaking with my back towards most of you, especially when we're talking about Dialogue. From Interpeace's perspective, as the inaugural CSO co-chair of the dialogue, the starting point has to be that we should not downplay the access that we have created together. The dialogue has opened doors, we have created relationships, we have built trust, and we also created a shared language around these engagements. And we have created a more regular space space for civil society, the UN, and member states to think together both about peacebuilding and about prevention. And that matters, especially at a time when civic space is shrinking. But access was never the whole ambition. What made this initiative innovative is that it was never conceived as a one-off consultation or a conventional UN engage— engagement format. It was designed as a continuous cross-sectorial learning space between different parts of the UN system, but also different parts of the civil society ecosystem. It was rooted in mutual trust and mutual interest in learning from one another and in owning the process, the outcomes, and also the recommendations together. So the honest question here now is whether this access that we're talking about has actually translated into influence. Because the recommendations are not the problem, right? The outcome documents, they're rich and they're increasingly concrete, the recommendations map there. The question is, where do we go with all of this? Who owns these recommendations and how do they change the practice? And ownership, I want to really emphasize here, it cuts both ways, right? Influence does not only depend on whether the UN takes up what civil society proposes, but on whether we build shared ownership and mutual accountability together going forward. So follow-up cannot only rest with the UN alone, and it cannot only rest with civil society alone going forward. And part of this challenge is structural, because the peace and security architecture— it was mentioned previously— it sits largely in New York. But alongside, we also have the operational part of the UN, which is very often where the civil society meets the UN system. And the aim here is not to create a setting where we have to choose between them or which part we engage, but actually to make them complementary. Because if peace is generally understood as a cross-cutting setting theme, peacebuilding becomes the entry point for where the UN works across its silos: the human rights, the development, the humanitarian action, prevention, and political engagements. And I want to emphasize here that financing is what makes this concrete, because we cannot claim to be more than a one-year convening if the resources, they only fund the annual gatherings. But not the year-round infrastructure that requires the follow-ups. How do we regionalize these conversations, the translation, the coordination, the protection, and also the grassroots participation? And the risk now is that as the dialogue moves forward and as it becomes more established, we forget what actually made it innovative. It was not simply an accident mechanism. It was a co-created process rooted in reciprocal learning and shared ownership. Institutionalizing this should protect that spirit, not bureaucratize it into another annual meeting. The opportunity is to institutionalize the dialogue without losing the dialogue character of it, and a process where the UN and civil society keep learning from another. We own the outcomes together and we share the responsibility for turning these recommendations into practice. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Hanna. I think it's very interesting to note that the same things that we've mentioned are elements of progress are also elements of challenges and elements of opportunity going forward, which tells us that we're on the right track, we're doing the right things, but we need to do it more and better. To sum one of those up— some of those up in terms of challenges, the disconnect between the national and international comes again and again. The underutilization of local mechanisms, initiatives, and institutions despite available knowledge. That this is where the impact happens. And the sustain— sustainability challenges related to funding, but also a lack of political will to continue investing in this. And I also think that the international environment should not be forgotten, that we're operating in the context of governance crisis, as it was put, and compromised principles at all levels, whether it's local, regional, or global. The geopolitical attention to these long-term issues is a real challenge, I think. And in terms of the opportunities, it's very clear. It's co-creation, it's shared ownership, and I think it's mutual accountability that was mentioned several times as well. I think that's a really key aspect here, as well as of course the mutual learning, a real partnership, which is part and parcel of that. And the vehicle access and opening— a door opening to BRIDGE was of course of course mentioned, but again that we have to think bigger and more, and the importance of leadership there was also highlighted, including reciprocal influence, bringing this to the highest level of the United Nations, and of course there being an opportunity with a new incoming SG. I will stop there and would love to hear also from the floor, again re-emphasizing the informal in a Q&A format, and I encourage you to react to some of these before we go into the third and last segment, where we really look to the future and become visionary. All right, let's see, I have two over here. I think first it was the gentleman in the back, and then you, I see you, yes.

Good morning, Excellencies and distinguished guests. My name is Jonathan Lam, and I'm speaking today as the international representative of the Migration Youth and Children Platform, YCP, the official youth and children constituency to the Global Compact for Migration. I share my own experience being in UN spaces here in New York, in New York City, sitting in negotiation rooms, observing how diplomats engage and trying to find ways for youth and civil society perspectives to actually enter those conversations. One of the biggest challenges of the CSO UN engagement is the gap between how inclusion is discussed and how it actually happens. We often hear about the importance of youth and civil society voices, and we see them referred in resolutions and side events, but when decisions are negotiated and priorities are set, meaningful participation is still limited and at times tokenized. That matters because peacebuilding is shaped by lived experience and by those who is recognized as having expertise. Many civil society organizations, including youth-led organizations, work directly with communities impacted by conflict, displacement, and instability. They bring perspectives that are essential for prevention and sustaining peace, yet these experiences are not always reflected in formal negotiations. At the same time, there is a real opportunity. From what I've seen, UN negotiations are ultimately about relationships, trust, and sustainable engagement. Through myCP's work with youth, migrants, refugees, and displaced youth across different regions, one message remains constant— constantly emerges. Young people do not want to be symbolic inclusion. We want to be treated as genuine partners in shaping solutions. During the past several months, MyCP engaged with member states, collaborated with other civil society organizations, and participated in a series of negotiations here at the UN headquarters in participation for the International Migration Review Forum, which occurred last month, and we made history. We secured language on ending children detention, committing to enhancing family reunification, and improving mental health services for migrants. Through my capacity, it is clear that young migrants are already committed to strengthening dialogue, social cohesion, and inclusion within their own communities. The challenges is ensuring these contributions are connected to formal peacebuilding processes. This means moving beyond one-off consultations and towards more structured and institutionalized practices and participation where civil societies youth can engage consistently through negotiation, implementation, and follow-up. Last year, myCP and other partners conducted consultations which examined existing gaps in practices, and these exchanges point to 5 priority areas for consideration. One, institutionalizing youth participation across peace processes through formal and sustainable advisory, negotiation, and implementation monitoring mechanisms. Second is ensuring meaningful rather symbolic inclusion, such as youth contributions informing agenda setting, decision making, and follow-up across peace channels, such as the UN Civil Society Dialogue. Third, integrating displacement and mobility into peacebuilding and mediation, recognizing the agency, expertise, and lived experience of displaced youth as relevant to conflict prevention, social cohesion. Fourth, strengthening intergenerational and cross-sectional dialogue amongst mediators, policymakers, and youth peacebuilders. And lastly, fifth, establishing follow-up mechanism including the CSO dialogues that translate youth engagement into sustainable institutional commitments at local and international levels. Ultimately, strengthening the civil society organization youth engage— UN engagement is not simply about creating more opportunities to speak, it's to ensure that decisions are being generally reflected into reality expertise, and solutions of communities most impacted so that peacebuilding becomes more sustainable, effective, and inclusive. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Yes, please go ahead. Great.

Hello everyone, my name is Zana Idrisi and I'm representing today UNDP. I would just like to provide brief reflections on the discussions and thank you so much for such rich and thoughtful reflections. It's one area of opportunities that we see also, it's around digital participation as well. And I think even in the opening remarks, we heard about the way that technology and capital and geopolitics is converging in a way that we have not seen before. So we see digital participation as one of the key elements when we engage with civil civil society as well. And UNDP, if I could just provide a few reflections here, UNDP has done work on youth, peace, and security, especially around the elections, on youth-led protests that just happened in the last couple of years, and we've seen that youth and youth-led organizations, they are not disengaged, they are engaging in a very different way, where everything now is becoming digital, It's becoming continuous and increasingly digital. So for peacebuilding, digital participation, I would say, presents both an opportunity and a challenge. An opportunity is that we see the new, new space where young people are coming in together, organizing, mobilizing, expressing their thoughts. But the challenge is that we know that this is also a very contested space as well. We do see quite a lot of I mean, we see misinformation, disinformation was, I think, also mentioned in the targeting civil society, which it's an opportunity and a challenge in a way that we cannot just respond to those challenges anymore as a way of just responding to the digital world. But this is one— the new way forward on digital civic participation, and we see it as one of the key priority areas when we engage with civil society. Thank you.

Thank you very much, and I warmly welcome that also you and colleagues are coming in. And another opportunity and challenge, of course, is the digital. Great, thank you. Please go ahead. I see you.

Good afternoon, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon. My name is Narumi Sobhani. I've been working peacebuilding collaborative diplomacy for 26 years now. And actually, in the last many, many months, I'm hearing something that seems to be echoed over and over and over again. And I wonder, because part of the exercise is to understand where the gaps, emerging issues, opportunities that may require further attention in future dialogue processes. And really looking at stocktaking around the four priority areas, and specifically around the third element around promoting inclusive, locally-led approaches. And so, and one of the things, a lot of things that we do here, one, over and over again, is to what extent the grassroots convening, grassroots agency, really the population, and how, from my perception from here, in terms of what is the peacebuilding impact, might be different than what actually really on the ground, the nuances when that refugee population is articulating what exactly is that indicator of change, and seems to be a disconnect. And then there is this conversation around how, what does it look like, what do we need to do differently to empower and convene that agency at the grassroots so it's actually locally owned and so on. There's a lot of— and then there's another element that also has been said, and we see over and over again how that connection, accountability linkages vertically and horizontally, like how the local chiefs, and then there's municipality, and then there's like informal, formal, customary, existing spaces, existing mechanisms, community-based. I mean, I can go on, but there's actually a lot. So basically, perhaps it would be interesting to unpack, an opportunity to really unpack this, this process between the grassroots and the middle-level leadership. Thank you very much.

Impact is something that occupies a lot of us. Please, go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. This is Luis with GPAC. I wanted to share a couple of reactions, not as GPAC, that I've just recently joined as the UN liaison, but as a participant present in the previous three dialogues on behalf of my organization called Partners Global. I think one of the biggest opportunities that I've seen is the kind of like the proof of concept that we have with the dialogue. It is an imperfect and still under construction proof of concept, but as Hannah was saying, the innovative part of the dialogue has been the trust, the co-creation, the co-ownership, the shared responsibility. And for me, the opportunity is that we can show other aspects or other elements of the UN system, as well as other intergovernmental bodies, that this sort of like true authentic partnership, true co-created constructive dialogue, is feasible, especially at a time where we see governments that are closing the space, that are rejecting citizen participation. Participation and where we see a lot of fear of engaging with civil society because it might get out of control. So I do think we have a proof of concept, again imperfect, still under construction, but that could hopefully inspire other spaces and other entities to engage in a different way with civil society. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Louie. Last comments from Rebecca on this segment, and then we will move on to 3 and look ahead. Thank you.

Thank you, Jeppeke. As we ponder the second question about opportunities, I wanted to just suggest something rather practical as an opportunity that we have. I'd like to highlight disability inclusion. As we know, I think it's around 16% of the world's population Roughly 1 in 6 people lives with a disability, and yet persons with disabilities are significantly, significantly underrepresented in peacebuilding processes. And as we think about the future of this initiative, we have an opportunity to embed accessibility and meaningful disability inclusion starting from now, I think more intentionally. Rather than treating it as an afterthought or just an invitation to a meeting. I think that we have an opportunity here to think more about meaningful disability inclusion. Thank you.

Thank you, Rebecca. And I think in Geneva, for the first time, to that end, starting along that route, We had sign language interpretation throughout the two days, only in the plenary though, which is a clear limitation, but it's a start, so we're on the right track. Great, thank you. Well, moving into Section 3, where now we're going to look to the future. We've already concluded that the future lies with youth, and the youth has— the youth participants in the room have already convinced us of that very clearly in their very sharp for your sharp, targeted remarks. But I will now call upon a number of more core group members to really share with us what practical steps you think, from your role and your organization, should be some of the ways forward now, drawing upon what we've learned and heard. I will start with handing the floor to Fermin Selva, who is coordinate— well, it's in Spanish. Spanish. If you want to re-pronounce that, be my guest. Thanks.

Um, yes, well, thank you, Chair, colleagues, and friends. I speak for CRIAS, the Coordinadora Regional de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales. It's a bit tough, so you did a really good job. A network of research institutions across Latin America and the Caribbean. The perspective our region brings is one that this process still needs to absorb more fully, and I want to be direct about it. Let me start with what must be fundamentally reframed. Latin America and the Caribbean is, by most measures, the most violent region in the world. Yet we have almost no wars in the classical sense. What we have is chronic violence, criminal governance, democratic erosion, and disinformation. What our own André Servigne has long called polycrisis. The peacebuilding architecture, its tools, its financing, its template, was built for post-conflict transitions. It struggles to see violence that does not look like war. If prevention and sustaining peace are to mean anything, they must be reconceived for this context. Prevention cannot only be a about ending wars, it must also be about societies coming apart without one. This brings me to what we should invest in. We are asked to do more with less, shrinking series space, shrinking funding. In that reality, I want to make a deliberate call. This sector must open itself seriously to new technologies and to artificial intelligence in particular, not as a fashion, but as a real multiplier of our limited capacity. I say this knowing that AI also drives the very polycracy I described. It fuels disinformation, it can deepen inequality. That is precisely why civil society cannot stand aside. If we do not engage, these tools will be built without us, and the civil society of the Global South will end up on the wrong side of that divide. What should we stop doing? The habit of 3 things: civil society as a short-term project implementer, a contractor for someone else's log frame. That is the opposite of the strategic partnership Geneva called for. On what to prioritize strategically, the core group that came together this week should be institutionalized with predictable support as a standing partner to the UN. But its value is only as real as its roots are local. Much of this week returned to the same truth. Peace is built locally, so this group's role must be connective tissue, carrying regional and local realities into this process and turning the commitment to localize peacebuilding from language into structure. Continuity is what turns dialogue into commitment. In these tragic times, my thoughts are with the Venezuelan people and with everyone waiting for news of loved ones after the earthquake that hit the country yesterday. Muchas gracias a todos.

Thank you very much, Fermín. We go to Pieter van Schluys from the Civil Society Platforms for Peacebuilding and State Building, CCPPS. Pieter, please.

Thank you, Madam Moderator, and I would like to express my thanks also to the permanent missions of Switzerland, Denmark, and Finland, UNPBPSO, and ACORD for organizing this timely event. My name is Peter van Slyss, and I represent indeed the Civil Society Platform for Peacebuilding and Stabilizing, also known as CSPPS. We are a global network of civil society organizations supporting peacebuilding efforts in fragile and conflict-affected settings, and we work at present in over 3 countries worldwide. CICPPS only recently joined the core group and since the beginning of this year, but have been participating and engaging directly and via our members in the dialogue since its inception. Our motivation to join the core group stems from our firm belief that this dialogue can help shape and strengthen the relationship between civil society and the United Nations system. And while we're happy to make that— happy with the progress that is made to date, I would like to make following recommendations for the direction which the dialogue can and potentially should advance. We believe that the dialogue should manifest itself as a continuous evolving process moving beyond consultation and providing a space for deep dive discussions between civil Civil Society and UN as strategic partners. We believe that this dialogue can gain further relevance and influence when it allows for real dialogue, co-creation, joint analysis and priority setting, and also continuous and reciprocal learning as priorities. We are very happy with the move towards decentralized and regional dialogues and believe this is a potential for expanding and deepening this process. And maybe also as a segue to inclusion of civil society in developing and also crafting national prevention strategies at the national level. Finally, we consider this dialogue of key importance as a bridge towards and support the— support and elevate— sorry about that— the pivotal work done by local peacebuilders and help to ensure that their their work is met with a clear recognition and tailored, flexible, reliable, and sustainable support. We do think that the CSO-UN dialogue holds potential to connect local peacebuilders and communities affected by conflict and the UN peacebuilding architecture. In the current context, this is more relevant than ever to connect, support, and help deliver impact on the people we aim to serve, those confronted with the complexity and lived reality of fragility, conflict and violence. Thank you for your attention.

Thank you very much, Peter. We move on to Tahir Ahmad Fouad Abdel Rahman from the Middle East and North Africa Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security. Please, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Excellencies, colleagues. I'll speak in Arabic, so if you want translation, please. Excellencies, colleagues, today when we talk about the implementation of the Geneva commitments in our region, it is difficult to separate this discussion from our daily realities. You all know that Africa and the MENA region faces compounded crises, as well as diminishing civic space. However, our communities continuously hold on to hope despite uncertainty and distrust. As I speak to you today, thousands of youths and hundreds of CSOs continue to work relentlessly to build dialogue, to contain tension, to enhance social cohesion, and build spaces for peace. And I'm coming here to you to stress that the current reality that we're facing demonstrates one truth, that peace is not built in such meeting spaces solely, but in very difficult or under very difficult circumstances with limited resources in the field. Therefore, if we want these Geneva commitments to turn into real change, We need to think of how we can support such actors. We need to measure the success of this dialogue with what happens after it, not during such a dialogue. This cannot be measured through the number of meetings that we hold, but our ability to morph these recommendations into policies that ensure non-discrimination, um, and no double standards. We can measure success through accountability mechanisms through which local actors can feel that such policies have led to real change in their lives. In the MENA region, we must highlight a truth that is no longer an option: the need to protect those who build peace in the field. Youths and CSOs in our region are faced with mounting facing challenges, tension, polarization, terrorism, misinformation, and lack of hope, as well as distrust. And if we want them to build peace, we must commit to protecting them. Youths have established regional policy papers calling for adequate care and mental health protection to implement the Youth Peace and Security Agenda to ensure the protection of peacebuilders. We believe that digital transformation and AI require greater investments in order to strengthen our capacities. We do not lack dialogues. However, We need to ensure that we transform the lessons learned into collective change in the field. We must connect not only New York to Geneva but also to local capitals and to peacebuilders in the field so that lessons learned in the field can be— or can help establish policies and so that these policies are implemented once again in the field. We must talk about localization and the need need to enhance trust in local authorities. CSOs must no longer enjoy symbolic representation and participation and engagement, but rather support must be provided directly to those on the front lines. And I wish to conclude with a tangible idea. In our region and across the world, people don't ask questions about the number of statements delivered nor the number of meetings held despite their impact. They ask one vital question every day: How can peace be truly achieved in our lives every day? We can answer this question when we place human beings at the heart of what we do and when we invest in trust before we invest in projects, when we invest in practice, uh, partnerships before practices and in peacebuilders before investing in peacebuilding. I thank you.

Thank you very much, Tahir. We move on to Vahhe Mirikyan from Peace Direct, please.

Thank you, Madam Moderator. I would also like to express the strongest appreciation to the Permanent missions of Switzerland, Denmark, and Finland, along with UNPBP, PSO, and ACORD for organizing this timely discussion. Excellencies and colleagues, my name is Vahhe Mirikian. I am the managing director for Peace Direct's US office. Peace Direct is an international peacebuilding organization that works in direct partnership with over 25 local peacebuilding organizations across 16 different conflict-affected countries, while we seek to shift power and resources to local actors. Peace Direct joined the core group at the beginning of this year, but has been participating and engaging through our partners in the dialogue since its inception. As the core group gathers in person for the first time, there is an opportunity not only to improve the dialogue itself, but to reflect on a broader question: What role could the dialogue play in shaping the future relationship between the United Nations and civil society? The dialogue has generated important recommendations and access over the years. The next challenge is to ensure continuity, accountability, and learning. The dialogue should shift away from extractive one-off engagements with civil society and avoid high-level panels and pre-prepared statements. A shift should aim towards honest spaces where participants on both— both sides can dive deeper to discuss the forceful headwinds the world faces today and zoom in on the future. The inaugural Peacebuilding Week provides a segue towards sustained dialogue between the United Nations and society. As discussions emerge regarding the future leadership of the United Nations and broader UN reform efforts, the Core Group may wish to consider whether its role should gradually evolve beyond supporting consultations. One possibility is for the Core Group to become a trusted strategic bridge between civil society, local peacebuilders, communities, and the UN leadership. Over time, the Core Group should explore developing a structured relationship with the Office of the Secretary-General. Such a relationship would not replace intergovernmental processes nor create new decision-making body. Rather, it would provide a channel through which grounded perspectives from local peacebuilders and civil society could inform strategic discussions on peacebuilding, climate prevention, civic space inclusion, and the future of multilateralism, along with many emerging issues. In doing so, the core group can help strengthen the connection between the global decision-making bodies and the local realities. The challenge is not simply how to improve participation. The challenge is how to build a more trusted, accountable, and meaningful relationship between the United Nations and we the people. After all, peace is built with communities, not and never only for communities. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Raja. We move on to the final speaker of this segment. We'll have some short minutes for interventions from the floor after that. It'd be great once again to hear reactions and reflections on, on some of the topics we've heard here today. I'll turn over to Natalia Martinez-Cutias from CMI Method Therapies Foundation.

Thank you, Jevika, and thank you, colleagues. My first point, it's one not so much of improvement but of continuation. The dialogue, of course, is an innovative initiative that really turns away from the one-way consultation format and revolves around genuine two-way dialogue between the UN and civil society. It recognizes that— it recognizes, of course, what CSOs can bring to the UN, but also what CSOs can gain from engaging with the UN and how this can contribute to their work. So this mutual learning component is one of the dialogue's greatest strengths, and we see that through the iterations this element has really developed with the engagement with the UN, and we, of course, hope that it continues in this direction. However, when the dialogue was first was conceived as a three-way structure between the CSOs, the UN, and member states. But we see that meaningful engagement and two-way dialogue with member states has remained somewhat limited. Important steps, of course, have been taken in this direction, and we recognize that, but we believe that the dialogue community should foster dialogue and opportunities to strategically engage with member states Member States, and specifically the Peacebuilding Commission, allowing both CSOs to support the implementation of the commitments made in the 2025 Peacebuilding Architecture Review, but also to allow that mutual learning component in this relationship with Member States as well. Many of my colleagues have already mentioned other crucial elements of the dialogue, such as the co-creation and co-ownership and co- responsibility. And as civic space constraints, it is more important than ever to protect that space, both financially and politically, and make sure that that ambition really does not diminish. Of course, this initiative will continue to evolve depending on what is useful and priorities, etc., but it is vital that these elements of co-creation, co-ownership, and dialogue always remain at the core of this initiative. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Natalia. Now I hope to see a flourish of hands coming up for this last opportunity to come in and share some reflections and remarks. We have one first here. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Maria Stay from the Permanent Mission of Denmark to the UN. So first of all, thanks to all of our civil society partners for coming to New York to join us for Peacebuilding Week. We're very pleased to see you here, and also thanks for the work you're doing in your regions, your countries, and communities. And of course, also thanks to UN and other partners for the work. We are in a context where we really see high demand also support through the UN's peacebuilding architecture. We see the demand for support through the Peacebuilding Fund outpacing the available resources. In recent years, we've seen many new countries coming to the Peacebuilding Commission, and these are just some of the examples of the demand for support in this area. And civil society engagement is just very important for legitimacy and sustainability of peace efforts. We really see the importance of the CSO-UN dialogue in this regard. We think we have heard some important areas today, both relating to innovation, financing for peacebuilding, inclusion, and of course partnerships. Some very important points have been raised in terms of the regional dialogues and also engagement between civil society organizations and UN leadership. At the field level, which is very promising. And as we also hear some recommendations in terms of seeing how these can be further strengthened. Also think there were important points on institutionalization and trust building. So really, thanks to everyone for participating today. We consider this CSO-UN dialogue also important in relation to follow-up to the Pact for the Future and implementation of the peacebuilding Architecture Review. Thank you.

Thank you very much to Denmark and for really stressing that we as CSOs, we felt that the initiative very much came out of recognition from the UN structures that actually they need CSOs to deliver on the commitments made in the Pact for the future, and this was really something we felt when we began this journey. Please, I believe it's Canada, if I'm not mistaken. Please go ahead.

This is Sarah Michael, a partnership lead for conflict prevention, peacebuilding, and mediation at Global Affairs Canada. I mostly want to appreciate— a great appreciation for today's session. It was among— it is among the most inspiring and hopeful of this week. I just want to express appreciation for the work of Interpeace and in the regional consultations. We were very glad that this is one of Canada's contributions to the Peacebuilding Architecture Review. We really appreciate the relinquishing of power and control and relying on the strengths, capacities, and networks who are represented here with the JIP and IID, um, in Latin America and Southeast Asia. I'm also especially happy that there were other regional consultations beyond what Canada could support with peanuts. Please don't say that this is what Canada thinks about its funding mechanisms. They're more than peanuts. I very much appreciate the speaking in different languages, and not just the languages of English, Spanish, French, Tagalog, Arabic, my own mother tongue, but also the linguistic barriers that are reflected in peacebuilding language and approaches. And so I really appreciate that the use of these sort of physical languages and cultural languages also call us, challenge us in our own approaches that are centered in hubs like New York and Geneva. This is a fundamental measure of inclusion and, and I think a challenge to the whole community. I appreciate the contribution on the importance of disability disability. We look at this, if we look at intersectionality and access, this is huge. And as many folk would say, even aging incurs disability. So we are all impacted. This is not an add-on. This is essential. I appreciate the challenge of youth and I welcome it as much as it creates anticipation and anxiety and all these things and me feeling a bit stale in this world as a new generation challenges us and holds us to account and changes the paradigm. I really welcome it, and I am eager to hear more and learn how we could be supportive as a country. Just a couple more appreciations. The call for a more direct relationship with the Secretary-General, I heard this. I'm curious about it.— and I think Canada, along with its UN counterparts, with other member states. I'm just curious. So I'm happy to hear more if anybody's inclined to let me know what their views are. I also want to finish by acknowledging that a number of Canadian peacebuilding civil society organizations hailed from Ottawa on their own dime to be here, and they are in the room. I very much appreciate the work of the Canadian Peacebuilding Partners Network, Network, who has been advocating in this time for Canada's continued investment in peacebuilding in light of the challenge and the push for more security, uh, securitized approaches. The Government of Canada acknowledges it, but relies heavily on the advocacy and the work of local peacebuilders who are supported through our Canadian Peacebuilding Partners Network to do this work. So I also want to acknowledge that we also have a hub and a network And they are represented here, and they are very much engaged. Thank you very much.

Yes, we have room for one, possibly two more, depending on how long you are. But we go first there, and then we have a late one. Okay, three. Let's go three. Please, go ahead.

Thank you very much, Jibeke, and thank you all. I'm Cyprien Flusen from the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform. First of all, I wanted to echo what's just been said and thank you all core group members, PBPSO team, and all of you for making this a very interesting discussion this morning. I think it's been very enlightening and stimulating, so I'm glad I could attend, and thank you all for organizing this. Having joined the Dialogue for the first time last year, in Geneva as a Geneva-based organization. We've discovered this initiative over the past couple of months and followed some of the discussions that have followed the Geneva edition. And I think I'm really excited to see some of the reflections that have already— and some of the comments that have already been made by other core group members that already reflect some of the maybe advice or pieces of ideas that we would have had. The only point that I'd like maybe to go back to, even though some of the speakers this morning have already referred to it, is the whole-of-system approach and the whole-of-UN approach. And here my only question in terms of priorities going forward and things to bear in mind going forward is to maybe continue to deepen the reflections on how the dialogue articulates with other processes and forums, both within the UN and outside. And for instance, I'm thinking of how it could connect, or again, how we could think its articulation with other highly relevant discussions and spaces for dialogues in CSO engagement initiatives in relation to the Human Rights Council, the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights, the World Health Assembly, or other forums that take place on these topics. Obviously also the kind of discussions that, that we organize in Geneva, part of the Geneva Peace Week, Geneva Peace Forum, but I'm not only preaching for Geneva here, but I think there is lots of spaces beyond Geneva, but especially maybe in other multilateral hubs that they are already work and think about all these issues, and I'm encouraging all of you to consider how to articulate and connect the dialogue with those initiatives. Also ensure that the outcomes of the dialogue aren't exclusively focused on the PBA and the New York-based policy discussions, but also on how they can be relevant to other UN actors. I think looking at some of the takeaways from the Geneva edition, I think I can think of lots of colleagues from other UN agencies and other organizations that would benefit a lot from hearing those messages. So I'm wondering whether we could further efforts at interagency coordination and ensure connection and coherence with discussions elsewhere at the stage of preparation, implementation, but also follow-up. So thank you very much and well done again all for this great discussion this morning.

Thank you, Cyprien. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thank you for organizing this week of peacebuilding. My name is Ali Mata Koulibaly. I'm a founder of Ali Mama Foundation Children New Rescue Hope, based in America, but we are implementing in West Africa region, specifically in Mali and Senegal, Gambia. So I want to thank you again for this organization. My contribution for this will be that it's very important that the civil society organizations cooperate and partner with the United Nations when it comes to peacebuilding. As far as concerns my organization, we work for children, child protection, education, and we also work for— with women and women empowerment. Economical empowerment. So I think it's a priority and it's very fundamental and a necessity that we work together hand in hand with civil society and the United Nations in partnership for the— because the civil society, they are on the ground, so they don't have access to all the international peace agenda information. So they are the ones who tackle all the issues, all the difficulties that the civil society are going through. So it's fundamental that the United Nations works well with the civil society and local organizations to promote partnership and also to promote women inclusion in peacebuilding, because on the ground, women, they have a lot of importance. Place in the society, so they are the ones who are always in front of challenges and crisis, and they are the ones that are more affected with children. So I think it's very important that we work with women on the ground, in the field, and also get the youth engagement so they feel included, they know that they are included in this peacebuilding. Lastly, I would like to mention that it's very important that we know that without all the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, we cannot come to peacebuilding because everything is interrelated. Without from zero anger, hunger, to no poverty until the 17th, partnership. We cannot come up to a peace if we don't agree in all together. So they are all interrelated. I think we must work together to have the Sustainable Development Goal promoting. Thank you.

Thank you very much. We got our final, um, Speaker at the back.

This is Stefania Döbel, policy specialist from UN Women. Very happy to be here. Thank you to all organizers and congrats on ACORD. We look forward to collaborating with you on this new version of the CSO dialogue that is personally my favorite space at the UN, especially at these critical times. I just want to highlight how UN Women really greatly values this space because it is rooted in the same value that we uphold of working closely and, and with civil society organizations, women-led organizations, and young women-led organizations as our most trusted and important partner. We would like to continue the emphasis that the dialogue last year had on the synergies between the Women, Peace and Security Agenda and the Youth, Peace and Security Agendas. We agree with the emphasis on the discussions today that young people, and particularly young women, need to remain at the center of peacebuilding and that we need to move from consultations to influence through our partnerships with the Women, Peace and Humanitarian Fund, through the Young Women Peacebuilders Initiative, and the ongoing consultations for the Second Independent Progress Study on Youth, Peace and Security, we continue to hear the same message from women peacebuilders across the globe. They are asking for influence, not just participation. They are tired of consultations that are not going anywhere, and they're asking for direct and flexible financing, stronger partnerships, and a real role in shaping decisions. Policies and investments. And we, looking ahead, really hope that the dialogue can become that platform where we bridge local realities with global policy spaces and we really move from consultations to influence. Looking ahead, we would really hope we can shape the peacebuilding discussions to ensure that we are addressing the issues that matter the most to local peacebuilders today, including addressing climate insecurity, AI, shrinking civil space, protest movements, as my colleague from UNDP highlighted, and care provision, especially to address the needs of women peacebuilders. So we are here to continue this collaboration and hope to support the shape of the next year's agenda. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Also, UN Women has been part of this from the beginning and enabled at least one of the regional consultations, one that CIMAI did in Eastern Europe, with the help of Denmark and Sweden— and with the help of Finn— Ireland, it was in the end. We are at the end of this session. I'd like to say very just about this session, and then Graham will wrap everything up eloquently, as he always does. First, if the operational, targeted, and focused interventions and recommendations made here today did not convince you of the importance of working with civil society, then I'm not sure what will. The constructiveness, the respect that everyone shows one another by keeping to time, being well prepared, and really speaking to the substance is commendable, and I hope everybody is appreciating this as much as I am. I also would like to note how our Canadian colleague in action showed what this type of format— what I mean is informality— can offer. Are in terms of candid and frankness sharing. The safe space that we can provide is something that I think we need to also be very proud of, even in this type of setting. Going forward, it's clear that also us, like everybody else right now, will have to adapt, will have to innovate, and will have to show some courage to do so. We have to challenge categorizations we heard, nuancing definitions, definitions, unpacking established terms, and asking ourselves a lot of difficult questions, including the objective of our own initiative that we all own together. It's been at length talking about localization and decentralization, and then finally also about turning commitments into impact, but also questioning what impact means. It's about policy, it's about practice, but it's also procedural, which is of course very hard to sell. And the strategic nature of this initiative comes out very clearly, and the need to further protect this space, as well as doing more things in common. The joint analysis point came out clearly, in addition to learning. I think that's a very interesting one, as all the others were. But really, that we need to protect this space here, at the regional level, at the local level. And I think also the point that the Under-Secretary-General did in the beginning related to the national prevention strategies, and that some of you also brought out, to really ensure CSOs' participation in those, because the national ownership in certain contexts might not help in that regard, whereas in others it does. But still, there is something there. It's both an opportunity and a challenge, of course. I will stop there. There, and thank you tremendously for the attention during these 3 full hours today. It's still a very full room, which is remarkable. I will hand over to Graham and respectfully take my return. Thank you.

No pressure. So, Joubeka, at the end of each of the segments, I think you did the job of synthesizing. I'm not sure I want to repeat that, so I'm gonna just try and pull out a couple of threads that are going to be incomplete, will not do justice to the unbelievable richness of this conversation and the different voices in this room. I think one of the things that really struck me was how many of the things we described as the, the sort of navigated— trust-based articulation of what the space should look like at the beginning, how those remain the same issues that we are wrestling with and working out how we can consolidate that and deepen it and enrich it. And I think that's incredibly healthy, actually. I think it's about our joint acknowledgement of the fact that we are trying to reimagine something here that is not traditionally within the organizational cultures of either the UN sometimes or some of the society organizations, and that finding that common ground and deepening it with sincerity and trust is an ongoing endeavor, and this conversation and the recommendations and what's come out of it reflects that. It reflects a lot of the things that I was saying we saw as warning signs, we tried to fix, we navigated right at the beginning of this process, and we continue to do that, but I think on a very different footing, and I think that's really interesting. The second issue is that I think there was a fascinating conversation about the local, the global, the translocal And frankly, I think a really rich and critical reflection on what we may very easily take as a quite tokenistic conversation about localization, but one which was also saying that localization is not about the dropdown templates of policy assertions that are then implemented locally, but in fact the opposite. That this is about the local lived experience, our job to create the platforms, amplify it, not romanticize it, not isolate and insulate it, because our translocal horizontal learning is not just a learning between the UN and CSOs, it's a learning within the civil society sector, within the peacebuilding practitioner space. But that's really changing the conversation about localization as an amplification up, as a different power, assertion of power in that space. As some people have said, perhaps advisory functions and the attempts to institutionalize that so that it's not just a conversation about localization as dropping down policy approaches and measuring whether or not they're being implemented locally.. It's actually about how policy is shaped from below. I think there was really powerful conversation here about trust, and I— shame, Hannah's going to go mad from this— I always talk about how we need to stop talking about trust, because that often imposes the onus on those who we want to trust the system rather than trustworthiness, which is that the system has to prove itself to those people. There is a conversation here which is, I think, embracing this conversation about trust and trustworthiness at the heart of what we're doing, at trying to find a different and a common institutional culture across the CSOs and the UN from very different places that is necessary and driven by the transactional world and politics that we're engaging with and the greater need now than ever before to find a common ground, to defend it, and to do it with real sincerity because the enemy is not in the room, it's out there in terms of where global politics is going. I think there was a really fascinating set of issues that came out about One of the consequences of this process, which is perhaps an unintended consequence but one which has been grasped, and that is that this has become a vehicle for building the regional networks, for building the translocal connections, and we've seen examples of where that's happening. And our, our interest in actually moving this conversation into a more decentralized space has actually played a really important support catalytic role in potentially sort of sustaining the energy, if not the resources, to build those kinds of local or more regional conversations. I think there's a really important conversation which is self-reflective and self-critical that's in the room from the civil society actors. It's expressed as always and unsurprisingly through the youth lens, which is stop tokenizing participation. We recognize the challenge of expanding our own access and representation, whether it's disability groups or whether it's greater participation of women or it's a different set of indigenous actors, et cetera, et cetera. But I think there's a real recognition of the fact that one of the challenges of the CSO, the institutionalization of the CSO role, is always going to be who do you represent and on what basis do you represent people. And we have to embrace that and we have to do it as a demonstration effect by constantly expanding our own commitment to inclusion and diversifying that. And I think that's come out here in really interesting ways from different perspectives. I think there's a real valuation here of innovation, but at the same time there's a reality check that I've heard from a number of the inputs, which is that there is always a really grave danger, however much we talk about dialogue as co-creation and co-invention, and flat rather than hierarchical, there is still nonetheless a real danger that if we don't recognize what dialogue looks like and where it fails when the demand is protection, there is often a sense that dialogue can be seen as different to action. And we have to recognize the demands for protection, the shutting down of civic space, that the luxury of our conversation here is not replicated in the spaces in which many of the people here come from. And so it's not a simple exercise of let's take this from the global to the local or localize it. It's actually a recognition of the fact that the constraints at the local level and the civic space constraints and the lack of protection issues and the transactional nature of politics and the reclamation of ugly power and the securitization of the peacebuilding agenda actually are barriers that we have to navigate and overcome. So I'm going to leave it at that. I do think there were some important points made. I love the fact that there are member states represented in the room that are as inspired by this as we are. And I don't want to be crass, but I do think there's also a message here, which is that we need to put money where our mouths are on this, because the institutionalization of this is not about replicating the annual dialogue. It's about building the infrastructure that we are creating here on trust, that people from within the PBPso, and this is credit to Rebecca and her team, are looking at where in the UN system we can create the, the, this decentralized access to different UN stakeholders, that the whole-of-system approach or the, the commitment to an ecosystem is seen and understood as we need to actually work with structures inside the UN that enable that and focus This all requires resources and it requires a different kind of commitment, both resources and political commitment to these processes, to take it beyond consultation, to make dialogue more than just a distant conversation. So I share your— the collective appreciation here of what this voice looks like. And our onerous, and particularly Accord's onerous obligation with the PBPSO to take this forward. With that, we close the main segment of this inclusion event and we hand over to the two closing speakers. Thank you.

I'm not good at taking instructions, as you can see. I always get the wrong instructions. But firstly, Rebecca, let me thank the PBPSO for the partnership with the civil society. On behalf of ACORD, as the co-chair, let me thank firstly the core members of the core group. For your support to ACORD in this difficult task. It's not an easy task. I want to thank Karishma. I don't even know why I'm sitting here because, you know, I'm just the Executive Director. They make me look good. I come and sit and give these speeches, but actually she does all the work. She's doing a great job as the co-chair. So I want I want to thank her for that. I did say, I sent her a message, I said, "I don't even know why I'm supposed to come here. You should be the one doing the closing." But anyway, yeah, yeah, there you are. Now, she does a good job of it. And I want to also thank our colleagues at the office who support Karishma, they're online somewhere, who put a lot of effort into making sure that the machinery runs. Our partners, I heard, Denmark speak, and Canada, and Switzerland, the UNDP, who is partnering also within the UN system, Switzerland. I think, you know, they are a dying breed, the partners. This is the unfortunate reality, because the funding is declining. And so we must be grateful to those who are still ready to stand up. And as Graham said, put their money where their mouth is, because it's a difficult time. And I want to take 5 minutes just to say something about that. Gus, when we started in this game, this field, it was a different time. It was not an easy time, but not as difficult as the time now. I sat there and I listened very carefully. I was very encouraged that there are many young people here that are participating. We were once younger, I think, sitting in the same place almost 30 years ago. Very enthusiastic, participating, and I think we all made this contribution of building this architecture that you see in the UN system. None of this existed, by the way, pre-1990. All of what you see in the UN system, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the Mediation Support Unit, PB— PP, whatever it came, there was many incarnations to PBSO and PBF and, you know, all of that. UNDP, yeah, you guys were there a little bit before that, but— so everything we see was post-1990. Even where we work in Africa and the African Union, it's all post-1990. But it was a wonderful period when the world suddenly seemed to wake up and say, we want a different world. And that was what these multilateral institutions and all the rest of the global community created— the rules-based, values-driven world order. And we thought we were creating a new world, and we thought that this was going to be the beginning of a new history in the world. Now, suddenly,— it seems like it's ending. That's just the reality. Why I raise that and why I raise the fact that you— a number of young people here— because you're a new generation entering a new era. We are a generation that exits an era that we thought we were creating this really powerful world. It's a much more difficult time. When the peace-building architecture was founded in 2005, The population of the world was about 6.5 billion people. We're about 8.3 billion today. That's 2 billion more people in the world. Much more complex, uh, transnational organized criminal syndicates, insurgencies that are not ideologically driven, they're transactionally driven. These are dangerous times. Urbanization, that is a reality that we never saw 40 years ago or so, but the rate at urbanization is taking place and the complexities around social cohesion, the hatred around the world, the democratic backsliding, you as a generation are entering a very dangerous world. It's not a cliché to say that you got to take it very seriously. This is about your future. As you're the generation in a decade from now will be sitting in the UN as decision makers. So, I'm encouraged to see you here. Stay the course. It will be difficult. It will take courage. And I encourage you to have the courage to shape your own future. So thank you very much. Now, Richard, we met yesterday. Yeah, I'm going to hand over to you.

I can't, it's so hard to follow that. No, come on, you say a few words and then I'll do what I did previously. And I'm like 3 days into this job. So please. Yeah, yeah, that's great. A lifetime in the UN. In fact, you know, when I was working, I started in CSO, International NGO, in Asia, Indonesia. And then at some point, I was offered a job in the UN. And my impression of the UN was not good, right? I really felt that the UN was just a lot of talk, and I didn't see a lot of action in changing things on the ground. And I asked my boss, who was an incredible person, and he was very wise, and he said, think of the power behind that flag. And what you can do in the organization. So I jumped over and became that other, and I saw some incredible things, especially when I joined in this area where I was working initially in the area of HIV/AIDS. And at that time, civil society— we had enough money and enough collaboration across the UN system that we were able to partner with civil society with the theme of "Nothing for us without us." And that came from, you know, sex workers in Asia-Pacific who said, "We're tired of you telling us what to do, how to live our lives, what to do with our bodies. We want to have that discussion directly with member states." And we were able at that time to bring transgender people, sex workers, gay men, the whole gamut of people affected by that epidemic, straight to member states where they could talk about issues and what needed to change. It was an incredible time because, you know, I never imagined the power of the UN in bringing people who could never have a voice or never express their voice to people in power. And that's the best of the UN, that we can do that. And I feel we've backslided— is that a word? Backslipped. We've gone back. And when I look around now, and I'm most recently a resident coordinator, and I know the limitations of partnership at country level. And I know the frustration. And we talk about trustworthiness. How do we build that trust? Clearly, there are many things that we need to do on our side to improve. And in this area of peacebuilding, more important than ever that we partner with CSOs. What I saw on the ground in Papua New Guinea, where I was Resident Coordinator, was the best examples of peacebuilding were very grassroots. So when I see women on the ground, one woman from the Catholic Church, a nun that was going out and rescuing women who were being tortured because they were accused of sorcery-based violence in a conflict setting and willing to take that risk. And also how the communities work together to set up support systems and safe houses and help people move to other places and safe places. So there are so many good examples of peacebuilding building where women leaders in the community were coming together and saying, 'Stop this fighting. We have to stop. The men must stop this fighting.' Very effective ways of advocating at community level. So the best practices are on the ground. And how do you bring that up to country level and to regional level? The only way is with partnerships with CSOs. So I firmly believe that this regional platform, the global platform, the regional dialogues is a very important first step, but we need to take it to country level now. So some practical ideas I'd just like to raise today, because as we transition to UN80, we will have a smaller footprint at country level. UN agencies will move away from that project mentality, project modality, and start to focus more on advocacy, policy advocacy, technical advice, which opens up a space for civil society to do more on implementation in partnership with the UN, in partnership with government or others. So I think now is the time to figure out a different way of working where civil society plays a greater role. So one is in this advisory capacity. There are many entry points. I know a lot of you are frustrated, how do you get into the RC office? There are partnership officers, there are peace and development advisors. Some of the best people are your human rights advisors. They're the, the most outward-facing in many places, so utilize those channels. Of course, agencies like UNDP, UNFPA, UN Women, they're also more effectively inclined towards civil society. That's also an entry point, but there has to be, in countries with a prevention strategy, civil society advisory around that strategy. In countries developing the strategy, they need to be there at the table when the strategy is developed. Also in monitoring, you know, monitoring, holding governments accountable and line ministries accountable to implement that strategy. It's your RC and the team that can place or help to facilitate that role in the advisory capacity. And the second is implementation partners. And that's the harder one because we tend to treat CSOs as contractors at best. You know, sometimes we just go around and ask your advice and go away and never come back. Or we ask you to participate in an evaluation and never come back. So you probably feel like you're being mined constantly and not given a role that you deserve, that you must play as an equal partner. So how to move beyond that? Clearly, funding modalities is also a challenge. I mean, you have to have very thick skin as a CSO, a great resilience to navigate our financial rules and procedures. We're not doing it because of lack of trust. It's our audit systems require the same procedure for a $30 million project as it does for a $300 million workshop— a $300 workshop. The systems tie our hands, so we have to find more flexible funding modalities. As we move to pooled funding setups at country level, can we have a CSO window that's a bit more flexible? And so that's very important that we find a way at country level. We have to move, and what we'd like to do is move— am I talking too long? Moving beyond where we've come so far, which is incredible, to really practical ways of working in these two areas at country level. So with that, I just want to deliver a few lines from my very important remarks, which is to thank all of the partners involved that have supported these dialogues up to date, including Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Australia, and Germany. In this era of declining ODA and declining support for civil society organizations, the fact that you have stood behind this effort is incredibly appreciated. Also great to see Canada here and in putting very important— bringing people. Also thanking all of you who have been here throughout and continue to have faith in the UN and how you can partner with us. Don't give up. We have to find a way, and I think country level is a way to start to make it work. So with that, all I do is say from PBPSO, that we will stay on this course with you and we're going to get to that next level of implementation in the year ahead. So hold us accountable for that. And thank you all. And it was a pleasure being here today and listening to you.

Thank you, Richard. And in the spirit of healthy competition, please support South Africa against Canada in the World Cup. We're playing them on Sunday at 3 o'clock, but Richard, in a divided world with divided peoples, we need today more than at any other time the United Nations, so protect it. Thank you.