Introduction
According to Langmore, global peace and security remains to be of critical relevance to the existence of humanity. Development cannot be attained without peace.
A cross examination of the conflict-torn regions in the world reveals a low rate of socioeconomic development. It is critical to understand what peace really entails in order to craft a desirable agenda for the cultivation and sustenance of global peace. Peace can be defined as the absence of conflict. Conflict is a broad term, which comes from a wide range of socioeconomic and political developments.
The importance of the sustenance of embracing and sustaining global peace is argued to have emanated from the world wars. The massive devastations that were caused by the war on human life resulted in the reiteration of the significance of peace and security in the world. During the world wars, there were massive killings, physical abuse, forcible displacement of human populations, and massive destruction of property.
These resulted in a number of secondary impacts, which included hunger, the outbreak of diseases and the prevalence of an undesirable social state of the human population. It should be noted that similar impacts are still replicated in any conflict that occurs in the contemporary world. There are a number of issues that need to be given much attention by the organizations that are responsible for maintaining global peace and security.
One critical thing that emanated from major global conflicts like the world wars was the establishment of bodies that were bestowed with the responsibility of pacifying the globe. The League of Nations was the first body to be established. However, the body was weak and failed to attain the goals for which it was meant to fulfil.
This resulted in the establishment of the United Nations Organization (UN), an organization that has been charged with the mandate of maintaining global peace and security. While the organization still exists, a lot of questions have been raised about the capacity of the organization to maintain global peace and security, considering the fact that there are a lot of politics that surround the functioning of the organization.
However, it should be noted that the organization has been critical in maintaining global peace and security through the establishment and sustenance of the global peace missions in different regions of the world. On the other side, there still prevail a number of issues in global peace, which have not been amicably addressed by the United Nations. Notable among these issues is the historical conflicts that have torn a number of regions like the Arab-Israel Conflict.
Under the leadership of the Secretary General, the United Nations still has a tough task of executing plans on how to maintain peace and security in the world. This paper presents a five year Peace and Security Agenda for the Secretary General of the United Nations Organizations. Research shows that there are five major areas in which focus has to be given by the United Nations.
These are the reduction of levels of poverty, the embrace of environmental management in order to eliminate the dangers of environmental degradation, the development of long lasting solutions to historical conflicts across the globe, the enhancement of democracy and advocacy for human rights through the cultivation of stronger institutional environments, and the enhancement of social security and the enhancement of economic globalization.
Therefore, these five main issues are considered to be the main agendas that ought to be given attention by the Secretary General of the United Nations Organization. The justification for each Agenda is discussed.
Agenda 1: Reduction of levels of poverty
The issue of poverty, especially in the developing world, has been a center of focus in a substantial number of economic, political and even the social forums across the globe. Poverty is taken as one of the major impediments to the attainment of developmental goals in different parts of the globe. It is important to mention that reduction of the levels of poverty has been given attention in the Millenium Development Goals.
The millennium development goal is one of the most comprehensive documents in the attainment of an economic and social order in the 21st century. Therefore, the enlisting of poverty as one of the main issues to be given attention in the development agendas reiterates the criticality of the elimination of poverty since poverty is taken as the center-pin for most of the problems that are facing the globe today.
While a substantial number of people point to the fact that it is quite daunting to eliminate the levels of poverty, more so in the developing regions of the world, most of them agree that the levels of poverty can be brought down through planning and the gradual implementation of development plans.
Before exploring the role of the United Nations Secretariat in the reduction of poverty across the globe, it is important to explain how global poverty endangers the existence of global peace. Poverty is the main source of frustration amongst the global citizens. When the levels of poverty are so high, the likelihood of strife for resources becomes quite high, thus attracting the struggle for resources in the diverse regions of the globe.
Poverty has been likened to the many conflicts that are being witnessed in different regions of the globe, where diverse groups of people are reported to fight over resources. Some of the regions in which resource driven conflicts are being witnessed include the Horn of Africa, the Darfur conflict in Sudan and the Middle East conflicts, among other civil conflicts in different countries in the world.
A number of theorists have tried to establish a link between the struggles for natural resources in what is referred to as the natural resource problem. The relationship between poverty and civil conflicts in different parts of the world is better explicated through an inner look into the theories of development. One of these theories is the theory of poverty and conflict.
According to Justine, there is a turgid relationship between the levels of national incomes and the prevalence of civil conflicts in a substantial number of civil conflicts-afflicted countries in the world. While the organization and the manner in which attacks and battles point to the political insurgency, the main thing that ought to be understood is that the characterization of the civil conflicts point the deficiency of resources on one hand, and the forceful search and acquisition of resources on the other hand.
An example that justifies the question of poverty and conflicts can be pointed at countries is the developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. One reason why these countries do not exhibit poverty driven conflicts is that they have a higher and a desirable level of national incomes, which often satisfy their citizens.
A lot of the commentators of international political economy have reiterated the importance of the refocusing of the response to poverty by the United Nations. It is critical to say that the United Nations, under the leadership of the Secretary General, has been responsive to issues of poverty reduction to most of the poverty stricken regions of the world.
The Agencies of the United Nations, among them UNDP, UNICEF, WFP, UNESCO and WHO have been seen running poverty reduction response programs across the world. The response mechanisms that have been applied by these agencies have been critiqued for being unsustainable.
Therefore the Secretary General of the United Nations ought to improve the nature of the focus of the poverty reduction initiatives for the coming five years in order to attain sustainability in poverty reduction. Sustainability, as used in this context, implies the establishment of more long-term driven poverty reduction programs rather than the responsive direct material aid as has been the culture of these agencies.
Focus on the direct aid driven poverty in the developing economies by the United Nations’ Agencies is argued to be one of the promoting factors for dependency and the extension of the vicious circle of poverty in the less developed world. It is critical to appreciate the fact that the United Nations has already realized the need for the sustainability of their aid and poverty response programs.
Sustainability is the leeway to the break of the cycle of dependency and the focus on established projects so that people can afford to sustain their incomes, which could help reduce the pressure over the scarcity of resources in the developing world.
According to Downs, poverty reduction by the UN ought to be approached from the sustainable point of view. This includes the encouragement of the populations to invest in agriculture trough the provision of agricultural education and enlightenment of the populations on the latest agricultural technology, and the embrace of investment in education through the provision of support to improve education infrastructure.
Others include the investment in business through the provision of entrepreneurial education to the population, improvement of institutions of research and development in the developing world and the facilitation of the exchange of production technology between the developing and the developed world.
The ultimate goal of the reduction of direct aid reduces the level of dependency on aid and, instead, it encourages the embrace of long-term sustainable economic programs, which reduces poverty in the long run. The United Nations needs to adopt a more integrated approach when tackling issues to do with reduction of economic poverty.
Agenda 2: Environmental management
The issue of environmental degradation and its resultant impacts upon the human population has raised a lot of concerns about the need for better management of the environment. Environmental pollution is one of the causes of environmental disasters like desertification and the prevalence of natural disasters, which threaten human security.
The ripple effects of environmental pollution are rising in magnitude; in other instances resulting in the constriction of resources, leading to other secondary security threats to the global population. Most of the concerns that are being raised over the malpractices in environmental management today are caused by the realities of the resulting impacts of environmental damage today. These include climate change and global warming, which contains other disastrous impacts within them.
The question that ought to be asked at this juncture is how the issue of environmental mismanagement can be a threat to the sustenance of global peace and security. There is need to mention that the global environment is vital for sustainability of human life. The failure to advocate for the environment has been the cause of the numerous environmental disasters that are being witnessed in the world today.
Degradation of the environment should be a concern for the United Nations as it endangers human lives. The United Nations has been quite vocal when it comes to advocacy for sustainable development. With the organization of deliberative conferences like the yearly United Nations Conference on Climate Change, the organization provides a platform for discussion on the ways of embracing environmental management.
However, there have been a lot of arguments about the role of the UN in advancing courses on sustainable management of the global environment. A substantial number of commentators on sustainable environmental management argue that the United Nations play a facilitating role, rather than playing an active role as far as reduction of environmental degradation is concerned.
The response to the question of environmental management begins with the inner activities of the United Nations. As a lead global agency, the United Nations has shown its commitment to the minimization of environmental degradation. The commitment has been shown through external projects, as well as internal projects and day to day activities of the agency. All UN agencies have shown their commitment to reduction of emission of toxic wastes to the atmosphere through the embrace of environmental friendly techniques.
This is a positive move towards the embrace of environmental conservation and the resultant minimization of the impacts of environmental pollution. However, the issue of environmental degradation today is quite expansive and can be addressed from two dimensions by the United Nations. These are the embrace of policies to limit the emission of toxic wastes to the atmosphere and the development and deployment of mitigative measures.
However, there is need to attain a balance between the limitation of the release of toxic wastes to the environment and deployment of mitigation measures to minimize the impacts of toxic waste release on the environment. The United Nations Secretary General is charged with a heavy task of ensuring that this balance is sustained over a couple of years to come.
The embrace of policies to reduce green gas emissions
According to Webersik, the debate surrounding emission of toxic wastes to the environment is often volatile. It is often marked with a blame game, where the developing world blames the developed nations for being the main emitters of greenhouse gases and other toxic substances into the atmosphere. With the blame game on, the environmental statistics still point to the fact that the rate of pollution of the environment is still alarming.
This leaves one question: What is the role of the United Nations in the fostering of a balance between economic development and environmental sustainability? The United Nations need to reset its global agenda to see it that countries cut down the level of green gas and toxic substance emissions. The United Nations, through the United Nations Environment Program needs to come up with policies that will see it put restrictions on the continued use of technologies that do not embrace the sustainability of the environment.
The ability of the United Nations to control and, if possible, impose sanctions on countries that are not showing commitment to environmental management is something that should be given consideration by the UN Secretary General. What has come out of the global environmental management conferences over the past few years is that the developed countries top the list of environmental polluters, yet their activities cannot be easily contained by the United Nations.
Mitigation of environmental pollution
The United Nations has been on the forefront in terms of deployment of initiatives that are meant to minimize the damages that are caused by degradation of the environment. One of the main activities under the reduction of the impacts of environmental degradation should be the embrace of technology transfer across the globe.
There is need for the United Nations to ensure that clean technologies are developed and transferred across the entire globe. This is because the pollution of the environment in one region impacts the whole globe. Clean technologies are developed out of investment in research and development. One thing that ought to be done is financing of research that is meant to enhance development of clean technologies.
The other activity that ought to be given focus is pressuring of the developed countries to transfer clean technologies in the developing world since they are the main polluters of the environment. The developed world should also be made to take responsibility of climate change and its resulting impacts by being made to finance environmental pollution mitigation programs in the developing world.
Agenda 3: Pacification of the regions marked by conflicts
According to Richmond, conflicts are reported to be the major causes of direct threat to peace and human security. It should be reiterated that one of the main reasons why the United Nations Organization was set up was to ensure that the world was pacified through prevention of any form of aggression by states.
While the United Nations can be applauded for managing to maintain world peace by virtue of preventing the existence of any other world war, there are a lot of pointers to the existence of regional conflicts, which implies that the organization has not attained its broader goal of ensuring global peace and security for the guarantee of safety of humanity.
There are a number of regional conflicts that have been fought for a long time, causing suffrage to human beings in the conflict torn regions. It is evident that the conflicts resonate from several historical issues. While some of the conflicts are simple and can easily be sorted by the application of integrated approaches, there are other conflicts that have been termed as complex in nature because they are based on a combination of factors.
These factors include ethnicity, the struggle for natural resources and political factors. An example of the complex regional conflicts is the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The prevalence of regional conflicts for an extended period in history has raised a lot of questions concerning the capacity of the United Nations to enhance a post-cold war global order through cultivation of global peace and security for the sake of human safety. Part of the plan of the United Nations Organization under the leadership of the UN Secretary General should center on pacification of the regions that have been marked by conflicts.
It is critical to mention that the United Nations has been involved in the launch and the sustenance of peacekeeping missions in different countries that are marred by conflicts in the world. Every year, the United Nation Organization spends billions of dollars in peacekeeping missions across the globe.
Concern been raised about the rationality of the expenditure on peacekeeping missions by the United Nations and to what extent the peacekeeping missions have resulted in the pacification the conflict torn regions or countries in the world. This observation emanates from the concern about a number of conflicts that have been sustained, irrespective of the high costs that have been incurred by the United Nations in terms of sustaining peacekeeping missions in these countries and regions.
Examples of these conflicts are the Congo conflict, the Darfur Conflict and the Israel-Palestine conflict. A lot of money goes to waste in these conflicts because the peace that is attained through the peace keeping initiatives only lasts for a short period. This implies that there are core issues that are not fully responded to by the United Nations, meaning that peacekeeping only acts as a short term intervention to the conflict.
The question that should be posed here is whether there is a better way to attend to and find a long lasting solution to the sustained conflict in the world. A more comprehensive approach is needed in order to attain a longer lasting solution to the regional conflicts, instead of the peacekeeping missions that consume a lot of financial resources and result into other incidences of denial of the breach of human rights by the peacekeeping forces.
There is need to explore the underlying causes of the violent conflicts that occur in different regions of the globe under the leadership of the United Nations. The United Nations needs to be more proactive in exploring conflicts, rather than being responsive to the violent conflicts in diverse regions.
According to Copley, the failure of the peacekeeping missions is attributed to the failure to tackle the main issues that surround the conflicts. Taking an example of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, it has been noted that the main underlying cause is the struggle for land and territory, which emanated from the settlement and the establishment of the Israeli state in the current location. Therefore, aggression between the two countries often revolves around this issue.
As its strategies on its future plans, the UN needs to plan on how to unearth and respond to the core issues that lead to frequent conflicts in different regions across the globe. While this is a comprehensive task, a substantial number of political commentators have applauded such a move, arguing that it is the only way through which sustainable peace can be attained in the regions that are torn apart by historical regional conflicts.
Peacekeeping ought to be used as an alternative for the temporary pacification as the main peace initiatives are negotiated through diplomacy. Diplomacy encourages peace building. It is a comprehensive process that addresses the deeper issues that mark the development and sustenance of regional conflicts.
Agenda 4: Encouraging the growth of democracy and the observance of human rights across the globe
According to Maley, the issue of democracy dominates the contemporary discussion on the attainment of social and economic order in the globalized world. The issue of democracy in the contemporary world is highly centered on the need for the development of an institutional environment that favors enforcement of the attributes of democracy within political set-up.
It is critical to point out that the struggle for the attainment of a democratic society has taken a long course and has been mostly spearheaded by the western countries. There are still a lot of incidences of autocracy, especially in the developing regions of the globe. The exercise of autocracy in any country often results in the breach of the principles of democracy, which are critical to the protection of human rights and the guarantee of human security.
The proponents of democracy argue that there is a turgid relationship between democracy, human rights, human security, and the attainment of social and economic order in the globalized society. The importance of democracy remains to be elusive as the world keeps searching for means of ensuring that the safety of human beings is guaranteed in all aspects of governance.
From the struggles and conflicts of governance that are witnessed across the world today, it is apparent that the embrace of democracy is still at levels that are not desirable. This implies that the United Nations and the international broader international community need to pace up the initiatives of broadening the democratic space in the developing world for the sake of the safety and the security of human beings in the world. Democratic governance provides an open space for the citizen participation in governance.
It should be noted that democracy is a system of rule that encourages the direct participation of the citizenry in governance. The question of direct participation in governance implies the presence of a highly institutionalized environment, where the system of ensuring checks on attributes of governance can be easily pursued.
Democracy cannot be easily attained without political change. This implies that the cultivation of democracy, thence human rights and socioeconomic and political order, should begin with political change and the nature of political governance in countries that are presumed to be having a constricted democratic space.
The issue of political change ought to be approached from a dual perspective by the United Nations. The first perspective should be centered on the post-conflict political order. The conflict torn regions are often marked by activities that imply a higher level of breakage of the principles of democracy and the breach of human rights.
Thus, it becomes quite complicated to advance issues of democracy and governance without giving priority to the establishment of stable political institutions. The pacification of conflict zones by the United Nations should be followed by the support from the international community under the coordination of the United Nations, which can see the countries establish political institutions. This is a key step in moving these countries from one condition to the other.
This transition has to be done in an open manner in order to make it easy for the embrace of democracy within the established political institutions. One thing that ought to be addressed by the UN when discharging this activity is ensuring that there is a highly participative landscape, which denoted the first step towards the attainment of democratic governments and the subsequent attainment of social and economic order.
The second perspective of the embrace of democracy is the encouragement of the expansion of democracy in the regions that have not been marked by conflicts. The development of institutions should be the priority of the United Nations. The opening of the democratic space in the world faces a lot of hitches; one of them is the lack of the will of governments to embrace democracy.
The lack of will emanates from the association of democracy with the tendencies of the western countries to expand their philosophies and dominance to other countries. Therefore, the United Nations has to ensure that the globe understands the meaning and essence of democracy and the need of the embrace of democracy and human rights through the establishment of stronger institutions within states. It is no doubt that this is a demanding task.
However, such a course is worth as it will help the global citizenry to understand the meaning and value of democracy, which in turn gives the citizenry a reason to push for democracy. The issues of human rights are attained when there is a wide space and increased citizen participation.
The democratic control of the instruments of power in the nation-states is an affair that needs a systematic approach. This means that the United Nations has to plan and mobilize the required tools for democratizing states across the world. In doing so, the United Nations will be considered to be establishing a world that is free from dictatorship and autocratic governance, which are often the sources of human rights abuses and autocratic governance.
Agenda 5: The enhancement of sustainability in economic globalization
Globalization is a broader subject, which cuts across the diverse realms of development in the world. Globalization refers to the increased in the number of businesses and other transactions between countries, which is spearheaded by the limitation of restrictions of transactions between countries. Economic globalization is the most desirable segment of globalization since it encourages the flow of trade between countries, thus expanding the scope of economic development across different countries in the world today.
The issue of economic globalization can be traced from the late years of the 20th century, where countries found it increasingly important to limit the barriers to the flow of trade between countries. However, several issues have emerged in economic globalization, particularly the limitation of the trade barriers. One of the main issues that have occupied trade negotiations concerns the issue of the balance of benefits under a liberal trading environment.
While the liberalization of trade increases the flow of trade between countries, it has been noted that some countries end up benefiting, while other countries end up losing under the practice of economic liberalization. The ultimate gainers when it comes to trade liberalization are the developed countries, while the ultimate losers in economic globalization are least developing economies of the globe.
Several explanations have been given on why the developed economies lose out under the prevailing structures of economic globalism. One of the main explanations centers on the issue of competitive advantage and the ability of the developing nation-states to be positioned the increasingly liberalized trading environment.
This phenomenon can be explained by the argument that the developed world has a lot of advantages when it comes to the production of goods and services, unlike the developing countries that suffer from inadequate resources; therefore, the developing countries often find it hard to produce goods and services.
This can be explicated further by exploring the law of competitive advantage. Nonetheless, the application of the law of competitive advantage has failed to materialize due to the widened gap between the rate of development in the developed world and the rate of development in the developing world. This gap has left a huge vacuum in economic globalization, which is often filled with the exploitation and the economic loss by the developing world.
As a body that is charged with ensuring that there is a global order in the world, the United Nations has to come in and try to strike a balance in economic globalization.
While there are a lot of doubts whether the real balance can be attained in economic globalism, most commentators on political economy argue that there are a number of things that can be done in order to raise the level of economic competitiveness of the developing world in order to increase their earnings from international trade.
The United Nations Economic and Social Council and the United Nations Development Program are critical bodies in the establishment of economic order even amidst globalization of trade.
One of the main initiatives of the United Nations in attaining a balanced trading environment, which leads to the attainment of mutual benefits in international trade, is the embrace of technology transfer from the developed to the developing world.
One of the things that place the developed countries at a greater advantage in international trade is that the developed world has set stronger footage in terms of advancing their production technologies. The advanced production technologies help the developed countries to minimize the strain in production, thereby highly minimizing the cost of production. This is a contradiction of the situation in the developing world.
The United Nations, through its development agencies, needs to empower the production capacity of the developed world through facilitating the transfer of technology from the developed countries to the developing countries. This is already being done. However, the scale at which such initiatives are being undertaken needs to be raised. This is a rational way of embracing the economic empowerment of the developing world, thus reducing the level of dependency.
Economic empowerment also increases the capacity of the developing world to withstand the impacts of natural calamities. This is also another way of addressing the resource based conflicts, which have afflicted a lot of people in the developing world. It can be taken as a component of the integrated process of solving the resource-drawn conflicts.
The other approach of empowering the developed countries so that they can derive a lot of benefits from the globalization of the economy is the empowerment of traditional industries in the developing world. This can be implemented through the United Nations Social and Cultural Organization.
Traditional industries are those industries that are historical, like the cultural arts and tourism among other industries. The positioning of these industries is essential since these industries can act as a source of revenues, thus improving the economic status of the least developed countries.
Conclusion
The contemporary world is faced with a growing number of challenges, which threaten the prevalence of global peace and security for human existence. The problems that threaten human security and the prevalence of the peace in the world are interrelated. Therefore, the need for the application of integrated approaches in the pursuance of the activities of the United Nations has been reiterated in the five agendas in the paper.
As an organization that is charged with the responsibility of maintaining global peace and security, the United Nations needs to focus on a number of issues that are posing a lot of threats to the existence of human security. The five security concerns that should form the global security and peace agenda for the Secretary General of the United Nations include: poverty reduction, environmental management, conflict resolution, the promotion of democracy and human rights, and the promotion of sustainable economic globalism.
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