Geneva Peace Week 2022

Sustaining Peace in Practice: Geneva Peace Week event explores the topic of breaking the siloes between humanitarian, development, and peace action

Workshop organized by Interpeace in collaboration with the ILO, WHO, UNFPA, IOM, UNICEF and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform.

News | 08 November 2022
This year's Geneva Peace Week featured a workshop event on the 3rd of November 2022, organized by the Interpeace in partnership with the ILO's Peace and Resilience Coordination Unit, the WHO, FAO, UNICEF, UNFPA, IOM, and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform.

Entitled "Sustaining Peace in Practice: breaking the siloes between humanitarian, development and peace actions", the event was part of the Geneva Peace Week's thematic track on "Rights, Inequalities and Peace." It featured ILO's Peace Specialist, Nieves Thomet; Kevin Babila Ousman, Interim Lead of the Interagency Policy for Emergency Unit at the WHO; Cecilia Sánchez-Bodas, Programme Specialist at UNICEF; and Julius Jackson, the team leader of the Peace Unit (CPU) at FAO. Anita Ernstorfer and Annika Erickson-Pearson, respectively from Interpeace and the Geneva Peace Platform, moderated the workshop.

It is time for us to discuss peace responsiveness-We have to change the dialogue from working in conflict to working on conflict. We need to integrate conflict sensitivity and analysis to better carry out our mandates."

Kevin Babila Ousman, WHO
With a dynamic workshop in which participants were involved, the panellists engaged in lively discussions centred around the organisational mindset shifts needed to operate when working in fragile settings. Panellists agreed on the importance to reinforce and operationalise peace-responsiveness and conflict sensitivity approaches across organizations, policies and technical areas.

We took stock to see where we are, what we have learned to start building peace consciousness. This leads to introducing explicit peacebuilding objectives cross-cutting our different sectors."

Cecilia Sánchez-Boda, UNICEF
Peace has been in the DNA of the ILO (International Labour Organization) since 1919, explained Nieves Thomet. Decent work and the social justice mandate of the ILO are key elements of the sustaining peace agenda that we should promote in times of crisis and across the Humanitarian, Development and Peace Nexus, in coordination and complementarity with our partners, in particular our UN sister agencies and our constituents.

Our organisations need to move away from taking for granted that our mandate is enough to contribute to peace, to explicitly address conflict drivers at the origin of fragility - related to decent work deficits in ILO’s case - through collective conflict-sensitive and peace-responsive strategies."

Nieves Thomet, ILO