2024.05.24
Grandview Institution 2024.05.24 14:51 Beijing
May 21st~23rd, 2024, a delegation from GVI was invited to participate in the 4th International Crisis Mediation Partnership Conference organized by the British Foreign Office, during which they talked with the representatives of mediation centers of European foreign ministries, the heads of well-known crisis mediation agencies, and the directors of mediation agencies from the EU, ASEAN, LAS, and AU, about the reality and difficulties, innovation and future, supervision and evaluation of the international crisis mediation.
Convened by the Crisis Mediation Center of the British Foreign Office, the conference brought to Belfast senior officials from the European Commission, the EU External Action Service, and the Crisis Mediation Centers of the British, Finnish, German, Irish, Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss and Canadian Foreign Ministries, as well as the top heads of the major internationally renowned crisis mediation institutions based in Europe. At the conference, GVI, as a specially-invited Chinese delegation, together with other invited representatives from the EU, ASEAN, LAS, and AU, shared their historical experiences and developmental reflections on China's, the above-mentioned agencies’ and third-party forces’ performance in crisis mediation, from the perspectives of strategic research and action cases.
Ren Libo, GVI’s President, Ouyang Wei, Deputy Director of the Academic Committee of GVI, and Lv Xiaoyu, Assistant Professor from the School of International Relations of Peking University, had in-depth exchanges with the other participants from the aspects of the history of China's participation in international crisis mediation, case study, China's role and function, and future international cooperation, etc.
Some of the attendees believed that the Chinese government's active involvement in international crisis mediation based on the overall goal of maintaining world peace and development and the effect it has attained deserved to be appreciated, but there was still a need to continue exploring how to increase the sharing of experiences and cases, and how to better utilize the power of the third party, and so on. Some other experts suggested that, with the complication of the global landscape, new deeper-rooted crises are brewing, so in the future it is necessary to combine the ex-ante prevention of crisis management with the ex-post handling of crisis mediation and to promote the whole-process management and sustainability of crisis mediation.
The organizers have chosen Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, as the venue for this conference, probably because, 26 years ago, the leaders of the major parties in Northern Ireland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister Ahern inked the Belfast Agreement, which put an end to the 30-year-long violent conflict in the region, and the peace process in Ireland has achieved significant results since then. During this conference, the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs deliberately arranged two historical sharing sessions, at which former government officials, parliamentarians, representatives of local parties, and journalists who had been personally involved in the peace process recollected many details of the negotiations of the agreement. The organizers also invited several heads of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) involved in order maintenance, community management, and social assistance to share their working mechanisms and demonstrate to the participants the grand and subtle system behind the mediation of those years’ crisis.
Heads of major international crisis mediation agencies present at the conference:
Andrew Gilmour, CEO, Berghof Foundation
Janne Taalas , CEO, Crisis Management Institute (CMI)
Jonathan Cohen, CEO, Conciliation Resources
David Harland, CEO, Humanitarian Dialogue Center
Jonathan Powell, CEO, Inter Mediate
Comfort Ero, CEO, International Crisis Group
Stine Lehmann-Larsen, Deputy Executive Director, European Institute of Peace (EIP)
Marta Ruedas, Senior Advisor, CIT pax
Kate Fearon, Director of the Center for Crisis Prevention, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)
Ambassador Puja, Executive Director, ASEAN Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (IPR)
Akok Maduta, Executive Director, African Union Mediation and Dialogue Division
Ambassador Hossam Zaki, Assistant Secretary-General, League of Arab States