Mediation, Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Wood of Anfield) (Lab)
My Lords, I am also very grateful to my noble friend Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale for securing this debate and for the way he opened it with his experience, reflections and wisdom on this broad issue. I pay tribute to his work as co-chair of the All-Party Group on conflict and peacebuilding, and to his long personal commitment to peace in many parts of the world, particularly in Mindanao, which he spoke about.
I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. It is a debate that has brought not just experience of diplomacy, negotiation and the slow challenging work of building peace on the ground but a sense that peacebuilding is not the work of Governments alone. In fact, sometimes Governments are not the best-placed partners to make progress. I will come back to some of those points in a minute and I will try to respond to as many of them as I can. Apologies if I do not get to everything, but I will come back to you if I do not.
In particular, I would like to start by endorsing the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, that we should stop the revolving door of ministerial appointments. I could not agree more; we should start that right now.
We meet at a sobering moment. As many noble Lords have said, including my noble friend Lord McConnell and the noble Earl, Lord Courtown, there are more conflicts in the world today than at any time since the Second World War. The figure my noble friend mentioned was that a quarter of a million people died in violent conflicts across the world in 2025. Conflict is driving terrible humanitarian crises, forcing families from their homes and seeing the most appalling atrocities committed against innocent people. We talked about Sudan earlier. I will come back to that in a minute. It is perhaps the most egregious example but, sadly, they are all too common.
The noble Lord, Lord Redwood, mentioned Ukraine. Just last month I was in Ukraine, meeting veterans, families, civil society leaders and others enduring a brutal assault on their country. I went to the village of Yahidne, which some noble Lords may know about. Just after the invasion, some 400 people were held in a school basement there for 27 days. I was taken around that basement by people who were in there without food, lighting or any provisions, and by people whose family members had suffered, some of whom had died. Ten people died in that basement. In Kyiv, I visited a UK-funded centre that is doing the heartbreaking but extraordinary work of tracing children who have been stolen from occupied territories and deported to Russia, where they have been adopted by Russian families. In the short time in my job, the human cost of this one example and the incredible courage of ordinary Ukrainians in this war is something I will not forget.
A few days after that I went to Toronto, where I joined more than 80 countries at a conference to discuss how to respond collectively to the problems that Ukrainians under Russian control face. There, we committed to convene a core group with Ukraine in London on the identification, return and reintegration of civilians from the occupied territories detained by Russia. That is perhaps a small example, but it is one of an attempt at peacemaking: the patient, often unseen work of getting people home, working with NGOs in the community of nations, trying to secure a just and lasting peace at a time when prospects seem pretty bleak, and using international law to do so.
I take seriously the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, on the need to have a heard-headed strategy to go along with that. In a nutshell, our strategy is to raise the costs of conflict for Russia so that it is forced—reluctantly, perhaps—to come to negotiation and discussion. This is at a time when Ukraine has made it clear, even at some cost to itself, that it is prepared to engage in those discussions. I am pleased to say that we are doing a variety to things, from sanctions to incessant diplomatic work, to try to achieve that outcome.
On prevention, beyond tragedies overseas, we have all seen how the effects of conflict reach our own shores—through irregular migration, organised crime, and higher costs for families here at home. For those who do not look abroad perhaps as much as noble Lords in this debate do, with their expertise and interests, prevention is in the national interest. My noble friend Lord McConnell is right that prioritising prevention is crucial. It is a hard-headed choice. It is not a soft option. Acting early saves lives and saves money. Mediation—helping those who are fighting to find a way to stop—is one of the most practical tools we have.
This theme has recurred in this debate: prioritising prevention is not the job of a single small group of people sitting in the Foreign Office; it runs through the activities across the Foreign Office and across government departments. Money is crucial, of course, and I will come back to that, but it is not reflected in a single pot of money allocated to something called “prevention”. It is much broader than that. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who has extensive knowledge of this across six Foreign Secretaries and five Prime Ministers, rightly talked about the interconnection of different activities, such as peacebuilding, prevention, peacekeeping and mediation.
However, we have to acknowledge that the world of peacemaking in particular has changed—although the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, is right that we need more imagination in thinking about pre-emptive action and the way that the UK Government should act in the future. On the one hand, the group of states playing significant mediation roles has expanded, as my noble friend Lord McConnell mentioned at the start. However, as my noble friend Lady Chapman pointed out, some deals are short-term and transactional, do not stick, and leave the causes and drivers of conflict untouched. Some deals between states have that characteristic, as well as deals between non-state actors. The United Nations has also found it much harder to play the role it once did, which is a point many noble Lords have made. That must shape how we think about our role.
So what is our role? The noble Earl, Lord Courtown, rightly challenged me to spell it out. I will put it in three sets of categories or clusters of activities. Before I say that, it is striking that there was universal agreement that the UK, for all our faults, has pedigree in this area and a strong reputation. Despite some parts of the world thinking we are perhaps historically tainted in some ways, we are a country full of organisations, diplomats and experts that has a positive role to play. We should be proud of that and it continues to be true, for all the challenges we face. I will put the UK strategy in three parts: the first is to bring expertise, the second is on partnerships, and the third is to strengthen and protect the institutions of peace.
I will start on bringing expertise. We rarely lead mediation processes ourselves, often because others—NGOs, other countries or faith groups, to come back to my noble friend Lord Rook’s point—are better placed and more trusted by the parties concerned. Instead, we tend to back mediators, regional organisations and parties themselves, drawing on our diplomatic relationships, our influence, our expertise, back channels and ceasefires. We have experience: the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, referred to the sad, painful experience in Northern Ireland, which gives us a mixture of pain, experience, credibility and wisdom, and enables us to have some perspective and authority.
My noble friend Lord McConnell knows this from Mindanao: in 2009, at the request of the parties, the UK led the formation of the international contact group, alongside others such as Japan and Saudi Arabia, and helped pave the way to a peace agreement that has significantly reduced violence. On Colombia, which the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, referred to—he is about to meet former President Santos, as he said—my noble friend Lady Chapman noted in quite moving detail the specific way in which UK engagement actually made a difference, particularly in the perceptions of the enemy at the point of demobilisation. Here, the UK used its role on the Security Council to keep international support behind the peace process.
Through our new conflict and violence community of expertise, we deploy specialists on mediation, atrocity prevention and conflict-related sexual violence where they are needed. Through our conflict resolution programme, we have funded expert partners to support dialogue in some of the hardest places to achieve that. Much of that work is very discreet and is not talked about, for good reason: as many noble Lords have mentioned, discretion is an important part of keeping people safe and keeping talks alive.
On this issue, I want to go back to my noble friend Lord Rook’s comments on the role of faith-based organisations and individuals. I always love listening to my noble friend; he is one of my favourite speakers. He raised two issues. Last year, when we announced our approach to freedom of religion or belief, the Government made a commitment that we would have a report, and I can confirm that the report, which outlines the progress we have made, will be presented to the Prime Minister before the end of this year. On contact between FCDO conflict experts and religious leaders, I am pleased to say that it not only is crucial but happens frequently. It is pivotal to informing the FCDO’s understanding on how to use its influence, where not to use its influence, where to delegate, where to use partnerships and other approaches.
The second theme is building partnerships. As my noble friend Lord McConnell mentioned, since 2025 we have formalised co-operation on conflict resolution with Qatar and Turkey, for example. I know from our ambassador in Qatar how much effort he and his team are putting into that partnership, particularly with the Iran conflict and other conflicts in mind. They are partners with growing roles as mediators whose expertise we value. We have also begun working with Japan’s new mediation unit, which I know my noble friend has championed, and we are deepening our co-operation with the European Union, as provided for by the security and defence partnership.
Again, our job is not to crowd an already crowded field; it is to help those with access and more legitimacy than we sometimes have to succeed. As I mentioned earlier in answer to a Question on Sudan, my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary was in Istanbul last week for an E3+R4 meeting looking at ways in which countries with other kinds of relationships in areas such as Sudan and Iran can play a more constructive role.
I come back to a very important point that my noble friend Lady Chapman raised. She is completely right about the framing of responses being overly dictated by the last response. With my academic hat on—I can never quite give up being an academic—there is a wonderful book by Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War, which is precisely about military engagement falling prey to exactly the same vice: fighting the current war based on the lessons from a previous war. Peacebuilding can suffer from some of those same vices as well. That is an incredibly important point.
The third set of activities to which I want to draw attention is strengthening the institutions of peace. I was in Vienna last month where I opened the UK’s chairpersonship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which is one of the few multilateral institutions where we sit around the table with Russia and which, in my view, is more valuable for that. In my speech—I am sure noble Lords have read it, but I will just summarise for those who may have missed it—I talked about how dialogue matters most when trust is at its lowest ebb and how Europe’s security institutions still have a role, despite it being unfashionable in many quarters, to manage risk and prevent escalation. We will keep investing in them. For example, we have contributed more than £200 million to the UN peacebuilding fund since 2006, which makes us a very long-standing and loyal donor.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, gave us a chastening and correct challenge to try to recapture the spirit of 1945. Let us be honest: this is not a good time for multilateralism and the UN. It is therefore not a time for us to walk away from these multilateral institutions. To go back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, it is a time to try to put some steel back in the multilateral architecture. I will respond to the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, in a minute.
It is also a time to beware false choices, which have been presented in some noble Lords’ comments today, between hard and soft power. I completely agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford’s point that if you want peace you have to invest in the institutions of multilateral co-operation that bring it about and not assume war. There is also the false choice of thinking that it is either defence or development. Of course, this has been a very difficult time because of the cuts that have been made to the development budget. But there is a more fundamental challenge than just zero-sum trade-offs of funding, which is to rethink the way we think about defence and to bring security, economic and military dimensions—pre-emptive downstream interventions—into our concept of what proper security and defence are about.
We helped shape last year’s review of the UN’s peacekeeping architecture. We fund the UN’s mediation experts, and as the UN prepares for a new Secretary-General, we want a United Nations that uses its good offices actively and early. Regional organisations matter too, particularly the African Union, for example. We will support these organisations to make that commitment real and will work with the World Bank and other international finance institutions so that money flows to prevention before violence breaks out.
Several noble Lords raised early warning, including the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad. The problem is rarely that we cannot see a crisis coming; we usually can. It is about turning warning into action. The FCDO has developed a variety of mechanisms and tools to support early warning and early action across the network. The importance of using technology to improve translation of that early warning into action was a point well made. The Foreign Office is bringing conflict, atrocity and humanitarian analysis together into a single view of risk, drawing on our embassies, open-source data and horizon scanning. We support local civil society organisations to strengthen their early-warning functions.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned atrocity prevention. I welcome the challenge in the Peace Works report launched by my noble friend’s all-party group and in the Atrocity Crimes Review published earlier this month. We are considering their recommendations carefully. I am particularly considering their recommendations carefully because my old boss, Gordon Brown, spoke at the launch of the review, and I have learned over the years not to ignore Gordon Brown, especially on early-warning issues. Officials are meeting the authors, and I would be glad for our officials to meet my noble friend and the group’s officers as well.
I was going to talk about some particular cases. Given the time, I probably will not, but we talked about Sudan earlier and the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, challenged us on Sudan. There are definitely complexities with those involved in peacemaking also being parties that have interests. That is not just a complexity of Sudan, but clearly it is a complexity there. What are we doing? We had an UNGA event specifically on the drone attacks to try to make some progress on that. We are leaders of the coalition for atrocity prevention group, and there is constant engagement on this. I am sure there is more that can be done, but it is not a field in which we are silent.
I also want to mention the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, on the question of the International Alliance on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict, which I believe he was instrumental in starting. We are continuing to prioritise that. We work with Colombia, the DRC, which I think is chair this year, Ukraine and others. We are vice-chair this year, and it is an agenda that is being actively pursued with energy from the United Kingdom.
Inclusion is vital. Peace agreements are more likely to last when, for example and in particular, women participate in a meaningful way, and parties are more likely to come back to the table if talks falter. We need women’s leadership and meaningful participation in these spaces. We have protected funding for women, peace and security, and we are refreshing our national action plan on this. Inclusion also means hearing local peacebuilders, the people who raise the alarm first, stay the longest and have most at stake. We must do more to protect women peacebuilders and human rights defenders who face growing intimidation, reprisals and violence.
Many noble Lords asked about resources. I will not pretend that reducing aid to 0.3% was easy and has not had trade-offs—of course it has. It has had consequences, but we are concentrating on where we can do most good. I am pleased to say that more than 70% of our country and regional aid will go to fragile and conflict-affected states by 2028-29. As I said earlier, and I speak as someone who used to come up with pots of money as a Treasury special adviser for a previous Chancellor, this is an area where money is crucial, but the magnitude of commitment cannot be expressed simply by how many people work in a particular unit or how much money goes to a particular sub-activity inside the Foreign Office, crucial as that is.
The noble Earl, Lord Courtown, rightly challenged us on defence, although traditionally the spending review is when spending decisions are made. At least, that is my understanding. There will be more to say on that.
To conclude, the success of prevention is often invisible: the war that did not start, the ceasefire that held, the talks that kept going when everyone thought they would fail. These are non-events that are huge events in the world of peacekeeping and peacebuilding. It is one of the best investments that we can make in security for people living through conflict and for us here at home. Our role is to bring expertise, build partnerships and strengthen institutions.
I will make two quick last remarks even though I am hitting my time limit. The noble Lord, Lord Hastings, asked whether Britain was afraid to speak. Absolutely not—I say that with all due respect. Without being pious, I see myself as part of a team of Ministers at the Foreign Office who are putting ending suffering and violence at the forefront on Israel, even though many noble Lords will not agree with our position on Israel and in our Israel reset, on Sudan and on Ukraine. I am sure everyone will keep us challenged on that, but it is absolutely at the centre.
Lastly, are we afraid to talk to those with whom we disagree? This point was made by the noble Lords, Lord Bates—whom I congratulate on bringing Dan Burn’s name into a debate on conflict prevention—Lord Hastings, Lord Anderson, and others. The answer is yes, sometimes we are too afraid to speak to those with whom we disagree. That is probably true of our Government at times, so that is a good challenge, because lines of communication are more, not less, important when tensions and conflicts are at their greatest. That is a salutary lesson to take away.