General Announcements - February 16, 2008

IPI Launches Task Forces on Strengthening Multilateral Capacity

On February 7-8, IPI  launched a new initiative, the Task Forces on Strengthening Multilateral Security Capacity, with an opening symposium on “Development, Resources, and Environment: Defining Challenges for the Security Agenda.”

This high-level two-day meeting, held at the Greentree Foundation Conference Center in Long Island, New York, gathered approximately twenty representatives from UN Member States, including many Permanent Representatives, and a select number of international scholars and experts.

The meeting aimed at exploring ways in which cardinal, even existential, threats to humanity – chronic underdevelopment, energy and resource scarcity, environmental degradation and climate change – are shaping both security challenges and our capacity to address them effectively.

IPI’s Task Forces on Strengthening Multilateral Security Capacity is a new initiative aimed at developing action-oriented recommendations for redoubling and reorienting the capacity of the United Nations and its partners to deal with emerging, multifaceted and global security challenges. The central goal of these Task Forces will be to identify the policies and institutional modifications needed at the multilateral level to meet emerging security challenges, and the political and institutional strategies needed to bring these policies and architectures into being.

By examining the critical and related issues of underdevelopment, resource scarcity and climate change, the Opening Symposium provided a larger geo-political and economic context for the work of the subsequent Task Forces, which will focus on two core dimensions of the security concerns facing the UN and its partners:

   1. Transnational Security Challenges
   2. and Inter and Intra-state Armed Conflict.

The Task Forces initiative is established within IPA’s wide-ranging research program on Coping with Crisis, Conflict and Change: The United Nations and Evolving Capacities for Managing Global Crises.