IPI is continuing its multi-year project to research how the secretary-general’s recommendations on prevention and sustaining peace have been operationalized in countries through a series of case studies. The overall objective of this project is to enhance practical understanding of the UN’s peacebuilding and sustaining peace agenda in the lead-up to the next comprehensive review of the UN peacebuilding architecture in 2020. The project aims to push the discussion on prevention and sustaining peace programming beyond financing to look at what innovations are or should be taking place and how to better encourage and support these practices. In the long term, this project will contribute to the debate on how to advance efforts to build sustainable peace in practice at the country level and to assess whether the UN is having a positive influence on the way peacebuilding is undertaken.

In 2019, IPI published case studies on how the UN’s sustaining peace agenda is currently being implemented in Liberia and Papua New Guinea. In 2020, IPI will conduct an additional case study on Burkina Faso and publish a paper drawing on lessons from all three case studies to inform the 2020 peacebuilding review.