The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction as a Vehicle for Conflict Prevention: Attainable or Tenuous?
Publisher: Researchgate
Author(s): Katie Peters, Laura E. R. Peters, and Colin Walch
Date: 2019
Topics: Conflict Prevention, Disasters
Prevention – of both natural hazard-related disasters (‘disasters’) and conflict – has long been prioritized within the international system. As early as the 1970s, the UN General Assembly began to recognize the central role of prevention, planning, and mitigation in disaster management (see UNGA Resolution 2717, 1970). This shift gained even more traction in the 1990s, which were designated as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, and the conclusion of this decade saw then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan affirming that “disaster prevention is a moral imperative, no less important than reducing the risks of war” (Annan, 1999).
Likewise, the concept of conflict prevention has long been central in peace studies (Ackermann, 2003; Ramsbotham et al., 2005; Woocher, 2009). Burgeoning after the Cold War (Ackermann, 2003), conflict prevention gained mainstream visibility in UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for Peace (BoutrosGhali, 1992), and continued to grow in prominence in 2015 with the UN’s return to the basic principle of ‘prevention’ under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (2017a, b). In an address to the UN Security Council in 2017, Guterres confirmed the vital role of conflict prevention by declaring, “Prevention is not merely a priority, but the priority” (Guterres, 2017a).