From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe: United Nations’ Resilience in Keeping, Making and Building Peace

Motivated by a shared vision of a United Nations system prepared to address unforeseen challenges, this roundtable meets during the 35th anniversary celebrations of the establishment of ACUNS. A bridge linking opinion builders, policy makers and practitioners to promote a wider and better understanding of the United Nations with its evidence-based resilience in responding to existing, new, and intensifying challenges, ACUNS draws timely attention to the intensifying global challenges that include but are not confined to ongoing and frozen armed conflicts within and among the 193 countries in the world. Facing a concurrence of multiple challenges that know no territorial barriers, the international system still operates, and is likely to remain, tied with the state as the basic unit of global governance. This is happening amid an exponential growth in the emergence of civil society as a major stakeholder in conflict prevention to underpin a global commitment to accord priority attention to three of the 17 inter-related SDGs as evident in the Voluntary National Reviews: No Poverty; Zero Hunger; Promotion of Good Health and Well Being. The roundtable will aim to yield a forward-looking strategy for reaching specific targets to oversee compliance with a well-known criterion deployed in management circles. Known as SMART it stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Resource based, and Time-related.