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Comfort Ero Is The President of The Crisis Group
Comfort Ero Is The President of The Crisis Group
One thing worth noting is that no region is untouched. While there are a
number of factors, it started around 2012 with the Arab Spring. It’s not as
though the era that went before, especially the 1990s, was glorious but there
was a sense in which everybody was mobilized towards multilateralism and
in which people were believers, faithfully ascribing to that.
But since 2012 the guardrails are slowly being chipped away. The tools that
were often used to prevent, avert or mitigate are no longer holding. Instead,
you are seeing more impunity. You can go as far as to say people are getting
away with murder.
We are experiencing conflicts that could erupt into wider, regional wars:
Gaza, Ukraine, the Horn of Africa. Is the path to peace via a military
response or will it be political and diplomatic?
In the past 10 years there has been an appetite for militarization, even by
those intervening to help resolve the conflict. I understand the concept of
‘security first’, that you need an enabling environment, but the recent trend
has been that that’s the only option on the table and there is no room for
political dialogue.
Where we have seen efforts of diplomacy, they have been for the sake of
humanitarianism. For example, the Black Sea grain deal led by Turkey,
which opened a corridor to allow food to get out to those who needed it or the
use of prisoner exchanges in Gaza or Russia and Ukraine. But this hasn’t
necessarily led to the next stage. Instead, it has been seen as transactional.