In partnership with the organizers of World Peace Festival, Peace Direct and the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, the United Nations Development Programme will help to create space for a better understanding of the “Infrastructures for Peace” approach at World Peace Festival Conference 2011. Since 2004, UNDP has supported national and local actors – governments and civil society – in nearly forty countries to develop and apply their own capacities for dialogue, mediation, and conflict resolution. These capacities have offered an important supplement, or an effective substitute, for international diplomacy. More critically, they have helped resolve recurring conflicts over land, natural resources, and governance, and to build more resilient societies. In Kenya, the constitutional referendum in 2010 saw not a single incident of violence due to the systematic application of an “infrastructure for peace” at the national and local levels, comprising of forums for dialogue at the national level, and effective early warning and response at the local level.

Learn more about how expected elections-related violence or instability has been successfully prevented in Kenya, Ghana, Guyana, Sierra Leone, Lesotho, Kyrgyzstan and Benin due to such initiatives by national and local actors. At World Peace Festival Conference from 26 - 27 August 2011, representatives from some of these countries and UNDP will showcase their experiences and inform how at least ten countries from around the world have formally declared their intention to develop and apply such “Infrastructures for Peace”.