Shaped by Carnegie Corporation funding, the United Nations’ start-up Peacebuilding Commission strives to bring security to a conflict-ridden world.

Bosnia, Somalia, East Timor…Haiti, Liberia, Nepal… Point almost anywhere on the world map and you won’t be far from an area of conflict—past, present or on the brink. As of this writing, Pakistan is still reeling from a recent assassination and a post-election meltdown is taking place in Kenya, while ongoing efforts to stop the violence in Sudan continue to come up short. With so many countries coming apart, can we count on an unproven United Nations Peacebuilding Commission to stave off disaster? Maybe…if this fresh approach performs as anticipated. It’s way too soon to say. Even so, there’s a compelling story behind how the UN’s newest idea for attaining a more secure world came about.

After decades of costly attempts, the international community’s record on building sustainable peace has attracted considerable criticism. Yet foreign policy scholars say things are not as bleak as they appear. According to Stephen Del Rosso, director of Carnegie Corporation’s International Peace and Security Program, more wars have ended than have started since the mid 1980s and the number of armed conflicts in the world has fallen roughly by half. “Rather than one side defeating the other, most conflicts have been concluded through negotiation or by winding down,” Del Rosso says, “in many instances thanks to international peace efforts.” There have been gaps in the process that have hampered its success, he admits, but that record should improve once the UN Peacebuilding Commission is fully up and running. At least that’s what he and other experts in the global security field hope will happen.

By some measures, more than a quarter of the world’s states are considered at risk of instability and collapse, Del Rosso explains, and such states—particularly in regions of the developing world where national borders are porous and under constant stress—not only imperil lives at the local level, but also threaten security, stability and prosperity around the world. The ability of developed countries to come up with a coherent approach to this growing problem is one of the most urgent security challenges of the 21st century, he argues.

Significant research in this area is funded by Carnegie Corporation’s International Peace and Security Program, and has been for years. To support the new generation of experts attempting to deal with this daunting issue, in addition to funding research on states at risk of instability or collapse, the Corporation supports dissemination of grantees’ findings and best practices to practitioners and policymakers. The goal is to smooth the path between scholarship and consumers in foreign policymaking circles and in the field.

The subject of global security has become a “boom area of the political science field, resulting in an impressive body of knowledge,” says Michael Doyle, Columbia University Harold Brown Professor of Law and International Affairs and previously vice president of the International Peace Academy as well as assistant secretary general and special adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “People are very engaged,” he adds, “which is important. There is genuine scholarship and debate, similar to the attention given to the issue of arms control in the 1970’s.” The pipeline between world-class scholars like Doyle and the international policy community encourages an active exchange of information that influences many of the positive steps being taken to improve the world’s chances for peace.

To many in the field, one highly positive step is the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission, which represents the outcome of “outside-inside collaboration requiring intellectual heft from outside scholarship the UN couldn’t produce in-house,” Del Rosso says. He sees this new addition to the world body as an example of true synergy between it and the academic community. “That’s where foundations can play a role in helping to support and facilitate, not just to conceptualize. With 72 countries potentially sliding into the abyss, it’s important to close the gap between knowledge creation and practice on the ground, and to do it without delay,” he stresses, citing grantees working to replace the usual UN practice of trial and error with more sophisticated contextualized intervention. “The last ten years taught us many lessons, but some were poorly learned or ignored,” he adds. “Unfortunately, just as generals always fight the last war, official policy in this area always lags behind developments on the ground.”

As a global peace broker, the UN has, over the past twenty years, played a role in ending wars in Cambodia, Southern Africa, Central America, the Balkans, West Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere, according to a report by the International Peace Academy, an independent institution dedicated to promoting the prevention and settlement of armed conflicts through policy research and development. A long-time grantee of Carnegie Corporation, this organization—in partnership with the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, also a grantee known for its agenda-setting work on post-conflict peacebuilding and global peace operations—has contributed extensively to the body of scholarship on conflict resolution as well as the United Nations capacity and reform efforts.

Such expertise has been sorely needed to help the UN find out why, for all it has accomplished, its efforts have too often failed to stop violent conflict in countries such as Angola and Rwanda, for instance, where the cost is measured in millions of lives. The world body has also been unable to reverse the pattern of fragile peace followed by a relapse into violence that threatens large swaths of the world’s most under-resourced areas. Violence most frequently recurs in cases of civil war, this century’s most menacing and fastest growing type of conflict. Already poor, civil war-torn countries rapidly become increasingly impoverished and susceptible to crime, disease, terrorism and drug trafficking, to name just a few grim possibilities. It’s mainly the recognition that civil wars must end—and that the UN still represents the world’s best hope of doing so—that has led to the formation of the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission.