Sustainable development goals: The need for peacebuilding and measures of disarmament

“The future we want”, the outcome document of the General Assembly open working group on the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), sets out as Goal 16 the promotion of “peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development …”. Desirable as this is, it unfortunately is the closest the proposals get to any reference to diminishing national or international conflict, let alone to reducing military expenditures or to measures of disarmament. And this is in spite of the latest United Nations report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), stating that “conflicts remain the biggest threat to human development, with fragile and conflictaffected countries typically experiencing the highest poverty rates”. Moreover, the largest failures to achieve rapid progress towards the MDGs have been in countries beset by conflict.

Related Subject(s): Disarmament