Regionalisation and Responses to Armed Conflict, with Special Focus on Conflict Prevention and Peacekeeping

Regionalisation is the process through which governmental polities, civic society and the corporate sector share interests and combine resources to agreed common ends atthe regional, as distinct from the national or global, level. It is the process – the array and sequence of events – by which regionalism (the state of, and attitudes towards,regional identity) is advanced. Regional organizations act on behalf of their constituents, the nation-state, as facilitators of regionalism. There is, however, no formal definition of a ‘region’ or a ‘regional organization’, the framers of the UN Charter having decided not to enter such definitions in the document. Two of the Charter’s seven principles concern the maintenance of peace and security,viz; pacific settlement and the non-use of force. The three principal methods under the Charter for attaining peace and security are conflict prevention, enforcement andjudicial settlement, each warranting a separate chapter for the global response to armed conflict. The past decade has witnessed the introduction of new concepts ofpeace (preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution, peace enforcement, crisis management, peace-building) that need to be made compatible with the principal framework of the Charter provisions.