Lt. Gen. David Leakey, Director General of the EU Military Staff, and James Putzel, Director of the Crisis States Research Centre at the Development Studies Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science, exchaning views at the DPF roundtable on security and development.

The Development Policy Forum (DPF) met on December 1 to discuss the security-development nexus. The roundtable, entitled “Development and security: Two sides of the same coin”, examined the relationship between development and security with the goal of moving beyond civilian-military cooperation to a more holistic approach to the issue.

Fred Tanner, Director of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), stressed the importance of state-building and the rule of law. Security and development actors need to work to empower the people, to “build competent, solid, resilient states,” he said. “Only then can we have peace.”

Other participants agreed with this assessment, underscoring the need to prevent failed states, rather than attempting peace-building after the fact. “We should use the multi-faceted crises facing us today to urgently shift to conflict prevention and coalition building amongst the various stakeholders,” opined Paul van Tongeren, Secretary General and Honorary Chair of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC).

Discussants in the second session focusing on conflict prevention included Lt. Gen. David Leakey, Director General of the European Union Military Staff (EUMS), Col. Robert Sewade, Deputy Director General of the National Gendarmerie of Benin, and the roundtable was co-moderated by Giles Merritt, Secretary General of Friends of Europe and Gie Goris, Editor-in-Chief of MO*.

Please click here to download the list of the attended discussants at this DPF roundtable.

The Development Policy Forum (DPF) is a partnership between Friends of Europe, the World Bank, the United Nations, France’s AFD, UK’s DFID and Germany’s GTZ. DPF events are also organised in association with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the IMF and the European Commission. Security and Defence Agenda (SDA) will also partner us for this debate.