Conflict prevention in the 21st century
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 4, 2016
5. Conclusions
China-UK cooperation in bringing sustainable peace, stability and development to conflict-affected regions and countries is desirable and, if given a long timeframe, both realistic and feasible. With the continually evolving international security landscape and the failures of the international community to effectively prevent conflict, new partnerships and interpretations of conflict prevention are required to make peace more sustainable.
Achieving a significant increase in China-UK cooperation on conflict prevention is undeniably challenging and presents a number of hurdles for both countries. Cooperation on peace and security issues, and even more so on conflict prevention, is considerably more challenging than existing China-UK cooperation on economic issues. Such cooperation will require establishing greater mutual trust and will not happen overnight. There are obstacles, such as the differing understandings of certain concepts and differing prioritizations of certain values, which will need to be carefully managed. However, if sufficiently de-politicized these differences are not insurmountable and steps are already being taken in the right direction towards cooperation. The significance of this should not be underestimated or ignored. Some encouragement can be drawn from increasing political will on both sides and evidence to suggest increasing (if incremental) convergence in outlook and approach. Recent joint statements suggest a new warmth in the bilateral relationship which could be capitalized upon, and there is also enough common ground to provide the incentives for partnership on conflict prevention.
For China and the UK, cooperation will only be feasible in certain areas of conflict prevention, and there will continue to be differences in their approaches to conflict prevention. However, there is also great potential for the two countries to work together towards shared or parallel goals in specific geographic and thematic areas where interests overlap.
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