The Stimson Center and The Hague Institute for Global Justice teamed up in 2014 to address critical global issues at the intersection of security and justice and build effective responses to them. To these ends, the two institutions built a major new project around a highly experienced Commission on Global Security, Justice and Governance that, in June 2015, released its primary report, Confronting the Crisis of Global Governance. This page highlights the outcomes of the Commission’s work, which will be followed up by a new Stimson project, Just Security 2020: Advancing the Recommendations of the Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance.  

Focus

Emphasizing the intersection of security and justice, the project focused on three realms that are increasingly connected: state fragility and violent conflict, the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations, and the volatility of the “hyperconnected” global economy.  Designed to start a conversation in the tradition of the 1995 Commission on Global Governance and the 2004 High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, the project considered new frameworks for collective action on these three critical issue areas. The Commission released a focused set of global policy and institutional reform recommendations in June 2015, in advance of the United Nations’ 70th Anniversary Summit in New York. 

Approach

The project team commissioned a range of background papers from recognized experts to address key issues and make recommendations in each of the project’s three main focus areas. The team also engaged multi-stakeholder consultations (more than thirty in total) in conjunction, for example, with The Hague Conference on Business and Human Security (September 2014), The India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance (CyFy, October 2014), The UN Climate Change Conference in Lima (December 2014), and The Munich Security Conference (February 2015). The project hosted facilitated dialogues online with business and civil society groups in each subject area and continued active consultation and outreach after the final report was released, looking toward the UN’s 75th anniversary summit in 2020 as a benchmark for implementation, although the project’s recommendations ranged beyond the United Nations.

Partners

Stimson’s partner on this project, The Hague Institute for Global Justice, is an independent, nonpartisan and interdisciplinary organization that conducts policy-relevant research, develops practitioner tools, and convenes experts, practitioners and policymakers to facilitate knowledge sharing on conflict prevention, rule of law, and global governance.

Acknowledgements and Project Team

The Hague Institute for Global Justice and The Stimson Center are pleased to acknowledge the contributions made by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation at the Peace Palace, the Embassy of the Netherlands to the United States, the International Peace Institute, the Municipality of The Hague, the Observer Research Foundation (India), the Permanent Missions of Brazil, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, and The Netherlands to the United Nations, and the President Woodrow Wilson House. We wish to thank the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) for thematic support—in particular from Michèle Augua, Sara Burke, and Volker Lehman from FES New York—as well as for in-kind assistance at various stages of the Commission’s work.

We also wish to thank the following reviewers of parts of the Report: (alphabetical order) Kuniko Ashizawa, Robert Berg, Sara Burke, Richard Caplan, Simon Chesterman, Stephen Gardiner, Harris Gleckman, Lise Howard, Ian Johnstone, Mary Kaldor, Georgios Kostakos, Don Krause, Melissa Labonte, Peter Middlebrook, David Mittler, Milton Mueller, Craig Murphy, Ted Newman, Vesselin Popovski, Stephen Schlesinger, Peter Stoett, Ramesh Thakur, and Paul Williams, as well as the following e-consultation special guest facilitators: Elko Brummelman, Sara Burke, Harris Gleckman, Peter Middlebrook, Natalie Palmer, Peter Stoett, and Ian Wallace. We wish to also thank Jessica Tsang and Ameya Naik, students from The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, for their valuable research assistance.

Project Leaders
Richard Ponzio, Project Director
William Durch, Director of Research
Marie-Laure Poiré, Production and Outreach Coordinator
Joris Larik, Senior Researcher