Comfort Ero is the President of the Crisis Group.

Its annual ‘10 Conflicts to Watch’ report has

become an anticipated calendar moment, setting the security and peace agenda for the year.
Beginning her career at the Crisis Group as West Africa Project Director in 2001 She spent
three years as the United Nations Special Representative to Liberia, and subsequently joined
various think tanks until returning to the Crisis Group in 2021. She is the first black woman to
lead the organization. Here, she talks to Roxanne Escobales about the obstacles facing
peacemaking.

One thing worth noting is that no region is untouched. While there are a
number of factors, it started around 2012 with the Arab Spring. It’s not as
though the era that went before, especially the 1990s, was glorious but there
was a sense in which everybody was mobilized towards multilateralism and
in which people were believers, faithfully ascribing to that.

Militarism is being preferred to the diplomatic dance.

But since 2012 the guardrails are slowly being chipped away. The tools that
were often used to prevent, avert or mitigate are no longer holding. Instead,
you are seeing more impunity. You can go as far as to say people are getting
away with murder.

On top of that we have the geopolitics of serious major power tensions – in

the context of fallout tensions from the Ukraine and West versus Russia, and
the United States versus China, which is the worst that we’ve seen in
contemporary times. There is a sense that militarism is preferred to the
diplomatic dance.

We are experiencing conflicts that could erupt into wider, regional wars:
Gaza, Ukraine, the Horn of Africa. Is the path to peace via a military
response or will it be political and diplomatic?

In the past 10 years there has been an appetite for militarization, even by
those intervening to help resolve the conflict. I understand the concept of
‘security first’, that you need an enabling environment, but the recent trend
has been that that’s the only option on the table and there is no room for
political dialogue.

Where we have seen efforts of diplomacy, they have been for the sake of
humanitarianism. For example, the Black Sea grain deal led by Turkey,
which opened a corridor to allow food to get out to those who needed it or the
use of prisoner exchanges in Gaza or Russia and Ukraine. But this hasn’t
necessarily led to the next stage. Instead, it has been seen as transactional.

Many leaders seem to not believe in the art of diplomacy or in multilateral

institutions any more. Actors we would often turn to are themselves burdened
with domestic issues. They have also become compromised by what they
have done in the past. We hear a lot of talk about double standards and
hypocrisy.