About us

All participating members have different skills, expertise and experience and they therefore have a unique perspective to offer the rest of the team. Ultimately, the community was founded upon the concept of allowing different organisations to share their experience of best practises from working within the security sector.

The origins of the Global Partnership for Security and Peace (GPSP) are rooted in a project undertaken by RESDAL in 2017. The project focused on strengthening civil society capacities in the key areas of security, defence and security sector reform. It was framed within the context of South-South cooperation which consequently allowed RESDAL to share Latin America’s experience with other regions, with a core focus on Latin America’s best practices and successful experiences in the field. Thereafter, a series of different workshops were held in Panama, Argentina and then Liberia, Malaysia and Morocco with participants from civil society organisations (CSO) based in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. These consisted of disseminating different experiences in the field, visits to state institutions dedicated to security and defence and exchanging ideas about strengthening the capacity of CSOs in security sector reform through cooperation and knowledge exchange. Each successful experience paved the way for RESDAL to expand the project to include more objectives, topics and participants in the subsequent workshops.

Following the workshops, a first meeting took place in Berlin in November 2019. During this meeting, participants, drawing on an extensive variety of views and experiences, discussed the predominant political, social and cultural issues which presented a specific challenge to the security situation in each region. This activity allowed participants to recognise that, despite the existence of regional specificities, many of the issues raised are shared across the world. Consequently, it was noted that these mutual challenges provide an ample opportunity for different regional organisations to exchange knowledge and experience and, ultimately, foster a global community of practise to tackle and mitigate the most urgent security concerns

Naturally, the onset of the pandemic presented some obstacles to consolidating the bases and continuing the work of the GPSP. However, these challenging circumstances allowed the GPSP to recognise the importance of civil society’s work across key security issues. Therefore, the community continued to maintain contact and link up capacities to harness their potential as a working group, subsequently producing 3 newsletters. Each of these newsletters assumed a different core focus and provided recommendations for policymakers around a set of issues framed within the context of COVID-19. During this same period, a meeting took place remotely in December 2020. There were a number of participants from 14 different countries and from various organisations including Think Tanks and NGOs. The meeting’s overarching goal consisted of strengthening the GPSP and reinforcing the working group dynamic. Other objectives included advancing current projects, exchanging ideas about new potential projects, and providing an opportunity for individual members to build working relationships.

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