On 23 April 2018 in New York, Slovakia and South Africa, on behalf of the UN Group of Friends of SSR, co-hosted a High-Level Roundtable on Security Sector Reform and Sustaining Peace. The event took place on the eve of the High-Level Meeting of the UN General Assembly on “Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace” and was organized with the support of the Security Sector Reform Unit of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), the Bureau for Policy and Program Support at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), and the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD).

The High-Level Roundtable was the third in a series of three high-level events held in the period of a year. It was preceded by a High-Level Dialogue on Global Experiences in SSR, hosted in New York in May 2017 – especially a seminar on “The Nexus between SSR, Conflict Prevention and Peace Sustainment” co-hosted by South Africa and Slovakia, and a seminar on “Conflict Prevention and Peace Sustainment on the African Continent” co-hosted by South Africa and Senegal – as well as a High-Level Conference on the “Role of Security Sector Reform in Sustaining Peace: Challenges and Opportunities” that was hosted by Slovakia on 5-6 June 2017 in Bratislava. These events served to highlight important challenges to SSR support in the context of sustaining peace that needed to be addressed, and to develop a series of recommendations worth pursuing further.

The High-Level Roundtable on Security Sector Reform and Sustaining Peace held on 23 April 2018 sought to build on important insights from these past events, as well as on the body of relevant policy and research that has been developed over the past year in the areas of sustaining peace and SSR.