Civil Society Leads Track II Diplomacy Efforts with North Korea

In July 2013, it will be 60 years since the Korean War Armistice was concluded, but there is still no peace in the Korean Peninsula.  In November, 3P Human Security and the Alliance for Peacebuilding hosted a roundtable discussion on civil society engagement with North Korea featuring Peter van Tuijl, Executive Director of the Global Secretariat of GPPAC (Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict) Secretariat.  Van Tuijl reported on a high-level Track II diplomacy effort in Pyongyang, Beijing, and the region undertaken by members of GPPAC’s North East Asia network over the last two years, including the most recent trip in October. GPPAC’s efforts are currently focused on promoting dialogue and building trust between Six Party countries in order to help create the conditions for moving the peace process forward even while political diplomacy is stalled at the Track I level.  Following the roundtable discussion, Van Tuijl headed to Capitol Hill where he lead a briefing on civil society diplomacy with North Korea with staff from several Congressional offices.

GPPAC’s delegation to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was hosted by the Korean National Peace Committee (KNPC) in Pyongyang.  The GPPAC delegation included members from Australia, China, Ghana, the Netherlands and Japan. A reflection on the visit was published in the China Daily, and can be found here.

Peter van Tuijl leads a Capitol Hill briefing on North Korea.

Peter van Tuijl is Executive Director of the Global Secretariat of GPPAC (Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict)in The Hague, a world-wide civil society network that works to promote conflict prevention and peacebuilding. In between 2000-2007, he lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, and worked as a  Civil Society expert with the UNDP-led Partnership for Governance Reform and as a Senior Technical Advisor for a project to combat corruption in the Indonesian National Police, under the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), United States Department of Justice. Earlier, Peter worked as a Senior Advisor with OxfamNovib, concentrating on NGO advocacy capacity building, and served as Executive Secretary to the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID). He has published a number of articles in Academic Journals and other media, on the role of NGOs, transnational civil society, human rights, NGO accountability as well as on social and political developments in Indonesia. He is co-editor with Lisa Jordan of “NGO Accountability, Politics, Principles and Innovations“ (Earthscan 2006).