In recent years, the world has faced a series of crises that have challenged global peace and security and raised questions about the United Nations’ capacity to respond. While the first decade of the twenty-first century brought a decline in the number of violent conflicts, the last few years have witnessed a wave of new conflicts in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. At the same time, old conflicts have rekindled and sparked new violence in the Central Africa Republic, Mali, Nagorno-Karabakh, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Yemen. The rise of extremist groups such as the socalled Islamic State (ISIS) and Boko Haram...

This report identifies four common themes that have emerged from the three reviews: (1) sustaining peace and prevention; (2) gender equality and women’s participation; (3) collaborative and strategic partnerships; and (4) peoplecentered approaches. These four areas may provide the foundation for a more effective and less fragmented UN system and energize member states to transact business differently across the three UN pillars.

“Sustaining peace” is a new term embraced by the reviews as an overarching framework to guide the wide spectrum of UN peace and security work. Sustaining peace means putting member states and their populations in the lead, putting...

The operational recommendations put forward by the reviews can be broadly grouped in three areas for action: (1) integration and coherence; (2) financing; and (3) accountability, leadership, and governance. Several key challenges and opportunities in each area are explored below, followed by the existing connectors and processes through which both member states and the UN Secretariat have been able—in some instances—to overcome fragmentation and work across silos to address today’s complex and interconnected global challenges.

At an open debate of the Security Council in February 2016 on the review of the peacebuilding architecture, a number of member states...

Despite the UN’s well-documented and often lamented fragmentation, member states and the UN Secretariat have, at times, been able to work across silos. To leverage the synergies identified in the reviews, the UN can build on existing connectors, activate new ones the reviews recommend, and turn ad hoc precedents of overcoming silos into practice (see Figure 3). In some cases, connectors have been funded by extra-budgetary voluntary contributions; where these connectors have proven effective, core funding—even when voluntary—should be shifted to support them in a more sustainable and predictable way.

The UN system can build upon the many...

The three major reviews of UN peace operations, the UN peacebuilding architecture, and the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security present clear opportunities to recommit the organization as a whole to making itself “fit for purpose” and able to respond to challenges and crises more effectively. As the secretary-general put it, “The various reviews and initiatives recognize that we cannot continue to address problems in separate or unrelated silos; we need to find the linkages among the reviews and work together so that the recommendations add up together to more than the sum of their...