About us
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues (APPGCI) was set up in the UK Parliament in September 2006 to provide a forum for dialogue between Parliamentarians, Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) and civil society on alternative methods of preventing and resolving violent conflict.

The APPGCI is firmly anchored inside Parliament, while working closely with peace and conflict professionals from other sectors. Our dialogue partners include officials from the Department for International Development (DFID), the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), as well as various conflict NGOs, academics, members of the business community and the media.

The APPGCI focuses on violent conflict both internationally and domestically, which is reflected in our work with organisations both from abroad and within the UK.

Our aims
APPGCI’s aim is to influence HMG, and by extension, other governments, to improve resource allocation and capacity building for conflict prevention, non-violent conflict resolution and peace building. It does this by encouraging dialogue, on the basis of expert information and opinion from across the political spectrum, on issues relating to conflict; especially the practical means to prevent, transform and resolve violent conflict, both in the UK and internationally.

The APPGCI is the only All-Party Parliamentary Group approaching conflict in this generic and systematic fashion.

Our organisational structure
The APPGCI currently consists of twenty ‘named’ members from both Houses of Parliament, and a further thirty Parliamentarians have expressed support or interest.

The Group is headed by three Co-Chairs, one from each of the three main parties – Simon Hughes MP (Liberal Democrat), John McDonnell MP (Labour) and Gary Streeter MP (Conservative). They are supported by a small Secretariat of non-Parliamentarians, and guided by an Advisory Group of independent experts.

The APPGCI was formally entered in the Parliamentary Register of All-Party Groups on 21 December 2006 and held its inaugural meeting on 7 February 2007.

Our work
Our work aims to challenge traditional attitudes held in Parliament and HMG towards conflict. The rationale underlying our actions is that unless practical and clearly effective alternatives are offered, policy-makers will always tend to favour ‘default’ methods for dealing with conflict, especially at times of crisis, and violence will be an early option.

For example, for every dollar spent globally on conflict prevention and conflict resolution by non-military means, nearly two thousand times as much is spent on defence and the military. The average direct cost of one violent conflict is $64 billion. With just a fraction of that, the violence could be nipped in the bud, thousands of lives saved and many millions in post-conflict reconstruction costs avoided.

Additionally, the APPGCI’s approach seeks to highlight ways to transform the structural and cultural (i.e. root) causes of conflict, as well as its more immediate triggers.

Since the early 1990s more wars have ended by negotiated settlement than by military victory, and yet the chances of violent conflicts restarting are still almost 50%. Research has shown that this is most likely to happen where there is no systematic bottom-up approach, or ‘insider’ effort to match the ‘outsider’ intervention. In other words, ignition or re-ignition of violent conflict is much more likely where local peace builders are insufficiently mobilised or resourced to engage in the peace process, to feel part of the agreement and to help carry out its terms.

The APPGCI therefore advocates improved resource allocation and capacity building for early-warning and conflict prevention initiatives, rather than focusing on conflict resolution in its aftermath, and endorses an integrated top-down/bottom up approach with stronger involvement of local peace builders.

Accordingly, Early Day Motion 1248 on Conflict Prevention put forward by the APPGCI earlier this year ‘applauds the many local initiatives around the world that help to prevent conflict’, ‘calls on the Government to carry out a study into the cost-effectiveness of local and regional peace building initiatives’ and ‘encourages the Government to give greater priority to conflict prevention work…in particular to fund more local conflict prevention initiatives.’

Why Parliament?
As the nature of violent conflict has shifted away from traditional inter-state conflict towards intra-state violence, the APPGCI believes that Parliamentarians worldwide are uniquely positioned to play a leadership role in their societies and to strengthen bottom-up peacebuilding.

In this regard, the APPGCI will be pressing for the UK Parliament to draw the attention of HMG, the media and the public to prospective violent conflicts, and to argue for a greater allocation of resources for preventive action and increased capacity building. Specifically, UK Parliamentarians can:

· foster political attention and raise awareness, both with the media and the broader public
· hold HMG accountable
· influence legislation
· improve resource allocation and capacity building for conflict prevention
· support advocacy work with concrete action

Additionally, the APPGCI will seek to develop its international links, primarily through its partnership with the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention and Human Security . An initiative of the EastWest Institute, the APPGCI organised the launch of the Parliamentarians Network in Westminster in March 2009.

The future
Non-violent approaches to conflict prevention, transformation, resolution and reconciliation are firmly on the political map.  They will become increasingly important as the realisation continues to grow that military approaches to conflict have an extremely limited use and often simply make the underlying problem worse.

There are better ways of managing conflict, at all levels, and the APPGCI will continue to search them out and present them to Parliament, HMG, the media and the public at large.