Thank you very much.
I'll start with the second one first, since that's my area of responsibility within START.
In fact, there are very few countries now that we would refer to as “failed states”. The preference internationally within the OECD DAC and within the UN is to refer to countries that are “vulnerable”, or “fragile”, very much recognizing that different contexts require different kinds of approaches and that when we refer to them as fragile and vulnerable, these are countries that are least likely to be able to manage external or internal shocks as a result of armed violence or organized crime.
There's a whole complicated cocktail of reasons why a country may be vulnerable or fragile, and then it is incumbent on us to design our strategies to be able to address it effectively. So our preference is in fact to speak of them as vulnerable and fragile, because we think it more appropriately reflects the context those governments are facing. They may have an elected government, a strong national government, but they might not necessarily have control over a specific geographic area of their country. Therefore, we would say that they're fragile because there is internal unrest. A country might be very capable and strong but it may experience a catastrophic natural disaster, in which case then it becomes vulnerable. So it all depends on the context we're dealing with.
With respect to some of the challenges that we will face or that the international community faces, these are ones that you're very familiar with. Obviously, there are the country-specific challenges that depend on the context in which you're working. There are cultural and social issues that one has to grapple with and that one has to be very aware of when you're trying to engage in specific country situations. For us, there will be an issue of even just baselining our current approaches, to determine what we are already doing, then collecting all that information in one place, making sure we're very aware of how much of our programming, for instance, does take this into account, and doing it in a very systematic way. After making sure we have that, then we can measure how we're doing going forward.
As for challenges in capacity-building, again, it very much depends on the country that you're going to, and their level of awareness about these issues; then you'll design your capacity-building training and mentoring accordingly. Your mentoring and training in a place like Sudan is going to be very different from the mentoring and training we do in a place like Afghanistan, and that can be impacted for a whole variety of reasons. It depends on levels of literacy of the people you're training, and on the social and cultural context. Those are all the kinds of challenges we're dealing with.
At the international level, when you look back over the last 10 years from when 1325 was first adopted, you actually see a significant number of developments. You see the language being used increasingly. You see UN Security Council resolutions paying specific attention in the geographic context to the risks faced by women and girls. You see Security Council missions increasingly meeting specifically with women's organizations when they go on the ground. But there's still a gap between the aspirations that we as the international community have set out in the various women, peace, and security resolutions and our ability to actually implement them on the ground. Again, it's for a whole host of reasons, whether they're human resource, technical, socio-economic, or financial.