From Risk to Resilience: Embedding Human Rights Due Diligence in Peacebuilding

In fragile and conflict-affected settings, preventing violence requires more than reactive responses to crises. It calls for the ability to anticipate risks, understand their complex drivers, and adapt interventions before harm occurs. This panel examines how Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) and the broader UN human rights system can function as strategic levers for sustaining peace, bringing together insights from policy, operational practice, and grassroots perspectives.

The discussion will explore how the UN human rights system generates distinctive and actionable early warning signals of violent conflict, and how these signals can be translated into timely, integrated prevention strategies. It will showcase innovative approaches to HRDD that move beyond procedural compliance towards deep, field-informed analysis — triangulating political and social dynamics, legal and oversight frameworks, organisational structures, and individual-level factors such as trauma, incentives, and patterns of maladaptation.

The panel will also address critical gaps in current peacebuilding frameworks, particularly the underexplored role of migration and mobility in shaping risks and resilience. It will consider lessons from contexts where supporting disengagement from armed groups, safeguarding victims’ rights, and strengthening the role of frontline civil society actors are essential to both effective HRDD and sustainable peace.

By connecting global frameworks with local realities, the session seeks to reframe HRDD not simply as a tool for mitigating risk but as a means of shaping pathways to peace, making prevention more adaptive, inclusive, and impactful.