Peacebuilding requires patience

Doors are slamming all over the Western world; we shall not see them opened again in our life.

This sentiment - adapting a remark attributed to then British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey on the eve of World War I - seems to me at least as defensible as his prophecy.

The brute facts of poverty, or worse - starvation, wars, even slavery - impose themselves upon the world, more urgently than before because those the writer Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth are now mobile and have mobile phones to assist their journeys.

Where from 1980 through 2016 the US lived up to the words on the Statue of Liberty, which invited in the "huddled masses" by taking in more refugees than the rest of the world put together, the number of refugees resettled in the US has been sharply cut since last year.

Europe, after splurges of good-hearted mass inclusion of migrants, especially in Germany and Sweden, now recoils.

Britain's Migration Advisory Committee this week recommended the country should take in skilled workers - but cap the number of unskilled migrants it takes at a lower level.

That means most of the poor will not qualify.

The time for large humanitarian gestures and for interventions in the name of humanitarian goals is over.

The proponents of the "humanitarian invasions", like former British prime minister Tony Blair - are seen as toxic, including by many of those who supported their actions at the time.

Yet however averse the Western world is to intervention and to grand gestures, evidence grows that it is in the interests of both the wretched and the comfortable, for the latter to do something with the former.

Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation, which put more money than most countries into fighting disease and poverty in Africa, released a report this week, warning that "decades of stunning progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be on the verge of stalling".

If conditions cease to slowly improve and instead grow visibly worse, the rivers of desperate migrants will become floods.

We need to do something, and it must be large. But unlike those grand interventions designed to fix a state of affairs once and for all, this is a decades-long relationship of common need.

Not a US-style Marshall Plan to rescue the economies of other regions, but an engagement that recognises the smallness of the planet and the vastness of the reforms that need doing.

It needs close cooperation - and that means mutual learning, between the wretched and the comfortable.

There is an example of this. It is in the peacemaking business, a job that demands the patience of a cathedral-full of saints.

The non-governmental organisations in this sector celebrated the United Nation's Peace Day last Friday by publicising their request that "peacebuilding" be formally recognised as a dictionary word.

The Cambridge English Dictionary has already included the word. The Oxford English Dictionary is still reflecting. It is an NGO stunt with a purpose.

The purpose is both to remind us that development will not take place in war zones; and that though there are fewer wars between states, there are more conflicts within them.

That is where the peacebuilders work.

One of these is Mr Jonathan Powell, former chief of staff to Mr Blair, a central figure in getting a ceasefire in Northern Ireland in 1998, ending 30 years of "the Troubles".

Mr Powell has founded a conflict-resolution NGO called Inter Mediate - trading both on his Northern Ireland experience and on the contacts he made when with Mr Blair.

But he said: "Governments are less and less likely to accept mediation: you must work carefully round the edges, till you get the sides willing to open up channels and begin the process - which can be long."

If the age of the grand intervention has gone, that of the constant partnership - serving two, intimately connected self-interests - has to grow up in its place.

The writer co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is senior research fellow. This is an edited version of an article that appeared on Reuters.