By Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former Britsh Ambassador to the UN and the UK government's former Special Representative in Iraq, where he worked alongside Paul Bremer in the Coalition Provisional Authority until his resignation in March 2004, three months before the end of the CPA's term.

I start from the point that not only is the world changing, but I'm conscious that what we have tried to do as government practitioners over the last couple of decades has in many ways not been successful in terms of preventing conflict, or reducing conflict, or constructing after conflict. The world is a difficult place, and you get lots of things wrong, and we don't have the instruments and the resources as the United Kingdom necessarily to do on the ground what our huge wisdom in the seminar might tell us to do.

Nevertheless, there are some things that we could have done better and there are things happening which we are not correctly analysing, and I think we need to have a discussion about those. Let me just say quickly some things that I think are true about the world now, the world of conflict now.

First of all, war and conflict used to be more often about territory than anything else. Now, conflict can be about territory but it is increasingly about ideas. And using your military - or your paramilitary or your resources in other ways - to deal with conflicts about ideas is quite a different business from dealing with conflict or war about territory, whether it's attack or defence about territory. And obviously we have been in the mode for at least the past hundred years, on the whole - and let's not forget we were a colonial power - of defending the United Kingdom and its wider interests and territories, rather than trying to gain other territory.

But our military forces and our resources for conflict - it's called 'defence' but it's not always defence - are geared for wars about territory. We are not necessarily constructing the right resources for wars about ideas, and the United States in particular - as the great military power, the great hard power - has focused its resources as our security leader, as our big brother on security issues, and as our essential defence, on the kind of conflict that is not necessarily breeding the greatest threat to the interests of the United States and its Allies.  There is a mismatch, and we need to discuss what that mismatch is.

First of all, just a couple of words about why it's a war of ideas, or a conflict about ideas in the world.

It's important to pay tribute to the international community, and particularly to the UN as a forum for intergovernmental activity, [for the fact] that inter-state war has very largely diminished in the years since 1945.  And there was obviously a particular global sigh of relief at the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War in 1989-90, and all sorts of exaggerated talk about 'the end of war', 'the end of history' etcetera. 

But we didn't realise that out of that greater freedom - for which the United States has been more responsible than any other nation - there have come other things. Out of globalisation, out of the spread of democracy, out of the spread of opportunity and of economic growth, there have come things that we didn't correctly analyse, or sufficiently analyse as being a threat to us.

Because what has not globalised, what has not got better since 1990, when economics and information and exchange and travel and the internet and all its works have opened things up for us; what has not globalised is politics and political structures and political relationships.

Indeed, they have polarised more than globalised. As the opportunity for using open space and open economics and open information has grown, politics and identity and culture and religion have tended to divide people more down into smaller entities than might have happened if there was a greater sense of global community about threats, and about the lack of opportunities, and about the needs of the developing world. If the pendulum had gone in that direction, we might have been more united.

The paradox is that with freedom and opportunity, the world has become more polarised.

We have to analyse that more carefully to see where the threats are coming from, and why it's resentment for the wish to return to a former age amongst fanatics and extremists, using the opportunity of modern weaponry and modern propaganda channels to do that better than government; why that has become the threat, and how we should adjust to it.

The UN has done a lot of things right. The UN, where we have asked it and resourced it, and not wrecked it through intergovernmental dissension, has been an effective organisation and has not got the credit for that.  Where it has gone wrong, it has mainly gone wrong for intergovernmental reasons, not professional UN reasons. Let's be absolutely clear about that.

But what the UN has not been able to do is to deal with conflicts within states rather than between them, because the UN is not an organisation that can invade sovereignty. And we have not really understood how we can take another tack when intergovernmental argument and dissent has ruined the collective spirit.

One of the consequences also of the way that the world has globalised and polarised is that governments have found it more difficult to govern. Because of the greater freedom, the greater space out there, and the greater resources out there, with all the opportunities for companies and private sector organisations and civil society and individuals to act without governments; because of all of that, non-governmental groups have taken on some of the areas where governments used to act.

Governments have lost their monopoly in various areas; most of all, of course, in the use of force, and in the holding of information, and in leadership of the community. And we need to analyse that.

But what I want to leave you with is just two or three thoughts.

If this is the world we are describing, what should we be doing? One thing, of course, is not to put all our eggs in the hard power basket, or in the basket of military forces in the way that we recognise them from the history of the past hundred years.

But there are also other things that we must recognise that governments have to do.
They have to understand the limits on sovereignty, even though the UN protects sovereignty; the limits of government to have the power to do things everywhere that they want to do. They have to broaden the range of instruments available to them to deal with the different kinds of conflict. They need to cooperate across borders as a higher priority than they actually give it.

And I could talk for half an hour about how my government, when I was ambassador for the United Nations, of course focused on the UN when there was a crisis; but when there wasn't, from one month to the next never really asked what was going on at the United Nations; was not really interested in what I was doing, because there were other areas that interested and absorbed them much more: the next NATO or the next EU meeting - much more important than what happened at the UN.  Or, of course, the whole range of domestic issues that feed into international affairs.

So cooperating needs a more conscious and proactive effort than you would imagine.  And strengthening the UN, which is necessary, needs some sacrifice and not just some analysis.  It's not happening. Why isn't it happening? Because it's not a priority. Yet it is a priority. Mistakes are being made there.

There's something else that I need to say on this subject, and that is that governments are not understanding that they must move away from centralisation.

Centralisation of the instruments of government and government delivery gives opportunities to those in those hidden spaces - it is sometimes called the increase in 'ungoverned space' - where, in the benign sense, NGOs and other societies are taking over the business of government, but also criminals and terrorists are taking over. And if the movement in any particular area is being governed by the locality, which is what is happening, then government also must allow the benign forces, the positive forces of that locality, to interact and to fight for the good cause in that locality, as against the bad cause. We have to encourage, away from centralised government, the non-governmental areas to take up the cudgels, if you like, against conflict where it matters.

We cannot stop these trends, we may have to join them in the way that we organise our government instruments.

This article is a slightly edited version of a talk given at the first meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues in Westminster on 6 February 2007 , and transcribe by Wendy Conway Lamb. The full text can be found here.