A/HRC/14/38 most importantly to protect humanity from weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. 19. Thierry Tardy, a faculty member at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, stated that in the context of contemporary peace operations, the notion of peace could be seen from different perspectives. The nature of contemporary peace operations was that they were aimed at transforming a situation of negative peace into a situation of positive peace. He indicated that they did so by transforming the society in which they intervened, through programmes relating to security sector reform, democratization, power-sharing, rule of law and others. 20. Concerning the link between the concepts of peace and human security, the expert observed that the activities of a peace operation took place at both the State and individual levels. At the State level, contemporary peace operations aimed at recreating a Weberian State that had the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, that embodied a good governance model, and that had running State institutions, including police and armed forces. Mr. Tardy noted, however, that peace operations were also centred on the individual, aimed at ensuring the security of people. He also noted that human security was understood as complementing State security, because it enhanced human rights and strengthened human development. It sought to protect people against a broad range of threats to individuals and communities and to empower them to act on their own behalf. As a consequence, positive peace was dependent upon security at the individual level. That human security dimension was being translated in the mandates of peace operations through different types of activities that targeted people, the most important one being the protection of civilians in post-conflict environments. Protection of civilians was about physical security, which was a key component of human security. 21. Mr. Tardy concluded by recalling that there had been debates on the nature of the peace that the international community was trying to establish through peace operations. One criticism had been that peacebuilding was about replicating a liberal, Western-style model in countries that were not necessarily ready to absorb it. Peacebuilding, however, was articulated around two pillars: the establishment of a democratic system and of a market economy. The problem was that the processes of political and economic liberalization had proved to be destabilizing, mainly because those processes were inherently conflict-ridden. They required a certain ability of the recipient society to absorb the changes. Yet, in many cases those societies had proved to be unprepared for those drastic evolutions. They lacked the institutional structures that would allow them to manage the types of competition that were induced by political and economic liberalization. As a result, in some cases peacebuilding processes had become counterproductive. That had raised the issue of the legitimacy of an external presence, as well as of the degree of local ownership that recipient societies enjoyed. On those two fronts, the expert noted, it seemed that even if peace were provided in a consent-based manner, in reality, it was by and large a peace that was imported, and rarely home-grown. III. Session 2: Content of the right of peoples to peace 22. Jarmo Sareva, Deputy Secretary-General of the Conference on Disarmament, recalled that, as declared in article 1 of the Charter of the United Nations, one of the purposes of the United Nations was to maintain international peace and security. However, there was no explicit reference to the right to peace in the Charter. The drafters had delegated to Member States the task of determining the nature and scope of that right, which was outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other documents. He noted that the right to peace was underdeveloped and had not yet been incorporated in the body of international law. It was moreover unclear how that right could impinge on the GE.10-12138 7