Stability Leaders Forum (SLF) History and Development


The Stability Leaders Forum (SLF), founded in 2013, brings together leadership and working-level staff from countries with civilian stabilization organizations similar to the United States’ Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO).

The forum established a network of government representatives experienced in leading civilian stabilization responses. The SLF helps establish and strengthen relationships, enhance information and knowledge sharing, coordinate efforts, and improve our collective efforts to prevent and respond to conflict.

The inaugural gathering generated a framework for member countries to discuss ideas, identified lessons learned from previous interventions, and pinpointed areas of cooperation. CSO led a sub-group of The Netherlands, Denmark and UK to create a $30 million security initiative to support local police in liberated areas of Syria. Our SLF partners provided more than half of the program’s funding.

In addition to potential programmatic cooperation, the SLF provides a forum for CSO to promulgate broader thematic issues. Subsequent annual meetings focused on topics such as atrocity prevention, election violence, early-warning indicators of conflict, violent extremism, mediation, the role of gender in conflict, monitoring and evaluation techniques, and research methods and goals. Members also contributed to input for Germany’s 2015 security sector reform conference and established an Early Warning and Action Working Group in 2016, designed to mitigate fragility and violent conflict.

SLF member countries include: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom.