UN General Assembly
1994

Such regional organizations and arrangements themselves can play a most useful role. We should not have unrealistic expectations of them because most cannot match the capacity of global bodies to marshal resources for peace-building or, at the other end of the scale, for military responses to crises. They nevertheless offer a way of bringing together the parties to disputes in a constructive and non-confrontational framework. We welcome recent developments to strengthen regional approaches, in particular the recent inaugural meeting of the Regional Forum of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, with its evident willingness to develop preventive diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region. We hope that others will share our interest in exploring the scope for establishing regional peace and security resource centres - to advance these objectives under the banner of regional organizations or the United Nations itself, or both.