By Sadaf Sundas Riaz | SCN NEWS
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation ended its 15th Islamic Summit in Banjul on Sunday with Gaza at the centre of its diplomacy but with a less visible decision pointing to a broader ambition: developing the 57-member bloc's own capacity for conflict prevention, mediation, reconciliation and peace-building.
Leaders meeting on May 4-5 adopted the Banjul Declaration, a Final Communiqué and a separate resolution on Palestine and Al-Quds, calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza, unhindered humanitarian assistance and continued international support for Palestinian statehood. The summit also called for implementation of provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice, placing international law alongside political diplomacy in the bloc's response to the war.
But buried deeper in the 28-point Banjul Declaration was an institutional development with implications beyond Gaza. OIC leaders called for continued deliberations on fully activating the organisation's peace and security architecture and acknowledged Pakistan for initiating discussions on mechanisms covering conflict prevention, mediation, reconciliation and peace-building. The language suggests an effort to strengthen the organisation's ability to address conflicts before or alongside traditional summit-level political declarations.
That shift matters because the crises confronting OIC members increasingly cut across regions. The declaration paired Palestine with Jammu and Kashmir, called for a peaceful and inclusive Afghanistan, expressed support for Sahel states facing armed conflict, violent extremism, food insecurity and climate-linked vulnerabilities, and backed international accountability efforts concerning the Rohingya. Rather than treating these as isolated disputes, Banjul placed them within a broader debate over security, international law and multilateral action.
For Pakistan, the summit produced unusually explicit recognition on two diplomatic tracks. Leaders reaffirmed political, moral and diplomatic support for the Kashmiri people and called on the U.N. Security Council to implement its resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir. Separately, the declaration credited Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and other member states for efforts at the U.N. General Assembly that led to resolutions on combating Islamophobia, including the March 2024 measure calling for a U.N. special envoy to combat Islamophobia.
The Gambia itself illustrates that strategy. The declaration praised Banjul's role in pursuing proceedings at the International Court of Justice over alleged genocide and atrocities against the Rohingya in Myanmar on behalf of the OIC. For an organisation whose membership includes states with sharply different geopolitical alignments, legal and multilateral institutions provide one of the few arenas in which collective positions can potentially be converted into international action.
Gaza nevertheless remained the summit's defining immediate crisis. Leaders demanded an end to the fighting, rejected forced displacement of Palestinians, called for humanitarian corridors and reaffirmed support for a sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. A dedicated Palestine and Al-Quds resolution adopted at Banjul reinforced those positions, demonstrating the political priority attached to the conflict separately from the summit's wider declaration.
Banjul also linked traditional security questions with pressures that increasingly contribute to instability. The declaration cited climate change, food security, poverty, health and education while calling for accelerated implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. In its section on the Sahel, it explicitly connected armed conflict and violent extremism with food insecurity and vulnerabilities intensified by climate change.
The result was a summit broader than its Gaza headlines. OIC members emerged from Banjul with established positions on Palestine, Kashmir and Afghanistan, but also with language pointing toward preventive diplomacy, mediation and peace-building as institutional tools. Whether those mechanisms acquire operational weight will depend on what member governments do after the declaration.
That is the central test left by Banjul. With 57 members spanning Africa, Asia, the Middle East and beyond, the OIC already possesses geographic reach and diplomatic numbers. The summit's more consequential question is whether that collective weight can increasingly be converted into coordinated action before crises reach the point where declarations are the only instrument left. The OIC itself describes its membership as 57 states and the organisation as the world's second-largest intergovernmental body after the United Nations.