Based on a commitment to the democratic principles that underpin the Alliance itself, the purpose of the Partnership for Peace is to increase stability, diminish threats to peace and build strengthened security relationships between individual Euro-Atlantic partners and NATO, as well as among partner countries.
Activities on offer under the PfP programme touch on virtually every field of NATO activity, including defence-related work, defence reform, defence policy and planning, civil-military relations, education and training, military-to-military cooperation and exercises, civil emergency planning and disaster-response, and cooperation on science and environmental issues.
The essence of the PfP programme is a partnership formed individually between each Euro-Atlantic partner and NATO, tailored to individual needs and jointly implemented at the level and pace chosen by each participating government.
Over the years, a range of PfP tools and mechanisms have been developed to support cooperation through a mix of policies, programmes, action plans and arrangements. At the Lisbon Summit in November 2010, as part of a focused reform effort to develop a more efficient and flexible partnership policy, Allied leaders, decide to take steps to streamline NATO’s partnership tools in order to open all cooperative activities and exercises to partners and to harmonise partnership programmes. The new partnerships policy approved by Allied foreign ministers in Berlin in April opened all cooperative activities and exercises offered to PfP partners and some programmes offered in the PfP “toolbox” to all partners, whether they be Euro-Atlantic partners, countries participating in the Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, or global partners. (For more details, see For more details, see A-Z page on “Partnership tools")
The Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council provides the overall political framework for NATO’s cooperation with Euro-Atlantic partners and the bilateral relationships developed between NATO and individual partner countries within the Partnership for Peace programme.
There are currently 22 countries in the Partnership for Peace Programme, see list by country or date.