Just peace postponed. Unending peace processes and frozen conflicts (original) (raw)
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The Making of Peace: Processes and Agreements
Armed Conflict Survey, 2018
The term 'peace process' captures a wide range of different phenomena primarily related to the (mostly) international management of intra-state conflicts. As a label, it has been applied to processes at the end of which some form of peace had actually been achieved (such as in Northern Ireland), as well as to processes that are outright failures, including extreme cases like Rwanda where a peace agreement in 1993 became the precursor of a genocide in 1994. Between these extremes, however, a third type of peace process can be identified that would be better described as protracted, and which can take the form either of a serial failure to make a negotiated agreement last (such as the situation in South Sudan since late 2013), or of processes that are caught in more or less stable ceasefires without achieving a sustainable conflict settlement (such as Ukraine). This categorisation is admittedly crude: the great variety of actors involved, the relationships they have with each other and the types of agreements that they achieve (or not) speak to the uniqueness of each such process, but underneath the specifics of each situation, there are important commonalities that many peace processes share and that are worth exploring in an effort to understand the causes of both success and failure. Broadly defined, a peace process might be understood as the process towards a non-military solution sought by the respective parties to a conflict, often supported by international involvement. Yet the local and international commitments that are necessary to achieve durable peace are not always sincere or sustained; they can be undermined by domestic and/or third parties; and they may suffer from unrealistic expectations that, if unfulfilled, cause peace processes to stall or collapse back into violent conflict. Given the human and material costs of conflict and its
PARADOXES OF POST-CONFLICT PEACEBUILDING: THE DYNAMICS OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION
The paper mainly looks at the two-edged saw nature of peace building measures that are usually introduced and implemented in post-conflict societies. It makes the point that if the implementation of such measures are not than with the most care, they can produce unintended negative results as much as they present a good opportunity for sustainable peace in post-conflict areas. It ends with some recommendations.
The importance of ‘prenegotiation’ within peace processes following protracted conflict.
This paper critically analyses the attributes and merits of the ‘prenegotiation’ phase within the dynamic wider peace process. I use the completed El Salvadorian and the present Colombian processes as a comparative framework, to argue that without this initial stage, the subsequent ‘negotiation’ and ‘implementation’ stages of arbitration will transpire with a diminished efficacy and ultimately a lesser likelihood of achieving a meaningful and long-term sustainable peace, or at worse would simply not take place at all.
Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies
Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, 2007
Prior to the Second World War, interstate conflict was the predominant form of organized violence in international relations. During the Cold War and the period that has followed it, intrastate violence and intercommunal conflict have replaced interstate violence as the principal form of conflict in international relations. However, what is striking about the international conflict trends is that over the past two decades the number of civil wars, measured by their frequency and aggregate levels of violence, has been on the decline. This trend is now well-documented in a large number of studies, including, most recently, the Human Security Report (Mack 2005) of the Liu Institute of International Studies at the University of British Columbia. What is also borne out in these studies is that many of these conflicts-Bosnia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Mozambique, the conflict between North and South Sudan, El Salvador, Guatemala, the border dispute between Peru and Ecuador, and now perhaps the conflict in Aceh-have been settled or 'resolved' through a process of negotiation, upsetting a longstanding, post-Westphalian trend where wars traditionally ended when one party defeated the other on the battlefield. And even in those cases of those perennial conflicts-Israel-Palestine, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Mindanao, and Korea-that are still ongoing , negotiations between the warring parties have rarely been off the table. In terms of war termination, there are two trends to explore. The first is the apparent decline in the outbreak of wars. There is obviously a need to explore the factors or forces that are shaping and influencing these international conflict trends in order to understand better why some conflicts are diminishing and whether or not this tendency will continue (Marshall and Gurr 2005). 1 The second trend is the growing interest in negotiated settlements, which is the area that this paper will explore. The objectives of this paper are as follows: (1) to discuss why warring parties in recent years have increasingly turned to the 'negotiation option'-usually with the assistance of third parties, including third-party mediators-in order to settle their differences; and (2) to explore some of the different approaches to the study and practice of negotiation in the burgeoning conflict management literature.
2017
Functional and Dysfunctional Themes in Successful Peace Agreements Arising From Intractable Conflicts by Sharon Catherine Ryan MA, University of Alberta, 1990 BComm, University of Alberta, 1984 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy College of Management and Technology Walden University March 2017 Abstract An important challenge facing humanity today is to determine how to resolve intractable conflicts. Intractable conflicts are intensely violent conflicts that are difficult to resolve and last at least one generation. The purpose of this study was to explore the themes leaders used in resolving intractable conflicts by writing peace agreements, whichAn important challenge facing humanity today is to determine how to resolve intractable conflicts. Intractable conflicts are intensely violent conflicts that are difficult to resolve and last at least one generation. The purpose of this study was to explore the themes lea...
Peace agreements in armed conflicts: focusing on finding a solution to the conflict incompatibility
Pathways to Peace and Security, 2021
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s (UCDP) Peace Agreement Dataset was first published in 2006. Its main goal was to provide the research community with a dataset on peace agreements that was not linked to conflict termination, i. e. included both successful and failed agreements. The latest update of the dataset includes 355 peace agreements concluded in the 1975–2018 period. A number of studies have been based on the dataset over the years. The dataset is unique in its strict connection to the UCDP conflict data and in its focus on the conflict dyad, actors, and the conflict incompatibility. The dataset’s focus on only those agreements that involve the dyadic relationship between primary warring parties – between governments and rebel groups or between two governments – has direct policy implications, as it is exactly these parties who need to change their stances on incompatibilities in order to solve a conflict. Also, the Peace Agreement Dataset’s focus on agreements that addres...