Functional and Dysfunctional Themes in Successful Peace Agreements Arising From Intractable Conflicts (original) (raw)

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...

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.

PEACE NEGOTIATIONS AND PROCESSES: NATURE APPROACHES AND CHALLENGES

Peace Negotiations and Processes: Nature, Approaches and Challenges (Journal of Conflict Early Warning and Response, Vol.1 No.1 Sept-Dec. 2015, pp. 97-106), 2015

Peace negotiations often seek to resolve protracted conflicts and provide a vision for inter-group or interstate relations at the local, national and regional level. This is done through reaching a peace accord or agreement. As agreements are reached on key issues, the foundations of peace are strengthened. Nevertheless, for peace to take root, negotiations are an important starting point. In many cases, the negotiation efforts fail and recourse to more violence follows. After careful examination, it turns out that sometimes the approaches and strategies applied to such peace negotiations add up to factors that cause either their failure or even the failure of the agreements that culminate from them. This article therefore examines negotiation as a tool for conflict prevention, management and resolution. It explores the nature, elements and processes of an effective peace negotiation which has its ultimate goal of establishing a sustainable peace agreement and consequently building durable peace.

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