Comparative Peace Processes E-Book

Jonathan Tonge

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 532

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015

The term �peace process� is now widely used to describe attempts to manage and resolve conflict. As the nature of conflict has changed, so the range of available tools for producing peace has grown. Alongside a plethora of political actions, there is now a greater international awareness of how peace can be brokered and policed. As a result, peace processes now extend well beyond the actuality of ceasefires and an absence of war to cover legacy issues of victims, truth and reconciliation.

This book expertly examines the practical application of solutions to conflict. The first part analyses various political means of conflict management, including consociational power-sharing, partition, federalism and devolution. The second explores the extent to which these political formulas have been applied - or ignored - in a wide range of conflicts including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, the Basque Region and Sri Lanka.

Comparative Peace Processes combines optimism with a realist approach to conflict management, acknowledging that the propensity of dominant states to engage in political experimentation is conditioned by the state of conflict. It will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in general theories of political possibilities in peace processes and the practical deployment of political ideas in conflict zones.

Leseprobe

Comparative Peace Processes

Comparative Peace Processes

JONATHAN TONGE

polity

Copyright © Jonathan Tonge 2014

The right of Jonathan Tonge to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

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Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8415-4

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

About the Author

Introduction

1  The Concept of a Peace Process

2  Prescriptions for Conflict Management or Resolution

3  Peace: Implementation; Maintenance; Reconciliation

4  Deadlock: The Palestinian ‘Peace Process’

5  Conflict and Confessionalism in Lebanon

6  Consociational Triumph: Northern Ireland’s Peace Process

7  Confederalism and Consociation in Bosnia-Herzegovina

8  ETA’s Slow Defeat: The Basque ‘Peace Process’

9  When a Peace Process Fails: Sri Lanka

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

A large number of debts have been incurred in the publication of this book, but I particularly wish to thank colleagues in the Department of Politics, the School of Histories, Cultures and Languages and the Sydney Jones Library at the University of Liverpool, for offering an environment conducive to research. Polity has been a very patient publisher and I thank them for their generosity. Researching and writing the book has taken a considerable period at the expense of quality time with Maria, Joseph, Frances and Connell. I am very grateful to my family for their considerable forbearance, and this book is dedicated to them.

Abbreviations

AIPAC

American Israeli Public Affairs Committee

AMODEG

Mozambican Association of the War Demobilized

ANC

African National Congress

CIRA

Continuity Irish Republican Army

DDR

Demilitarization, demobilization and reintegration

DUP

Democratic Unionist Party

EA

Basque Solidarity

EAE-ANV

Basque Nationalist Action

EHAK

Communist Party of the Basque Homelands

ELA

Basque Workers Solidarity

ELN

National Liberation Army (Colombia)

ETA

Basque Homeland and Freedom

FALANTIL

Armed Forces for the National Liberation of East Timor

FARC

Revolutionary Armed Forces (Colombia)

FMLN

Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (El Salvador)

GAL

Anti-Terrorist Liberation Group

GDP

Gross domestic product

GFA

Good Friday Agreement

GNP

Gross National Product

HDZ

Croatian Democratic Union

HET

Historical Enquiries Team

ICC

International Criminal Court

ICTY

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

IFOR

Implementation Force

IPKF

Indian Peacekeeping Force

IRA

Irish Republican Army

JVP

People’s Liberation Front (Sri Lanka)

KAS

Patriotic Socialist Coordination (Basque Country)

KLA

Kosovo Liberation Army

KPNLF

Khmer People’s National Liberation Front

LAB

Nationalist Workers Committee

LTTE

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

MPLA

People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

PDK

Party of Democratic Kampuchea

PIC

Peace Implementation Council

PIRA

Provisional Irish Republican Army

PLO

Palestine Liberation Organization

PKK

Kurdistan Workers Party

PNU

Party of National Unity

PNV

Basque Nationalist Party

PP

People’s Party

PRK

People’s Republic of Kampuchea

PSOE

Spanish Socialist Workers Party

RENAMO

Mozambican National Resistance

RIRA

Real Irish Republican Army

RUC

Royal Ulster Constabulary

SDA

Party of Democratic Action

SDLP

Social Democratic and Labour Party

SDS

Serbian Democratic Party

SFOR

Stabilization Force

SWAPO

South West Africa People’s Organization

TELO

Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization

TNA

Tamil National Alliance

TULF

Tamil United Liberation Front

UFF

Ulster Freedom Fighters

UN

United Nations

UNF

United National Front

UNIFIL

United Nations Interim Force

UNITA

National Union for the Independence of Angola

UNSCR

United Nations Security Council Resolution

UUP

Ulster Unionist Party

UVF

Ulster Volunteer Force

About the Author

Jonathan Tonge is Professor of Politics at the University of Liverpool and a former Chair and President of the Political Studies Association of the UK. He has published 14 books and more than 50 journal articles and chapters, mainly on political aspects of peace processes and conflict, including pieces in Political Psychology, Party Politics, West European Politics, Political Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence, Irish Political Studies, Representation, Parliamentary Affairs, Nations and Nationalism and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. His 2010 book on Former Prisoners and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland, co-authored with Peter Shirlow, Jim McAuley and Catherine McGlynn, won the Political Studies Association of Ireland prize for the Politics book of the year. Professor Tonge has completed six Economic and Social Research Council and two Leverhulme Trust funded projects over the last decade.

Introduction

Recent decades have seen the growth of the term ‘peace process’ to describe the often protracted period of ceasefires, negotiations, settlement and implementation of deals designed to achieve peace. The proliferation of peace processes does not herald a more peaceful geopolitical environment. Many peace processes end in failure, some catastrophically, but their expansion does highlight the capacity and desire for peace-building. The persistence of wars has been accompanied by burgeoning attempts to ameliorate conflict via processes embracing mitigation, conciliation and reconciliation, increasingly via third-party intervention. Realist perspectives will continue to point to the anarchic nature of the world system, shaped by nations having permanent interests rather than enduring allies, maintaining the inevitability of war. They point to the mediocre record of peace processes as hopes against history or actuality. Longitudinal examination of conflicts demonstrates that peace processes offer only a modest record in solving conflict. Nonetheless, there is tentative evidence that this record is improving and that peacemaking and peacekeeping capacities are becoming more adept. Successful peace processes have now been developed in every region of the world (Wallensteen 2011). It is necessary to explain how and why this progression is evident.

This book undertakes a number of tasks, adopting a distinctive analytical approach. It marries analysis of the growth of peace processes, assessment of the tools of conflict management and analysis of the increasing importance of post-conflict restorative justice with a series of case studies. Whilst comprehensive coverage of all peace processes is obviously impossible, this book chooses a particular selection of the most successful processes in terms of reductions in violence, such as those in Bosnia and Northern Ireland and the most unsuccessful, such as in Sri Lanka, which had a catastrophic end, and that in Palestine, bereft of any obvious chance of political success. The book thus avoids the possible trap of choosing winners and readily acknowledges the limitations of even the most successful processes. Thus alongside the major political progress in the Bosnian and Northern Irish cases there has been only modest societal reintegration. A key feature of the book is its detailed exploration of consociational power-sharing as a means of conflict management. Given the shift in conflict away from inter-state to intra-state forms and the predominance of inter-ethnic rivalries, power-sharing between antagonists has become a key tool of diverting conflict into politics. The focus on consociation does not make great claims for its success and acknowledges its limitations, but stresses its importance as a model now regularly deployed, one which can be re-defined according to circumstance to at least have some utility.

In undertaking this combination of universal and local conflict analysis, this book assesses the growth of peace processes and considers their sequencing, analysing what might be considered the essential and probable components of successful processes. The book explores which types of process succeed and why, discussing key variables such as the nature of conflict – inter- or intra-state; the length of war and the ability to utilize external brokers. The volume also examines the rise of a wide range of measures designed to offer a fair political settlement to antagonists. It considers vexed problems of implementing peace and achieving restorative and retributive justice for different groups, ranging from families of victims to war criminals. The focus of the work is upon the political tools available to broker, implement and maintain peace. The book is deliberately aimed at the politics of peace processes, not upon the military aspects of conflict which pre-date (and often accompany) peace processes.

In attempting these tasks, the book is divided into two sections. The first outlines the development of peace processes. Chapter 1 begins with an assessment of the growth of the term ‘peace process’ and explores its usefulness weighed against realist assumptions of the ubiquity of violence, empirical evidence of the persistence of conflict and the failure of a majority of peace processes. The chapter highlights the rise of peace processes amid the partial displacement of inter-state wars by intra-state conflict and discusses which type of conflict may be easier to settle. The chapter examines the common sequencing of peace processes, from secret talks to ceasefires, implementation and future prevention. The essential and useful features of peace processes are identified and the relative importance of endogenous and exogenous factors considered.

Chapter 2 begins with a critical assessment of ideas of ripeness for peace, contending that asymmetry may be as liable to yield peace as a supposedly mutual hurting stalemate. The chapter then examines the utility of various political prescriptions applied to conflict arenas, including consociation, partition, secession and devolution. Amid a growth in ethno-national conflicts around issues of identity, the chapter assesses the extent to which power-sharing deals based upon proportionality for ethnic pillars can endure, amid sectarian retrenchment and polarization.

Chapter 3 looks at the difficulties of implementing peace processes. The chapter examines the capabilities of United Nations peacekeeping forces in physically preventing re-ignition of conflict and assesses how reconstruction can take place after war. It then turns to an exploration of the psychological healing attempted as the denouement of peace processes, via such mechanisms as truth and reconciliation commissions. It contrasts the ‘soft’ approach of truth commissions with the ‘hard’ retributive ending of war crimes trials.

The second section of the book offers empirical scrutiny of a selection of peace processes of recent decades. There is little point in merely selecting the most recent or the most dated such processes, but much greater value in analysing how the modus operandi of peace processes have varied across different types of conflict and across time. Moreover, to select peace processes which appear to have worked would offer scant value. As such, the case studies include some deemed broadly successful; others far less able to resolve underlying problems and an example of one which collapsed amid slaughter precipitated by the successful pursuit of victory by one side.

Chapter 4 analyses the peace process in Palestine. It assesses the scope for dilution of the territorial claims (infused to different degrees by religious perspectives) of Eretz Israel or a full Palestinian state based on pre-1948 borders. The chapter focuses upon fundamentalist Israeli and Palestinian (Hamas) political-religious narratives. It examines the failure of previous attempts at conflict management, assessing whether blame was attributable primarily to the structure of the deals or the flaws of the agents. The chapter concentrates particularly upon the false hope of the Oslo Agreement of the 1990s and explores whether territorial boundaries can ever be agreed for the much-vaunted two-state solution.

Chapter 5 assesses the Lebanese peace process which produced the 1989 Ta’if Agreement and discusses the extent to which loyalty to the state of Lebanon has been secured in subsequent decades. The attempts at establishing internal fidelity to ‘project Lebanon’ and to engage in state-building are discussed in the context of persistent external interference within the Lebanese polity and the development of Hezbollah as a governing force across much of the south of the country.

Chapter 6 examines the Northern Ireland peace process. It explores the extent to which the 1998 Good Friday Agreement secured a definitive peace in establishing consociational power-sharing political structures. The chapter measures the extent to which it has been possible to diminish sectarianism amid institutional recognition of ostensibly competitive Protestant-British-Unionist and Catholic-Irish-Nationalist identities. The persistence of low-level violence via spoiler groups, in the form of ‘dissident’ IRAs, is also assessed.

Chapter 7 dissects the peace process in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It explores the consociational and confederal aspects of the 1995 Dayton Agreement and assesses the contribution of each to freezing ethno-national hostilities between Croats, Serbs and Bosnians. The chapter examines the degree to which reintegration has been evident since the end of hostilities. It discusses the importance of external intervention in forcing and implementing peace, and evaluates how the avoidance of blame inherent in the Dayton deal gradually shifted towards the determined pursuit of war criminals.

The final two chapters examine what happens when peace processes collapse entirely, amid very different levels of violence, but with the state determined in both cases to ensure the absolute defeat of insurgents without offering any tangible rewards for their rebellion. Chapter 8’s exploration of the Basque peace process stretches the label of ‘peace process’, as what has mainly occurred is a gradual petering out of ETA’s violent campaign to achieve an independent Basque homeland. The chapter discusses the Spanish government’s pressure upon ETA and also discusses how the government has responded politically to demands for greater Basque autonomy or independence. The various ETA ceasefires are explored in the context of the organization’s difficulty in sustaining a credible armed campaign.

Chapter 9, in its dissection of Sri Lanka, shows how a peace process can collapse via a determined onslaught from a state. Here, the promise of peace deals dissipated amid the rout of the Tamil Tigers by the Sinhalese government. The chapter traces the reluctance of both sides to clinch a permanent agreement and assesses whether the Tamils’ demand for an independent homeland was ever viable. The denouement of this ‘peace process’, the destruction of the Tamils, was accompanied by numerous allegations of war crimes against the Sri Lankan forces.

Through its initial comparative approach and the deployment of these case studies, the book attempts to establish the central and peripheral aspects of peace processes. It explores whether the political tools associated with the management of conflict have become more nuanced and successful in, as a minimum requirement, harnessing conflict in new political institutions or constitutional structures. Alternatively, are attempts at managing conflicts through the prism of ethnic identity politics ultimately doomed to failure, as issues of sovereignty and territory continue to preoccupy antagonists?

CHAPTER ONE

The Concept of a Peace Process

Peace studies have grown in scope and depth since the Second World War. Peace research has historical roots in the field of international relations and retains the multi-disciplinary focus of that discipline, but has developed a wider remit than inter-state relationships and conflict. Peace research offers a holistic approach to the prevention of conflict and maintenance of peace. Cross-national attempts at formulating international peace are not new; the Hague Peace Conference was held at the end of the nineteenth century, but peace research was piecemeal and uncoordinated during the first half of the twentieth century.

The late 1950 and 1960s saw a collectivization of peace research, via the formation of organizations such as the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the Conference on Peace Research in History and the International Peace Research Association (see Van den Dungen and Wittner 2003). By the 1970s, peace studies had expanded vastly in scope and size, reflected in the growth of research institutes, the launch of academic journals such as the Journal of Peace Research, the creation of university departments and appointments of peace scholars. Allied to the importance of the research conducted, these developments facilitated a growth in confidence within the field, to the point where peace research was claimed as a discipline in its own right (Boulding 1978a). Central to the development of peace research has been the belief that scholarly research can have practical application, contributing to the management or resolution of conflict. Within the field of peace studies, deployment of the term ‘peace process’ is fairly recent, but has become extensive. The label has become an often unsatisfactory catch-all badge for episodic or sustained attempts at resolving conflicts.

As the world order shifted from a West versus East paradigm before the close of the twentieth century, local wars and intra-state civil conflicts assumed greater prominence. Such conflicts had always existed, but they became the subjects of greater focus and intensified peacemaking efforts, amid the demise of the rigidities of the old bipolar geopolitical perspective which had dominated much post-1945 thinking. Although the focus on regional conflict was soon accompanied by a global ‘war on terror’, the concept of peace processes continued to embed. The unfreezing of the old United States versus Soviet Union, West versus East, inter-bloc hostility facilitated a focus on other inter- and intra-state and inter-communal conflicts. The thawing of Cold War hostilities encouraged fresh thinking about war and terrorism, allowing the ‘superpowers’ greater influence in brokering peace beyond their boundaries, rather than using countries as proxies for the pursuit of inter-bloc enmities. It is within that context that the term ‘peace process’ became regularly deployed to cover attempts at ending violence. The term was already developing amid the collapse of white settler regimes in African countries (Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Rhodesia and South Africa). An apparent resurgence in ethnic pluralism, previously suppressed within Soviet-influenced countries or dormant elsewhere in much of the northern hemisphere following the Second World War, created new conflicts and from these arose numerous peace processes.

Wars are more commonly inter- rather than intra-state clashes, and the majority of peace processes relate to internal conflicts. Indeed nearly four-fifths of conflicts are now labelled as predominantly internal (International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance 2006: 26). However, the boundaries of states are often contested, leading to dispute over what constitutes inter- or intra-state violence. Between 1990 and 2002, civil wars accounted for 90 per cent of conflict-related deaths, overwhelmingly occurring in non-democracies (Lacina 2006: 276). Even when inter-state conflict is evident, it may not necessarily be termed ‘war’. Britain’s retaking of the Falkland Islands in 1982 from Argentina, whose forces briefly captured the territory earlier that year, was not preceded by a declaration of war by either of the two antagonists, yet a war it was. The conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s erupted not through formal declarations of war, but through the determination of constituent parts of Yugoslavia to secede from that state, as each pressed claims for self-determination.

Defining and Studying Peace Processes

In analysing the concept, development and outworking of peace processes, there is a need for precise terminology over what constitutes war and peace. Superficially, this may appear straightforward, in that ‘war’ is associated with considerable conflict, whilst ‘peace’ is seen as a common label for non-war, a catch-all term covering an absence of violence. Yet war and peace may be much more difficult to identify. States may be reluctant to label internal conflicts as war, preferring to identify political violence as ‘terrorism’, the problems in the Basque region, South Africa, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka all offering examples in recent decades. In these cases, the state has been reluctant to confer status upon an organization contesting its legitimacy, with the result that ETA, the ANC, the IRA and the Tamil Tigers have never formally been acknowledged as armies, their ‘status’ confined to that of terrorist guerrilla group.

Acceptance of the term ‘peace process’ requires understanding that transitions towards non-violence and the permanent eradication of conflict are non-linear, subject to regression and rarely short. Peace processes rarely have definable start and end dates and may be marred by fractured ceasefires. How is a ‘peace process’ best defined? Given the different methods of brokering peace, regularity of breakdowns and sometimes indeterminate length of bartering, there is an inevitable imprecision in establishing what constitutes a peace process. The peace process generic label covers a multitude of aspects of the possible ending of conflict. It is applicable where a conflict is subject to attempts at mediation, transformation or resolution. Few conflicts are immune from such efforts and the outright failure, or longevity, of such processes ensures that the concept of a ‘peace process’ is imprecise. Given its elasticity, the ready deployment of the term is vulnerable to criticism of overuse. The label of ‘peace process’ assumes that there is at least some momentum to efforts to resolve a conflict. It is regularly deployed in the Middle East amid, at times, an absence of either peace or a discernible process. However, it is possible to attempt a workable definition regardless. A peace process is defined as the active attempt at the prevention and management of conflict between and within states, a remit covering the treatment of inter-state, inter-communal and intra-communal violence. The term peace process requires the following: the involvement of most combatants; the cessation of conflict (peace); the formulation and implementation of political arrangements, whether interim or comprehensive accords; the prevention of the re-ignition of conflict (process) and the attempted political management of differences.

Peace is not a singular event, but a conglomeration of incidents, ideas, tactics and developments. An all-embracing peace process fuses the military, political, humanitarian, psychological and restorative aspects of movement away from conflict. The use of the term ‘process’ acknowledges that war does not end suddenly, but is contained, managed and (possibly) resolved over a lengthy period of time. Concepts of peace can also extend towards the need for harmony in societal and inter-personal relationships, or even the psychological need to be at ease with oneself (Rinehart 1995). Whilst cognizant of Galtung’s (1969) contention that issues of social justice arising from peace processes may affect issues of inter-personal harmony and aware of the need to avoid reductionist definitions of peace (see Johnson 1976), the focus of this book is upon the political development and management of non-personal conflict.

Peace is not merely the temporary absence of war and process is not merely an avowed willingness of combatants to negotiate. Bloody conflicts have followed both these circumstances and the term ‘peace process’ should only be utilized when sufficient ingredients are in place to indicate movement from hitherto fixed military and political positions. Peace as merely the nonpresence of war is a largely static concept, bereft of dynamism, one which does not tackle the basis of conflict. Defining peace in such a negative fashion does not tell us what peace could or should comprise and indicates only what to avoid, not what action to take (Cox 1986). Temporary ceasefires need a political process to remove the conditions underpinning the conflict, or end the political paralysis arising from antagonistic relationships.

It is possible for decades of peace to have been evident without a permanent resolution of a problem, in which case the term ‘political process’ may appear more useable than that of ‘peace process’. To take one example: Cyprus has enjoyed peace and has become a popular tourist destination in recent times. Yet the island was partitioned (although the partition was not recognized by the United Nations (UN)) following the Turkish invasion of the north of the island in 1974, a move which followed years of inter-communal violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Decades of cold peace have resulted, with 30,000 Turkish troops deployed to ‘protect’ the Turkish sector and a UN buffer zone separating the two sides. Attempts to unfreeze the divide and reunite the island have not been successful. Most notably, the 2002 Annan Plan was rejected by Greek Cypriots in a referendum (see Diez and Tocci 2009). The question begged is whether the negotiations leading to the Annan Plan constituted a peace process, given the lack of immediate prior violence. Those arguing that peace processes need to challenge division and not merely address the absence of war would argue yes. Guelke (2003) notes how peace processes may come to be seen almost as substitutes for a settlement and that continual search for a solution almost becomes a surrogate for enduring peace. Cyprus, paralysed by a lack of movement and yet perennially supposedly on the verge of a ‘breakthrough’, offers one prolonged case.

Alongside the growth of peace processes, there has been considerable debate over the scholarly and practical value of their study. Much of this discussion has attempted to gauge the value of purely academic peace research, relative to the need for the practical application of peace studies. Anatol Rapoport (1970) claimed long ago that radical research raising fundamental questions was discouraged by governments, which withheld funding for projects challenging existing modes of thought. As a consequence, too much peace research consisted of technical matters of a narrow empirical character, with little wider value in improving knowledge of why wars start or how peace begins. Whilst acknowledging the validity of the criticism of the blinkered, narrow approach of some peace research, Kent’s (1971: 47) rejoinder suggested that no radical ‘would want or would expect government support for his antigovernment campaigns. He [sic] can and should look elsewhere’. For Kent, the problem was that too few scholars ‘know how to relate normative and empirical studies’ (Kent 1971: 50), a difficulty which has not entirely dissipated. The argument of Galtung (1975), amongst others, was that peace research needed to deploy objective scientific study, beyond the control of any particular government or organization and that such research needed to be of practical and emancipatory value. For Galtung, the major challenge confronting peace researchers is to encourage the state’s exercise of power in a non-violent direction, using a multifaceted approach embracing research, education and action, and concerning itself with human development as well as violence. Peace studies embrace a broader range of concerns than ‘security studies’. More recently, Patomaki (2001: 726) expressed similar sentiments to those of Galtung, urging a realist ontology which, nonetheless, asks fundamental questions of existing concepts, is critical of asymmetric power relationships and is intentionally transformative:

Peace research is an applied science charged with the task not only of presenting how things actually are, but also of telling how they should be. Just as the normative objective of medicine is health, the objective of peace research is peace. Therefore, not only are peace researchers expected to produce original high-quality studies, they must also be relevant.

Scholars of peace processes have divided into two very broad methodological schools; positivist empiricists and a critical peace research school (Dedring 1987). They have engaged in a somewhat artificial and sterile debate. The empiricist school argues that quantitative and behavioural approaches are the most appropriate means of studying processes. This approach stresses the need to test falsifiable or verifiable hypotheses, measure essential variables and produce an objective, scientifically-rigorous approach to peace processes, often based upon mathematical modelling (Singer 1971, 1972). Using rational choice modelling and factoring in local variables, this approach may allow forecasting and analysis of how peace can be attained. The criticism offered by the quantitative school of non-quantitative, qualitative work is that such studies risk being normative, judgemental, value-laden, descriptive and unscientific.

In response, the critical peace research school argues that much of the quantitative research on peace processes is neither objective nor value-free. Moreover, it adds little to our understanding of how to avoid future conflict, which ought to be the primary purpose of the research. These critics argue that game-theory and modelling are eschewed by policy-makers dealing with the real world (a point rebutted by those who argue that modelling is increasingly used by peacemakers) and as such may have only minor value. Qualitative research may involve detailed work and discussion with combatants, ascertaining ground-level perceptions of the righteousness of their cause and determination to persist, arguably a more value-learning process than research constructed around a series of elaborate but abstract hypotheses. Critics of approaches grounded exclusively in quantitative studies also argue that they risk being reductionist in their definitions of war and peace. For researchers in the critical peace school, genuine peace is more than the mere absence of war, bringing into question the value of the conflict data utilized by the empiricist school. Data is thus value-laden, designed and filtered according to the values of the researchers. Quantitative research is based upon preordained conceptual ideas and as such offers little value-added. Despite the mathematical modelling, it has rarely offered any reliable predictive capacity.

The objectivity of peace research has been a source of contention, more particularly when developed via qualitative studies. In particular, the search for relevance has sometimes led to a blurring of the relationship between peace research and peace activism. Van den Dungen and Wittner (2003: 367) argue that peace researchers ought to (and do) ‘occupy a middle ground [between government and activists] which allows them to tackle questions in a more objective manner’, yet they also claim that most peace researchers ‘evince an affinity with activism’ and could legitimately be termed ‘activist scholars’. This type of scholar believes that activism provides value-added to the research, although the extent to which peace activism contributes to change remains difficult to assess. For example, Cortright’s (1993) thesis that citizen activism was a primary factor in the demise of the Cold War is appealing given the extent of the ‘People’s Uprising’, but has strong counter-arguments based on the ruinous economic cost to the Soviet Union of the arms race. A further illustration of the limitations of peace activism was provided by the ‘Peace People’ in Northern Ireland. Their visible demonstrations for peace enjoyed huge popularity during the 1970s, their leaders receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976, but a further two decades of conflict followed.

Articulation of the differences between what might be called the quantitative and critical schools (the distinction is far from absolute) has to some extent been a redundant dialogue of the deaf. Clearly there is a need for empirical testing of what may constitute salient variables in contributing to the development of peace processes. Moreover, peace and war are palpably identifiable in many instances. There is, however, scope for nuanced qualitative interpretation of, for example, grassroots perceptions of how wars start and end. The debate over methodology is difficult to resolve fully, as it highlights a gap between differing conceptualizations of peace and demonstrates a gulf in the desired objectives, scope and outcomes of academic study, in addition to the dispute over the value of applying mathematical modelling to conflict scenarios.

Early research into the peace studies field found the profession equally divided between those who defined the concept of peace as the control or elimination of war and those who preferred the broader, more positive, definition of both the prevention of war and the advancement of human rights and justice (Parker 1978). Negative definitions, revolving around the mere absence of war, reflected the pessimism evident among peace scholars of prospects for permanent global peace (Everts 1973; Kemp 1985). For the ‘Galtungian’ school, conceptualizing peace as merely the absence of war discredits peace research, ignoring structural violence. Galtung’s (1985) human rights-based conceptualization of peace was a product of his location in Rhodesia, where the second-class citizenship and oppression of blacks was not accompanied by substantial inter-racial violence. On a strict ‘war’ and ‘peace’ definitional criteria, this was the latter, highlighting the inadequacy of the minimalist definition of peace. Research on peace processes has also focused increasingly upon the ‘aftermath’ of conflict in terms of state-building and social healing, as much as the negotiations which prevent violence. The reconstructive has thus begun to assume greater parity of status with the preventative.

The term ‘peace process’ is now common currency, covering the apparatus of establishing, implementing and maintaining peace, defined on the minimalist Uppsala model as the absence of violence for more than one year (Wallensteen and Sollenberg 2001). In the final decade of the twentieth century alone, there were 23 peace agreements reached. Two of those deals broke down entirely and at least sporadic violence followed all the remainder, with an unhealthy overall recidivism rate. The overall success rate for peace processes in the six decades following the Second World War, measured in terms of a non-return of violence two years after a deal, was only 41 per cent (Doyle and Sambanis 2000; Ramsbotham et al. 2005: 222–4). Wolff (2006: 131) highlights the cynicism surrounding peace deals in citing an observer of seemingly perennial conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo: ‘The peace agreement was signed on Tuesday. Just in time for the massacre on Thursday’.

The grim statistics are not necessarily surprising, given that peace processes involve new thinking, rapprochement, painful compromises and often further hurt for families of victims of the conflict, as perpetrators may re-enter society, sometimes even assuming senior political positions. Although a self-evident aside which has acquired cliché status, it is worth remembering the observation of the former Israeli leader, Yitzhak Rabin (if also attributed to Moshe Dyan and Olaf Palme) that one does not make peace with one’s friends, but rather with one’s enemy (Rabin 1996). Propensity towards compromise creates danger for leaders willing to deal with the enemy; Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish ultra shortly after making his observation.

Peace processes are never a quick fix and should not be conceptualized in terms of a single ‘big bang’. Although common stages are identifiable, some may have to be revisited and issues returned to via new agreements. Breakdowns or reversals of peace processes are common. To cite one of hundreds of examples, Bosnia-Herzegovina had a potentially viable ‘Vance–Owen’ peace plan in 1993, based upon ethnic cantonization, which soon collapsed, but within three years an enduring deal had been reached, emphasizing that peace processes are not dead due to the collapse of a single plan. Despite this, there remains a tendency to focus on the ‘big deal’, rather than the confidence-building pre-deal agenda, or the problems of post-agreement implementation.

There is no comprehensive checklist of essential features of peace processes, but there are a number of ingredients sufficiently common to indicate they are key elements. In isolation, these features are necessary but insufficient ingredients; the sum of the parts, however, may yield a durable process. Darby and Mac Ginty (2003: 2) offer five such components: negotiations conducted in good faith; inclusion of the main combatants; a willingness to address the key points of dispute; the disavowal of force; and prolonged commitment.

A peace process without the above essential components is not worthy of the name. A lack of commitment or unwillingness to include the main groups fighting, regardless of past heinous actions, means that a peace process is doomed to fail. Peace processes require acceptance by all significant participants of the impossibility of total victory, although symmetry of position on entering negotiations is unlikely. Nearly half of all conflicts do result in a total victory for a particular side, with the defeated army crushed, often amid serious human rights abuses or even genocide, as seen in the Sinhalese massacre of the Tamil Tigers in 2009 (see chapter 9). Where there is such disparity in prospects, a peace process is superfluous; few states or armies negotiate seriously around what might readily be taken on the battlefield. It is when the costs of victory are too great, in terms of human and financial resources, or when the prospects of success are low, that actors enter a peace process. The process may allow undefeated, but non-victorious armies, some share of the peace process spoils, but the original demands of one set of antagonists may need to be heavily diluted, amid uneven compromise. This scenario is common in the asymmetrical conflicts involving terrorist campaigns, where the terror group cannot be entirely vanquished, but the inability to achieve its fundamental goals leads towards inevitable compromise.

Concepts of peace have developed beyond negative avoidance of war towards increasingly positive ambitions of permanent peace through change in a region. Emancipatory definitions of peace have been accompanied by programmes for the rectification of social inequality and injustice. The search for transformative peace was ushered in amid realization that many of the wars of national liberation or anti-colonialism stemmed from ill-treatment of a native population by a colonial power. There is a danger of over-emphasizing a neat chronology of change in assuming that decisive movement from inter-state to intra-state, internal struggles against colonialism occurred following the termination of the Cold War. Civil wars have been more numerous than interstate wars for at least two centuries, although the gap has widened further in recent decades (Mack 2005). Moreover, the labelling of conflicts as civil wars can be contentious. For example, Lacina (2006) claims Northern Ireland as the only post-Second World War European civil war that lasted more than four years, but the organization committing the majority of killings in that conflict, the IRA, saw it not as a civil war, but as an anti-colonial uprising against ‘foreign’ British rule (see chapter 6).

The concentration upon avoiding nuclear war between superpowers was at the expense of a focus upon how ‘positive’ peace might be attained in the numerous anti-colonial struggles or social conflicts. It was the framework of analysis that changed towards regions and nations more than the nature of conflict, given that regional and intra-state conflict was already prevalent. The demise of bipolarity and rise of unipolarity encouraged the proliferation of new thinking on how to create peace and improved the context for peace processes. The end of bipolarity also removed the ‘proxy’ argument against creating peace. Right-wing forces, most obviously the apartheid regime in South Africa, could no longer claim to be a bulwark against expansionist communism; left-wing forces no longer received backing from the Soviet Union.

As concepts of peace were refined, there was a concomitant development of peace processes, bolstered by policy learning and knowledge transfer in how to anticipate, broker and maintain peace. Predictive capacity, in terms of the ability to forecast future arenas of conflict, remains low, meaning that peace initiatives have often been fire-fighting, reactive entities. Yet this makes the greater political sophistry acquired through decades of peace processes even more valuable. Two case studies in this book add to scepticism over predictive capabilities of peace scholars. It was impossible to find any academic predicting the war with a huge death toll in the Balkans that erupted in the 1990s, or warning in the 1960s of the onset of decades of violence in Northern Ireland. ‘Peace learning’ has been more successful in terms of prevention of conflict recurrence and the amelioration, eradication or management of existing conflict than in anticipating where and when the next outbreak of violence will occur. The capacity for peacekeeping and peacemaking has exceeded that for conflict forecasting. Nonetheless, broad holistic models of scenarios under which conflict is likely to occur have been developed, utilizing variables including the opportunity for ethnic rebellion; immigration and refugee numbers; the level and type of repression; environmental upheaval; size and performance of the economy and distribution of wealth (Gurr 1970; Baechler and Spillman 1996; Collier and Hoeffler 1998; Ramsbotham et al. 2005). That such a multiplicity of conflict causes exists highlights the difficulty of predicting where violence might erupt, but relative deprivation and ‘second-class citizenry’ – the ill-treatment of particular ethnic groups fuelling grievance – are the most persistent factors in explaining conflict causation.

External Inputs and Knowledge Transfer

A comparative approach to the management of conflict was a logical development arising from studies of international relations examining why and where violence erupts. As Galtung (1985: 153) comments, ‘one cannot build a general theory of peace for the world on relations between Nordic countries alone, or a theory of disarmament on the basis of Costa Rica’. Equally limited is theoretical work which has no practical value or collapses at the first hint of empirical testing. The comparative approach allows peace scholars to determine what matters most in the construction of peace, using key cross-national tests of consistency of applicability and viability. It is through this approach that factors common to most peace processes, such as verifiable, monitored ceasefires, demobilization, prisoner releases, external aid and healing mechanisms, such as truth or victims commissions, have become familiar features. The knowledge accumulated from a succession of peacemaking initiatives may allow the success rate of peace processes and agreements to improve. As the range of tools available to peace-brokers increases, along with cognizance of when best deployed, a concomitant rise in the number of successful peace processes is possible.

Cross-national policy learning and transfer has been aided by the growth of academic studies of peace and by the numerous examples of the ‘export’ of experienced peace-brokers across various conflicts to offer brokerage or mediation roles. The United States diplomat Richard Holbrooke was involved in efforts to create peace in Vietnam, Morocco, East Timor (one of the most enduring conflicts, which had persisted since 1975), Bosnia (where he did much to broker the 1995 Dayton Agreement) and Afghanistan. Senator George Mitchell successfully brokered the talks leading to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland in 1998 and subsequently acted as United States peace envoy to the Middle East. Finland’s Marti Ahtisaari has been involved in peace processes in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Indonesia and Kosovo. External actors extend well beyond the diplomatic corps, with, for example, the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches playing brokerage and mediation roles in Argentina, in a dispute with Chile and amid civil war in Mali (Mitchell 2003). External brokers play a wide variety of roles, ranging from those of flatterers (warring parties may, perversely, enjoy the international attention warranted by their actions) to enforcers, with a range of intermediate remits in teasing out positions, facilitating compromises, guaranteeing deals and overseeing the implementation of agreements.

Encouraged by the promotion of international norms of peace by the UN, external brokerage of negotiations has become an important component of many peace processes, given that local groups are often unable to settle differences amid the unilateral pursuit of blinkered interests. Honest brokers require a host of skills to function effectively: historical knowledge, confidence-building, an ability to mediate and facilitate deals, confidentiality and the ability to present the offerings of the other side as concessions and compromises. They may also need to be deadline-setters and enforcers. The honest broker acts as a conduit for rival forces, given that they may not engage directly with each other.

This honest broker requirement is nonetheless problematic, as brokers are often not regarded as neutral, one factor in the failure of the United States to referee Middle East peace. Supposed honest brokerage has often been usurped by physical intervention, in which a particular regime type has been imposed. Interventionism has also been justified on the basis of forcing people to be free. Neo-conservatives and neo-liberals have tended to share the same assumptions concerning the value of intervention, regarding it as undertaken for the good of the local population. This belief has elevated interventionism to a regular feature of Western foreign policy, even if its results in pursuit of the belief that states can be transformed into capitalist democracies have been, to be charitable, only mixed. Moreover, external agents cannot remove the antagonisms which fuel many conflicts (see Lederach 1997). As one example, a variety of non-governmental organizations in Europe and South America staged dialogues on political and economic change with Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) during the early 2000s, sponsored by the German, Swedish, Mexican and Cuban governments, but as talks proceeded the conflict merely intensified (Chernick 2003; Jeong 2010). Other factors, such as the level of state repression and the breadth of FARC organization (with over 60 FARC fronts in existence) were more salient factors than the quality of external brokers (Holmes et al. 2007).

At best, external agents can achieve transformation and management by moving conflict into a potentially more peaceful setting, but such agents do not resolve, only referee, the problems which caused the conflict. There is also an ongoing debate over the extent to which external brokers or mediators may bring their own cultural understandings or misunderstandings to the brokerage process. This is potentially dangerous and can collapse the process where violence is culturally-based (Galtung 1990). In contrast, those who see conflict as rooted more in the need for human security and who believe that there are holistic approaches to diplomacy are more sceptical over the importance of cultural understandings to long-term conflict resolution (e.g., Zartman 1995). This is not to suggest that those diplomats, peacemakers and policy advisors are merely the peace process version of the doctor on call, prescribing remedial treatment to make the patient better. Nonetheless, in the way that patient treatments have grown in range and sophistication, the same is true in terms of the political sophistry which can be applied to manage conflicts. Moreover, as a doctor also relies upon patient willpower and commitment to improved health, so peacemakers are reliant upon sincere commitment to peace and progress amongst combatants. The export of peace process knowledge and policy transfer by practitioners – part of what is sometimes referred to, not always flatteringly, as the ‘peace industry’ – has been accompanied by rapid growth in multi-disciplinary peace-oriented academic studies.

External input to peace extends beyond diplomacy. The use of force to ‘create’ peace has also been a prelude to peace processes. The invasion of Iraq by the United States and United Kingdom ended Saddam Hussein’s oppression of his own people, but precipitated civil war, with the allies remaining until a new constitution was agreed and a relative, often fractured, peace implemented. The deployment of the same countries’ armed forces in Afghanistan as part of the ‘war on terror’ proved unsuccessful in ousting the Taleban when accompanied by a supposed peace deal (the Bonn Agreement), which attempted to ignore their presence. Creating peace through militarism may be possible; sustaining that peace and building a post-conflict society is more problematic, as the transition from coercion to peace-building may take years. The issue of legitimacy is particularly difficult, given that a government imposed following external intervention may be seen as a puppet regime of foreign powers, even if democratic elections take place. Security issues may require a long-term, non-local, military presence, exacerbating the perception of external governance. The longevity of military intervention for peace inhibits the establishment of purely local judicial systems, whilst foreign financial aid is invariably needed. Institution-building and state-building are most difficult when accompanied by a continuing post-conflict military presence.

Agreements and Crises: the Limits of Peace Processes

Peace processes rarely succeed quickly. They tend to originate in cost–benefit analyses of peace versus war by combatants, influenced by policy priorities and with compromises offered on the basis of viable exchange (Schwarzer 1998). Concessions to violent protagonists are far from guaranteed to succeed and a total breakdown of the political arrangements which led to the suspension of hostilities is not uncommon (Call 2008). If war really is, to paraphrase Clausewitz (1873), politics by other means, then adequate political arrangements are self-evidently most likely to bring about peace. That war and politics are seen as interchangeable highlights the difficulty of moving from conflict management to conflict resolution, as only the latter eliminates the risk of a resumption of violence.

As Mac Ginty (2006) argues, too often the focus is upon bringing about peace via an agreement, rather than considering whether an agreement is likely to hold. It did not, as one example, take great prescience to foresee that the 1990 unification deal between North and South Yemen might collapse due to a lack of commitment from the respective leaderships. Mac Ginty suggests a need to re-orientate the emphasis of peace processes upon sustainability rather than the big event of a deal. Whilst the focus on the attainment of peace is understandable, too little thought is given to the possible after-effects of deals, which may contribute to longer-term destabilization. There is considerable empirical evidence to support the concerns over flawed agreements. Much more rarely, the focus upon the ‘big agreement’ risks overlooking those conflict cessations where no deal has been struck, but where the conflict has simply petered out.

Whilst there tends to be a transparent climax, in the form of an agreement between warring parties, some violence may follow and implementation of a deal may be followed by collapse and a worsening of the situation. The collapse of the 1993 Arshua Accords in Rwanda, followed by two million deaths, provides one stark example. The agreement between rebel Tutsis of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and government Hutus was designed to settle an ethnic-economic conflict (the economic element was principally over competition for arable land) but was followed by a rapid descent into genocide, with a staggering one million deaths within three months. The fragility of the deal was emphasized by the assassination of President Habyarimana, an act which plunged both sides back into civil war.

Failure may be frequent. As one example, a succession of peace initiatives, accompanied in the mid-1990s by a major UN peacekeeping intervention, failed to bring peace to Somalia, where conflict has ranged from endemic to episodic. A 1988–92 ceasefire agreed by the combatants was followed by invasion by United States forces, appearing to end the conflict between rebel movements and the Presidential government of Siad Barre. However, the country disintegrated post-ceasefire amid further violence. Autonomy was awarded to Somaliland in the North West and Puntland, where power-sharing between the Presidential forces of Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and rebel militias was partially successful. A struggle ensued for control for the capital, Mogadishu, and much of the South. The US-backed Ethiopian invasion in 2007, designed largely to prevent the growth of Islamic movements, exacerbated the problem. By 2011, many of the country’s inhabitants were facing starvation. The Islamist group, Al-Shabaab (The Youth), an armed militia opposed to Western influence, emerged from the Islamic Courts Union and gradually extended control, particularly in southern Somalia, in the absence of an authoritative central government. The failure to observe peace agreements and foreign incursions (Kenya invaded the south of Somalia in 2011) led to further violence.

Conflict is even more likely to re-ignite where there has been a failure to clinch a political agreement to consolidate the peace offered by ceasefires. Violence in Bodoland in north-eastern India, where the National Democratic Front demands a separate sovereign state, provides one example. A ceasefire agreement in 2005 was not accompanied by a fully agreed political arrangement and the cessation of violence duly collapsed. In Myanmar (Burma), the Karen National Union’s armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army, demanding a federal Karen state in Eastern Myanmar, renewed hostilities with the military government in 2005, after barely one year’s cessation of violence, reviving a conflict which has persisted in varying degrees of intensity since 1949. Concurrently, fighting resumed between the Shan State Army, demanding an independent Shan State, and the same government.

The Sequencing of Peace Processes

Although definitive starting points are rarely observable, peace processes usually contain identifiable stages. Dialogue is often secret and informal initially, constructed on the basis of deniability, between representatives of the combatants and trusted third parties. These exploratory and indirect ‘feeler’ discussions help establish the terms for a cessation of violence. This pre-negotiation stage then tends to be followed by a ceasefire, the durability of which may form a crucial test of the bona fides of combatants in seeking peace. In some cases, the ceasefire may be preceded by a broad declaration by one or more interested parties, often the states involved in brokerage, of the outline contours of what a future political agreement might contain. An example here is the 1993 Downing Street Declaration in the Northern Ireland conflict, which held out the prospect of an ‘agreed Ireland’ without providing much detail on the contents of a formal deal, its finer points being negotiated several years down the track. Another, far less auspicious, example from the same year was the Oslo Agreement, which lacked precision on how a settlement would take shape in the Middle East, but made various pronouncements concerning peace and security and offered recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) by Israel. Movement towards recognition of the political aims of combatants is crucial. In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) moved rapidly from pariah status to becoming an official negotiating body; as did Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland and the People’s Liberation Movement in Sudan.

It is usually only after ceasefires and other confidence-building measures that serious discussions take place to achieve an agreement. Even then, direct negotiations between former combatants may be rare or non-existent. Proxy talks are common and there may be the need at this stage to agree an honest broker to handle negotiations and engage in rule-making. Dialogue normally opens with articulation of statements of position, followed by exploratory examination of the possible scope for compromise, moving beyond the repetition of selective historical narratives by combatants. A further important stage may include reverse role-playing, where members of one side are asked to consider and articulate the case of the other. This can have a profound effect, forcing antagonists to consider conflict from the position of the ‘enemy’. In the Northern Ireland conflict, this process had already occurred and impacted upon Irish republican thinking prior to negotiations. English (2004) records how Irish republican prisoners were forced to adopt loyalist-British perspectives during internal debates, a development which rendered those republicans uncomfortable over the certainties of their position.

Self-analysis at an early stage of the negotiation process can cut through the self-delusion, deception or myopia of a particular position and require combatants to see how fixed beliefs can antagonize the other side. It does not require outright repudiation of beliefs, or rejection of the righteousness of the cause, as that would be far too ambitious, especially at this early stage. Introspection may nonetheless assist awareness of the claims and rights of opponents and encourage meaningful dialogue at the expense of monologue. It may be the first occasion on which the hurt imposed upon others, rather than that suffered by one’s own side, is seriously considered. From this self-assessment may follow a desire to address opponents as equals and accept that hurt has been inflicted upon rivals. Introspection helps foster the cognitive awareness necessary if the causes of conflict are to be addressed. If introspection is undertaken in a cursory fashion, it is difficult to conceive how movement from fixed positions can be attained.

The next point in the process is for deadlines for negotiations to be agreed. The key criteria are ‘reasonableness’ and ‘seriousness’, along with a willingness by participants to agree deadlines that may be produced by external brokers (du Toit 2003: 66). For fulfilment of the reasonableness requirement, there needs to be sufficient time for details to be finalized, as ambiguities and omissions will invariably complicate any agreement later. The seriousness criteria means that deadlines need to stick, or the process loses credibility. Seriousness can be a high hurdle, particularly if participants are lukewarm and the deadlines are imposed by external mediators. The sanctions that can be imposed by outsiders are very limited. They do not want to collapse the process by being over-insistent and participants are aware of this, thus the incentives to meet deadlines may be modest. Accepting his role as Middle East peace envoy under the Obama US Presidency, Senator George Mitchell emphasized how peace processes can be extraordinarily prolonged, a feature scarcely surprising given the longevity of the conflicts which precede them. Referring to his previous role as chair of peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, Mitchell (2000) noted how all ethnic rivals agreed to share power only after he insisted that talks were truncated, given that political representatives would have talked forever had they been allowed. Moreover, a peace deal in the region was concluded:

[A]lmost 800 years after Britain began its domination of Ireland, 86 years after the partition of Ireland, 38 years after the British army began its most recent mission in Ireland, 11 years after the peace talks began and nine years after a peace agreement was signed. In the negotiations we had 700 days of failure and one day of success. For most of the time progress was non-existent or very slow. (Mitchell 2009)

Mitchell used the Northern Ireland example to emphasize that ‘there is no such thing as a conflict without resolution’, no matter how protracted. This belief sustained the fragile peace process in the Middle East, where Mitchell claimed a bystander had remarked, in reference to the conflict in Ireland lasting 800 years, ‘Ah, 800 years; so recent a conflict’ (Mitchell 2009).

Mitchell earned a reputation as an honest, neutral broker, yet there have been convincing, if counter-intuitive, assertions that biased mediation can be more successful as a means of brokering agreements of greater quality and sustainability. Cetinyan (2002), Walter (2002) and Svensson (2007, 2009) all contend that biased mediators have more credibility with antagonists and can thus sell a difficult deal more readily, hold greater detailed knowledge and can use a special relationship with a particular side and make offers to, or withhold resources from, that side. In particular, demobilization, confidence-building guarantees and amnesties are more likely to feature if the mediator is drawn from the ranks of either the government or anti-state allies. There are credible examples of partisan mediation being successful, such as Kenya’s brokerage role in the peace process in Mozambique, but the role of the United States in the Middle East offers an obvious empirical rebuttal of the argument.

In terms of movement towards a deal, clearly ‘facts on the ground’ are crucial. Conflict containment may create sufficient space to facilitate agreement. Perhaps surprisingly, only 60 per cent of peace process agreements include ceasefires as a formal provision (Harbom et al. 2006: 624), although de facto or actual ceasefires may already be in place prior to the deal, with permanent cessation assumed rather than stated. A series of confidence-building measures, embracing one or more of demobilization, verifiable disarmament and decommissioning, may then be required. The problem of spoilers, or ultras, determined to ignore an agreement and fight on, is attendant to virtually every peace process (Stedman 1997). Using a rational choice model, successful peace-building requires broadly symmetrical perceptions to be held by combatants, in terms of mutual recognition of the limited utility of continuing violence. Yet such perceptions are rarely universally held amongst all combatants, placing considerable pressure on the leaders of warring groups to deliver the inevitable compromises of peace amid the threat of fragmentation of their side. Amid pressure from below for continued violence, military and political leaders have to offer a vista of gains through peace which may be difficult to contemplate given what has occurred to date. Presentation of how a switch from war to peace will bring better results requires considerable skill. Violence may have brought rewards prior to negotiation, as might belligerence and aggrandisement afterwards. Ethnic entrepeneurship, communal advancement and continuing threatening actions towards opponents during negotiations are common features. Peace processes may offer conflict management rather than conflict resolution in such cases; the volcano may be rendered dormant, but not extinct.

Should an agreement be concluded, it is necessary to recognize its limitations. Peace processes are not necessarily designed to resolve conflict, but may merely manage a problem with an aspiration (but no more) towards its long-term dissipation. As Boulding (1978b) argued, stable peace does not necessitate the resolution of conflict, but does require recognition by former combatants of the lack of utility and purpose of a resumption of violence. Antagonists need to declare for peace and eschew war as costly and ineffective, whilst political action, economic exchange and greater integration need to be promoted as appropriate replacements. Successful peace processes achieve conflict transformation, changing the conditions of enmity from those where violence is seen as essential and may be endemic, towards a position where non-violent methodologies are considered as viable alternatives. If conflict transformation embeds, there is the prospect of successful conflict management and even full resolution.