Ceasefires - Stopping the Violence and Negotiating Peace
In this newly published book, negotiators and scholars join forces to identify how ceasefires and political negotiations intersect and when and how ceasefires work to promote peace. Case studies cover conflicts in Bosnia, Burundi, Colombia, Darfur, El Salvador, Myanmar, the Philippines, Sudan North/South, and Syria.
Almost all peace processes involve ceasefires. These ceasefire arrangements vary greatly in terms of their timing, content, and connection to the political negotiation process. In Colombia, the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) conducted political negotiations in the absence of a bilateral ceasefire, formally agreeing to stop the violence only once they reached an agreement on the main conflict issues. In the Philippines, a ceasefire was put in place very early in the negotiations between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), contributing to a drawn-outbut successful political negotiation process. Burundi saw initial attempts to install a comprehensive ceasefire between the government and the Conseil National Pour la Défense de la Démocratie—Forces pour la Défense de la Démocratie (CNDD-FDD) fail, yet once an earlierpeace agreement began to bear fruit, efforts to stop the violence and resolve the contested issues progressed more smoothly. In Syria, a range of different strategies was tried, but at the time of writing, all ceasefires and political negotiations have failed to stop the war. Why do conflict parties adopt different ceasefire sequencing strategies? What factors condition this choice? And what explains the different uses and effects of ceasefires across these cases?
The book shows how the ceasefire process and political negotiations are distinct processes, often involving different actors, strategies, and challenges, yet at the same time being closely intertwined. Rather than considering these two parts of a peace process together, or focusing narrowly only on ceasefires, we explore the dynamic interaction between both processes, focusing on two questions that have previously received little attention:
- When and why do conflict parties adopt a ceasefire at different points of the political negotiation process, and how does this shape political negotiations?
- How do context factors—the domestic political context, the international political context, and the military context—condition the relationship between the ceasefire process and the political negotiation process?