Nearly 40 percent of peace agreements since 1975 have failed five years after their founding. Whether war breaks out again or spoilers delay the process, many agreements don’t last long after they’re signed.
The unfortunate reality is evident around the world today. Negotiations in Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and other places mired in conflict have failed. Policymakers around the world are discovering that it often seems impossible to convince fighters to lay down their arms and come to the negotiating table. Making lasting peace agreements is even more difficult.
What can be done?
This year Pearson Global Forumparticipants gathered in an attempt to find answers. First launched in 2018, the forum brings together researchers, policymakers and practitioners to explore a different topic around the root causes of conflict and the path to peace. This year’s event, held on October 18 at the David Rubenstein Forum, focused in particular on negotiations and agreement in peace processes – with the aim of bridging the crucial gap between academic research and policymaking.
“The work of the Pearson Institute and this Global Forum really goes to the heart of trying to understand how we achieve peace, resolve conflict and address the world’s great suffering in the most rigorous way,” said Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, dean and the Sydney Stein Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, during his opening remarks. “It is exciting to have brought together such a leading group of experts – both academics and practitioners – to explore these types of thorny questions.”
Throughout the daylong event, speakers, including world leaders, drew lessons from successful agreements and from the challenges negotiators faced on the path to peace. In Colombia, the government’s negotiations with the country’s largest guerrilla group, known as the FARC, were successful in 2016, even though peace processes there had not made real progress for more than fifty years. And what was once seen as an impossibly unresolvable conflict in Northern Ireland saw a peace process in 1998, with women at the frontlines of the negotiating table and most militia groups eventually defused in the years that followed.
Expert panelists also explained situations in which armed conflict halts peace negotiations. In Sudan, civilian-led negotiations were disrupted by divided military groups, leading to civil war and genocide in Darfur.
Although it is a more high-profile conflict, Israel’s war in Gaza rages on and American views on it remain polarized, he said. a recent Pearson/NORC survey released in collaboration with the Forum. About three in four Americans say Hamas, Israel and Iran are responsible for continuing the war, while about half say the United States is responsible.
Former Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis expressed the fundamental challenge of resolving the unrest and violence in her country this way. “To have peace, we need security” against arms imports that support both state and non-state actors, she said. “As long as this fuels gang violence, it will continue and negotiations will be extremely difficult.”
For Nobel laureate James A. Robinson, institute director of the Pearson Institute, creating the space to discuss these issues has been gratifying – and an important part of his legacy.
“I write a lot about the challenges of building institutions that actually serve the interests of society, rather than a narrow, personal interest,” Robinson said. “If we can shed some light on that and bring some wisdom to the table, what could be more satisfying than that?”
The Forum’s agenda also resonated with the students. While working with Fambul Tok, an organization focused on peace and recovery in the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s civil war, Harris student Mario Venegas Wignall learned this summer that local approaches to reconciliation are crucial. Expanding peacebuilding involvement from the capital to the countryside meant developing a distinctive methodology, based on Sierra Leone’s culture and contexts, so that the country could move forward.
“Sometimes major international organizations focus on building truth reconciliation committees, which of course play an important role, but they neglect to focus on what is right in front of them: how can these people make peace here, right here where they live? Several speakers at the Forum emphasized that peace can only be built based on the reality and context of each place,” he said. “Hearing perspectives on this – and so many other topics – made the Forum such a great learning opportunity for everyone who attended.”
Read more and watch video recordings of the event on the The Pearson Institute YouTube page.
—Adapted from a story first published on the Harris School of Public Policy website