Comfort Ero offers three lessons for peacemaking in an unstable world

By Comfort Ero, president of International Crisis Group

We are in the middle of a very violent decade. Since 2020 a series of major wars—in Ethiopia, Myanmar, Ukraine, Sudan and the Middle East—has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The number of smaller conflicts is also rising. Over a quarter of countries globally are afflicted by some form of serious violence. The year ahead is unlikely to see much of a let-up.

As violence increases, policymakers in many capitals seem to be losing interest in making peace. The post-cold-war era, now romanticised as an era of stability, was punctuated by wars and massacres from Rwanda to Syria. The International Crisis Group that I lead, a global conflict-prevention organisation, was founded in 1995 after the international failure to halt the Balkan wars. The global “war on terror”, and misadventures like the Iraq war, caused huge suffering. Yet the 1990s and 2000s saw peacemakers and peacekeepers make real progress in countries from Liberia to Timor-Leste.

Today, such peacemaking successes are fading into the past. The last comprehensive peace agreement ending a civil war—between the Colombian government and Marxist rebels—was signed in 2016. As conflicts have spiked in the years since, peacemakers have been able to do little more than craft temporary ceasefires or humanitarian pauses. The United Nations, which was at the centre of international peace efforts 30 years ago, is now a marginal player in Ukraine and Gaza, and losing traction in Africa.

The most obvious reason for this drift is the return of geopolitical competition. America, China and Russia increasingly view regional conflicts in zero-sum terms. This is not only true in cases where they are directly involved, as in Russia’s war against Ukraine. The logic of great-power competition is also shaping less strategically significant conflicts. Russia has exploited instability in the Sahel to undermine Western interests in the region, backing military juntas and deploying private military contractors. At the UN, great-power politics has crept into a debate between Chinese and American diplomats over how to deal with criminal gangs in Haiti, because the Haitians recognise Taiwan.

A second driver of conflict is the increasing willingness of middle powers to get involved in fuelling violence. In cases such as Libya and Sudan, regional actors including Turkey and the Gulf states are backing proxies, or deploying their own forces. As the number of participants multiplies, peacemaking grows ever more complicated.

Given these challenges, and the need to focus on other aspects of an ever more complex threat environment, it is understandable that politicians in Washington and elsewhere feel they have less political and financial capital to spend on conflict resolution. It is politically easier to make the case for funding missiles than mediators.

But a failure to get a grip on the proliferation of political violence is likely to store up trouble over the medium term. In a competitive world, even apparently peripheral conflicts can evolve into far bigger headaches, as Russia’s exploitation of the Sahel shows. Equally, Moscow and Beijing may find that refusing to work with the West on issues like North Korea’s nuclear programme causes them more trouble over time.

Against this difficult backdrop, my team at Crisis Group and I hold onto the lessons of the past 30 years of conflict resolution. Three stand out. The first is that addressing conflicts before they escalate remains far more effective than waiting for them to burn out of control and trying to make peace. The second is that in almost all conflicts, it is useful to engage all the warring parties to hear how they articulate their perspectives, however hardline and obstreperous they may be.

Third, as much as great-power competition and middle-power engagement are shaping the conflict landscape, local dynamics are often the key to understanding what makes parties fight, and how to persuade them to stop. If we can understand these dynamics, there remains enough shared interest in de-escalating violence, in some parts of the world, that peacemaking efforts can still gain traction. In Haiti, China’s bickering with America has not stopped the UN greenlighting a peace force, led by Kenya, to start rolling back violence. In Colombia and the Philippines, peace processes aimed at reconciling with rebel groups have had some success and offer hope. The alternative is to allow today’s burgeoning list of conflicts to grow further and make an already unstable world more perilous. ■