Peace talks are one of the most important tools in the international community’s arsenal for addressing intrastate conflict. Yet they are also among the most difficult to initiate and sustain. Even when they do succeed, they can stall, or worse, splinter into competing factions and new violence. Even apparent successes can be illusory, as the 1993 Arusha Accords for Rwanda demonstrated when they led to horrific tragedy instead of ending the war.
Peace processes are complex and involve intricate dances of procedures and substantive discussions among armed actors, often choreographed by third-party mediators. The success of peace negotiations can depend on many factors, from the structural constraints that shaped the conflict to the capacity of negotiating parties to make meaningful concessions and satisfy diverse constituencies.
Structural barriers include political institutions and agents, such as parties and armed groups that may oppose peace process negotiations for ideological or security reasons, and spoiling actors that seek to undermine the legitimacy of the peace process. These obstacles can derail the negotiation process by making it unfeasible for a political elite to negotiate with its enemy or for nonstate armed actors to accept the terms of a power-sharing agreement.
Aside from these structural obstacles, the ubiquity of information asymmetries and commitment problems in armed conflict has caused the need to reassess the capacities of peace agreements to solve those issues (Darby 2001; Findley 2013). More specifically, the ability of agreements to reduce the information asymmetry between adversaries, set clear guidelines for the process, address indivisibility and power sharing problems, and address the structural causes of violence must be addressed if peace processes are to have a chance of succeeding.
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