Surprising science of a ceasefire: failures can help
EVEN though the ceasefire in Syria has collapsed – as most analysts expected it to – it could have a lasting impact on the conflict.
Political science research shows that ceasefires change more than just conditions on the ground: They alter how a war’s participants weigh the benefits of fighting versus talking.
Ceasefires can create something like a virtuous cycle, studies have found, making future pauses more likely. Each one has a better chance of lasting longer, discouraging violations, isolating bad actors and building trust among adversaries.
This cycle is not always as visible or politically urgent as the question of who is dropping bombs where on a particular day. But, over time, it can shift the participants’ calculus in ways that build conditions for peace.
Page Fortna, a Columbia University professor and leading scholar on peace negotiations, says that “piecemeal” deals, though modest and rarely successful, can eventually align the incentives of groups whose demands at the moment are unreconcilable.
But there is a flip side. Sometimes ceasefires can create a vicious cycle instead of a virtuous one. Distrust can deepen, the parties can move further apart, and incentives can shift to make peace even less attractive.
Whether the diplomats who arranged the current seven-day pause in Syria know it or not, they are making a highrisk, high-reward gamble.
Two Notre Dame political scientists, Madhav Joshi and J Michael Quinn, last year published a study examining 196 ceasefires and peace deals from 1975 to 2011. They found something surprising: One of the best predictors of a peace agreement’s success is simply whether the parties had prior agreements, even if those earlier ceasefires failed. Not even a war’s duration or its intensity can so reliably predict a peace deal’s outcome. Neither does the poverty or ethnic diversity of the combatants.
“Failures pave the way for better agreements down the road,” Quinn said.
Over time, participants see ceasefires as less risky. If all sides come out feeling that they at least broke even, they grow more willing to make another deal. In Syria, with the status quo so terrible, breaking even doesn’t require much.
“These items could be as simple as a request that Assad refrain from calling opposition members terrorists in the press,” Joshi and Quinn wrote in a Foreign Affairs article summarising their research and referring to President Bashar Assad of Syria. “As soon as one party reciprocates, a peace process is underway. And with each successful round, just enough trust and good will may be generated to move on to the next item.”
This is trust not in the colloquial sense of proving personal integrity, but in the political science sense: negotiators believe they understand one another’s incentives and can predict their behavior. Each side becomes more willing to make concessions, believing the other side will deliver on its end.
Take, for example, Yugoslavia, where there were 91 mediated truces or ceasefires from 1989 to 2000. Of those, 35 percent lasted less than a week and 13 percent lasted exactly a week. Though each appeared to be a catastrophic failure, they culminated in the 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the Bosnian war that was a subset of the larger conflict, as well as later deals.
We are already seeing possible hints of this in Syria. The tempo of ceasefires is increasing, with the terms expanding and the outside actors investing more political capital. Those gains are slight and the process of building trust is still fragile, so it remains unclear whether the cycle will catch.
If the great hope is that Syria’s warriors can learn to trust and cooperate, then the great danger is that they will instead learn to distrust and reject.
If ceasefire violations are punished inconsistently, combatants perceive cheating as less risky. So while every transgression does not need to be punished, it’s important that all sides be held to a similar standard for what will provoke retaliation, and how severe.
If groups believe that everyone else is likely to cheat, they have a strong incentive to cheat as well. By the same token, if groups come to see the other side as unreliable or unpredictable, they have little reason to enter into any deal.
Over successive rounds, each side could bring less to the table or be less willing to follow through on its promises – further convincing one another that talks are not worthwhile.
This happened in Angola, where a civil war killed half a million people from 1976 to 2002. The United States and the Soviet Union saw it as a Cold War battleground, and both intervened. They pushed their Angolan proxies to keep fighting, which destroyed trust on the ground – a worrying lesson asWashington and Moscow now find themselves on opposite sides in Syria.
Whether Syria slips into a virtuous cycle or vicious one, Fortna said, depends in large part on the US and Russia.
Civil wars are much likelier to end in peace if they have a mediator, often a powerful outside country, according to research by the political scientist Donald Rothchild. That mediator can impose stopgaps, such as temporary ceasefires, that open up space for negotiation. And the mediator makes both sides more willing to take risks for peace, because they trust that the other side will be punished if it fails to keep its word.
The 30-year state of war between Israel and Egypt, for example, ended only when the United States brokered the 1978 Camp David accords. President Jimmy Carter offered billions in aid to both countries, altering their strategic calculus to make peace more attractive – and implicitly threateningWashington disapproval if either party backed out.
Mediation can take subtler forms, such as Norway’s role in hosting the 1990s Israeli-Palestinian talks: The neutral setting reduced the political costs.
Syria has no such mediator because the only two viable candidates – the United States and Russia – are engaged in the war. Nor is either likely to allow another party, such as the United Nations, to get in the middle.
Fortna argued interim US-Russia deals like this week’s could eventually move them into a sort of joint-mediator role. Though this is politically distasteful in Washington for appearing to put Moscow on equal strategic and moral footings, it is probably necessary.
But this would require both powers to demonstrate something they have yet been unable to: the ability to extract concessions from their allies on the ground in Syria. Only then could the United States and Russia trust each other’s ability to follow through on their most important promises.
That would surely take multiple rounds to accomplish, and would be only a step toward peace. This can look like failure because it is so incremental. And the success stories often take a decade or more.
“There’s not a lot of incentive to give the other guy the benefit of the doubt, which is why wars are hard to end,” Fortna said. “But they do end.”