Getting into Talks: Designing a Viable Early-Stage Peace Process

Authors: Laura Wise and Monalisa Adhikari

Drawing from a review of global pre-negotiation peace agreements from 1990–2024, academic and policy literature, and PeaceRep’s experiences with supporting dialogue stakeholders, this report sets out some key issues that need to be considered when designing a viable peace process in the early stages. Although political analysis and context specificity will make some of these key issues more relevant to some conflicts than others, peace agreements and mediation literature identify some common process design challenges for third parties and funders to consider, that are often raised when engaging with peace process stakeholders.

The report is structured with sections on trust- and confidence-building measures, and preparing for pre-negotiation phases of talks. However, there is no default linear trajectory of early-stages of peace processes. The fragility of early attempts to bring conflict parties into dialogue means that there are often multiple rounds of confidence-building and pre-negotiation that can breakdown before more structured forms of talks move forward.