Peace Fragmentation
Key findings from PeaceRep research into peace process and conflict fragmentation and multimediation
The nature of conflict and peace processes has changed substantially since the 1990s. PeaceRep studies this changing landscape and generates new ideas and tools to help peacemakers prevent and resolve conflict.
These key findings draw on PeaceRep’s wide research into peace and transition processes and PeaceTech work. The findings are not exhaustive of all PeaceRep’s conceptual and empirical work, but are the result of an attempt to deduce some key insights and lessons from PeaceRep’s growing body of evidence for contemporary peacemaking.
Browse our key findings below or download them as a PDF.
Key Findings
PeaceRep research shows that a key feature of many of today’s conflicts and peace processes is fragmentation. Rather than ‘a conflict’ to be resolved, contemporary contexts such as Syria, Yemen, Sudan and South Sudan show a conflict system operating as a mesh of local, national, transnational and geopolitical conflicts (see, for example, Salisbury, 2024 on Yemen). This fragmentation makes designing any process to bring all actors into a mediation very difficult. Peace process models premised on using mediation to achieve a ‘national peace accord’ – an approach that had its heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s – often find the project impossible (Bell and Wise, 2023; Bell, 2024a).
Geopolitical shifts also mean that more states and different international actors are now intervening in conflicts as professed third-party mediators. PeaceRep’s data shows clear trends in the proliferation and diversification of mediators over time. Often these actors have different conceptions of mediation and of the peace it aims to achieve (on Turkey, for example, see Sofos, 2023).
The engagement of Western countries as peace agreement signatories is decreasing, particularly in the case of the United States, while the involvement of some ‘non-Western’ countries is increasing (see PeaceRep’s Global Transitions series). Kenya, Qatar and Turkey have become much more engaged in peace processes, signing an increasing number of peace agreements as third parties, particularly from the early 2000s onward. The number of agreements signed by international organisations, and the United Nations in particular, has declined in recent years. From 2004 onwards, regional organisations have been increasingly taking the lead in signing agreements (Badanjak, 2023; Coe and Nash, 2023).
Mediation efforts often appear to be more ad-hoc and piecemeal, which is also reflected in the eventual peace agreements (Houghton and Peter, 2023). Building on earlier research on multi-party mediation, Bell defines this situation as ‘multimediation’, namely the ‘the accidental and deliberate use of multiple overlapping mediation processes directed towards the discrete problems and actors that make up a complex conflict system’. Rather than addressing a conflict in its entirety, mediators often seek to unwind key elements of that system, but with an uncertain final destination point in terms of ‘peace’ (Bell, 2024a).
Another key feature of peace process fragmentation is the increasing number of local peace processes ‘beneath’ national-level processes. PeaceRep maintains the most comprehensive database of local peace agreements (PA-X Local), which has shown that local peace processes hold both opportunities and risks for wider peacemaking. Local peace agreements serve a variety of purposes, including halting violence, building momentum for national-level peacemaking, or enabling humanitarian access (Bell and Wise, 2023). However, local peace processes also risk fracturing armed groups, potentially creating new forms of local autonomy and conflict (Bell, Pospisil, and Wise, 2021).
As a result of both conflict and peace process fragmentation, conflict resolution actors find it increasingly difficult to ‘mount’ holistic peacemaking efforts. The models of the 1990s and early 2000s which aimed to achieve a national peace accord through a single mediation process appear increasingly inadequate in tackling some of today’s most fragmented conflicts.
Questions & Challenges
A key question is how to deal with fragmentation, and whether to work with or against its grain. The international community needs to find ways of engaging armed actors in ways that (i) end conflict and create future government that is acceptable to civilians, and (ii) prevent conflict re-occurrence. There is a need for innovation in how to bring together state and non-state actors in support of peace processes, including in ‘minilateral’ formats such as ‘contact groups’ or ‘troikas’. PeaceRep’s in-country research shows how fragmentation and multimediation play out in practice, including in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Ukraine. This work explores potential pathways for conflict resolution and wider inclusion in peace and transition processes.
Fragmentation and the multiplication of mediation actors also pose challenges to peace process inclusion and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda – key areas of PeaceRep’s work. Today’s peace processes require women’s rights advocates to engage with and understand emergent third parties’ approaches to WPS, to identify potential entry points for gender interventions (Wise, 2024). Only 21% of peace agreements signed since 1990 contain explicit references to women, girls, gender or sexual violence – despite efforts by multiple stakeholders to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and integrate gender perspectives across peace processes (PA-X Gender). Many of the peace agreement references are single line and tokenistic, and only a few peace processes include a more holistic gender perspective throughout (Wise and Knäussel, 2023). There is a clear need for more robust measures to ensure gender perspectives in peace processes. PeaceRep regularly feeds evidence into WPS policymaking, trains peacebuilding professionals on the latest developments in WPS, and developed the PeaceFem mobile app on women’s inclusion in peace processes.
Another key challenge is the need for more and better data and research to drive evidence-based policy. Proliferating mediation initiatives are increasingly hard to ‘hold in view’. Mediators often expend tremendous resources on ‘conflict analysis’ but expend less concerted effort on ‘dialogue process’ analysis. PeaceRep combines in-country research with data from PA-X, a database with over 2,000 peace agreements signed since 1990, to generate this kind of evidence. For example, PeaceRep makes dialogues and agreements more visible in what are otherwise highly contested contexts in which no compromise seems possible (Wittke, Bell, and Henry, 2024).
A related challenge is how to harness the power of ‘PeaceTech’ and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, and how to do so responsibly. The goal of developing PeaceTech is to support peacebuilding practices through digital innovation (Bell, 2024b). PeaceRep has developed the PA-X Tracker, a cutting-edge tool providing curated evidence to inform decision-making and research into peace and transition processes. PeaceRep leverages AI techniques, particularly machine learning and natural language processing (Henry, 2024; Gardner, 2023), to develop new datasets and provide insights through ‘peace analytics’.