This report summarises a meeting of 50 practitioners, policymakers and academics, convened by independent peacebuilding organisation Conciliation Resources, to discuss new and innovative ways of dealing with protracted armed conflicts and preventing violence. A consensus emerged during the seminar that the negotiation table should not be the only pillar, or even the main pillar of effective conflict resolution. Some went as far as arguing that a peace agreement is not always needed to transform a conflict, as illustrated by ETA’s recent unilateral cease-fire in the Basque country. The heavy concentration on Track 1 activities tends to close opportunities for peacemaking and sometimes even complicate the achievement of more sustainable peace.
Participants agreed that there was a need to overcome challenges to building greater civil society participation in peace processes. Ensuring the inclusion of women was seen as central to the quality of a peace process. Without women’s inclusion in the peace process, the conflict cannot be transformed.
Concrete lessons for the international community emerged through the discussions. There is a need reduce reliance on the negotiating table and the prestige mediator. Instead the international community can do much more to engage and support local capacities and processes by looking at what is there and works, and building on it. International support to peace processes has to get better at using sanctions and incentives in a strategic way: the case of Cyprus’ accession to the European Union without conditionality on the unification of the island being a case in point. But also counter-terrorism policies such as the blacklisting of armed groups or International Criminal Court indictments, which sometimes prove counter-productive to peacemaking processes.
