Abstract

The Making of Peace: Processes and Agreements Stefan Wolff The term ‘peace process’ captures a wide range of different phenomena primarily related to the (mostly) international management of intra-state conflicts. As a label, it has been applied to processes at the end of which some form of peace had actu- ally been achieved (such as in Northern Ireland), as well as to processes that are outright failures, including extreme cases like Rwanda where a peace agreement in 1993 became the precursor of a genocide in 1994. Between these extremes, however, a third type of peace process can be identified that would be better described as pro- tracted, and which can take the form either of a serial failure to make a negotiated agreement last (such as the situation in South Sudan since late 2013), or of processes that are caught in more or less stable ceasefires without achieving a sustainable conflict settlement (such as Ukraine). This categorisation is admittedly crude: the great variety of actors involved, the relationships they have with each other and the types of agreements that they achieve (or not) speak to the uniqueness of each such process, but underneath the specifics of each situation, there