Legal Tools for Peace-making - Concepts and Practice

Approximately 1000 cease-fires and peace agreements have been concluded since 1945. Most of the settlements that have been achieved involved international facilitation or mediation by a variety of actors. The UN has been the principal actor in this respect, but regional organisations, sub-regional actors, individual governments and non-governmental actors have also been involved. The list of resulting peace agreements is vast and imposing, representing a repository of international practice that has scarcely been mined by scholarship in a comprehensive and systematic way.
There is no shortage of academic writings in the area of conflict settlement and peace-making in political science and international relations literature. However, there is a remarkable gap in the treatment of this area from a legal perspective. Professor Christine Bell is one of the only legal scholars engaging with the topic. Moreover, there is no systematic review of the substantive practice of peace-making in its entirety. This project will be the first to offer such an ambitious review and assessment of all known practice.
What is more, there are currently approximately 40 on-going internationalised peace negotiations, covering a wide range of issue areas that need to be addressed in an eventual settlement. At present settlement options need to be researched afresh in every new peace negotiation in relation to each of the issue areas that arise. The outputs of this project will dispense with this time-consuming task as the project will offer detailed settlement options to international peace processes.

This project aims to give coherence to the burgeoning practice of internationalised peace-making, offering practice-relevant guidance for mediators, while gaining important conceptual insights into the nature of this rapidly developing area of law. The project's objectives are to:
(a) generate an analytical digest of settlement practice, offering for the first time detailed and accessible examples from previous treaties in relation to all specific issues that tend to arise;
(b) offer case-studies on the major issue-areas of concern, highlighting different settlement options, relevant past experiences, and their relationship to other legal standards. The project will generate a shorter Handbook on Peace-making for practitioners on this basis;
(c) investigate, at a more conceptual level, in a major collective study, to what extent the trends in settlements, which will be revealed through this analysis, evidence a change in international legal rules in relation to individual issue areas;
(d) consider whether such developments constitute a new and distinct branch of international law (lex pacificatoria) and ask whether this specialist practice risks fragmenting the unitary legal system.

As the project will be conducted in coordination with the UN and other major international organisations involved in international peace-making, it has unique access to practitioners placing it in a position where it can learn from them and also impact on their actions.
Currently, in peace negotiations each issue has to be researched afresh by the mediation team and the parties to negotiations, as there is no substantive repository of approaches to the settlement of specific issues based on previous practice. Moreover, even where previous examples can be found, there is no time to assess how the approach in question has been implemented, and with what results.
The project will offer a legal toolkit, or a set of options, regarding the general and specific problems, that typically arise in negotiations, providing guidance to the array of actors involved in creating peace agreements; thereby diminishing the present significant divergence in the quality of mediation attempts. It would also bring relief to the unhelpful asymmetry among the parties to peace mediations, currently favouring governments

As was mentioned above, the project will make a significant contribution to the development of international law scholarship in relation to peace-making, along with making new invaluable digital resources available to researchers in the fields of international law, international relations, and other disciplines investigating into areas surrounding conflict settlement.
Yet the most significant impact the project can have is a practical one - it has the potential to significantly assist in the various peace negotiations all around the world and thereby contribute to the facilitation of peace. The project outputs would be important resources for all participants of peace negotiations. Currently, without the project outputs, more or less the same research and background work needs to be done - and done again - in each new instance in relation to the substantive issue areas that require settlement. This may involve the trawling through of hundreds of peace settlements each time, with a view to identifying useful previous examples and experiences, wasting valuable time and effort. It is of course necessary to develop peace settlements that specifically address each individual situation; there are no general solutions equally applicable to all cases. But the project outputs would offer guidance about which type of solutions have worked in what kind of circumstances.
The project would also help address the unhelpful asymmetry among the parties to peace mediations. Governments may have the tools to prepare their positions on the basis of an understanding of previous practice, but invariably opposition groups are not able to engage in the necessary research effort. A lack of understanding of settlement options and of previous relevant experiences often constitutes a major obstacle in negotiations. The project outputs would certainly assist in creating a level playing field for both parties.
One set of "users" of the research outputs are international organisations that often engage in mediation efforts. The project answers an urgent demand from such international organisations for practice-oriented guidance. These "users" will also be involved in the project throughout its duration, as a Senior Practitioner Sounding Board will be established, composed of leading figures in peace negotiations, among them the divisional heads of the mediation support elements of the relevant international organisations. The Sounding Board will be able to help shape the format of the practice-oriented outputs and offer advice on individual substantive issues where they have special competence. The project has been formally endorsed by the UN and the PI has been in constant interaction with the UN Mediation Support Unit of the Department of Political Affairs, which is eager to cooperate and utilise the project outputs. Contact has also been established with the AU, where there is interest in collaboration. Other project partners or beneficiaries include, in particular, the African Sub-regional organisations involved in mediation ventures, the EU Mediation Support Team, and "mediatEUr" (European Forum for International Mediation and Dialogue), which is providing mediation coaching to the EU External Action Service.
Another set of potential "users" are policy-makers at both national and international levels. The project's in-depth study of peace-making can serve to inform policy-makers of successful strategies of mediation and conflict-resolution, contributing towards evidence-based policy-making and bringing vast amounts of additional information to them, thereby facilitating decisions on more effective future policies. There is potential for collaboration with the FCO by organising workshops, so that there can be direct benefit for them from the project.
The project can also help increase public awareness and understanding of the complex world of peace-making, as the project outputs will be easily accessible for everyone.