Bloody Months In Conflict Promote Ceasefire Study They Arrived With 800,000 Cash And Oil Hungry: Glencore Sued For Bribery

Together with international partners, researchers from ETH Zurich investigated the conditions under which conflicting parties in civil wars concluded a ceasefire. Conclusion: Bloody months and government changes during civil wars in particular call for a ceasefire.

For this, the researchers from ETH Zurich together with scientists from the Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) and the University of Uppsala analyzed 2202 Armistice Agreementsaccording to a report published Thursday by ETH Zurich.

In addition to a bloody escalation of the conflict, government changes also favored ceasefires. However, this effect of new leaders diminishes after a year, as the initial momentum usually wears off.

The analyzes of the conflict researchers also showed that conflicting parties were more willing to lay down their weapons if they had a political justification for doing so. For example, in the form of a mediation offer from a mediating party asking for a ceasefire, or during religious holidays that allowed the warring parties to stop fighting at short notice without losing face. In the Afghan civil war after 1989 there were repeated temporary ceasefires, for example when the fast was broken after Ramadan.

Cease fire sooner or very late

Another finding of the study was that ceasefires are often signed in the first month of a conflict. The parties appeared to be testing how serious they were about the war and whether there was any chance of a peaceful resolution of the conflict, the report said. If this does not work, it takes an average of four years before the chance of this increases again.

The ceasefires analyzed were all from civil wars between 1989 and 2020; it involved 109 internal conflicts from 66 countries. According to the report, conflicts between states were not taken into account because they were “absolute exceptions”. The five countries with the most ceasefires were Sudan (169), followed by India (167), the Philippines (157), Syria (140) and Israel (103).

(yam/sda)