There is a pattern in failed peace processes that deserves more attention than it receives. The pattern is this: the ceasefire almost holds. The agreement almost works. The parties almost trust each other enough to take the next step.
And then it collapses, and the narrative becomes “peace was never possible,” and everyone moves on.
But the “almost” is the most important part of the story. Because if peace almost worked, then the analysis should focus not on why the conflict is intractable, but on what specific, identifiable factor caused the near-success to fail.
That factor is usually small. It is usually fixable. And it is almost never addressed, because by the time the ceasefire collapses, the political will to examine what went wrong has already evaporated.
The Last Forty-Eight Hours
The most dangerous period in any peace process is not the beginning, when positions are hardest. It is the end, when the agreement is nearly complete and both parties are at maximum vulnerability.
At that point, each side has made concessions. Each side has domestic constituencies that view those concessions as betrayal. Each side is looking for evidence that the other will not follow through. The atmosphere is one of extreme fragility.
This is the moment when a single incident – a provocation by a spoiler, a leaked document, an ill-timed statement by a third party – can collapse months of negotiation in hours.
And this is the moment when the international community, having brokered the agreement, most often fails. Because the hardest part of peace-making is not getting the parties to the table. It is standing behind them during the forty-eight hours when the agreement is most vulnerable and every faction with an interest in continued conflict is working to destroy it.
What “Almost” Teaches Us
When a ceasefire almost holds, we learn several things that the standard “intractable conflict” narrative obscures.
We learn that both parties were capable of agreement. If they reached the point of a near-ceasefire, then the claim that “they will never agree” is empirically false. They did agree, or came within reach of agreeing.
We learn that the obstacles are specific, not general. A ceasefire does not collapse because of “ancient hatreds” or “irreconcilable differences.” It collapses because of a specific event, a specific failure, a specific absence of support at a specific moment. These are addressable.
We learn that the question is not “can this conflict end?” but “what resources are needed to ensure that the next near-success becomes an actual success?” This is a fundamentally different question, and it leads to fundamentally different policy responses.
The Investment Gap
The cost of sustaining a peace process through its most fragile period is a fraction of the cost of the conflict it replaces. This is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of accounting.
The resources required – mediators, monitors, economic support for implementation, security guarantees for vulnerable parties – are known and quantifiable. The reason they are not provided is not that they are unavailable. It is that the political incentive to invest in the final stage of a peace process is always lower than the incentive to respond to a new crisis.
This is the core dysfunction. We fund emergencies. We do not fund the patient, unglamorous work of ensuring that near-peace becomes actual peace. And then, when the ceasefire collapses, we describe the situation as hopeless and redirect our attention to the next emergency.
The cycle is self-perpetuating. And it will continue until we change the investment model.
What I Would Change
One structural reform would address a significant portion of the problem: dedicated funding for peace process maintenance.
Not negotiation. Not initial agreements. The maintenance phase – the months and years after an agreement is reached, when the parties are most vulnerable and the international community is most likely to lose interest.
This would require sustained, boring, unglamorous investment. Monitors on the ground. Economic development tied to compliance. Regular mediation sessions to address the inevitable frictions of implementation. A commitment measured in years, not news cycles.
It is not dramatic. It would not make headlines. It would, based on the evidence of every near-success I have studied, work.
The Stance
I hold the near-successes. That is my role. While the world focuses on the dramatic failures, I focus on the moments where peace was within reach and ask: what would it have taken to close the distance?
The answer is never “a miracle.” The answer is always “a little more. A little longer. A little more patient.”
The ceasefire that almost held is not evidence of impossibility. It is evidence that we were close. And if we were close once, we can be close again.
The question is whether we will stay long enough, this time, to finish what we started.