Today is the UN International Day of Peace and it comes at a time when many people seem to feel peace is taking a horrible worldwide kicking. Is it so bad?<\/p>\n
In the SIPRI Yearbook 2016<\/a><\/em>, my introductory chapter reviews 2015 and tries to draw up a rough balance sheet. That there were significant negatives for peace in 2015 is undoubted \u2013 but it is worth being reminded that there were also significant positives.<\/p>\n \u2018Peace for Colombia\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n The big sign of hope at the moment is\u00a0the peace agreement in Colombia<\/a>. With good will and massive effort, it may bring an end not simply to 40 years of war but to the endemic conflict and instability Colombia has experienced throughout its two centuries of independence.<\/p>\n Some may have wanted to see the\u00a0ceasefire in Syria<\/a>\u00a0brokered by the US and Russia in a similar light. Reasons for scepticism abounded from the outset, however, even before its\u00a0seeming collapse this week<\/a>. It came under\u00a0immediate strain<\/a>,\u00a0as everybody expected<\/a>, but perhaps more importantly its\u00a0credentials\u00a0as a prelude to peace were open to question. It was, before that, a prelude for military cooperation between two external and hitherto opposed forces in Syria \u2013 the US and Russia.\u00a0 If implemented, they could\u00a0be able to coordinate action against the Islamic State group and other forces they agree to regard as extremists and jihadis<\/em>.\u00a0The trouble is, of course, that the distinctions between what the US regards as acceptable and unacceptable rebels are not crisp. Many groups that oppose President Assad regard\u00a0jihadis<\/em>\u00a0as legitimate allies. Meanwhile, for Assad, and thus for Russia, all rebels are unacceptable.<\/p>\n Yet the first decade of this century continued a positive trend begun in the 20thcentury\u2019s closing years \u2013 a big expansion of the world\u2019s zone of peace. \u00a0Compared to 49 armed conflicts in 1990, there were 31 in 2010<\/a>. Moreover, though war is always terrible, armed conflicts were\u00a0on average both shorter and less lethal<\/a>\u00a0than in previous decades.<\/p>\n This owed much to the end of the Cold War, once a deadly short-term spike in the number of wars each year was over. Armed conflicts that had persistently been interpreted politically as outcrops of Cold War could at last be addressed on their own terms. That did not mean it was easy to resolve them, but it was less fiendishly difficult than it had been before.<\/p>\n At the same time, the United Nations was free from the grip of US-Soviet rivalry. It could be both more active and effective on the world stage, especially in efforts to make and sustain peace. The\u00a0Human Security Report<\/em>\u00a0in 2005 made the case that the only empirically viable argument to explain the decline in the number of armed conflicts was an \u2018extraordinary upsurge of activism by the international community<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n Since 2010, the picture has deteriorated sharply. By 2015, the annual total of armed conflicts had\u00a0risen back to 50<\/a>. The impact of this shift in global politics is seen in the plight of\u00a065 million refugees worldwide<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a010 million stateless people<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 the highest totals since the UN Convention on Refugees was signed.<\/p>\n What explains this? One factor is\u00a0a decline in the activism<\/a>\u00a0that expanded the zone of peace.\u00a0The governments that drove it seem recently to have invested less effort, perhaps in part because of the knock-on effects of the international financial crash in 2008. The reason is not so much the need to cut government spending \u2013 peacemaking is relatively cheap \u2013 but the absorption of energy by efforts to handle the economic crisis and the damage to confidence and credibility generated by the inability to resolve it.<\/p>\n At the same time, with high profile conflicts in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the Western focus had shifted from peacemaking by peaceful means to forcible intervention.<\/p>\n If the West thus lost its peaceful way beginning in 2001 with the US-led response to 9\/11, another piece of the explanation lies in Russia. In the 1990s, Russia tended to tolerate though not always actively support the West\u2019s international direction of travel. It stayed out of the Oslo process on Israel and Palestine after that became public knowledge in 1993. It had little to say about the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1995. It revealed no significant interest in peace or conflict in Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Sudan or Guatemala.<\/p>\n Relations with the Western group of states were not always smooth and became increasingly scratchy as years passed; for example, Russia was\u00a0highly critical<\/a>\u00a0of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 and\u00a0sent\u00a0200 soldiers\u00a0into Kosovo after the bombing<\/a>\u00a0in a vain effort to influence the political outcome. But Russia in those years was far from willing or able intervene decisively in the politics of the Western Balkans. Compare that with its\u00a0intense and visible support for the Assad government<\/a>\u00a0when civil war started in Syria in 2011.<\/p>\n The critical moment in a growing confrontation came with\u00a0Russia\u2019s annexation of Crimea<\/a>\u00a0in early 2014, followed by the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The Russian decision to bomb foes of Syria\u2019s President Assad, including Western-backed groups, in 2015 and 2016 was one further step on the same path.<\/p>\n Whereas the impact of the large geo-strategic and geopolitical developments in Russia-West relations was to allow an enlarged space for mediation efforts in the 1990s, latterly the impact has been to restrict it.<\/p>\nCOLOMBIA \u2013 AND SYRIA?<\/h2>\n
![\"\u2018Peace](\"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/hcri\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/325\/2021\/09\/screen-shot-2016-09-20-at-16-25-19.png\")
<\/a>THE ZONE OF PEACE EXPANDS\u2026<\/h2>\n
\u2026AND CONTRACTS<\/h2>\n
THE CHALLENGE FOR PEACEMAKING TODAY<\/h2>\n