O CTOBER 30, 2023

A World at War
What Is Behind the Global Explosion of Violent
Conflict?
EM M A B E A L S A N D P E T ER S A LI S B U RY

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 A World at War

A World at War
What Is Behind the Global Explosion of Violent
Conflict?
EM M A B E A L S A N D P E T ER S A LI S B U RY

V
iolent conflict is increasing in multiple parts of the world. In
addition to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and the Israeli
offensive on Gaza, raising the specter of a wider war in the
Middle East, there has been a surge in violence across Syria, including a
wave of armed drone attacks that threatened U.S. troops stationed there.
In the Caucasus in late September, Azerbaijan seized the disputed enclave
of Nagorno-Karabakh—forcing an estimated 150,000 ethnic Armenians
to flee their historical home in the territory and setting the stage for
renewed fighting with Armenia. Meanwhile, in Africa, the civil war in
Sudan rages on, conflict has returned to Ethiopia, and a military takeover
of Niger in July was the sixth coup across the Sahel and West Africa since
2020.
In fact, according to an analysis of data gathered by the Uppsala
Conflict Data Program, conducted by the Peace Research Institute Oslo,
the number, intensity, and length of conflicts worldwide is at its highest
level since before the end of the Cold War. The study found that there
were 55 active conflicts in 2022, with the average one lasting about eight

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to 11 years, a substantial increase from the 33 active conflicts lasting an

average of seven years a decade earlier.
Notwithstanding the increase in conflicts, it has been more than a
decade since an internationally mediated comprehensive peace deal has
been brokered to end a war. UN-led or UN-assisted political processes in
Libya, Sudan, and Yemen have stalled or collapsed. Seemingly frozen
conflicts—in countries including Ethiopia, Israel, and Myanmar—are
thawing at an alarming pace. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, high-
intensity conflict has even returned to Europe, which had previously
enjoyed several decades of relative peace and stability. Alongside the
proliferation of war has come record levels of human upheaval. In 2022, a
quarter of the world’s population—two billion people—lived in conflict-
affected areas. The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide reached
a record 108 million by the start of 2023.
Until now, the international response from European Union member
states, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all of whom invested
heavily in peace building in the wake of the Cold War, has been to shift
the goal posts of “peace” from conflict resolution to conflict management.
But events in the Middle East and elsewhere are a reminder that conflict
can be managed for only so long. As fighting flares worldwide and the
root causes of conflict remain unresolved, traditional peace building and
development tools look increasingly ineffective. The result is that aid bills
grow, refugees are displaced, and fractured societies continue to suffer. A
new approach to resolving and managing conflicts and their impact is
urgently needed.
BROKEN MACHINERY

Having fallen between 1990 and 2007, the total number of conflicts
worldwide began to rise in 2010, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program
found. The number of civil and interstate wars, and the fatalities they
cause, are now at their highest levels since the mid-1980s, and the UN
declared in January that the number of violent conflicts worldwide is at its
highest level since the end of World War II. Wars that are halted are

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increasingly likely to reignite within a year, as happens about five times a

year on average.
Wars are becoming more common, and difficult to end, for a number of
reasons. One is the changing nature of conflict. Twenty-first-century wars
tend to be fought between states and armed groups committed to different
causes with access to relatively advanced weaponry and other forms of
technology, as well as money earned from natural resources and criminal
activity. Complex, multiparty conflict became the norm after the Soviet
Union collapsed, which removed the binary organizing principle of West-
Soviet competition that shaped many earlier wars. More recently, conflicts
have also become increasingly internationalized. Countries including
Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United
States regularly become drawn, whether indirectly or directly, into foreign
wars, as has been seen repeatedly in conflicts in the Middle East and
Africa. The more local and international parties that are involved in a
conflict, the harder it is to end it.
The UN, once the go-to conflict mediator, has been sidelined. The UN’s
loss of influence has been driven by geopolitical competition, which has
divided powerful states. The UN Security Council is particularly affected
by these forces. It has seized up, plagued by growing international rivalries
between the United States, Russia, and China and by an increasingly
transactional approach to international politics. Deadlock at the Security
Council means that the UN can offer neither solutions nor censure for war
crimes or aggression. Security Council–mandated peacekeeping and
transition teams are becoming rarer and are often short-lived, and UN
envoys, peacekeepers, and other officials increasingly lack leverage and
credibility with conflicting parties. This June, for example, Mali sought
the withdrawal of a decadelong UN peacekeeping presence because of
tensions between the government and the mission, including a
disagreement over their role and mandate. Sudan’s rival warlords
reportedly refused to even speak to their country’s UN Special Envoy
Volker Perthes, before he resigned in September. The UN peacekeeping
chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, has stated that divisions within the Security
Council mean UN missions are no longer able to achieve “the ultimate

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goal of peacekeeping”—devising durable political solutions—and must

instead settle for “intermediate goals” such as “preserving cease-fires.”
Increasingly overwhelmed by a series of global crises and new policy
priorities, including Russian aggression in Europe and an assertive China,
many high-level policymakers in the United States and Europe see limited
value in intervening militarily or investing significant political capital in
far-flung conflicts that they regard as of little strategic consequence.
Attention has instead shifted to dealing with the consequences of conflicts
—waves of refugees and cross-border smuggling of drugs and weapons, in
particular—rather than their causes.
LOWERING THE BAR

Faced with this array of challenges, the perception of what is possible

among UN officials and Western countries who once threw their weight
behind peacemaking—principally EU member-states led by France and
Germany, as well as the United Kingdom and the United States—is
changing. A former UN official who worked for decades on international
peace processes has noted that the numerous barriers to mediation make it
“almost impossible” to end modern conflicts. In practice, UN intervention
today often serves to de-escalate conflicts or, in a best-case scenario,
initiate a fragile political process that few expect to work. In private, many
veteran mediators and policy officials have argued that the ambitions of
many international mediation efforts are tacitly limited to bilateral
dealmaking designed to achieve short-term détente or limited goals, such
as the 2022 agreement that allowed Ukrainian grain to pass through the
Black Sea. Marginalized during negotiations, and lacking broad peace
agreements and political transitions in which they can play a significant
role, UN mediators have lost much of their raison d’être. Most other
peace-building tools—including inclusive political dialogue,
accountability, transitional justice, and security sector reform—cannot
succeed without political processes to anchor them.
Elsewhere, the aspirations of many Western diplomats have quietly
shifted to pursuing or supporting containment or de-escalation, avoiding
the search for peaceful and sustainable resolution to conflicts. Efforts by

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the United States to describe the Abraham Accords—which sought to

normalize Arab relations with Israel—as “a peace process” highlight this
change. The accords in practice fail to address the drivers of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, as has become disastrously clear in the Israel-Hamas
war.
International aspirations for long-term solutions are particularly low in
the Middle East and North Africa. The current phase of Yemen’s civil war
has slowed to a near-halt following negotiations between the Houthi
rebels—who sparked the conflict by seizing the capital in 2014—and
Saudi Arabia, which intervened to oust them in 2015. But the UN and
the Houthis’ domestic rivals have been excluded from negotiations, and
the chances of a meaningful political settlement appear low. Many
Yemenis, including the veteran researcher Nadwa al-Dawsari, expect
either a return to fighting sooner or later, or the continuation of a limbo
state of “no war, no peace” if the Houthi-Saudi channel remains the main
negotiation track.
Syria’s so-called frozen conflict is also seeing an alarming but predictable
uptick in violence and instability because of the lack of progress of
negotiations. On one track, negotiations between the Arab Liaison
Committee, which is composed of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt and
the Arab League, and the Syrian government have stalled. At the same
time, the UN-led peace process in Syria is detached from the conflict’s
drivers. It is pursuing limited objectives, including a new constitution to
be drafted by a committee that has not met in 18 months, and a yet-to-
begin process, led by the UN, that seeks to build mutual confidence
between Syria and the Arab Liaison Committee, France, Germany, the
United Kingdom, and the United States. This process is largely divorced
from current political and military developments, including a recent spike
in violence across the country.
VIOLENCE CANNOT BE CONTAINED

Until recently, some international officials appeared to think an end to

fighting was a good-enough goal. In late September, U.S. National
Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, touting the Biden administration’s foreign

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policy bona fides, claimed that the Middle East was “quieter today than it
has been in two decades.” But Hamas’s brutal attacks in Israel a week after
his comments and Israel’s ongoing military response in Gaza, as well as
surging violence across Syria, show the limits of containment.
Containment does not resolve conflicts and requires active management.
This means proactive efforts to address grievances, quell violence, advance
negotiations, and take action to deal with increasing instability or
unexpected events. Whereas reducing violence is a sensible initial goal,
once conflicts are de-escalated, attention all too often shifts elsewhere. It
is easy, then, to miss warning signs that fighting is about to restart. This is
a particular problem when armed actors or regimes remain in control after
failed peace processes or during political transitions. Without
accountability for their past misdeeds, such groups feel free to repeat
violence. For this reason, Sudan’s generals appear to have believed that
they would not be held to account by the UN, their international backers
(particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE), or the states engaged in
supporting the transition process (including Norway, the United
Kingdom, and the United States) when they began to fight each other in
April. Sudanese activists and diplomats based in the capital rightly
pointed out that they had repeatedly warned that the men who have
governed the country since the 2019 military coup were gearing up for war
with one another. But these warnings were either dismissed or watered
down in Western capitals, including Washington, in part because no
conflict had yet broken out and because officials did not see Sudan as a
priority.
Both regional actors and Western diplomats and analysts have long
argued that the status quo in Gaza and the West Bank is unsustainable.
But international attention has been focused elsewhere. Regional
normalization efforts led by the Trump administration built ties between
Israel and former Arab adversaries including Bahrain and the UAE. The
Abraham Accords have been sustained by the Biden administration,
which has energetically pursued an Israeli-Saudi deal. But these efforts
have completely failed to address the drivers of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Despite this, even as the war between Israel and Hamas escalated,

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U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, declared that

Washington still hoped to continue Israeli-Saudi normalization
negotiations.
THE AID TRAP

All too often, humanitarian aid has become a panacea for managing
unresolved conflict. Take Syria, where, 12 years after the war began, the
UN aid funding requests for 2023 included $4.81 billion for programs
inside the country and $5.7 billion to support refugees. Similar sums are
being expended in Sudan and Myanmar, both of which are suffering
conflicts and have vacant UN political envoy roles and no discernible
peace process. Violence grinds on unabated, and civilians subsist on
meager aid provision—in areas where they can be reached. As the number
of conflicts rises, the price tag for aid keeps growing.
Donors cannot keep up with the growing cost of war. Funding for aid
appeals increased by an average of ten percent year on year between 2012
and 2018 but then tapered off. Yet UN appeals for funds have continued
to grow, quadrupling in number between 2013 and today. Of the 406
million people in need of humanitarian assistance in 2022, 87 percent
lived in a country in the midst of high-intensity conflict, and 83 percent in
a protracted crisis.
Aid, in these circumstances, cannot be the only answer. Refugee return
requires a fundamental shift in local dynamics that allows those fleeing
violence and persecution to safely return home, access their properties, and
reintegrate into society without discrimination. At the same time,
postconflict justice and development require management by suitable
governments that are willing to address the violations committed during
the conflict and provide adequate governance free of discrimination to
facilitate a productive economic environment in which corruption and
illicit activity are combated. Locally led peace building that heals the
social fractures caused by conflict requires civic space to conduct dialogue,
address grievances, and secure inclusive decision-making and governance.
BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS

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The world is at an inflection point, and it is still possible to galvanize

support for a new approach to resolving conflict. To achieve this, creative
and courageous leadership is needed from a broad coalition of politicians,
business leaders, the UN, peace builders, and local communities—aligned
with a renewed ambition to make peace. Without aspiring to, and placing
a value on, sustainable peace, it is all too easy to accept least-bad outcomes
and to forget the enormous human and resource toll of doing so.
First and foremost, any effort at renewing peacemaking for the twenty-
first century needs political will from powerful states, principally the
United States and the other permanent members of the UN Security
Council. This point was explicitly made by UN Secretary-General
António Guterres in his recently published policy brief, “New Agenda for
Peace,” a vision that places the responsibility for securing the peace and
upholding international norms in the hands of individual countries rather
than the multilateral system. If governments that say they believe in a
rules-based order—including those in Brussels, London, and Washington
—are willing to uphold international laws and norms, then there may be
some hope for the future. But if they are not, then the current race to the
bottom is certain to continue.
More accurate language around “peace” may help these governments to
reengage with the struggle for it. Describing negotiations over a cease-fire
as a “peace process,” as if peace were just around the corner rather than
years or decades away, all too often leads to early claims that it has been
achieved just because the guns have temporarily fallen silent. This
misconception leads to disengagement. New, more accurate framing that
differentiates between stages of conflict management, conflict resolution,
and peace building, as well as a more honest account of the prospects for
progress into the next stage, would lead to a more honest account of what
is possible and practical—or morally acceptable. In particular, this new
approach to language would help to establish realistic expectations of what
can be achieved in the short, medium, and long terms. It would also
prevent the all-too-familiar rush to declare success that scuppers the
continuation of many peace processes.

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Most important, a new approach to mediation is needed. Formal peace-

building processes and practices were expanded and professionalized
during the post–Cold War period, and they presume or require dynamics
—including geopolitical cooperation and successful peace settlements and
political transitions—that no longer exist. Today’s world is defined by
geopolitical competition and requires something very different. In
responding to these challenges, mediators must become more creative and
collaborative. They must become advocates for their own cause, making
the public case for peace, and they must secure diplomatic support and
engage with a wide variety of groups, including civil society. In particular,
mediators must work closely with, and empower, local peace builders,
absorbing local knowledge and involving key players in peace processes,
which must no longer seek to perpetuate status quo power dynamics.
Mediators must also work closely with—and at times provide support to
—regional blocs, play a greater role in supporting bilateral negotiations,
and empower conflicting parties to create sustainable peace once the guns
have been silenced.
Meanwhile, those seeking to make peace will need to engage
nontraditional actors—middle powers, humanitarian organizations, and
actors from the private sector. These partnerships should harness the
potential of the environmental, social, and corporate governance agenda to
carve out a role for the private sector in supporting peace, forge new
models of geopolitical cooperation, and use aid to support peace rather
than serve as a substitute for it. These are big asks. But they are also the
basic requirements for building sustainable peace, stopping the
proliferation of conflict, and aiming for more than the temporary quelling
of violence.

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