Talking while fighting
Ceasefires, peace deals, and Russia's war in Ukraine
A few weeks ago, in NYT Magazine, I wrote about how calls for a “ceasefire now” seem to have replaced calls for a lasting peace. I started researching the subject because I wanted to understand why ceasefires were proliferating all over the world map, while the violence they sought to contain simmered on. I learned that ceasefires are highly technical agreements, that humanitarian ceasefires are the weakest of them all, and that most ceasefires fail within 65 to 193 days. (And that’s with a rather generous interpretation of what it means to “fail”: if you define failure as one death, almost every ceasefire fails within 24 hours of implementation.)
“People tend to reach for cease-fires when they do not know what else to do,” said Valerie Sticher, a senior researcher at ETH Zurich. Intended to work as tools of conflict resolution, they often end up operating as mechanisms of conflict management instead. They proliferate in historical moments, like our own, when political settlements of intractable wars are difficult to reach and when few states seem to have the will to even attempt them.
President Trump went into last week’s summit with Putin confident that he would emerge with a ceasefire deal for Ukraine. That didn’t happen, and he is now saying that there should be a comprehensive peace deal and then a ceasefire, instead of the other way around. In the world of conflict negotiation, this technique is called “talking while fighting.” It worked in El Salvador, Colombia, and Bosnia, and it’s quite possible that it could work to end Russia’s war on Ukraine as well. As Christopher R. Hill, former U.S. Ambassador to Serbia, and the researcher Claudia Wiehler argue in a fascinating chapter on the peace process in Bosnia, “talking while fighting” works when the conflict parties have little reason to trust one another and when a long series of ceasefires have already failed to contain the violence. (Both of which are amply true in Ukraine.)
In contrast to earlier efforts, the ceasefire was the last piece of the puzzle and came at the end rather than the start of the negotiations. Bosnia is hence an example how “talking while fighting” can be a successful approach if the agreement between the conflict parties rests mostly on military interests rather than trust and mutual understanding.
In Colombia and El Salvador, “talking while fighting” facilitated peace talks in the grimmest sense: because violence never stopped, there was no threat that talks could collapse because of new attacks. “Parties operating in such a context can more easily signal their genuine commitment to finding a settlement and are less likely to be accused of progressing talks to achieve some devious military goal (e.g., rearming under the cover of a ceasefire),” the researchers Govinda Clayton, Valerie Sticher, Andreas Wenger, and Simon Mason argue.
This week, Trump has made it clear that he no longer likes the word “ceasefire” at all, so European leaders have opted to speak of a “truce” instead. As Clayton told me, diplomats need to have “‘linguistic flexibility’—they have to be able to call it what makes sense to them.” A ceasefire might also be a cessation of hostilities, a humanitarian pause, or a “pause for thought.” In Ukraine, several “windows of silence” have been imposed throughout the conflict to facilitate repair work on industrial facilities and essential services close to the front line, in addition to the over 25 ceasefires that Russian forces have violated since they first invaded the country in 2014.
In the war between Israel and Palestine, a slightly different vernacular applies: there, negotiators must weigh the potential outcomes of a long-term truce, or hudna, and a shorter-term “lull” in fighting, called a tahdiya. “Tahdiya is de-escalation — it’s seen as temporary and tactical — a warrior’s rest, as it were. Whereas a hudna is closer to a truce, but it is very far from salaam, from peace,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former advisor to the Palestinian Authority.
In 2005, a tahdiya secured a momentary decrease of violence during the Second Intifada. Before the October 7 attacks, Israel and Hamas had agreed to negotiated ceasefires in 2012, 2014, and 2021; since October 7, two ceasefires have allowed for the return of hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. Hamas has repeatedly offered a long-term hudna to Israel that would end fighting for a period of 10 years. (Israeli defense officials were reportedly in the process of negotiating a “hudna plan” brokered by Egypt in the months leading up to the Oct. 7 attacks.)
No matter what you call them, and no matter when they arrive—before, during, or after a peace deal—ceasefires are critical to securing a permanent end to violence, but they should not be mistaken for peace itself. In the absence of immediate cease-fires in Ukraine and Gaza, “talking while fighting” may be the best of bad options.
Here’s a link to the NYT piece, which goes into more detail about the history, purpose, and risks of ceasefires.