Legal Tools for Peace-making - Concepts and Practice

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Approximately 1000 cease-fires and peace agreements have been concluded since 1945. Most of the settlements that have been achieved involved international facilitation or mediation by a variety of actors. The UN has been the principal actor in this respect, but regional organisations, sub-regional actors, individual governments and non-governmental actors have also been involved. The list of resulting peace agreements is vast and imposing, representing a repository of international practice that has scarcely been mined by scholarship in a comprehensive and systematic way. There is no shortage of academic writings in the area of conflict settlement and peace-making in political science and international relations literature. However, there is a remarkable gap in the treatment of this area from a legal perspective. Professor Christine Bell is one of the only legal scholars engaging with the topic. Moreover, there is no systematic review of the substantive practice of peace-making in its entirety. This project will be the first to offer such an ambitious review and assessment of all known practice.What is more, there are currently approximately 40 on-going internationalised peace negotiations, covering a wide range of issue areas that need to be addressed in an eventual settlement. At present settlement options need to be researched afresh in every new peace negotiation in relation to each of the issue areas that arise. The outputs of this project will dispense with this time-consuming task as the project will offer detailed settlement options to international peace processes. This project aims to give coherence to the burgeoning practice of internationalised peace-making, offering practice-relevant guidance for mediators, while gaining important conceptual insights into the nature of this rapidly developing area of law. The project's objectives are to: (a) generate an analytical digest of settlement practice, offering for the first time detailed and accessible examples from previous treaties in relation to all specific issues that tend to arise; (b) offer case-studies on the major issue-areas of concern, highlighting different settlement options, relevant past experiences, and their relationship to other legal standards. The project will generate a shorter Handbook on Peace-making for practitioners on this basis; (c) investigate, at a more conceptual level, in a major collective study, to what extent the trends in settlements, which will be revealed through this analysis, evidence a change in international legal rules in relation to individual issue areas; (d) consider whether such developments constitute a new and distinct branch of international law (lex pacificatoria) and ask whether this specialist practice risks fragmenting the unitary legal system. As the project will be conducted in coordination with the UN and other major international organisations involved in international peace-making, it has unique access to practitioners placing it in a position where it can learn from them and also impact on their actions. Currently, in peace negotiations each issue has to be researched afresh by the mediation team and the parties to negotiations, as there is no substantive repository of approaches to the settlement of specific issues based on previous practice. Moreover, even where previous examples can be found, there is no time to assess how the approach in question has been implemented, and with what results. The project will offer a legal toolkit, or a set of options, regarding the general and specific problems, that typically arise in negotiations, providing guidance to the array of actors involved in creating peace agreements; thereby diminishing the present significant divergence in the quality of mediation attempts. It would also bring relief to the unhelpful asymmetry among the parties to peace mediations, currently favouring governments