More leaders are pursuing their ends militarily. More believe they can get away with it.
By Comfort Ero, the president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, and Richard Atwood, executive vice president of the International Crisis Group.
A fireball erupts behind a turreted building as smoke fills the sky after an Israeli strike over Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
A fireball erupts after an Israeli strike over Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Dec. 20, 2023. SAID KHATIB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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Can we stop things falling apart? 2024 begins with wars burning in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine and peacemaking in crisis. Worldwide, diplomatic efforts to end fighting are failing. More leaders are pursuing their ends militarily. More believe they can get away with it.
#10conflicts#watch2023#10Conflicts
2024 begins with wars burning in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, and peace in crisis. Around the world, diplomatic efforts to end the fighting are failing. More leaders are pursuing their goals militarily. They mostly believe that they can get away with it. War has been on the rise since about 2000, following a decline in 2012 and 1990.
First came the conflicts triggered by the 2011 Arab uprisings in Libya, Syria and Yemen.
Libya's instability spread south and helped spark a protracted crisis in the Sahel region.
A new wave of major battles followed 2020 Azerbaijani-Armenian war over Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, horrific es that began weeks later in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region,
Myanmar army's 2021 power grab, and conflict initiated by Russia's 2022 attack on Ukraine.
Add to this 2023's devastation in Sudan and Gaza.
Worldwide, more people are dying fighting, forced from their homes or needing life-saving assistance than in decades. In some war zones, peacemaking either doesn't exist or goes nowhere.
The Myanmar junta and the military officers who seized power in the Sahel are taking on overwhelming rivals.
In Sudan, perhaps today's worst war, with scores of people killed displaced, U.S. and Saudi-led diplomatic efforts were muddy half-hearted for months.
Banking on the decline of Western support for Kiev, Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to force Ukraine to surrender its terms and demilitarize – understandably unpleasant for Ukrainians.
In all these places, diplomacy was, as it were, about managing fallout negotiating humanitarian access or prisoner exchanges, or striking deals like the one that brought Ukrainian grain to global markets across Black Sea.
These efforts, while vital, are not a substitute for political negotiations.
Where war ends, silence owes more to treaty making than to war victory.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban seized power as US troops departed without negotiating with their Afghan rivals. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed struck deal with rebel leaders ending the Tigray war in late 2022, but that was more of a boost to Abiy's victory than deal on the region's future. Last year, Azerbaijan regained control of Nagorno-Karabakh, with September offensive ending what its victory in 2020 war had begun, ending a 30-year standoff over enclave and forcing exodus of ethnic Armenians. The wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen also took their toll, but without a permanent stay between the parties, or even in Libya and Syria, on a political track worth the name.In fact, warriors often wait for the chance to seize more territory or power. It's hardly news that the warring parties want to defeat their rivals. But a flurry of agreements in the 1990s ended conflict in places from Cambodia and Bosnia to Mozambique and Liberia. The agreements were flawed and often required ugly compromises. A period scarred by the Rwandan genocide and the Balkan genocide cannot be romanticized as a golden age of pacifism. Still, the string of agreements seemed to p. . ."
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