Benjamin Petrini
More than 150 peace processes produced roughly 1,800 peace agreements worldwide between 1990 and 2020 – calling into question United States President Donald Trump’s assertion at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025 that he had ‘ended seven “un-endable” wars’. Peace processes often involve both high-level inter-state negotiations and sub-national or localised peace initiatives – with the two levels requiring integration, or at least some tight connections. Mediating between war parties to achieve peace necessitates buy-in and legitimacy, as well as patience and a vision on how peace will be implemented and become sustainable.
Nonetheless, some recent peace processes, such as the US-mediated Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)–Rwanda peace deal of June 2025, display significant gaps in implementation, reveal a negotiating approach that is hardly conducive to solving complex armed conflicts, and even face questions about credibility. On paper, inter-state agreements aimed at resolving intra-state conflicts, such as the DRC–Rwanda deal, are beneficial because they may end external support to conflict parties, resolve underlying enmities, or address regional security concerns. However, in this case, opaque commercial interests appear to overshadow the promotion of peaceful outcomes in eastern DRC, whilst aspirational and unrealistic commitments clash with the harsh reality on the battlefield.
Peace processes aimed at resolving complex intra-state conflicts have been undergoing significant changes for a decade or more, in parallel with the progressive decline of the liberal peace paradigm, as well as shifts in the landscape of armed conflicts.
A proliferation of armed conflicts
Armed conflicts have greatly expanded in numbers since 2016: 61 state-based conflicts (i.e., where at least one party is a state) took place globally in 2024, representing the highest number since 1946. Most of these armed conflicts are intra-state in nature, but they increasingly feature the direct participation of third-party states – a trend driving the internationalisation of civil wars and presenting greater challenges to resolve them.
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