How To Make Peace

Imogen Foulkes reports from Geneva for SWI swissinfo.ch as well as the BBC.

Back then I remember discussing with colleagues what should happen. Fight to the end? Which many predicted would be reached in days. Or surrender now: save lives but give up hard won freedom, in the hope perhaps that at some point Moscow would have a more rational leader? How little we knew.

Twelve months later Europe stands, unusually united, facing a conflict that shows no sign of ending. It is no longer clear what Russia even wants, but still military analysts are predicting a spring offensive in which many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians will die.

But most wars do, eventually, end at the negotiating table, so what about this one? In this week's edition of Inside Geneva (and let's not forget this town likes to call itself the city of peace) we gather experts in peacebuilding and conflict resolution to discuss how this conflict might end, and what sustainable peace looks like.

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This content was published on Feb 23, 2023 Feb 23, 2023 One year on from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Inside Geneva podcast host Imogen Foulkes asks what the prospects for peace are, and how it can be won.

Before you get your hopes up that this discussion might have produced the diplomatic equivalent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's golden ticket, a sure-fire recipe for peace, I'll let you down gently by revealing that none of our guests think this conflict is almost over.

“There is this concept that floats around in academia called a hurting stalemate,” explains Keith Krause, who is director of geneva graduate institute's centre on conflict, development, and peacebuildingexternal link .“It's when the two parties have decided that enough is enough. And we are clearly not at this hurting stalemate.”

Katia Papagianni, director of Policy and Mediation Support at geneva's centre for humanitarian dialogueexternal link , agrees. Even the basic elements, she says, for negotiations are not there.“I don't know of any situation where a peace process has thrived in a hostile international climate. You may manage to bring humanitarian assistance, alleviate the suffering in the short term, but without the structural conditions your activity doesn't have cumulative impact.”

The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue knows a good deal about tough negotiations. It's a discreet Geneva organisation which works, behind the scenes, to try to bring even the most intractable of warring parties to the table. Over the years it has helped to resolve decades of violence in Spain – a process which culminated in the Basque armed group ETA dissolving itself. More recently it supported the UN in negotiating the Black Sea grain agreement between Ukraine and Russia.

The grain agreement, Katia tells Inside Geneva, like the discussions over prisoners of war, is a sign that some elements in Moscow and Kyiv are talking to each other. But they may not, she adds, be the parties who could actually move towards genuine peace negotiations.

What all our guests agree on however, is that any peace, anywhere, can only be sustainable if it involves the communities concerned. Hiba Qasas, who is executive director of Geneva's new principles for peace initiativeexternal link , points out that a good peace agreement involves so much more than the end of hostilities.

“Peace is beyond the absence of violence, it's really around access to justice. It's about economic opportunities, it's about security, accountable security. It's about pluralism.”

All those things, of course, take time, but our podcast guests share a certain optimism that Ukraine's vibrant civil society can provide a good foundation. Indeed, Hiba suggests that even while the conflict still rages, Ukrainians can start thinking and planning for the kind of inclusive future they want.

A key factor, our fourth guest Shefali Kaur Nandhra, a graduate student in sustainable development says, is the involvement of young people. They are, she points out, the ones doing the fighting, many of them are working in humanitarian relief in their local communities, and tens of thousands more have had their education interrupted by the war.

On the Russian side too they have been, many of them unwillingly, dragged into a conflict they did not expect. Those still at school are being subjected to endless propaganda aimed at convincing them Moscow's invasion was not only necessary, but provoked by the West.

“Sustainable peace needs to include the youth,” Shefali told Inside Geneva.“It needs to inform the youth, and it needs to educate the youth. So information, inclusion, and education.”

This episode of Inside Geneva was recorded with an audience at Geneva's Graduate Institute, and the students there also offered some thoughts on peacebuilding. Samuele Violini of the junior diplomat initiativeexternal link identified some tough challenges ahead. To bring Moscow to the negotiating table, he suggested, Ukraine will probably have to fight Russia into a bitter stalemate.

From there, the two sides will have to talk, and – a concession Vladimir Putin seems far from at the moment – Ukraine's territory will have to be guaranteed. After that, there will need to be a fund to rebuild Ukraine, and agreement on who contributes. Russian money would seem to be inevitable, but it has been conspicuously lacking in the reconstruction of Syria, despite the Russian involvement in the destruction of cities such as Aleppo.

It's a long and fascinating discussion, with much more nuance and complexity than I can relate in this newsletter, so please do listen to the podcast. The road to peace is, as Keith Krause puts it“slow, painful, imperfect,” but still we have to pursue it.

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on inside geneva host imogen foulkes puts big questions facing the world to the experts working to tackle them in international geneva.

Articles in this story

• inside geneva: how to make peace
• listen to our podcast, inside geneva

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