The processes, practices, and consequences of international ceasefire monitoring

Abstract

Third-party ceasefire monitoring is a common conflict response intervention generally correlated with ceasefire durability. However, how ceasefire monitoring’s routine practices contribute to ceasefire compliance and noncompliance is little understood. This dissertation aims to theorize and explain how third-party ceasefire monitoring influences, or seeks to influence, the behaviours of conflict parties in civil wars. Challenging the conventional view that ceasefire monitoring invariably promotes peace, this study develops a practice-orientated, mechanism-based approach to explain the effects of monitoring. Drawing on over 100 interviews, archival research, and document analysis from four different contexts—Kosovo, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Ukraine—this study examines monitors’ practices of reporting, public speech, and remote sensing. The research takes a qualitative, abductive, and inductive approach, integrating insights from bounded rationalism, practice theory, discourse analysis, and surveillance studies.

Identifying a range of causal mechanisms, the study shows that ceasefire monitoring can both constrain and provoke conflict actors. These mechanisms—such as how ceasefire monitoring provides conflict parties with new signalling options, establishes expectations of conflict parties, and enables conflict party resistance to surveillance—recur across conflict contexts.

By nuancing understandings of how monitoring operates in practice, this study contributes to peace and conflict studies by showing how monitoring can produce both ceasefire compliance as well as ceasefire noncompliance. Going beyond the generally positive, sometimes idealized, understanding of monitoring interventions, the study shows that monitoring brings with it both risks and unintended consequences.